A New Strategy for Leftist Media

Immediately following the outbreak of COVID-19, Tom Sexton coined the term ‘Epistemological Crisis’ to refer to the new extreme level of alienation from reality that we in the western world all had to get used to under lockdown. Maybe we were always this distant from the truth of the world and only then came to realize it. Or maybe there is no truth in the world and never was. Regardless, I do believe we are facing a crisis today, because now we know in an irrevocable way that there is not one reality; there are seven billion of them, barely overlapping and all based on completely different foundations.

Coincidentally, Barack Obama (my sworn enemy) expressed the exact same fear with the exact same phrase shortly after Sexton. As Obama points out, this creates a problem for democracy: if everyone lives in separate realities, there is no place for compromise because there is no common space for that compromise to exist in. As he put it, the marketplace of ideas can’t function in a society where nobody agrees on what’s true or false. Obviously this is rich coming from someone with a media apparatus to back him up by manufacturing the consent necessary to let him get away with, say, torturing some folks, and in consequence creating consent for the president that came after him with the promise to bring torture back, but you can’t expect a member of the ruling class to be honest in public. Obama doesn’t care what’s true or false, he cares about power. In the western world today, nobody with power cares about what’s true or false, and that’s part of the reason we’ve lost our grip on what’s real: projecting a message based solely on truth is a luxury these people can’t afford when their only priority is weaponizing every atom of matter, every calorie of energy, and every germ of an idea they interact with for the singular goal of maintaining their grip on power and prestige. Some among our ruling class might seem to approximate the truth more often than others, but if they do, it’s merely a coincidence: the ideas that they happened to need to use along the way happened to align with what we consider true, that’s all. It could have happened any other way and they would have been just as happy, so long as it maintained the grip. There really is a marketplace of ideas for these people: every idea is for sale, and to maintain your status you have to strategically buy and sell the ones that best serve you. They are commodities like anything else under capitalism, and holding onto ones you merely like but which you cannot use to your advantage is a weakness to be exploited by others.

This maximally cynical relationship with the truth among the ruling class in the western world gets propagated down to us through the media we consume, especially the news media, which is so thoroughly packed with competing narratives and propaganda that without constant vigilance and research to corroborate narratives with reality a person can be spun in so many circles on what to believe that all of their individual opinions might come to contradict not just their lived reality but even one another. In other words, the everyday person is effectively barred from ever having a coherent read on the world. Is it any big mystery, then, that average people are unable to organize together to better fight their ruling class, even as society crumbles around them? The revolutionary potential of the people is aborted by the schizophrenic rambling of their rulers. [On the other hand, while the voice of the ruling class comes down to us in such a dizzying way, it is important to recognize that there are baseline assumptions everybody seems to agree on and dangerous ideas everybody seems to avoid at all costs. Both of these also have no consistent relationship with the truth and are only agreed upon for their mutual benefit to the whole ruling class.]

There is a way out. There are some of us who have been lucky enough, despite the ongoing onslaught of alienation, to focus through the noise and form a coherent picture of our reality which is additionally correct, and has concrete goals for the replacement of the current western hegemony. Even more, there is a historical basis for achieving our goals which, if tuned and implemented correctly in a given time and place has proven able to lead to successful revolution and emancipation of the common people. That basis is the idea that if we correctly self-organize we can actually win in a fight with the ruling class. In other words, socialism. So, we must turn with all of our energy to the question of how precisely to organize ourselves. It is not good enough to simply say, “organize!” and be done, because that can mean seven billion things to seven billion people. We must formulate a plan, and in refining that plan we must come together and organize ourselves further. In the face of the particular conditions of our time and place, self-organization must run hand-in-hand with a media operation. The primary goal of an embryonic socialist movement in the west should be to overcome and push back the social incoherence all around us, and a tightly organized media of our own is the most obvious path toward this goal.

Independent leftist media must find a way to shed its independence. In general, individual productions across the entire spectrum of the left should form as many partnerships and sponsorships as possible with each other, and provide their platform to as many new creators as possible in order to encourage the growth of our revolutionary voice. Even better, existing popular leftist media personalities should reach out to those they trust the most and offer to collectivise, share all funds equally, and coordinate on all messaging. This advice applies equally to every type of socialist that exists in the world of independent media today, but my focus is on those who consider themselves revolutionary. Such people ought to, in collectivising, organize themselves along a democratic centralist line, with a party apparatus to administrate their operations. Once such a media operation becomes stable, this party apparatus will be able to take in dues-paying members and begin the sort of on-the-ground organizational work more typical of a communist party. In the shift from embryo to mature organization and needs shift from media war to class war, the media collective should transition into a department like any other of the robust popular institution that the party becomes.

There are so many reasons why collectivisation is necessary for leftist media. Chief among them is the benefit to coherence in left messaging. As has already been discussed, a coherent message is necessary to rally people toward a common goal, and necessary to cut through the political incoherence we see in the thoughts of ordinary people in the west. A coherent message is harder for the ruling class to co-opt for its own purposes, and when we can plan our own coherent messaging we can make more forceful demands of the ruling class, and more forcefully amplify and provide detail to organic messages that come out of grassroots movements. Coherence would additionally have the possibly surprising effect of reducing the worst effects of the uniquely parasocial nature of left media. To a large extent this nature is a necessary consequence of the mediums we operate in, but we must take pains to limit it. When two individuals with large audiences don’t take the same line on a political issue and argue in public, they necessarily demand that their audiences take a side. This is bad for left unity because it reduces politics for the audience into a choice between two parasocial relationships instead of two policy opinions. Even the idea of thinking about politics this way is distasteful to most people and turns many potential leftists away from our media at the outset. What’s more, those that are not turned away are uniquely ill-equipped to look past the issue of which person they like more as a person and come to the correct conclusion about the political issue at hand. When those among us with large followings have an organizational apparatus inside of which they may privately hash out their differences and only speak out publicly once a decision has been reached internally, we will begin to look much more professional, intelligent, and correct to all of these audiences, both unifying them and making room for them to grow, and to streamline the recruitment process once the time comes.

The second major reason for leftist media collectivisation is leverage. With collectivisation comes bargaining power, in the sense that with numbers we have a better chance at setting up negotiations for a better cut of revenues from the media platforms we use for our work. With a mobilized audience-membership, the collective will pose a serious financial risk to any platform that threatens to censure it. Less obviously, one of the most important things the establishment media has over us as individuals is the ability to blacklist anyone for any reason. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we saw the shuttering of any voice that so much as intimated that a war in Afghanistan might not be well-enough thought through, and the effect on our world was shattering. Wielded for good, a blacklist could serve to protect us from the kinds of embarrassment that make us look immature to our friends and empower our enemies. It would also let us pressure those in the mainstream media who want access to us for our audiences: no interviews if you take a neutral point of view on environmental destruction, no interviews if you act as a stenographer for the police, no interviews if you claim that escalating tensions against China are justified, no interviews if you endorse the wrong electoral politician. Delete or correct all your past messaging that we disagree with and issue an itemised public apology, and maybe…

The third major reason for leftist media collectivisation is true independence. There is a time and place for critiquing the mainstream media line on any topic, but as long as this is our main activity, we are undoubtedly dependent on the mainstream media to continue our own game. When we produce and present our own coverage of our own issues on our own platform and retain an audience of our own even when our choice of topics has no overlap with that of MSNBC, CNN, or Fox, we will begin to be able to call ourselves independent. People’s consumption of mainstream media determines for them what they consider the crisis of a given day, but the sad truth is that leftist media is nowhere near as able to manufacture a narrative of crisis on the level of the mainstream media. When the wellbeing of stock market futures depends on the existence or nonexistence of such a narrative of crisis among the populace, we need this power in order to finally terminate capitalist hegemony. (Also, a word to those who might read this paragraph and say, “but it is not our place to manufacture a narrative, we should be solely the stenographers of the truth!” If this is your reaction, consider that there is no truth without a narrative to corroborate it. There is no time for this kind of naivety. We need powerful narratives to rally people to our cause and away from our enemies.)

The fourth major reason for leftist media collectivisation is efficiency. We need not reproduce each other’s research if we can share it and compare our notes. We need not independently learn to operate all of the necessary technology for the trade when we can ask others for advice and assistance. We need not buy individually what equipment we can save money on through a bulk purchase. We need not each separately calculate and strategize our position in an always-changing hypercompetitive landscape where our enemies are vicious and our friends can’t be relied on. Even on a single-person production, a collective base of research and an agreed-upon narrative all vetted by trusted people can save hours of off-screen time and raise the quality of media produced a thousand-fold. There is an economy of scale in media that the mainstream takes advantage of, and we do ourselves a disservice by avoiding the same. Also, we need not fear the repercussions of advocating a supposedly dangerous position when we know our friends will be there for us in the fallout.

A financial stake is required from those of us who have been able to make a stable income in this business, and in a sense the willingness of these people to commit to an income sharing operation is a probe of the true revolutionary nature of what has been forming on the left in the last decade. We may genuinely be able to form the nucleus of a new revolutionary movement in the west here out of something that for us has always been disconnected and disparate. We may be able to solve the epistemological crisis that has been crushing and confusing us in recent times by working together. The one thing a communist is supposed to be the master of in any society is organizing people, and I hope the people behind the communist and socialist media that has developed in the west in recent years are ready to commit to that legacy today. The path forward may actually be feasible for the first time in our lives, if we are ready to dedicate ourselves to walking down it.

Together, we can televise the fucking revolution ourselves.