Thread by @NMamatas

1. I am beyond excited to have been invited to a small FB group about radical politics and art—a thread.

2. The specifics of the group do not matter. What I'd like to discuss is what does matter "at the current juncture." AtCJ is a term of art in radical politics.

3. Can there be anything less useful, AtCJ, than joining some small group of culture-makers and interpreters? Given the political climate of worldwide reaction and the climate climate of irreversible warming? I'd suggest that such a group can be very useful indeed.

4. The political climate of worldwide reaction didn't come from nowhere—the global economic crisis created the objective conditions for it. The subjective conditions came from the political and culture-making of the right, which were distributed by various billionaires.

5. But that far-right culture-making came from the underground. I'm not talking about 4chan, but the dumb and evil ideas found in dusty pamphlets, PO Box think tanklets, and self-published nonsense the far-right created and distributed.

6. If you spent any time in the underground at all, you've encountered "the fascist creep"—it's most obvious in punk and metal music, but exists in the zine scene, in college town libraries, midnight cafes and the like as well.

7. I'll tell you that these slimeboys never spent one second thinking "Aw man, what's the use! Nobody reads or listens to our stuff!" even though for a long time nobody read or listened to their stuff. Do you think anyone read Edward Limonov's books? Tito Perdue's? Nah.

8. But the handful that did, and understood them (which often didn't include their publishers) dove into action. And the same can be said for the music, the zines, the fine arts etc. It's a process that happens slowly, then all at once.

9. Why these underground works ultimately had significant influence (culture—>Internet—>billionaires—>we're doomed) is because they were designed to change the receptive individual who read them. Not all of them were simply didactic either.

10. At the prior juncture, the conditions were right (ideological and economic collapse) and an unworkable set of ideas were introduced. There was no real left-right battle until Occupy a couple years later, and Occupy was ultimately rerouted into BernieCorbynism.

11. Well good luck with BernieCorbynism! The right had been practicing in the underground for the years; left art also turned to the right—only slightly, but crucially—in order to, you know, get seats in HBO writers' rooms and such. Well good luck with that too!

12. As it turns out, "selling out" really is a bad idea after all. Not for the artist, but for the culture the artist generates! Instead of seeking to influence the receptive mind to critique society, one influences the receptive mind to purchase a product.

13. I had some RL experiences with this myself, writing a book according to a synopsis given to me by a major publisher. All the little horrors you could imagine were involved in it, but that's for another thread.

14. What is important is that I've heard many people in culture work do what the far-right never did: throw up their arms to say "Ah, we've lost! Nobody's reading/looking at/grooving along with us! Better shift our politics to get a mass audience!"

15. They stuck with it till the objective conditions changed.

Well, here's the interesting thing about objective conditions. They change frequently. You want to know your target audience? The children and students of the teachers who went on wildcat strikes in several states.

16. Also, those kids we're all shaking our fist at because a magazine found a dozen of them to say they're not going to vote in next week's midterm elections.

If your politics don't start from the assumption that people's minds can change, and radically, you don't have politics.

17. The time is right, the conditions are right, the fight is now. Go forth. Everything matters. There's no such thing as losing. There are only two conditions:

1. Yay, we won!

and, more frequently

2. Ah, the struggle continues!