Meta Narrative Tension and the Class Struggle

How to force society to make a choice

One of the first lessons you learn in a high school English class is learning how stories are properly paced. Whether it’s your first Shakespeare play or the movie version because you didn’t get it on your first read without a modern translator (I like Shakespeare and I didn’t get it at first either), you’re taught how stories start with an inciting event, then the protagonist is forced into action, then the protagonist is taken along a journey through a number of events, meeting more characters and developing along the way, until it all reaches a boiling point with the climax, where all the main characters are forced to make permanent and life changing decisions.

With the exception of comedic meta-fiction, all events throughout the course of the narrative start with an exciting “hook,” then move to their least tense and most calm point, and slowly raise the tension until the peak at the end (How well a story actually does this is a different conversation). The reason is that we enjoy reading about or seeing characters have to make decisions when they don’t have any option to refuse.

Why? Well, it’s probably because it reminds us of our own tendency to conserve energy (ie, being lazy or wanting to avoid conflict). Humans generally don’t like committing more resources to a task than they need to unless there is a significant enough reward to justify it, going back to our evolutionary need to preserve scarce resources in our hunter-gatherer era. Most of us are only prompted to action that we don’t want to do if we absolutely have to. The obvious is a fight or flight scenario, but as Marxists we generally agree that the pressure of wage labor and buying food, shelter, and medicine can be just as motivating. Even something like the pursuit of a higher paying job, or your dream career, forces action because we’re conditioned at a young age to feel as though we need to keep up on school work or we’ll lose our opportunity to someone else.

The tension of “now or never” and “it’s me or them” is the fundamental motivator in a competitive, capitalist society. When it comes to opposing such a society and building a new one, the logic will remain. What will actually motivate people into action is increasing the tension and raising the stakes.

There are generally two ways people try and motivate the politically unmotivated (who, if you go outside and touch grass, will understand are the majority of Americans) into action: either you use propaganda to fear-monger (rightfully so with facts and not lies like the capitalists do) or you use propaganda to try and empower the dis-empowered, portraying them as capable of defeating the chosen opponent.

One thing that generally isn’t talked about is how it’s quite rare for these (perfectly fine) techniques to be used simultaneously. It’s usually one at a time. It’s either “Oh my god the capitalists will doom the planet” (I mean, they will eventually if we don’t nationalize energy production) or it’s “Imperialism is a paper tiger” (It is and isn’t, as history has shown). But the reality is we really need to be cautious about how we use the techniques of fear induction and empowerment, because the reality is that we need to balance them out and raise both simultaneously: The threat of capital must be equal to the self-perceived power level of the proletariat.

Here I’ll showcase three scenarios. First, visualize the relative power of the proletariat being substantially low while the relative power of the bourgeoisie is extremely high (green on the left meaning friendlies, red on the right being enemies):

This is the macro effect of propaganda that focuses on fear-mongering (even if that fear-mongering is done with clearly good intention). Examples include things like focusing on war (and potential nuclear war in particular), ever increasing poverty, disaster, disease, etc. Anything that involves death caused or exacerbated by your enemy.

It’s definitely important to expose the crimes of our enemies as often as possible. This technique relies on anger and fear. You are made angry at the fact that this is happening to innocent human life at all, and you’re made fearful by being forced to imagine that you’re not far from the death list at all. Both of these are necessary feelings to invoke to spur action among the masses.

However this comes with a downside: raising the perceived power level of your opponent without raising the perceived power level of your allies will generate hopelessness. “What’s the point of fighting back? They’re too powerful, might as well just enjoy what little comfort we have” is basically how a lot of people feel right now, whether they’ll say it out loud or not (many actually will just tell you something along those lines).

In political spheres, this is most prevalent in “doomer” trends, where people mostly just lament about the breakdown of society and utter collapse of social institutions. There’s an interesting commonality between Left and Right doomers in their primary advocacy towards gun ownership and preparing for civil war and collapse. This isn’t all that helpful for most Americans. If most Americans can’t afford their rent or medical bills, obviously they can’t afford an $800 (probably more now) rifle and the expensive ammunition. (A reminder that I’m speaking about doomerism, CPUSA does not endorse violence as a political strategy).

The perceived state of politics for the American working class for decades since the rise of Reagan has just been that they don’t believe their opinion matters, that it’s out of their control. And, I mean, with the corruption of unions, breakdown of community led organizations, higher education made more inaccessible, and more, it’s hard to challenge that sentiment. We need to actually combat the feeling of hopelessness among the masses and that can only come from empowerment.

The reverse can also be a problem as well. Visualize a scenario now where the masses perceive the bourgeoisie as not as much a threat at all:

This scenario will generate complacency and apathy. “Well sure this system sucks but really it’s not that bad, I can still watch Netflix and Tiktok, I can still play video games. Sure I can’t get a better paying job but I’ll survive.” If the primary form of propaganda is empowerment but the primary enemy is not elevated to the level of an existential threat, then people wouldn’t find enough reason to care. We’ve all experienced procrastination and executive dysfunction. Even if a task is pretty serious, our own laziness can get in the way of completing it simply because our subconscious tells us to conserve that energy for something else.

People will generally not risk stability and comfort if they can help it, even if that comfort is just the scraps. “Comfort” ultimately is subjective as well. It simply is just the level of pain one is used to. Risking it all for something better relies on the belief that current levels of comfort aren’t enough to achieve your goals or that it can be taken away and replaced with pain.

I will admit that this type of propaganda isn’t as common as the former, and it is quite rare to see it become a problem when really, we need more empowering propaganda. But this situation does occur in the form of what I call overly eager democratic socialists (and social democrats, really). While it is important to protect the gains of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement against reactionary (and let’s be honest, Machiavellian Democrat) forces, it’s a bit of a different story to have total faith in the finality of these historical events. CPUSA, while arguing for a stages of struggle theory towards building socialism, we ultimately believe that in order to win socialism, a just and worker-led democracy, and end corporate and fascist terror once and for all, that we need to have a revolution.

To have faith in the finality of the current American political system really is to downplay the threat that fascism and capitalism broadly are to both our communities and the planet as a whole. As progressive as the Bernie Sanders campaign was in 2020, no elected politician alone will come down from on high to save you from fascist para-military squads. No singular charismatic political figure, no matter how progressive, can protect worker’s lives and democracy on their own in the face of stochastic terrorism. To defeat the trifecta of on-the-ground fascist terror squads, suit and tie reactionary politicians, and the capitalist boss who enables both (with greedy policies that leave us scapegoating each other for scraps as well as providing direct funding and training for them), will require the American masses and its allies to rise up in a unified coalition and force them to submit to the democratic will of the working class on the community level, on the electoral level, and the workplace level.

This also applies to any charismatic figure on the left. Those famous leftist and Communist accounts on social media that garner a following, even the ones that are actually doing very productive things, can often create a perceived atmosphere where a small group of dedicated cadre are able to affect way more change than they actually are. Of course, it would be absurd to say this is a net-problem. Clearly people doing work is good. The issue is that, and I’ve seen this in my own organizing, it’s not enough for people to praise what you’re doing and even become convinced your ideas are good through your mutual aid. I have seen many instances where aid receivers discard political literature without reading it, ignore calls to action outside of aid, and feel generally content with just having someone stop by their camp/block/center once a week and drop off food. None of this is their fault, obviously. Organizers need to consciously stress that the masses must recognize that the threat on their communities is far greater than any mutual aid or political advocacy group can tackle alone, and that it’s going to take YOU (the passive supporter) to also get involved. People need to be shown that the stakes are too high to let a few people in red shirts handing out prepped meals or standing in front of buildings with their fists up do all the work.

The only scenario in which a revolution is possible isn’t too dissimilar to from the climax of a story:

In this scenario, both sides are closely matched. In fiction, this is the stage in which the reader/viewer/player doesn’t know whether the protagonist or the antagonist will succeed in the final fight. Both sides suffered heavy losses (we’ve already lost many lives in non-adventurist situations so don’t get any fetishistic ideas when I say that). This is where the tension is at its highest. The protagonist and their allies, in order to save the world (or honestly just their own lives) must act decisively without any hesitation in order to win.

This is where I feel the American communist movement is generally lacking. We need to have a calculated vision of how to actually raise the stakes in a meaningful way. At pretty much every job I’ve ever had, politics is something that I’ve had to bring up and prompt my coworkers to think about. If I waited for an organic mentioning of anything political without prompt, I would be old and weary (but not retired, there’s no retirement for Gen Z and younger at this point).

It’s obviously not that workers don’t think about these complex big picture questions (it would be very chauvinistic and classist to assume that). It’s that workers, as of right now, can choose not to participate. There’s plenty of distractions and easy sources of dopamine that exist within the American meta-narrative that workers can indulge in so they can cope with an uncertain future.

Our task is to take action so that there is no third option to dip out of politics; either you’re going to fight whatever oppression one may be burdened with, be it class or identity based, and thus the ruling class that imposes it, or you’re going to defend its system (and of course to trust workers to overwhelmingly make the right choice, we have to). We need to shift the fight or flight response into a fight-only response.

So now the bigger question is how does one accomplish this?

Let’s look at the most common story structure common in many novels and films:

We can map out the stages of struggle similar to a Three-Act story structure. Obviously, the “day of the revolution’s completion” (the stage in which the proletariat seizes complete control of the state) is the Climax of Act 2. The Descending Action is the (unfortunately quite long and tedious) era of transforming the actual workings of our socioeconomic system from a capitalist hellhole into a socialist, uh, not-hellhole.

Every revolution is receded by a crisis of some kind, and said crisis needs to be incredibly severe. The U.S, although having multiple recessions and downturns in the past few decades (living in one currently), hasn’t had a significant one to really set the foundations for a revolution. The two times the Left had a chance were the Great Depression and the dual-crisis of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Struggle, neither of which was the Left able to seize the moment.

I would consider the Midpoint (in an American context) to be an official declaration of opposition by both bourgeois parties against a sizable political faction, whether in official speeches, letters or other public documentation, etc. I’d prefer if this is CPUSA, but if we fail in our set out goals then it would be someone else, a different communist/socialist party, or even a big enough mass organization, or a coalition of unions. It’s currently fair game for anyone. This would be the point where that political faction could actually seize the moment on disaster in a material way, rather than just complain about it on Twitter.

So now where does that leave us? Well we’re obviously still in Act 1. No political organization has the kind of influence to consider otherwise. Honestly the closest one to a narrative Midpoint is probably DSA, and half of you reading this just cringed so hard your face is sore (this is not a comment on DSA, I have some good comrades in DSA, and CPUSA works with any willing progressive organization). But even for DSA, neoliberal and reactionary political opponents usually just brush off DSA people as just “the Bernie people.” It’s really not significant enough to declare a Midpoint, or even an Act 1 climax.

We could name “the beginning” basically anywhere, from the fall of the USSR to WW2 to the October Revolution, Karl Marx’s birthday, or the Neolithic Revolution. But for our analysis, I think it makes sense to start at the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. Every generation alive has some tangible connection to the Recession. Rich Boomers (and some older Gen X) caused it and screwed us over, and working class Boomers saw decades of relative national comfort that they’ve known all their lives erode before their eyes. Younger Gen X and older Millennials were raising their children in this era a midst high unemployment and price increases. Younger Millennials were entering either university with skyrocketing tuition or the workforce with even less opportunity. And finally, Zoomers and Generation Alpha are still dealing with the material consequences of the Recession due a lack of any kind of substantial recovery, despite what the Democrats will tell you about the Obama Administration.

The “Inciting Incident”? 2015/2016, easily. For this analysis I’m going to call it “The Rival Populisms”: an American nationalist populism in the form of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, and a social democratic (or Democratic socialist depending on who you’re talking to) “Our Revolution” populism in the form of Bernie Sanders. Before this, any kind of anti-status-quo political platform was considered off the table. Obama’s rhetoric threw bones to the Left, but never outright stated anything substantial (not that he actually delivered). Even with his rhetoric of “Change is coming to America,” it never actually targeted anyone. It didn’t declare the GOP or rival capitalists as enemies, but rather as simply misguided friends who all can agree that America is still the greatest country in the world. The Bush administration leaned into reactionary sentiment to push its agenda but still held to a veneer of civility politics, and relied on euphemisms and deceit. Trump was the first president in a long time to stir up reactionary sentiment by dropping the mask and outright naming his targets, be they as clear as Latinos crossing the border or as vague as “globalists.” The Bernie Sanders campaign also dropped any notion of American cross class unity by naming his opponents as the “Top 1% who don’t pay their fair share in taxes.” He also gave the eclectic and vague rhetoric of Occupy’s “99% vs the 1%” tangible demands (medicare for all, free college and debt forgiveness, right to unionize, etc)

The “Second Thoughts” phase, which might be controversial, was the Summer of 2020 protests and riots (not to use the term riot in a derogatory sense). Those who call Summer of 2020 an analogue to the 1905 Revolutionary attempt in Russia would probably call it a Climax to Act 1. But hindsight shows us that we really didn’t achieve that level of progress (yet). 1905 Russia brought several major reforms including the establishment of the Duma, recognition of multiple key political parties, and the right to assembly and unionize (limited as it was). Neither of the two major analogous outcomes, the mass recognition of new political parties/organizations nor established reforms to appease mass discontent, really happened. Like I said before, in 2023 there is no anti-capitalist organization that has any hegemonic influence in the United States, and since 2020, there’s been numerous brutal executions of mostly black and brown workers by cops while their annual budgets get increased in basically every major city.

Summer of 2020 was in actuality a crossroads as opposed to a proto-revolution 1905-style. At the time, 51% of Americans supported the Minneapolis Police Station burning, while simultaneously rejecting other forms of destructive (again, not said in a derogatory way) acts in different locales. There were protests with where socialists were waving red flags on the front lines as cops threw flash bangs, used tear gas and riot hoses, and actively beat protesters of every ethnicity down with the same stick. And yet, there were also very mild, bland, status quo defending, Democrat-endorsed protests and protesters among the masses, who derailed conversation, obscured explicit demands to defund the police with vague platitudes, shifted the focus away to the systemic racist and class oppression of the police to individual acts of racism among the masses. There were genuine, sincere expressions of anguish and rage by lumpenproletariat who engaged in aggressive confrontation with the police (I mean, they burned down a police station for one, let alone other examples) and yet we saw multiple suspicious figures destroying property and escalating for its own sake, with numerous allegations of cop and FBI infiltrators. On the peaceful protest side of the action, we saw numerous organizations try and seize the moment, fighting for a spot to speak at the big rallies and share their oh so precious stance and how if everyone just likes their stance that will be good enough to do revolution.

At the end of all of that, everyone who cares to raise class consciousness and class power has a choice to make. It’s not enough to just believe in something and to have more people believe in your cause. The real question is this: how do you actually mobilize people to force the hand of those in power, to get people to feel strong and confident enough to put their bodies and jobs on the line, and to bring your enemies (the capitalists, the cops, the imperialists, the fascists, etc) to their knees? Lenin’s words more than 100 years ago rings as true as ever. Spontaneity will not bring lasting change, only a combined force (not even necessarily led by a single party but rather) led by a guiding ideology and theoretical foundation can even make any substantial reform, let alone a revolution.

Our task now is to push the meta-narrative forward. We must design our praxis like a well crafted story. We need to closely examine the stories our families, friends, coworkers, and community members tell us about the state of the world and direct it into the next stage of struggle. In the Three Act Structure, this is the Climax of Act 1. It’s hard to say what the analogue would be for sure. From a narrative perspective, a particular event would occur, but it’s impossible to predict “what” exactly should or would happen. No one predicted Summer of 2020.

However, a reasonable assumption, as a precursor to the state naming a singular org or coalition as a legitimate political rival, could be this: The end of Act 1 would display numerous leftist organizations in every major city in the country having localized hegemonic influence. We’re talking about orgs that enlist or regularly mobilize at least 3-5% of the local population. That sounds, uh, absolutely terrible when you first hear it. But remember how 51% of people supported the precinct fire, and to point to something less adventurist, many more Americans supported the non-violent protests of Black Lives Matter. It’s not like 51% of Americans participated in that, and it had a lasting influence on American culture since. Getting to even a steady 3% mobilization on the regular is already going to be a hard enough first step. It will take a lot of on the ground education sessions, high frequency outreach attempts, analyzing local demographics, coordinating efforts in a broad coalition, having the flexibility to adapt and experiment with new techniques, careful management of time and resources, etc. For more on how CPUSA believes these questions should be answered, check out our party program. For more insight into the San Francisco Harry Bridges Club and in formation SF YCL Club, check out my other articles.

And this is only Act 1. Revolution is not going to happen in the time span of the cinematic Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The beginning of Act 1 started 15 years ago (we’re all getting old now aren’t we), and Act 2 in most stories is supposed to be almost twice as long. Like any good story, a revolution has proper pacing that we just can’t deny. It’s neither good to drag it on for longer than it needs to be nor rush it without proper development of foundational elements. And just like any epic adventure from the dawn of human oral tradition to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings literary universe to the latest triple-A video game release, the actual decisions that matter are the little decisions along the way to the end. Every warrior convinced to join the cause, every innocent civilian rescued who shares your tale to far off lands (like from California to Arizona), every tool and tome picked up on your journey matters. There’s no climax, no final showdown between the forces of good and evil, without a hero to say “enough is enough” without any certainty they’ll see the end of the story.

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