In reality, entertainment media and news media serve the same propaganda purpose: they target not our reasoned beliefs about right and wrong, but our perception of social risks and rewards. People’s actual rationality, their ability to discern cause and effect, is far too resilient to be tampered with when their own immediate interests are at stake. People’s pride, however, is much more malleable. For communists to refuse to challenge media that makes them invisible — or, worse, aggressively humiliates them — is to surrender before the fight is even scheduled. And I genuinely believe that we do this every single time we refuse to challenge an Orwellism, or a Nietzscheanism. We have largely failed to create nourishing communist alternatives — not only in reality, as with the Black Panther breakfast program, but also as far as the imagination goes. And in the realm of imagination, as in others, nature abhors a vacuum. In absence of social-realist agitprop, Orwellism thrives.

Lenin titled his world-changing revolutionary pamphlet directly after Chernyshevsky’s beloved and influential revolutionary fiction novel What Is To Be Done? [46] Stalin took his pseudonym “Koba” from The Patricide, a heroism-romance novel that was popular in Georgia when he was a youth. [47] We could speak similarly of Mao’s esteem for Lu Xun [48] and Water Margin. [49] Assata has spoken about the insidiously grim messaging in our media. [50] Where is our revolutionary fiction today? Anarchist authors like Ursula K. Le Guin often appear the closest thing we’ve got to mainstream communist literature. I genuinely think that if one can truly imagine in fiction a viable transition from our current state of affairs into a better one, that plays a huge role in mustering the conviction to assert that it can be achieved in reality. Conversely, if we cannot even imagine what a transition might look like in our wildest dreams, any “real” organization is doomed.