leftist politics aren’t inaccessible.

there are a lot of leftist people.

some leftist writing is inaccessible for a variety of reasons.

if your real question is: why aren’t more people radical marxists like i am, well, we debate that all the time & imo there are reasonS.

if we can be fucking real for 1 second, the MANY failed states and authoritarian regimes that either billed themselves as, and/or tried to be, marxist-socialist utopias...

...gave our thing a pretty fucken bad name.

there is also a massive complex in all media, from educational products in K-12 + higher ed, to movies, and every other kind of cultural product you can imagine, telling stories about these places that elides any of the accomplishments they achieved & highlighting only collapse

i think there’s a sincere skepticism about whether “socializing” and “nationalizing” various things “can really work,” and that’s why we end up having to argue for doing it all piecemeal, showing how “it worked in France, it worked in the UK,” etc. etc. etc.

of course we also know of financial self-interest as a motivator; many who think they have the chance of joining the ranks of the upper class seem willing to forego solidarity with their brethren. we can’t deny this motivation.

unions are powerful socializing forces that don’t require jargon, but declining union membership tells us about an ideological shift away from faith in the power of collective bargaining. toward seeing unions as bad.

some people equate all marxist movements with anti-religious sentiment and that scares them, maybe even for good reason.

if nothing else, i hope this thread shows that there are multiple countervailing forces at work against us.

it’s not that someone was mean to someone online and it “made leftism inaccessible.” it’s not even that some leftist writing is jargony.

we have bigger fish to fry.