How to organize people?

by - MW, Aug 2025

Socialist parties keep hitting a wall at around 10-15% in places like Germany. The people who already get democratic socialist or marxist ideas are already with us. But there's this huge pool of potential supporters we can't reach because they're still carrying cold war era baggage that stops them from seeing the difference between authoritarian communist regimes and modern democratic socialism. They're stuck in information bubbles that just reinforce these biases.

Current outreach tactics won't break through to these people. Instead of handing them Marx or throwing around heavy terminology, we need to meet them where they are and talk in normal language about things that actually affect their lives. When you focus on concrete economic issues people deal with daily, they naturally start leaning toward solutions that challenge capitalism, even if they don't realize they're socialist ideas at first.

The mistake a lot of progressives make is thinking we need better "cultural appeal", cooler art, funnier memes, hipper music, or more appealing spiritual messaging. But culture is inherently divisive and subjective. What works for one person completely alienates another. When socialists get branded as just another cultural tribe with specific aesthetic tastes, we lose people before they even consider the actual ideas.

Economic material conditions though? Those are universal. Everyone deals with housing costs, healthcare expenses, job insecurity, wage stagnation, doesn't matter what their cultural background is. This shared experience is our most powerful organizing tool.

The goal should be mass education about materialism, helping people understand how economic forces shape their lives, while respecting their individual cultural and ideological preferences. Don't push personal lifestyle choices or spiritual beliefs onto the broader movement. People, especially conservatives, see this as cultural imperialism and it becomes divisive instead of mobilizing.

We don't need "acid communism" for general outreach. We need a non sectarian materialist framework that speaks to common economic struggles while letting people maintain their personal identities. Save the niche cultural stuff for people already in that scene.

You don't have to hide being a socialist, but you do need to drop the jargon. Break down complex theory into accessible everyday language. Understand where people are starting from and meet them there. Focus on shared material interests rather than cultural signifiers. And here's the thing, once people enter the movement through shared material concerns, something profound can happen. Real solidarity and recognizing the humanity in people who initially seemed completely different. Through working together on concrete issues, there's at least a chance that conservatives might become less militantly opposed to liberal values, which are also universal socialist values, anti-racism, feminism, LGBT rights, immigration solidarity, climate crisis urgency, universalism. When people collaborate toward common economic goals, those artificial divisions that seemed impossible to bridge can start dissolving, replaced by mutual understanding born from shared struggle and cooperation.

This approach needs clarity about principles while staying strategically open. Socialist parties should never abandon their core commitments. Instead, we can be honest with conservative working class people saying "We're not compromising on our principles, but we have other things to offer you in economic areas where we actually agree. Even though we might not see eye to eye on social issues, this is your chance to join a solidarity movement instead of a reactionary barbaric one. We know you probably disagree with us on social issues. That's fine. But you're still getting squeezed by landlords, corporations, and bosses. Why not fight together where our interests overlap instead of letting elites divide us?" This acknowledges the disagreement while extending an invitation based on shared material interests, potentially creating space for deeper understanding to develop over time.

PS- (May 2026)

I have noticed somethings regarding signaling within one’s in-group. Upper class liberal women compete with one another, and in their habitus social justice symbolism functions as status capital. They compete over who is more morally pure, more progressive, more awakened. To climb the status ladder they constantly search for new forms of symbolic transgression that don't hit their pocket. Some move toward trans ideology, others communism, others third-worldism, but all unite in the endless symbolic war against "the Patriarchy", at least whatever still remains of it in the West in 2026.

They universalize their own milieu politics onto all women as if women were some monolith with no class or cultural differences. Any normal person would feel awkward posting endless performative moral signaling online, but the status seeking narcissist loses that self-awareness because the audience they care about is not society at large. The opinion of broader society becomes secondary to the approval of fellow status seekers inside their habitus.

It is constantly said that elite women are getting cosmetic surgeries or starving themselves with extreme diets because of male expectations. No, this is abs bullshit.

A huge part of it is ruthless status competition among elite women themselves, endlessly trying to outdo one another within their own social games. Much of this has less to do with ordinary men and far more to do with intra-elite competition inside their own habitus.

Then the same people blame a floating signifier like “the patriarchy” to externalize responsibility for dynamics they themselves actively reproduce. I’m talking specifically about elite status oriented milieus here.

The same thing happens with upper middle class internationals from developing countries. They go onto talk shows and film festivals in the west arrogantly asserting their culture and playing victims at the same time, scratching historical wounds and framing others as essential oppressors. They do not care how cringe or alienating this looks to ordinary people in the west because western audiences are not the people they are signaling to. They are signaling back toward their own class milieu at home, where this performance raises their symbolic status among people driven by inferiority complexes and ressentiment for the west.

Then you have progressive activists in America moralizing about Germany, saying germans learned nothing from history because of votes for AfD, while having almost zero understanding of the actual political and material frustrations driving those votes. Again, they have no real interest in the working class people voting out of precarity or protest because their real audience is other progressives online. Their symbolic performance is aimed inward toward their own moral marketplace.

All of them are playing the same game of climbing the status hierarchy within their habitus while dressing it up as universal morality. Their performative politics are ultimately antithetical to universalism. You can see this very clearly once you apply a marxian and bourdieuan class analysis.

Hard propaganda rarely works. People align themselves with an agenda far more willingly when it is embedded within a status game, because humans are fundamentally status seeking animals. At the same time, deep pluralism prevents any agenda from becoming truly universal. People are embedded in competing niche status systems shaped by different forms of habitus. It does not produce a unified culture so much as an overproduction of habitus itself.

PS- It is not only strategically important to restrict immigration so that labor movements can at least have a chance to organize, it is also a moral urgency to stop the exploitation of foreign workers willing to work for lower wages, thereby suppressing wages for everyone else. These workers are often far more precarious, hesitant to join unions, lacking the same protections as native workers, struggling with language and cultural barriers, and constantly living on edge. How do you realistically expect people in such conditions to organize against capital?

Historically, labor only had a serious chance against capital when labor itself became scarce enough to constrain employers. Capital had nowhere to go as the industrial productive capacity of the global south was minimal, but now it's different. Once societies attempt to seriously restrict capital or strengthen labor power, globalized capital retaliates, investments flee, sanctions emerge, supply chains tighten, and production moves to places where labor is cheaper and easier to exploit, especially in the global south. Capital forces societies to remain trapped in this equilibrium while slowly eroding social cohesion in the process.

At the same time, this makes it impossible to ignore the global south. The conditions of workers there directly shape the conditions of workers in the global north. We therefore need international co-operation so that nation-states can once again regain the capacity to control capital mobility and limit the domination of capital over society and politics.

But this will not happen through woke cosmopolitanism. The hard political and institutional work has to be done at home first so that INTER-nationalism can even become possible. It has to go through the nation-state, and not bypass it.

Once upon a time in hollywood has always been my favorite movie for various reasons. But now, in retrospectivity, I see it through another lens. The film stages 1969 as the moment when a politics grounded in work, institutions, craft, class solidarity, and ordinary social obligations is displaced by a politics of style, transgression, youth charisma, therapeutic self expression, anti-authoritarian theater, and moral performance. The manson family in the film is not literally the New Left, and it would be crude to identify student radicals with murderous cultists. But the film uses the manson hippies as a grotesque allegory of what the Old Left fears the New Left degenrated into when it severed rebellion from labor, discipline, institutions, and class organization.