How to Win the Battle of Ideas Today
An analysis of the media landscape and how communists can effectively utilize it for overcoming the dominant capitalist consciousness.
We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us … This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.
— Fidel Castro
Information war, or as Fidel worded it in his time, the Battle of Ideas, is highest priority in a time of theoretical chaos. Engaging in the Battle of Ideas does not mean creating an ideological bubble separate from the world and imagining a new world. Rather, it means directly contending and engaging with hegemonic ideas and conversations. How is this done? This is a question of strategy. The most important feature of Marxism, as a tool for changing reality, is quantitatively reflecting on the result of any developed program. In other words, one important question must be asked, especially in an era where no communist party has yet gained momentum: have we been successful in disseminating the communist worldview?
Lenin described himself as a publicist for socialism far before 1917.
In the following sections, I will breakdown my view on the most effective ways of disseminating the communist ideology and criticisms of constantly tried and failed methods.
Decentralized Short-Form Media
The decentralized nature of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok makes it easy for ideological confusion. I call these platforms decentralized because they are open spaces for communist, postmodern, liberal, and fascist ideologies to exist at the same time and in the same space during consumption. The algorithms of each platform slightly vary but each feature the same problem. Information is atomized and mixed into a bag of other atomized information. These social media platforms encourage a lack of focus because the experience of scrolling through any of these is back and forth between humor and horror, news and meme, criticism of the establishment and defense of the establishment. Content you explicitly follow is mixed in along with ads, trolls, bots, and “suggested content.” This is an experience similar to sitting in front of flashing strobe lights—extreme bursts of information.
The second problem of these decentralized platforms is the ideological infiltration of reactionaries into content with a revolutionary message. Because of the short-form nature of these platforms, which already limits the amount an idea can be explained, the comment, like, and reshare systems all allow for quick, reductive, superficial, and viral ideological attacks from multiple points of view. These are difficult to combat as the value of an idea is socially measured by “ratios,” of likes and reshares.
Ideological attacks should be dealt in two ways: public debate and censorship. Short-form media does not allow for effective public debate so that is already out of the question. In regards to censorship, I do not mean censorship from the platform itself. The individual or organization disseminating information should be the force which censors comments or reshares on their own content. Targets of censorship should include messaging and derailment which take away from, or confuse, the communist ideology being put forward. This is impossible in decentralized short-form platforms.
Worse, socialized censorship is easy. The ideological mob, often the anti-communist left, will make viral an idea they disagree with and use moral grounds to quickly make it impossible for the original source to engage with an audience, or an audience to engage critically with the original source. There is a disgusting culture of social censorship in which individuals will spread misinformation, hearsay, and vitriol in their circles, resulting in a “socialized censorship” of an idea or the source, without the idea itself being critically engaged with. This is a severe weakness of using decentralized short-form platforms as a primary vehicle for engaging in the Battle of Ideas.
Centralized Long-Form Media
The centralized and long-form nature of streaming, podcasting, and live-soapboxing (Callin/Twitter Spaces) allows for an alternative to the weaknesses of decentralized short-form media. Historically, newspapers were a primary way for communists to engage with the masses. In his book on the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed described how crowds battled for the latest newspapers and how every popular political faction was only legitimate by keeping up a constant press.
Many things have changed today since then. Most peoples’ primary engagement with information, for better or worse, is through the internet. Of course, this is not a fact consistent across geography as there are pockets of the country who still have popular engagement with physical newspapers and radio. However, the generalized population primarily engages with the internet, many through the decentralized short-form media I described above.
On the other hand, many people (and growing in numbers) also engage with centralized long-form media such as video streams and podcasts. [Side note, there is an interesting shift in history from knowledge being transmitted from spoken word to written text and back to a digitized spoken word]. Centralized long-form media, including YouTube, Twitch, and podcasting plaforms, has the opposite characteristics of decentralized short-form media. This means that that censorship by the creator is easy, information can be more ideologically consistent, and socialized disruption is more difficult. In fact, attempted socialized disruption which happens in the decentralized short-form media, ends up giving more exposure to the often isolated long-form media.
Censorship of centralized long-form media most often comes directly from a higher source and not a socialized source as I described before. Usually, the state or the platform itself will intervene and censor. Examples of this include Joe Rogan’s experience with Spotify, Infrared/Jackson Hinkle’s removal from Twitch as organized by MSM journalists, the right-wing exodus from YouTube to Rumble, and the shutdown of RT America.
To maintain protection from distractions and derailment, live video streams can block or remove those who bring ideological confusion into the space or directly challenge them and their ideas to debate in a space that is not limited to characters or time. Dissenting ideas face a harder battle in these spaces.
It is not guaranteed that long-form media is centralized, in that it is ideologically consistent. However, the possibility for it exists, unlike decentralized short-form media. The organization or individual curating the streams and podcasts can choose to be ideologically consistent (as opposed to cattering to a feigned unity through diversity of voices) and thus offer an opportunity to viewers or listeners to develop alternative ideological perspectives.
Long-form media offers the most obvious benefit—there is more room to explain ideas in a way that Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok can never offer. Important information is not as easily diluted with an endless stream of random and ideologically inconsistent posts so focusing on a topic is easier. Many workers listen to podcasts and streams at work, commuting to and from work, and during their leisure time, as long as the long-form media also features one important characteristic: entertainment.
The Value of Entertainment
It is a simple fact that, in the United States, entertainment is a necessary (unfortunate or not) requirement for the attention of people, especially in a deeply depressed, tired, and alienated society. If long-form media is not engaging, it is easy to pick up the phone and consume oneself in hours of scrolling addictive short-form media.
Liberal media is either 100% brainless entertainment or 100% serious through the dissemination of news. News from capitalist media is described as events isolated from political and social processes. They do not proivide coherent context and demoralize the audience by refraining from providing any feasable solutions. A balance must be struck between engaging/entertaining and serious contextualized news.
Organizations or individuals choosing to engage in long-form communist media should choose a public face based on a combination of knowledge and charisma. Charisma without knowledge is surface without depth, and knowledge without charisma is depth with an ugly surface. General anti-establishment media, including right nationalist media understands this well. Long-form programs such as the Joe Rogan Experience, the Jimmy Door Show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Russel Brand (the most popular political stream on YouTube), all engage in a mixture of entertainment and information dissemination. This not only keeps the viewer engaged, but more importantly, keeps them listening/watching long enough for ideological development. Currently, there is no popular communist media at scale with such features.
Reflect the Masses
Communist media cannot be all entertainment, otherwise it would provide nothing new. Communist media should offer something new, something fresh. Topics should directly reflect current events and the concerns of target audiences (the politically homeless working class), in a serious way. The highest priority should be given to the most pressing topics. For example, today these topics can include the proxy war in Ukraine, inflation, the strangeness behind seemingly coordinated mass shootings, ongoing World Economic Forum, and culture war. Anti-establishment media, including some right wing media, is already doing this. Because these political sectors do not dominate the airwaves and do not have dominance over narratives through monopoly capital, they need to chase what their audiences are already discussing. Such platforms are focused on these topics and are exposing neoliberals as liars. Communist media should be doing this from the Marxist perspective. Many people are trending towards distrust and rejection of the neoliberal establishment so the gaps in their ideologies must be filled by directly discussing what they are already discussing amongst themselves.
Workers are very conscious to their position in the world and the communist ideology is their ideology. We must foster the development of their own thinking and not approach them as enlightened heroes with a divine message. This is why we must talk about what they talk about, not approach them with ideas and conversations that aren’t already occupting their political psyche. They won’t care about how Lenin described the transition from compeition to monopoly capital until you get them interested in the communist worldview first.
On Other Ways of Disseminating Information
Reading Groups - There is nothing inherently wrong with reading groups but there are ways these can be improved. Firstly, it is very common to come across decentralized and “social” reading groups. It is not true that everyone will always have something useful to contribute, especially if the group is not ideologically coherent. Those running reading groups should be keen on mastering the information they wish to share and assuming a teacher role in study. The student-teacher dialectic does not need to be discarded but there should not be an emphasis on the students analyzing theory before the teacher. Teaching should also be left to someone experienced in and well versed in Marxist theory, and who has proven themselves to be able to help others understand dialectical materialism by offering good analogies, examples, and creative methods. Secondly, organizations should seriously consider the merits and effectiveness of public reading groups vs. time spent in popular media.
Newspapers and Radio - Methods should change based on geography. While the internet should be used as the primary vehicle for the Battle of Ideas, other methods should not be discarded. It is untrue that the masses in general engage with radio or newspaper as their primary means of information, but there are pockets of the country where these modes of information are popular. These modes should not be prioritized unless the publicist of Marxism is working to disseminate information particularly in such geographies. When these legacy forms of media are utilized, the time and capital needed to sustain them needs to be measured up to their effectiveness.
Lenin’s reply to the sloganeering of “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” was to say “to repeat these words in a period of theoretical chaos is like wishing the mourners at a funeral ‘many happy returns of the day.’” Workers are quite conscious about their position in the world. They know they are powerless, they know that a corporate and corrupt ruling class leeches labor and money from them, and they know that they are not given the fruits of their hard work. We must explain to them why and welcome them into a coherent ideology. This is the first step before organizing for power. If we do not do this, the workers will move without the ideology of communism guiding them and it will be a time of barbarism.