Is it possible for communists to reach a mass audience without a revolution?

[RedMaterialist]

How is it possible?

[Skyhilist]

A revolution by a communist party when communists don't have a mass audience wont do it. Material conditions create the audience, not some party. When the shit hits the fan, and when things become so fucked up that the lies of the capitalists become absolutely glaringly obvious (even with mainstream media attempts at thought control), then communism with have a mass audience, and only then will we be ready for a successful revolution worldwide. Small scale examples of this happening are in Chiapas in Mexico, Catalonia in Spain, and "Free Territory" in Ukraine. The problem is that here they only happened (or continue to happen) on a small geographic scale and haven't garnered enough support globally. This will change in the future because the devastating impacts of things like climate change and ecological destruction will absolutely have a global impact.

[Hivemind]

I personally think that you can't have a successful revolution without reaching a critical mass of people. To me there are two "types" of critical mass, the first is enough to spark a revolution; there are enough people involved to bring the fight to the ruling class. But is that enough? I'd say no, I think you need the second "type" of critical mass: there being enough people to bring the fight and sustain the revolution. Without the second type, the revolution is pretty much doomed to fail, and without the first, there is no revolution, there would only be quickly crushable, isolated revolts.

So the key I guess is to reach that mass audience of yours before the revolution. How do you do this? You go door to door holding a copy of the Communist Manifesto and you talk about your lord and savior Karl Marx. Just kidding :D

There are various ways to do this. My group is involved in "infiltrating" unions in my city and introducing the concepts of communism and anarchism to the members in a very direct way (by demonstrating the capitalist relations that affect those in the unions, as they are most of the time low-wage workers who struggle to get by) and then trying to get them to understand that their union bosses are not on their side, and finally introducing the concept of workers councils and that type of worker's self management. It's been pretty successful so far, and we're trying to spread out to a wider audience.

We also run a monthly "paper" though it doesn't read like one. It doesn't mention specific struggles and it isn't verbose. It is catered more or less to students just because we think that at that stage in life, people are fairly impressionable, and a good portion of the students in the city that I live in have started seeing through the bullshit of capitalism and modern society. So what we do is spend time writing a couple of pages worth of stuff regarding capitalism, what it is, how it works, the alternative, how to organize, individual left wing concepts (what alienation and atomization is and how they work, for example), and then we print off the pages and hand them out to students in the city. And for the record, there are two universities and a college in my city.

The big thing with the "paper" thing is that we tried very hard to not make it appeal to intellectualism, we kept it straightforward and concise, easily readable, yet with enough substance to make an impression. The next step is to move beyond the students, as they are only a small portion of society, though a very significant portion. Why? Because they are what I would consider in between classes. Of course, most students are part of the working class just because where I live, most students have a job on the side, but this isn't permanent. A good deal of them will eventually become capitalists after their education, but the rest will remain working class, even if they are making a large sum of money in comparison to a minimum wage worker. What we are trying to do is to raise consciousness in the students before they get blinded by the money and life they'd have after their education. It is easier to raise consciousness before they become complacent towards capitalism after the fact.

I'm only writing all of this to describe to you guys some real world methods of raising class consciousness and reaching a mass audience. So far we've reached students, and union workers. Not all of them, obviously, but we're trying to be as horizontal and as thorough as we can. Students and union workers are but a small portion of society. And to be honest, I'm a bit stuck as to what the next step would be. I have a few ideas in mind as to who to "target" next but nothing has been decided yet.

Sorry to hijack the thread but what do you guys think of what I said? And what would you do next?

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Yes. Revolution can only happen as a conscious act of the mass of the proletariat and thus a mass-audience must have been reached in some way. In normal times, spreading "the message" is a hard task and proceeds very slowly, but is indispensable. However, much more importantly, capitalism inevitably produces crises. These crises, which can be both economic and political in their nature, often, if not always, come with discontent to the existing economic and political order. Whether this is by complaining about "corrupt politicians" and voting not changing anything or by protests against globalisation or a war.
These moments may not be revolutionary per se but give the left a platform to give an answer to the dissatisfaction people have. By using these crises the left can, patiently, build a mass-movement that would be capable of making use of a crisis or revolutionary situation and take power. Only with a mass proletarian movement can capitalism be destroyed, the realisation of such a movement may not proceed as fast as we want but is necessary to work for.

[Stalinist Speaker]

yes KPRF (communist party of the russian federation) have about 20% of the votes in russia according to official results, some sources claim they have about 30-40% of the votes. Their party also has most members and if i´m right the biggest youth wing in russia. So the answer is yes, and the reason why they are so big is because many people feel that they live worse under capitalism then socialism.

[BlackSovietComrade]

yes KPRF (communist party of the russian federation) have about 20% of the votes in russia according to official results, some sources claim they have about 30-40% of the votes. Their party also has most members and if i´m right the biggest youth wing in russia. So the answer is yes, and the reason why they are so big is because many people feel that they live worse under capitalism then socialism.

True, and the KPRF always comes out 2nd after the united Russia party. This means lots of people still believe that socialism is still a valid system, and that capitalism is failing.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

yes KPRF (communist party of the russian federation) have about 20% of the votes in russia according to official results, some sources claim they have about 30-40% of the votes. Their party also has most members and if i´m right the biggest youth wing in russia. So the answer is yes, and the reason why they are so big is because many people feel that they live worse under capitalism then socialism.

Except that the KPRF doesn't really want to get rid of capitalism. They are a nationalist, soviet-nostalgic, populist organization that occasionaly uses leftist and more often rightist populist demagogy.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

yes KPRF (communist party of the russian federation) have about 20% of the votes in russia according to official results, some sources claim they have about 30-40% of the votes. Their party also has most members and if i´m right the biggest youth wing in russia. So the answer is yes, and the reason why they are so big is because many people feel that they live worse under capitalism then socialism.

Except that the KPRF is a right-wing, chauvinist and nationalist party that obsesses over Eurasianism, reminiscing of soviet police-state measures, extreme censorship and 'the Russian way' i.e. putting bigoted and arbitrary social values on the ever so holy pedestal of 'culture' and running away with it.

They're as socialist as the 'National Socialist' party of 1930s Germany.

Oops. Judas beat me to it.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Yeah, I think looking for the explicit spread of "communist" ideology is a recipe for, on one hand, missing a lot of the communist content of struggles, and, on the other, misreading "communist" or "socialist" ideological posturing as part of "the real movement" (which, to be fair, it sometimes is, but often isn't, as the case of the KPRF demonstrates).

In lay terms, what we need to be looking for is moments where the working class "does communist stuff" and not "says communist stuff".

[Decolonize The Left]

If a revolution were to happen, a mass audience would already be enacting communism. Otherwise, no. It is not possible for communists to "reach" a mass audience within the confines of capitalism for obvious reasons.

[ind_com]

How is it possible?

At present it's not possible for a communist party to gain mass acceptance without a revolution, or lead a revolution without mass acceptance. So, both must happen simultaneously. If a communist party waits for the 'material conditions' to create mass acceptance, then it won't ever be able to lead any revolution.

[Stalinist Speaker]

Except that the KPRF doesn't really want to get rid of capitalism. They are a nationalist, soviet-nostalgic, populist organization that occasionaly uses leftist and more often rightist populist demagogy.
No they do want to get rid of capitalism and restore the soviet union they has always said that, they used nationalism to get people to vote for them but that dosn´t mean that they are nationalist i would rather call patriotism tho. read their program yourself and see

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think it is certaintly possible mass class consiousness and a corresponding level of militancy, but likely even in these conditions the revolutionaries in that movement would still be a minority among different views within the class. Revolutionary consiousness is trickier than class consiousness because exploitation and class antagonisms are more or less constant (to some degree) whereas revolutionary crisis and situations are more fleeting and depend both on where the working class is at, but also where the ruling class is at.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

No they do want to get rid of capitalism and restore the soviet union they has always said that, they used nationalism to get people to vote for them but that dosn´t mean that they are nationalist i would rather call patriotism tho. read their program yourself and see

Yeah so populist demagogy as I said. A party that needs nationalism to get support is not a revolutionary marxist party and is definitely not the self-organization of the class as a class.

On the same side they use soviet-nostalgia to get support, restoring real-existing 'socialism' has fuck all to do with socialism but only with the nostalgic feelings towards the past when the USSR was a super-power.

[Q]

No they do want to get rid of capitalism and restore the soviet union they has always said that, they used nationalism to get people to vote for them but that dosn´t mean that they are nationalist i would rather call patriotism tho. read their program yourself and see
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

The ultra-nationalism of the CPRF has a long history in the "Marxist-Leninist" tradition. The British pre-1991 CPGB for example (among many other examples) had a "British road to socialism" and while it started out as a "tactical" move, by the time they adopted that programme, in the early 1950's, they did grow into fully fledged "national socialists" (a loaded term for obvious reasons, but a correct one never the less). The programme builds the party: You attract the kind of people with the kind of mentality that you set out to aim for.

[Comrade Jacob]

Revolutions happen when you have a mass audience. Just spread the word, post, read and join a leftist organisation. I out of ideas, people will come through...

[Blake's Baby]

The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. Who said that again?