agitprop

I am not sure if this is the right space to post this: Jason Hickel and his colleagues have just launched this website collecting their work on global inequality, including many aspects, such as unequal exchange, climate injustice, carbon inequality, debt and structural adjustments programs. It's very comprehensive and full of graphs that can be very useful for agitprop.

If anyone talks to you about USSR, Russian, or Chinese imperialism show them this graph:

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5110414

"This is just as bad as those places we intentionally destabilized!!!"

Comment section full of people saying things like "At least someone has the backbone to stand up to Trump!!"

This is what taking a stand looks like to you?

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

Hexbears! I come to you with a challenge, an agitprop-off if you will. The most libbed community on Reddit, WhitePeopleTwitter, has been downed by the Admins. Now is the time for us to create a bunch of memes to post around reddit/bluesky to generate some movement behind a "Reddexit". Encourage people to sign up for Lemmy instances, or encourage Subreddits to break off and form their own instances.

If you are feeling daring, reddexit . com is available on Namecheap for like $6 a year.

As a bit of inspiration, I had deepseek generate this:

They need to start being honest with themselves that there is a reality where the Democrats never win another US election.

Are you really just going to "wait it out" and watch Trump Jr. or Meatball Ron takes over in '28? Then what?

Just like in Shadowrun Treaterinos

So, I know Deepseek's debut is enough of a triumph in terms of technological progress and the western economy - however:

What if it was released as a mechanism to help people achieve class consciousness and avoid western censorship? What if Deepseek is intended to function as the seed of global revolution simply by getting the masses to engage with it to receive answers/information that align in their own class interests?

One example:

It is exhausting to engage with/debate liberal propaganda regarding the history of communism; can Deepseek do that for us, now?

A second:

The internet is becoming more and more censored and algorythm'd to hell by capitalist astroturf projects; is Deepseek an avenue to get access to information that isn't western-aligned?

A third:

It is notoriously difficult to communicate on even a linguistic level with the Chinese as a westerner to learn their experiences and perspectives; can Deepseek function as an ambassador of the Chinese working class to Western working classes?

Deepseek could be a major force to wield against many adversaries that have proved problematic for the international working class during the digital age:

Information Control/Propaganda
Time economy & Paywalls
Educational/Academic abuse
Geographic and Linguistic alienation

Has China given us an open-source tool that we can harness to technologically update organizing/agitprop in the West?

time is a flat circle

What is happening:

Due to massive grassroots backlash to the looming TikTok ban in the US, millions of users are currently creating accounts on Xiaohongshu aka “Little Red Book”. It is currently the top trending app in the Apple App Store.

Why it is special:

This is truly an unprecedented development. Never have regular American and Chinese netizens had the ability to mingle so freely. Even more unprecedented is the fact that most of this early conversation will be regarding backlash to the US itself. This presents us with an opportunity to appeal to a large swath of (mostly young) Americans at the same time.

What the goal is:

We have recently had several chats on this site about how to actually turn posting/effortposting into something positive. Several ideas have been floated regarding Agitprop and how to encourage the creation of engaging content, and many people agreed on the idea of Agitprop contests. That is what we will be trying to do here for the first time ever.

The contest/rules are quite loose here and definitely open to change, so feel free to give your input:

‼️In an effort to help shepard the rapidly growing disgruntled and pliable new English speaking audience on Xiaohongshu, the leftist post or comment for English speakers on Xiaohongshu that garners the most interactions before January 19th at 5PM GMT will be featured on c/agitprop.‼️

Simply submit by linking the post or comment in the replies of this post. Please try to include some kind of watermark that identifies it as a Hexbear user. Ideally if you can link back here we can foster a few new users as well. Good luck my fellow posters

As of now there are no submissions, so if you’d like to participate just comment a link to your post! Of course, feel free to reuse your own Hexbear posts, and if you want to use somebody else’s post reach out and ask permission first.

This is barely agitprop but I don't know where else to put it

The idea is to collectively make a 2025 retrospective in the vein of the Charlie Brooker wipes or Munecat's 2020 wipe.

The gist of these videos is that it's a bunch of news clips from the year passed mixed in with some fun clips and narration to form a roughly cohesive narrative of the year.

On this forum we make a lot of the fact that liberals seem unable to remember anything that precedes the current news cycle and in many cases even agreeing with leftist stances in one moment but seemingly never retaining and incorporating it into their world view.

A retrospective that includes many of the most prominent stories with some emphasis on radicalizing stories (I forgot about that!), a few ignored by the mainstream press (I didn't hear about that!) and some funnier stuff to make it go down easy could maybe help some people early in the pipe to put things together and start forming a more cohesive understanding of the world. If it doesn't do shit as agitprop then it might at least be entertaining for hexbears to watch so I think it's worth trying.

The method would be to post potential clips to a thread (a weekly thread going forward? a tag for posts in the megathread?) as we go through the year and have some kind of intermittent poll (weekly/monthly?) as to which clips should be shortlisted.

This way the work is spread thinly throughout the year so that it isn't a large effort later and recency bias can be avoided.

In December we could then have a vote on which of the short listed clips should be included as well as discussion over how it should all piece together, what things seem more relevant in hind sight than they did at the time as well as pitching some jokes.

How it gets made into a video is something to be decided later and I suspect overtime the clips we collect will start to inform us more about the precise nature of what we are making.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4080361

I'm trying compile (for instructional use) a set of very vivid/egregious/horrifying examples of consent manufacturing in the Western media. Stuff like this:

Got any good examples like this? Post 'em!

Hey, you
We got your war
We're at the gates
We're at your door
Hey, you
We got your war
We're at the gates
We're at your door

We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run

We wanna thank you for flyin with us
We know you coulda stayed home, just cried and cussed
May all your guns go off if it's time to bust
May all their tanks have time to rust
They got the armies turnin bullets into gold
They got the hookers turnin tricks in the cold
And everytime the police kicks in the do
An angel gas-brakes-dips in The O
And even if a D-boy flips him a O
It ain't enough to buy shit anymo
Sleep in the doorway, piss on the floor
Look in the sky wait for missiles to show
It's finna blow, cuz
They got the TV- we got the truth
They own the judges and we got the proof
We got hella people- they got helicopters
They got the bombs and we got the- we got the

We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run

Don't talk about, it's not a show
Be about it, it's bout to blow
Don't talk about, it's not a show
Be about it, it's bout to blow

I just spit the dope lines
I don't snort em
Tell the boss to call police to escort him
You don't write all them lies, you just quote em
Get offline, plug in to this modem
No you can't out-vote em
The rules are still golden
Only jewels we holdin 
is if we guardin our scrotum
If you press your ear to the turf that is stolen
You can hear the sound of limitations explodin
Please, sir, may we have another portion?
We're children of the beast that dodged the abortion
Neck placed firm tween the floor and their florsheim
We'll shut your shit down- don't call it extortion
Caution- we're coming for your head
So call the feds and get files to shred
Every textbook read said bring you the bread
But guess what we got you instead

We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run

Let's keep it bangin like a shotgun
We're in a war before we fought one
Now if you're tired of workin so they can play-
A common enemy, we got one
Now keep it bangin like a shotgun
We're in a war before we fought one
Now if you're tired of workin so they can play-
A common enemy, we got one

Don't talk about, it's not a show
Be about it, it's bout to blow
Don't talk about, it's not a show
Be about it, it's bout to blow

My father in law is currently visiting extended family overseas in China. He flew in through Hong Kong, then spent three weeks traveling up the mainland by rail to Beijing and back again.

I'll preface this review of his visit by noting that he is a dyed-in-the-wool big-L Libertarian. He was part of Gary Johnson's Texas campaign staff in 2012 and personally introduced me to him that same year. He recommended "Road to Serfdom" to me in one of our first meetings. And he generally dismisses anything"socialist" as a trick to make people miserable.

Anyway, this is his take:

I’ve spent extensive time in the 3 largest cities in China and you can walk their streets freely without the slightest concern for violence.

I’m staying at my friend’s flat on the 4th floor of a 45 story high rise. It costs her $1000/mth. It’s nice but not opulent. My sister-in-law's less affluent uncle, who lives in Zhuhai had a much more modest apartment than this, yet he was happy, a wonderful host and you could walk his neighborhood without concern for your safety.

Shenzhen has the advantage of having been purpose built 60 years ago to be an extremely large city. Therefore the avenues are wide, with plenty of parks and common areas. Cab rides are super cheap in these very nice Chinese made electric cars. Everything is super clean.

Zhuhai too, is a beautiful attractive city but has a population of “only” 2.2 million, about the same as Houston.

The Chinese cities are superior to the US in a number of ways. If Trump were to actually visit, it would eat his heart out.

He's absolutely in love with China. We've heard similar praise of the mass transit system - speed, cleanliness, accessibility. He marveled at the effectively of civic planning - short, efficient commutes achieved by putting high ride housing right beside commercial and industrial sites. He repeatedly gawked at the absence of homelessness and poverty. He was thrilled with the museums in Beijing and Hong Kong. And, of course, had nothing but good things to say about the food.

Probably his biggest gripe is the cashless currency system (virtually everything is paid for with debit cards that are very difficult for a visitor to access). But otherwise, it has been something to see him come around so hard on a country he was deeply cynical towards for so long.

Just thought I'd share the virtues of a little cultural exchange.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4021395