Why do Communists and the Left always have to be Shouty Humanists in the Media?

For reasons to do with the way the media functions in democratic capitalism as a state apparatus,* this apparatus only allows communists to appear in the media as ‘shouty humanists’, in other words they must seem to place sentiment and moralism before science, and passion and emotionalism before reason, entirely going against the grain of classical Marxism. This is of course a way to prove in practice to the audience all the usual falsehoods about communists, from the mild reproaches of them being well meaning but inevitably wrong idealists to always angry totalitarian dictators.

This strategy has worked very well for the bourgeoisie for years now, even to the extent that leaders of most of the western communist parties usually follow this rule, and such conforming individuals are able rise to the top of these parties for this reason. The question is how this happens; there are two essential ways that such eventualities come to be: The first is by the simple process of reward and punishment, those individuals who follow these rules are rewarded by the system, mostly obliquely, and given more airtime and so on and thus seem more apparently successful than their opponents. Secondly, there is an unconscious following of these rules in the general sense, with persons with affective practices that behave 'obdiently' felt to be more socially positive. The latter is because of the underlying alienation from labour in capitalism.

Any Marxist will know that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, were fairly personable people in terms of their personalities. They were witty, highly intelligent and had the ability to write many books. They were theorists of communism but also studied the contemporary philosophy and sciences and were up to date with the most advanced scientific theories in diverse fields. Marx for instance could both read, speak, and translate on sight multiple languages. Of these figures, only Lenin and Mao became the leaders of actual political parties.

However, since this time, such individuals have, I think, been prevented by various means. To start with, in politics in general there has been a pervasive anti-intellectualism and suspicion of those who ‘know stuff’ in favour of those whose demeanour is more spontaneous and passionate. For instance, there has been, e.g. in the UK, on the left Arthur Scargill (miners leader), and Neil Kinnock, and currently in France there is Jean Luc Melenchon of LFI, or there was Georges Marchais of the PCF. In all these cases their political positions have been presented in the media in shouty humanistic terms (I am aware that Kinnock was hardly a communist of course).  We could of course debate whether these individuals were sincere or not, but really this is not the point. Also, one must be aware of politics in at least more than one democratic capitalist country to truly see how this is a pattern, a technique.

- The media has been a modern technical mass media since at least the rise of the Nazis, and it has been able to use mass techniques and has a lot of practical knowledge based in how to sway feelings, and make it seem as though certain things and positions and people are popular, and they are capable of pushing certain things that they as a class want, but can make that pushing seem like audience pull, as if it is the democratic will of the authentic masses. The new social media despite its great promise has only made this more intense through the constant intervention of troll farms and biased computerized algorithms.

This brings me to the concept of Affective Practices and to the idea of contradiction within an affective practice. Which means, whilst it is possible for a person to express ideas that are rational or Marxist, it is at the same time possible for this same individual to behave affectively in a manner that goes against this. I would venture to say that this is even the norm for most of the media figures on the political left who get near to socialism.

The techniques of how the bourgeois class deal with this problem of appearance, and what is essentially the process of political branding involves a body of knowledge that has been built up over decades in the apparatuses of the media which they either own or direct via the state.

* The theory of the media that allows me to say these things (rather raw and newly formed I admit) I have worked on elsewhere, likewise the concept of alienation that I am using here can be read about and is supported in my book Aesthetics & Alienation. Note that here I have only been able to say these things in a schematic fashion, unfortunately

Gary Tedman

Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Was An Anti-Communist CIA Operative who Kept Feminism From Discussing Class . Excerpts and paraphrasing from HR News article REPOSTED BY Iona Singh

Republished from HR News HR NEWS FEB 24, 2026

See link to HR News https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/feminist-icon-gloria-steinem-was

Declassified Cold War Ties Show How U.S. Intelligence Shaped Feminism’s Focus On Gender Over Class

In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union hosted a series of World Youth Festivals — mass international gatherings designed to export communist ideology to young activists worldwide. The CIA responded by quietly funding American liberal organizations to send students abroad to counter Soviet messaging. When Ramparts magazine exposed this program in 1967, it found the agency had secretly bankrolled dozens of American civil society groups — student organizations, labor unions, cultural institutions — under the banner of anti-communism. 

Steinem’s CIA Work 

Steinem was recruited by CIA officers C.D. Jackson and Cord Meyer into this program. She founded and directed the Independent Research Service (IRS) — a front organization tasked with sending American students to the 1959 Vienna World Youth Festival and the 1962 Helsinki festival to counter Soviet influence. An operation that was almost entirely bankrolled by the CIA: approximately $85,000 for Vienna alone. 

Steinem ran the organization from 1959 to 1962 and remained on its board as late as 1968–69. When Ramparts broke the story in 1967, Steinem confirmed her role to The New York Times without apology, describing the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable” and stating she would do it again. 

The Feminist Movement and the Class Problem Steinem entered feminist organizing in 1969–70 with no prior record in any women’s group, no feminist publications, and no history of organizing working-class women. Within two years, she was the most recognizable face of American feminism — co-founding Ms. magazine in 1972 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. A ridiculous state of affairs given the number of femininist academics and writers with reputable publications and achievements in the field. The feminism she came to represent was explicitly focused on gender — equal access to institutions, reproductive rights, professional advancement — and explicitly avoided class as a framework.

The mainstream of second-wave feminism under Steinem’s influence was built around the concerns of white, college-educated, professional women. It did not center poverty wages, the absence of universal childcare, or the conditions of working-class and domestic labor — all of which disproportionately burdened poor women and women of color. Socialist feminists and radical feminists of the same era — including the Redstockings, Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective, and figures like Barbara Ehrenreich — argued consistently that gender liberation without economic liberation was a half-measure that served elite women at the expense of everyone else. 

That critique was largely excluded from the mainstream feminist conversation that Ms. and the NWPC represented. The 1975 Redstockings Investigation In May 1975, the Redstockings — a radical feminist collective founded by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone — published a detailed investigation into Steinem’s CIA ties and their implications for the movement. 

They documented her IRS directorship, the CIA funding, and the network of relationships surrounding the launch of Ms. magazine — including the role of Clay Felker, who helped fund the magazine’s first issue and had himself worked as an editor on an IRS publication during the CIA-funded Vienna operation. Redstockings argued that Ms. functioned as what the CIA termed a “parallel organization” — an institutional presence that channeled feminist energy into an acceptable liberal framework and away from the class-based and anti-capitalist currents that were equally alive in the movement at that time. The investigation was widely circulated in feminist circles and prompted Steinem to write a six-page letter defending herself — but never to address the structural question directly: why did the most-platformed feminist publication in the country systematically avoid class? 

Suppression of the Record 

In 1979, The Village Voice reported that Random House had removed the Redstockings chapter documenting Steinem’s CIA history from their forthcoming book Feminist Revolution — following legal pressure connected to Steinem and figures in her network, including Katharine Graham and associates of Cord Meyer. The chapter was never published by Random House. Betty Friedan, herself a critic of the direction Steinem represented, publicly stated the questions deserved a full accounting. The pattern — liberal feminist establishment uses legal and institutional leverage to suppress a working-class feminist critique — was a demonstration of the very dynamic Redstockings had identified.

What This Produced 

The feminism that reached mainstream America through the 1970s and 1980s — the feminism of glass ceilings, professional representation, and individual advancement — was shaped decisively by Steinem’s network and platform. It produced real gains for professional women. It also produced a movement that could be absorbed into corporate culture with minimal disruption: companies could hire women executives, run feminist ad campaigns, and face no structural challenge to the low wages, absent benefits, and exploitative conditions that defined the working lives of most women. That outcome was the product of specific choices about what feminism would foreground and what it would leave out — choices made by people whose institutional formation was explicitly anti-socialist, and whose rise was funded, at its origins, by the agency most dedicated to containing the American left. 

Sources: Gloria Steinem, New York Times (1967); Redstockings press release and research report (1975); The Village Voice (May 21, 1979); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (1999); Daniel Brandt.

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