This piece is a contribution to the Pre-Convention Discussion for our 32nd National Convention. During Pre-Convention Discussion, all aspects of the party’s program, strategy, and tactics are up for consideration and debate. The ideas presented here are those of the author or authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Communist Party USA, its membership, or their elected leadership bodies. — Editors

With the development of mass multimedia, the avenues of ideological struggle for working-class consciousness shifted from traditional print media to digital media. This process for crafting culture and consciousness is different from the days of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It’s a harsh reality that the Party must deal with and overcome. Even within the last few decades, the media landscape has shifted online, and social media platforms have taken over as the vehicles for developing culture.

As the National Committee stated, “a rising multi-racial and multi-gender red generation of young workers and students is coming into being.” This new generation of the socialist-sympathizing left emerged through the mass struggles of the anti-war protests, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the anti-fascist movement against the Trump presidency, the George Floyd uprising and the COVID-19 recession. A vast portion of this new generation was witnessing the crises caused by and for capitalism 24/7 via phones and social media platforms. The data is clear: 90% of teenagers nowadays are on social media while only 17% of Generation Z watch cable TV daily, and 50% of Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and even Baby Boomers are just never watching cable TV anymore.

We cannot deny the significance of the real-time relaying of information that the online world has contributed in radicalizing young and disaffected people, especially in the realm of those rightly concerned by climate change and the Earth’s future. We are witnessing it at this moment with the ringing calls for an Israel-Palestine ceasefire, and how the digitally distributed accounts of atrocities committed by the Netanyahu regime in Israel — successfully fighting algorithmic suppression for months — have ignited a spark in millions of working-class and oppressed people around the world.

This new red generation has mostly developed through the conflicts of the previous decades and then was eclectically radicalized by digital and social media. The same can largely be stated for the far right. The difference is that the far-right’s aggressive takeover of online spaces funded by the capitalist class has produced a large section of disaffected and quasi-fascist people, in some cases, “left-nihilist” as elaborated by Comrade Dom Shanno.) These people comprise a political base which the Republican Party and Donald Trump continue to exploit. It is imperative for the Party to enter the 21st-century digital age completely and aggressively, to combat the far right’s stranglehold on the online culture wars and social development of the next generation.

We as a club affirm Comrade Taryn Fivek’s “Communist media” pre-convention submission. In addition, here are a few proposals to take the Party’s media apparatus to a higher level:

• People’s World editorial staff expanded to include newer members with media experience

• People’s World to develop an online news show and other video news/discussion programs to fully inform the online working class of our rank-and-file analysis of local, national, and international news. Shows/Programs should be varied to attract the broadest mass of people. Programs on cultural topics, local, national, and international news, etc., need to be cultivated by a sizable team of Party volunteers to handle the consistency of work as efficiently as possible

• The formation of a News Collective — perhaps combining it with the Media Collective — to oversee and centralize the efforts and skills of all members and national party media platforms:Peoples World, Party website, Red World Review, YouTube channels, etc.

• The return of the Political Affairs website to allow more avenues for internal party discussion and analysis

• The expansion of Party platforms to TikTok, Twitch, and/or other popular media platforms. Twitch Live Streaming should be explored for Good Morning Revolution, Pants on Fire, and any new Party show/podcast.

• The regular production of TikTok/YouTube Shorts/Instagram Reels styled videos on a dedicated People’s World account(s) which inform viewers of issues and events that are written about in PW, emulating the format, narrative tone, and earnest style of wide-reaching and popular “bite-sized” videos of a similar journalistic nature, accompanied by a link to the article in the description, in order to achieve digestibility, virality, and informative value

With TikTok having 150 million US users, 169.65 million on Instagram, 170 million on Facebook, and 108 million on Twitter/X, it’s clear there is an unignorable amount of working-class people on these platforms, gathering their news and deriving imprinted opinions from these sources. We can not let the right-wing win this area of ideological struggle. Therefore, the Party must modernize when it comes to our internal media development. It’s how the masses are reached today–and where we need to be to develop revolutionary consciousness.

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