I would like to see an agitprop community that does a few things:

• Provides help/training/support to teach comrades how to design agitprop materials. How to design flyers, how to use Canva/Photoshop/GIMP/whatever, where to go for printing, editing images so they work best on Twitter or Facebook or wherever they are going, how to work with print shops, etc. We need graphic design skills!

• Figures out through research, testing, or other means what kinds of agitprop messaging works best. I want us to collectively apply not just theory, but also knowledge of Psychology, Marketing, and other relevant fields to create messages that will have the best chance of breaking through the noise.

• Comes up with messaging ideas that are unique for specific areas/campaigns/etc. There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all message. In the deep south U.S., for instance, I could see us creating agitprop that co-opts all of the Christian messaging all over the place. Jesus was a Socialist after all! Or go after Shen Yun which will be on tour again soon. Or produce messaging around how to actually get organized beyond attending a march for the inauguration.

• Has a clear call to action. We may not agree on which org people should join, but I’d like all of our messaging to point to either joining a local branch of a left org or link to where people can learn more. Give people a drop of theory and then give them a chance to read more and radicalize.

This is not a request but merely a suggestion to consider if there is capacity within the mod team:

A calendar of important upcoming political and agitational(?) events

The way I see it, we did well (special mention to comrade Cowbee for being the exemplar) upon the Harris defeat/Trump win but I think as radicals we could, and honestly should, do better - we knew the election was coming up. We knew it was going to be Trump or Harris. I can’t think of anyone who wasn’t aware that this was happening. But we waited to act until after the election results came out.

Why? Should we not be ahead of the game and preparing our efforts at agitating prior to these known events? We were all talking about the upcoming election here, myself included so don’t think that this crit isn’t extending inwards and I’m not kicking myself (especially for waiting until now to raise this issue), but nobody put their hand up to say “Maybe this very large and world-affecting political event where we know exactly when it will occur should be used as an opportunity to agitate and educate, and maybe we should prepare for it?”. I didn’t. I can and should do better.

But what we can do is learn and groan grow from this, to organise better. (I’m frustrated with myself at the thought of me talking big about agitation/education/organising and not stopping to ask myself how to do those things in preparation for a moment that matters and usually only comes around once every four years.) And I think it would be great if the mod team would consider a calendar of upcoming known events at first so we can organise our efforts around them. Don’t know the results of the presidential election? That’s fine. How many outcomes did you anticipate from it? We can organise around one outcome, so it’s not like we couldn’t organise around an event where there are two known outcomes with just a little bit more effort.

I think if this is a success and it doesn’t put undue burden on the modteam, this idea could be expanded and we could consider adopting a newsmedia model. Those ghouls have pieces ready to hit the presses in a matter of minutes for when a prominent figure dies (or, in Chomsky’s case, survives). Surely we can do the same while probably inspiring a lot of optimism because we will literally be plotting the inevitable demise of our most hated political enemies. If there’s a lot of agitational contributions on a megathread for George W Bush’s death for example, when that hellspawn finally kicks the bucket and relieves the world of his sinister presence it would be a simple matter to dredge up the old megathread and start putting all the turboposting to good use. What, is that sick scumbag going to achieve anything else notable in his detestable existence? Unlikely. He’s done. We can put together his eulogy diseulogy now and gleefully await his death.

Doesn’t that sound kinda fun? We would get to celebrate his death twice, if you look at it from the right perspective!

(Sorry for being so negative and critical. I know this is off-brand for me. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed and maybe it’s because I’m so disappointed in myself that it’s dimmed my typically gentle and encouraging tone. I still love all my comrades )

Edit: I realised I have more to say about this and it’s really about driving the key message of my post home. I have worked to support comrade Cowbee’s efforts through DMs. He generously offered to credit me in his post but I refused, so if you are asking why he’s taking all the credit it’s because I was supporting him for the sake of helping my comrade’s efforts and I’m not interested in glory or self-aggrandizement. So don’t come for him because he stole no work, I gave him my input explicitly denying credit, and come for me instead I guess?

So when Cowbee made his first draft post, I checked over it and realised that I had a lot of those works uploaded as audiobooks on TankieTube. I made a list and started filling it out to find that I had all bar ~3 in audiobook format, almost all of them professional ones, so I collected up a list and contacted him to invite him to add this to his post. Obviously audiobooks increase accessibility and that’s a big thing for me with regards to disability justice/liberation but lots of people don’t sit down and read these days while plenty can be enticed to listen to audiobooks.

I fleshed out the audiobook offerings as much as possible and that’s where you see the addition of those to Cowbee’s post. But I was scrambling to make it happen. I’m not complaining, I’ll do the work where the work is required but if I wasn’t ahead on this with all the audiobooks downloaded and upped to TT and categorised etc. then it would have been an immense scramble to achieve this. Luckily it wasn’t this time but by rights it shouldn’t ever be a scramble.

The upshot of linking people to TT is that there’s a lot of audiobooks of theory and more agitation/education works and adjacent works available there which aren’t available anywhere else on the clearnet as far as I’m aware (and I go trawling through the Russian side of the internet and I dip my toe in the Chinese side of the internet so believe me when I say I cast a wide net in this regard). By directing people to head to TT , there’s a good chance that they will undergo some self-agitation and autodidactic efforts as they start branching out and bookmarking other interesting audiobooks and documentaries and the like that they will discover over there for themselves. The place is a huge resource and tbh even we are sleeping on it. I say this without intending to drag Cowbee, the user who has by far put in the most effort towards this recent push as anyone to my knowledge, but even he was surprised to learn that I had all of this stuff sitting on a metaphorical shelf collecting dust. I’m sure if he knew, he would have added in all the available audiobooks on his own initiative. But if one of our strongest posters isn’t aware of the absolute trove that TT has become very rapidly over the past few months since launch then whomst among us does?

You can ask yourself why I haven’t created a Comrade Cowbee’s playlist in TT yet - anyone can do it ;)
But I do intend set about making that happen in the next couple of days as spoons avail themselves to me in sufficient quantity for me to lock in on the tasks I need to do to make a clean playlist that accurately represents Cowbee’s current iteration of the masterpost.

Personnally I’d love to see a QuickDraw utility belt selection of memes or videos I could use to counter popular right wing ideas that don’t require a PH.D in history, sociology, or economics. Kinda like the gravel Institute. I would to see more “elementary”/“intro level” socialist and commie stuff. The more we can break down leftie stuff into super small building blocks the better. To get more regular people in the door at the very least.

•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)

this is a great idea. election results, new wars breaking out, political “scandals” big enough to register with the population at large, etc. any time something in the news presents a real opportunity for radicalization, we should have a thread that centralizes all our approaches to undertaking that radicalization. obviously very few such opportunities in the future will be as big and obvious as trump winning a second term, but it’d still be worth doing

Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere

this is too similar to the news mega IMO, we get some pretty deep discussion in there sometimes and lots of links to non-hexbear sources and articles. too many places for this kind of talk could spread the conversation too thin and reduce engagement

Death to America

I think part of agitated propaganda should include calls to action. I’m not saying we should be running and operating our own events, but we should have something to direct people to as well. We should maintain a working list of organizations (and not just the big ones) by location (country/state or provinces or territories/city). Something similar to this: https://hexbear.net/post/8930

Much of that list is Food Banks and Homeless Shelters, I think we can work on expanding it and directing people to things like Food Not Bombs (which is noted in the body of the post), women’s shelters, and any other mutual aid programs we can find in these localities. The direction shouldn’t be to simply donate money for food, but to encourage people to donate their labor.

Adjacent to that, we should curate a list of online social spaces where this content can be distributed. Reddit has a community for many localities (at least in the US and probably Canada), there are likely locality specific comms on the wider lemmyNet as well.

To encourage the creation of these types of AgitProp we should encourage agitprop “battles” not unlike “r/photoshopbattles” on reddit, an “AgitBattle” if you will. These posts should contain a topic with information that can be used to create the AgitProp, subjects should start with [AgitBattle]. Here is a good example of what I mean: Literacy Statistics 2024-2025 (Where we are now) by the National Literacy Institute. The information on this page can be easily transformed into agitprop, let’s see what people come up with. It might be useful to also include a leaping off point, maybe a photo or image that needs to be incorporated into the AgitProp.

These kinds of posts should help with getting the creative energy flowing. Friendly “competition” that will likely encourage critique and improvement by the creators and consumers.

To complement posts like this, it might be beneficial to have a weekly brainstorming mega thread that encourages users to collect these AgitProp subjects and themes. If something interesting comes out of those threads, encourage folks to create a AgitBattle thread relating to that subject or theme.

This should help us cultivate a culture of both “theory” and “practice” which we can use to sharpen our skills. I would also say it’s important to report back if any of the content being generated by this community appears to be effective. A kind of “field report” or “after action” report if you will. If content was posted on a publicly accessible site, link to the post, so that others can read the reactions and we can collectively assess its effectiveness.

Personally, I would like to see an effort made into actually making agitprop that can be disseminated. Like organizing the community’s skills towards building a workflow of producing memes, infographs, outlines/talking points, and various other propaganda that can be easily shared or built upon. We have people who like doing the reading, we have artists, and we have posters. We should be putting these things together.

Also, this is one of the areas that leftists should be embracing AI to make up for our lack of numbers in the overwhelming face of the cultural hegemony. Building leftist LLMs and image networks, experimenting with and teaching each other how to use them to pump out revolutionary slop should be an important part of our toolkit. Technology is a force multiplier we are badly in need of. This should be a place we can talk about that without the “It’S NoT ReAl iNteLlIGeNcE!” rhetoric.