Hello comrades, I read a comment on a post either on lemmygrad or hexbear talking about how most discourse happening was of poor quality and indicative of a lack of genuine leftist groups in the imperial core. Basically if there were patty’s with some teeth they would enforce party discipline and education and that would lead to higher quality discourse online.
I also read some of Lenins2ndcat’s comments which were very patient when they were interacting with users from other communities.
Is there anyway to work on like, an online party discipline? Or like having users who are very good at discussing with libs have a more concerted approach to their interactions? It really seems that much of us are often too aggressive and meme-y and as fun as that is it really isn’t productive.
I get that this isn’t how praxis or anything happens, it seems more like the way we engage could be more productive and fruitful in the long term and considerations like this might go a long way.
TL;DR Planned economy but for memeposting
Not necessarily. Comrades that engage in actual praxis in RL mostly just don’t care enough to engage in discussions online. I can certainly attest to that. Since I started organizing offline my interest in engaging with libs online has stopped almost entirely. It’s time consuming, annoying, unpleasant and for the most part simply unproductive. 99% of people of any political affiliation do not engage in good-faith debate online - including me and most comrades here. The time I have for political activism is sparse and I can do more productive things with it than talk to a liberal who’s just gonna reply with a sissy-pee social credit meme to a comment I took 30mins to write. RL discussions for the most part are much better in this regard, because the human component shines through much more and you tend to pre-select the people you engage with to a much larger extent. Getting into political discussions with people completely opposed to your view doesn’t happen that much, whereas it is the standard online.
For existing real-life parties going online maybe, but their energy is used much better elsewhere. For a bunch of randos like us? I don’t think so tbh. We are not organized, there’s no discipline, no organizational structure, no mechanisms to enforce things, no participation to come to conclusions and analysis.
I agree that communists in 2023 have to use the online space productively. Creating platforms like lemmygrad, producing content like podcasts, videos, articles, streams, etc is just much more worth-while (and even that’s limited) and lends itself more to concerted efforts than discussions with dorky libs.
yeah I have to admit since my org is pretty dead in the summer I spend way too much time online lol
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but let me nitpick
We can simply create organization, discipline (as in enforcement of behavior) is entirely possible with the correct online organizational structure, there are plenty of mechanisms to enforce things in an online organization, and participation would come with time
These same criticisms could have been made about the idea of making the first socialist party before the first socialist party was made. These are things that we have to build ourselves no matter what.
Thanks for the response. I have noticed that many of the comrades in my local org do not engage online and with their limited time they prefer to do material action which they can be certain of.
Could I ask, as there are a number of comrades online who do not have the access to a local org, and who manifest the lack of organization, discipline, etc. would a more formally declared subset of users fill in this role until perhaps access to a local org comes along? I’m honestly thinking like, Mao saw the peasantry as a useful force in his environment when trying to bring about socialist change, are the unorganized members of the community (both this and at large) not in a similar position?
It very much seems to me that the online environment is completely dictated by capitalists and their preference for a type of engagement which relies on hedonistic tendencies to counteract any potential revolutionary force. I am not advocating for a lack of pleasure as it is completely necessary, rather a space where it can be taken back for different aims as is evidenced by lemmy and the fediverse at large. It really seems that as someone in the imperial core there is a specific advantage in engaging online which does not make sense in other environments as a physical presence would be more apt. Maybe a lemmygrad strike force? Putting fear in the hearts of liberals everywhere.