Asymmetrical Logic and Building a Communist Movement

How and Why we should pick our battles wisely...

Chess can teach a lot of universally applicable strategy, from map control, the necessity of roles, denying the enemy’s ability to move, capturing priority targets, etc. There’s many books on the subject of chess and its applicability to anything from war, business, and personal development. But there’s a fundamental fact about chess that we need to consider if we want to play chess with comrades and those who are serious about building a revolutionary worker’s movement in the US (or any country for
that matter).

In Chess, both players have the exact same number of pieces and the same number of each kind. 8 pawns, one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, and two bishops. White goes first, so they are the ones who will control the pace of the game. Black’s primary objective is to spot a weakness in white’s strategy and counter it. If successful, white’s momentum is lost and the roles get reversed. White must then play catch up with black’s counter-attack. But aside from this, the actual rules of the game and how each piece moves is exactly the same.

Building a worker’s movement...is slightly more complicated, to put it lightly. Chess, being a game for total noobs who can’t just get good, is a symmetrical game. Both sides are using the same fundamental logic and have the same short term and long term goals throughout a match. Understanding player 1 gives you all the tools to understand player 2.

Marxism defines “players” not as individual people, but classes. Since the agricultural revolution, there has always been a ruling class and (at least one) oppressed class, and through dialectical contradictions, one of the oppressed classes overthrows the ruling class and installs their supremacy. Masters oppressed slaves under slave society, only to be superseded by feudal lords. Feudal lords oppressed serfs under feudalism only to be superseded by the capitalist class. The capitalist oppresses the proletariat currently, yet in various countries today and many others at different points in time, the proletariat overthrew the capitalist class.

The common unifier in all of these revolutions against the oppressor class is that the usurping class has a fundamentally different logic than the usurped class. Feudal lords drew their power from a radically different source than slave masters. Capitalists draw power from a more efficient source than feudal lords.

Overthrowing the capitalist class is going to require organizers, among and for the proletariat, recognize that our usurping class is going to draw power from a different source than our capitalist overlords.

Several components of the asymmetry built within the nature of class conflict are easy to spot. The proletariat vastly outnumbers the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie have more disposable income to throw towards their propaganda as well as complete control of the state.

But within these obvious features lie deeper asymmetries that movement strategists, on the ground organizers, and average big brain twitter communists don’t seem to consider on a daily basis. For one, control of the state has way more implications than first glance. Not only do the bourgeoisie have way more money to spend on their tools for propaganda, their tools for information warfare have default
legitimacy because they’re tied to the state.

Their narrative is always going to be super-structurally seen as legitimate. They can alwayspaint themselves as the “experts.”

“You can’t possibly go against our narrative, we own a monopoly on information, if you think
‘tankie’ countries are good then you’re the crazy one, not us!”

“We’re not bias, here’s our nonpartisan/bipartisan expert telling you that the objectively correct opinion is that the enemies of the US are bad, they can even say they’re just as bad as us, we don’t care either way!”

And I might be saying something a bit controversial here, but there really isn’t a way we can take on that kind of hegemony head on. In a one v one fight, a CNN or Fox News article is always going to have an advantage over anything the Left publishes. It doesn’t matter how much better written it is, how well cited the sources are, and how much we spam Twitter with links. People who aren’t ready to fully let go of “mainstream=popular=legitimate” are not going to care if some random leftists
share an article from an obscure news outlet they never heard of.

Despite how negative I just sounded though I’m not saying it’s a hopeless fight. Rather, I’m saying that we’re simply fighting on the enemies home turf, and that a simple change of battleground can turn the tide in our favor.

“Where then,” one might ask, “should we actually take up the propaganda war, if we can’t fightthem head on?” I think we first need to consider where our opponents consider themselves lacking first.

In “Ghosting the News” by Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post columnist, makes the case that local news is generally where the media is the weakest in communities. The internet now is predominantly where most people get their news, and we all know that the internet favors big, sensationalist news. Only the most hyperbolic, exaggerated stories stick in peoples’ consciousness now. Local news, often covering mundane day-to-day topics, can’t possibly keep up in terms of coverage. It’s not possible to have the kinds of stories that get people raging in the comment sections over.

The book ultimately argues that “saving democracy” (meaning bourgeois liberal democracy) will require a greater investment (from philanthropist capitalists, of course, this is WaPo after all), in local media, and get people interested in local politics.

What I like about this book is that there is an admission of weakness. The liberal faction of the bourgeoisie recognizes an arena that they are losing control (to the reactionary faction of capital). And that it emphasizes a place where they feel like they need to strengthen their hold. This reveals a place where we know we can strike before our opponents are able to patch the hole in the wall.

Local politics is where the bourgeoisie don’t have complete hegemonic control, and where they can’t ever have complete hegemonic control there because they live in ivoy towers. They live completely separate day to day lives from the workers they exploit. The only interactions that really matter are brutally enforcing efficient productivity onto us through whatever means necessary.

As organizers, we need to recognize this weakness and exploit it.

So to stop going in circles, what I suggest is that rather than spending the majority of our effort on national-level or geopolitical articles that no matter how good will not organically reach the workers, we should be spending our effort on fighting for control over local news. We should be sending our own reporters to local events, interview workers and get their opinions.

We can put up ads on the community bulletin boards, even respond to reactionary propaganda that gets put up locally like those unending waves of Shen Yun posters. We should always attend cityhall meetings. Even if we don’t speak up due to lacking numbers, we can gather information and recruit
from those who are upset enough to attend those city council meetings.

This is where we can even the odds a lot more on this front. While this doesn’t completely wash away the power imbalance, we can focus on where we can excel at and where our enemy is weakest. This is a fundamental rule of conflict going back to Sun Tzu.

Propaganda is only one arena as well, it just happens to be the most obvious. Asymmetry runs deep in practically every way we can engage with the struggle, whether trying to build up our own forces, legally and propagandistically attack theirs, or defend our forces against their attacks.

Something intuitive such as a union drive campaign or a labor strike is inherently asymmetrical as well. The antagonism is between the union organizers and the boss, but each has a fundamentally different relationship to the rest of the crew. The relationship between the boss and employee is one of workplace and financial dominance. When conflict is initiated in the form of a union drive, the
employer (and the management team) still controls the flow of the shop. On a legal level, they have every right to alter the flow of work in any way they see fit in order to shape perception. And even if the conflict between boss and workers escalates, the police will always side with the boss.

The objective of the boss is to shape workers’ opinions so that the union is distrusted and voted down. Trust is earned through a kind of “benevolence by comparison.” Workers will naturally compare their current boss to previous ones, so the boss that’s union busting really only has to seem better than a boss that the workers did not try and unionize. Because the boss also has the hegemony on their side, the meta narrative of “it’s always been this way so just deal with it,” they also draw their power on professional union busters, who’ve studied both the law and in depth psychological techniques to trick the workers into thinking that it’s within their best interest to oppose the union, even if it’s not. However, the boss can’t rely on building a personal connection between the workers through sympathy because everyone recognizes the boss makes a lot more money. Most managers at places make enough money to at least feel stable. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck often times. Even if they themselves were born in poverty it’s recognized by most workers that is no longer the case.

Union organizers have the exact opposite pros and cons. By literally being the coworkers, they can relate on that interpersonal level with workers because they literally make the same amount of money. If one worker is struggling with rent and paying bills then chances are that most if not all of the workers are. If one worker’s back is in pain then most of them are probably suffering back pain. The primary objective for union organizers is to get workers recognizing the shared struggles among them and build a sense of empathy and solidarity so that when the time comes, everyone will stand together and vote yes. That empathy and solidarity, if given a numerical value, has to be greater than the fear-mongering and the trust via hegemony the boss can rely on. The union organizers will never have the same access to hegemonic influence because we don’t control the media nor the state. It’s the same
with the propaganda war. Every argument in favor of the union from a purely logical standpoint will always have to go up against the boss’s.

Even though we are taught in school that the law treats you as “innocent until proven guilty”, the reality is that you are always “guilty until proven innocent”. The union is always guilty of being outside agitators until organizers can disprove it otherwise. The union is always guilty of excessive union dues that outweigh the benefits until proven otherwise. The union is always guilty of bullying members (ironic right?) until proven otherwise. Yet the boss always gets to enjoy an innocence by default paradigm. “Oh they’re not as bad as my old boss” until organizers prove otherwise or that that
fact is irrelevant. “But we give better benefits than most places” until organizers prove that’s a lie or that the benefits are not enough compensation to get by in life.

Recognizing the power imbalance and each of our organizational and individual positions in class conflict and how that will lead us having a different meta strategy from that of the bourgeoisie is vital to ensuring a revolution can happen in 21st century America. Rather than wasting so much of the blood sweat and tears our comrades have on meta strategies that are not efficient and don’t consider
every little facet of the struggle’s complexities, we can ensure that our minuscule and precious energy and resources can be spent in the best way possible.

Taking the time to properly assess the battlefield as it were, to reduce the fog of war, and to choose appropriate places to fight the bourgeoisie, rather than send our comrades to (metaphorically or literally) die in a suicide mission, will pay out with better results in the long run. I recognize that the examples provided are on quite a macro level but that’s because analyzing asymmetry and relative power levels of forces does become really dependent on local conditions, taking local data into account, and the calculations can only be done by organizers on the ground. But I hope that this articleat least gives you something to think about for your own work.

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