I really wonder why not all non-rich people are communists, as they would likely see their own condition improved in such a society. I suppose the possible reasons could be:
- They don’t understand how the current system exploit us
- They don’t know communism or misunderstand it
- They fear changing the current system for the “unknown”
- They think it can’t work
- They are not interested in politics at all
- They think that one day they will be rich too
- They are too busy being fascist
- Something else
I know it’s probably a mix of all of these, but in what proportions exactly? What are the most common reasons?
Well, in the West, proletarians are still beneficiaries of imperialist superprofits, making them support the actions of the bourgeoisie and become a ‘bourgeois-proletariat’ as was described by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (which he had observed in England at the time). In the global south, it’s likely a large combination of factors. The most dominant one being that imperialism shatters the ability to educate the population, and installing puppet governments while violently repressing or castrating any effective communist creates a cultural hegemony largely free of class consciousness. Add to this the massive swathes of fascism that leak out of the imperial core in the form of propaganda and false narratives and you end up with a largely impotent proletarian movement in much of the global south. The average worker doesn’t know enough and is more worried about ‘getting by’, helping their local community, or not getting blown up or killed by USian orc firing squads than organizing to overthrow Capitalism. With imperialism being the primary contradiction in the lives of millions of global southerners, the ones exploiting them are not visibly their national bourgeoisie, but rather the overseas American and European bourgeoisie. Thus the question for many radical sects in the GS becomes one of national liberation from the USA rather than the liberation of their class from Capitalism. Just look at modern Iran and Russia, which are becoming ever more galvanized against the USA while still being a predominantly right-wing nation/economy.
Despite all of those things being absolutely crushing, communism still finds its way into many liberation movements across the globe, and there are still many successful communist parties in the global south (some better than others).
Thank you for your answer.
For the West, I understand your point, even though there is still a large portion of the population that barely earns enough to live decently. In my country, this mainly affects the younger generation and single parents. However, they blame the government more than capitalism, which I don’t understand.
The Western proletarians are still beneficiaries of imperial superprofits from a multitude of avenues even despite their struggles at times. Most people in the West aren’t actively cheering for imperialism, they just simply allow it to continue because they, on some level, refuse to educate themselves on where it all comes from or have fully drank the capitalist kool aid. Their material conditions define them, and their material conditions tell them that their state is supreme. To the average paycheck-to-paycheck worker in an imperial core country, they get given things—often referred to as ‘treats’—like universal healthcare, infrastructure investments, full bellies, time off from work, a ‘dignified’ national identity, things that they know other nations don’t have. They never question why people don’t have them, whether it be because of their own prejudices or because of pure ignorance.
To the average Western worker, when struggle and austerity hits, it is a failure of the state to not allocate enough imperial superprofits to their needs. The state and its bureaucracy is all they know, and they know it keeps them fed and clothed, so they try to force concessions through it. When the older generation tell them of times that ‘things were better’ and say ‘this country has gone to shit,’ they literally observe the fact that the bourgeoisie have rescinded their concessions because they no longer feel threatened, but never internalize it. The bourgeois-proletariat has only ever known the state and understood the state. They don’t see the bourgeoisie taking back what they gave, but rather they see the state as being incompetent at resource allocation or otherwise corrupt because they do not understand that the state itself is a tool used to oppress them. Mamdanites and Bernie Bros in the US are an example of this. They never question how the USA became the wealthiest, most opulent nation on the planet, they simply desire that that wealth be distributed amongst Americans as opposed to amongst the proletarian class.
Thank you for your great answer again.
In my experience, many people simply want the government to improve their living conditions—whether through higher wages or lower prices. In other words, they seek to improve capitalism rather than replace the economic system entirely with something better. You are right: most Western proletarians do not actively challenge their state’s imperialist stance. But even so, why don’t they want to nationalize their largest corporations, instead of just raising their tax for example?
because that would be the spooky socialism or communism they’ve been told all their lives is the greatest sin anyone could possibly commit.
tbf, I’m still curious about why does Communism still persists so much.
like, a lot of communist books are available online. I don’t know why communist sites aren’t crushed like piracy sites.
(I know online Marxism is really small compared to meatspace Marxism, but why is it allowed at all?)
Well really, this is somewhat conjecture to speak on, but I see it as a list of things. In the West, communism is microscopic, but is allowed to exist in its current fashion because:
- In its current form, proper Marxism-Leninism of the West is impotent, and not threatening to Empire. The West is more concerned with crushing anti-imperialist nations, extracting superprofits, and tightening its loosening grip on the global south.
- It would ‘show the empire’s hand’ to crackdown on Marxist sites that get only a couple thousand views per day, mostly from the same users. For the population of the West to stay subservient, and continue allowing the bourgeoisie to exploit the Earth, they need to believe they’re in peaceful freedom-of-speech land and aren’t at risk of government crackdown by visiting the wrong site.
- The resources necessary to track and destroy all gatherings of Communism online are more costly that its worth. The internet is not a real place, and nothing that happens on it is real. Crushing every single site registers by a suspected Marxist is a lot more difficult than flooding every website with anticommunist botfarms, manipulating the highest traffic sites to be pro-empire, and using algorithms to discourage communist content. When things get hairy, you crush the movements organizing in real life. If some workers in Indonesia wanna read Capital, let them, it’s more of a pain to try and stop them considering there’s hundreds of ways they could access it. If they start striking and shutting down factories, send in the blackwater mercs and the problem solves itself.
- Capitalists were overconfident. Many of them are competent enough to be brutal imperialists, but when the USSR fell, many of them felt it was ‘the End of History’ and that Capitalism had won its final victory. There was no need to crush marxist bookstores or ML YouTubers because their ideology was dead, all that they were now were ways to generate some small amount of capital from views and ad clicks.
All of these reasons are visibly starting to become more trouble than their worth for the bourgeoisie. More nations are passing anti-communist media laws and actively banning leftist speech or artworks, denouncing ‘far-left terrorism’, and generally taking steps to behead very large online communist gatherings are all things happening right now in the face of the rise of China, which will trigger another Red Scare. During that Red Scare, the tiny Marxist sites you speak of will be deplatformed as soon as possible, and if they aren’t they’ll be used as honeypots for when someone who visits Marxist Archive gets their PC subpoenaed for evidence in a court case.
Thanks for the write up comrade
Anytime, comrade
Piracy sites persist too. You just need to know where to look.
Ultimately, this is knowledge you can’t just suppress. Even if all theory was burned and deleted tomorrow (an impossible task), people would still be able to pass the knowledge on to each other, and even if that failed, as we know, socialism and eventually communism is part of the natural progression of things so it will arise in one form or another eventually either way.
In addition to what you’ve mentioned, governments and corporations continually murdering communists might have something to do with it
we’re inundated with bougie viewpoints from birth to death in every facet of life
Yes, but what makes this propaganda so effective? Is it because people lack critical thinking, or knowledge about capitalism/imperialism/communism? What would it take to enable people to form their own opinions?
Lenin talks about this in chapter two of What Is To Be Done. Essentially, I can boil it down to the fact that Bourgeois Ideology is much older and more ‘developed’ among the masses’ consciousness, the wealth and infrastructure is already established to facilitate the spread of these ideologies. They have had centuries before the rise of Proletarians ideology. The consciousness of the masses is a battleground, not a vacuum.
A big chunk of capitalists (in Europe) are descended from nobility - mostly second rate but still. So they literally have over a thousand years of wealth accumulation.
Liberation is a process that can be understood through a scientific lens, like anything else. The development of marxism put this into sharp relief, especially through the framework of dialectical and historical materialism, and marxism-leninism made it real in the world. But, uh… the order I put these in is revealing of where I started from, being born into a culture enmeshed in idealism; I placed the ideas first, as if marxism came out of nowhere and then the material came after. Marxism no doubt derived both from the conditions of the world as Marx, Engels, and others lived in, and also from the superstructure (ideas layer) that existed alongside it.
Anyway, I’m getting distracted in self-crit, but the point is that this transformative stage of literacy in political struggle helped empower isolated rebellions or bourgeois revolutions to instead become a conscious, strategic proletarian revolution, such as in the Bolshevik Revolution. The conditions for discontent already existed, but the masses had not yet solved the problem of how to achieve liberation as explicit science. This is a dramatic oversimplification of history, but the reason I’m mentioning it is that you could as well ask why peasants in early kingdoms weren’t communists and hadn’t developed a framework called communism. It’s likely many of them were communal to some degree without the ism, having a culture that favored what we think of as the spirit of communism today, yet still were not what we’d call communists now. Modern capitalism has developed things into a much more isolated, individualist direction. This has been happening alongside virulent and violent anti-communist campaigns across the world. So on the one hand, you have the absence of development of liberation as science earlier in history and on the other hand, you have violent campaigns against liberation as a science now.
This is a meandering reply and did not pan out how I had hoped, but I think the part about me noticing my own language reading like idealism is worth showing as a learning experience, so I’m going to post it anyway.
Others explained it in a lot more detail, but the gist of it is that the ideas of a given society are the ideas of its ruling class.
OK, but why is that? What makes propaganda so effective? Is it because people lack critical thinking, or knowledge about capitalism/imperialism/communism?
It isn’t so much that people lack skills or knowledge of things at the individual level. It’s that the body of knowledge, including its distribution and reproduction, serves the interests of the bourgeoisie in reifying capitalism upon the level of the individual. The way the news is made, how movies are made, etc is a capitalist way of doing things, and reinforces a capitalist thinking of why the world works.
You likely did not come into a socialist consciousness out of your innate cleverness and capacity for understanding, you came to such a consciousness because new information undermined the system of thought which had been trained into you since you were a child. In theory, I don’t know you.
“Why is propaganda so effective,” well, why do you think the way you do? Our thoughts and beliefs are much more malleable than liberalism would like us to believe, for example. Pretty much anyone can be brought to any kind of understanding. Entire societies can be brought on board with genocide, as we see now. You can levy this as an individual moral failing at the scale of a whole society, or we can look at the systems of the production of information for what they are and see that control over thought and culture is actually very material. With this in mind, we can understand that the social zeitgeist may follow the agenda of those who control the levers of culture, and develop our own means of doing so as a counter.
its all those reasons but there is 1 underlying reason behind them all. The Bourgeoisie control the intellectual and cultural means of reproduction. They own the churches and the schools and the media and they use them to create an intellectual and cultural environment that supports their continued rule.
OK, but what makes propaganda so effective? Is it because people lack critical thinking, or knowledge about capitalism/imperialism/communism?
People only get a tenth or eleventh grade reading level education, on average. But everyone is required to navigate a world ruled by those with the means to pay the most highly educated to engineer extremely complex rules designed to protect their interests – mostly property and power.
Propaganda lives in the space between what most people can understand and how the world actually works. People are desperate to obtain an understanding of the world that gives them an advantage over others, or at least just enough to survive and avoid destitution.
They will grasp at anything that promises to help them individually outcompete the collective masses.
It isn’t just that people aren’t trained to avoid being deceived. They are actively willing to be deceived if they think it will help them specifically. The lure of secret insider knowledge is strong.
It would make sense if, thanks to this propaganda, people actually enjoyed good living conditions. But when they barely have enough to survive—even in Western countries—how could they not question the system and realize that capitalism is total crap?
Propagandizers tell them that they are just not doing the secret magic tricks good enough.
Most businesses in the United States fail. Doesn’t stop people from thinking that business running is the way to become wealthy.
Thing is eventually they do.
The average American for example is probably highly skeptical/cynical about their system; they just lack the language and information to understand & express their problems with it and largely have to figure it out on their own.
At best this can produce social democrats, maybe even anarchists or left communists, but principled Marxists require much more.
Different stages of struggle create different degrees of consciousness. For example, colonialism and imperialism principally produce national consciousness within the oppressed nations (rather than proletarian consciousness), which leads to anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggle (see Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine). It’s possible for both forms of consciousness to develop in tandem, but that depends on the specific historical and social conditions which the given country or region exists within. Fanon elaborates much further on this in TWOTE.
Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
B. F. Skinner
Because the ideological battle matters and if communists dont fight in that front then the bourgeoisie can create as much reactionary false consciousness as they feel like. Politzer talks about it in “elementary principles of philosophy”, also Ho Chi Minh in his letters at times talks about the importance of propaganda.
Go create or spread commie art and memes, its praxis and im not kidding.
Indoctrination by white supremacist capitalist propaganda.
This is why “the free marketplace of ideas” is useless. Many communist parties seem to think the problem is that they just have not scientifically crafted the perfect rhetoric that will act like a spell when spoken, being such an incredibly convincing argument, that anyone who hears it would immediately become a communist.
But, that’s not how the real world works. Sadly, people do not believe things just because of great, well-crafted arguments. The arguments can be absolute shit and people will still believe it if their friends, family, neighbors, bosses, the television man, etc, all repeat the same thing verbatim. Humans are social creatures, and enough people saying something gives it an air of social legitimacy, and questioning it risks social ostracization, and thus is viewed with higher skepticism.
People tend to believe whatever dominates all of the vectors of information they have access to for that reason, and whatever dominates the vectors of information depends upon who controls the most wealth, and who controls the most wealth comes down to who controls the means of production.
This is why I hold the rather controversial opinion that every communist party will remain irrelevant until they learn how to actually grow a financial base, because otherwise they will perpetually lack the material means to actually propagate their ideas. Many believe they can overcome this material limitation just by crafting more convincing arguments, but it is a delusion.
