Framing the Feed: How Social Media Shapes Our Interpretation of Reality

Shealeigh Voitl Facebook

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In 2024, Project Censored introduced Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames to critically analyze narrative strategies media outlets use to present news stories. Framing shapes how we understand these stories by emphasizing certain aspects and downplaying others, ultimately promoting a particular interpretation of events. The point of framing is that it’s subtle and extremely easy to overlook, so the guide walks readers through framing red flags, such as selective sourcing, passive voice in headlines, and deceptively cropped images.

Although my colleague, Andy Lee Roth, and I initially developed this guide to educate students about how news can be factually accurate and still misleading due to framing, this concern is not limited to news. Framing shapes our interpretations of all kinds of content seen online every day.

After all, we’re all the architects, or framers, of our personal online presence. We carefully curate what we want others to see or know about us and deliberately omit the less desirable aspects of our lives. But in a more extreme form, this curation becomes the domain of influencers, where false advertising, dubious health recommendations, or shameless self-promotion are often tools to boost one’s image and ultimately generate significant income.

Algorithmic curation on platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok also works to make framing a mostly invisible practice. Algorithms subtly amplify certain narratives more than others, ultimately trapping users in harmful echo chambers they’re unaware of.

For example, a user who repeatedly comes across a particular type of political content can begin to assume that most others on the platform share that same perspective. When, in reality, it’s not a matter of consensus—it’s a feedback loop. The user simply engages the most with that kind of content and certain accounts, signaling to the algorithm to feed them more of the same. This reality may feel organic, but tech companies have thoroughly engineered this exclusive focus over time.

In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cracked down on influencers and celebrities peddling products without disclosing brand partnerships, marking the beginning of the .Com Disclosures. By 2017, the FTC began improving disclosures on social media specifically, sending out more than ninety warning letters to influencers and celebrities about clearly identifying brand partnerships in posts, using hashtags like #sponsored or #ad.

Notably, in 2020, the FTC alleged that the brand Teami Blends misled consumers by not “adequately disclos(ing) payments to well-known influencers.” The brand’s 30 Day Detox Pack, promoted by Cardi B, Jordin Sparks, Alexa PenaVega, and others, was touted as a sort of miracle product that would help consumers lose weight, fight or prevent cancer, and clear clogged arteries, among other unsubstantiated claims.

Influencers’ “before and after” photos showed thinner versions of themselves, suggesting these positive body transformations were the result of using Teami’s teas, instead of what was likely a combination of rigorous diet and exercise. Moreover, the FTC said that when influencers did disclose paid partnerships, the relevant hashtags were often not visible unless users clicked a link to read more.

In November 2023, the FTC sent warning letters to lobbying group American Beverage Association (ABA), the Canadian Sugar Institute, and health influencers with a cumulative follower count of more than 6 million across TikTok and Instagram, saying it had identified nearly three dozen posts that “failed to clearly disclose who was paying the influencers to promote artificial sweeteners or sugary foods.” Unlike Teami Blends’ partnership posts, these posts were clearly captioned #ad, but they offered followers no clear identification of the influencers’ sponsors.

One follower of Mary Ellen, or @milknhoneynutrition, a registered dietitian with more than 150,000 Instagram followers, commented on the partnered post, saying, “Genuine question – your post says this is an ad/paid partnership…with who? Diet Coke? Aspartame? The FDA? The ADA? The WHO? I’m just curious…” By leaving the partnership unidentified, Mary Ellen could convince followers that her endorsement was more neutral or personally motivated than it was.

Beyond the FTC violation, critics argued that online dietitians flogging the safety of sugar substitutes was inappropriate, if not unethical.

Of course, consumer awareness is an essential ethical consideration. But what happens when FTC guidelines have not been violated, when disclosures are clear and conspicuous, but the concern that should be disclosed isn’t the paid partnership itself, but instead, the political and moral implications of the partnership?

For her “Challenge Accepted” series, YouTuber Michelle Khare, whose channel has more than 5 million subscribers, became an army soldier for a day, sponsored by (you guessed it) the United States Army. Khare’s video highlights the physical commitment of training, including obstacle courses, parachute operations, and marksmanship. However, her video neglects to emphasize the actual challenges and responsibilities of military life, such as combat risks and stress, and long-term contractual obligations. Instead, the video glorifies military service by framing it as an opportunity to travel, pursue education, and learn foreign languages, without addressing some of the most obvious risks and consequences.

Khare’s army video is a clear departure from a lot of her other content in the original series, including videos where she tries anchoring the news, training like a chess grandmaster, or joining the traveling circus. In these, Khare gains a deeper appreciation and understanding of the skill, discipline, and dedication required in a wide range of professions. However, Khare’s army video, and her previously sponsored Marine boot camp video, deliberately blur the line between entertainment and recruitment. The underlying message is: This could be a better version of who you are now.

Framing is everywhere and often intentionally subtle. Even the most skeptical among us can fall prey to curated realities, algorithmic manipulation, and persuasive narratives cloaked in (apparent) neutrality. These days, it’s not enough for the news we consume and social media accounts we follow to pass a fact-check. We must be vigilant frame-checkers, off and online, asking ourselves how facts are presented, what perspectives are prioritized or outright excluded, and whose interests are served.

We can’t eliminate misinformation or misleading framing, but we can try to see it more clearly.

This originally appeared on Project Censored.

Shealeigh Voitl is Project Censored’s Digital and Print Editor. A regular contributor to the Project’s yearbook series, her writing has been featured in State of the Free Press 2023, Truthout, The Progressive, and Ms. Magazine.

Strategic thinking

Dreaming as internationalist materialists

Thursday 8 May 2025, by Alexis Cukier , Franck Gaudichaud, Théo Roumier, Vincent Gay, Yoletty Bracho



This text, written by five members of the editorial board of Contretemps, is a critical response to Houria Bouteldja’s article ‘Dreaming Together: For an Internationalist Patriotism.’ Rêver ensemble. Pour un patriotisme internationaliste. [1] Unlike some others who have responded, we do not believe that its author should be discredited (let alone demonized, as some have been quick to do). 

We believe that this text deserves to be widely debated, especially as it echoes powerful trends running through the left today, at a time of rising authoritarian nationalism. In our view, Houria Bouteldja’s text is based on erroneous observations, and the ideas and proposals it defends run counter to the struggles for emancipation.

We will begin with a statement: yes, we dream, and we desire! We dream of emancipation, and we desire equality (individual, collective, between peoples).

And we are on the left, a radical and revolutionary left at that. What should be troubling us today is not changing our dreams and desires. Certainly not going poaching on the side of those opposed to us, claiming that “only the far right dreams”.
A politics of emotions?

It is legitimate to be interested in emotions in politics, and in particular in “mass emotions”, following the thread laid down by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whom Houria Bouteldja cites as a reference. Certainly, but to what end? Not necessarily to embrace them uncritically, but to help ensure that ideas and struggles for emancipation are not powerless, that they are massive material forces and not the fantasies of a few. Not to justify strategies that, historically, whether we like it or not, most often come from the far right.

There is no concrete reality of the working classes in France, no real alliance between “rednecks and barbarians” (if such categories are relevant), between “tower blocks and small towns”, and no political practice other than that of our enemies to support the proposition that “building a sentimental, emotional and ideological relationship with the victims of neoliberalism [...] can only be achieved through the mediation of patriotic sentiment”. In today’s France and Europe, this is above all the dream of the neo-fascists, and not only is it illusory to appropriate it in an imperialist country like France, but it would be extremely dangerous to claim to do so – such a perspective must be fought at all costs. We will return to this point later.

One might even wonder whether the far right is dreaming at all. Its leaders certainly dream of power, that is undeniable. But what about the rest? The rest is the opposite of a dream: the far right projects nothing but hatred and domination. Its stock in trade is resentment, fear, racism and exclusion.
Emotions, domination and social relations

Furthermore, distinguishing between what is an emotion and what has to do with the material dimensions of social relations is a political dead end, and in fact leads to ignoring these material dimensions, the socio-economic conditions that give social groups their reality; yet love of one’s country or nation makes it possible to render social relations invisible.

Is it really “transcendence” that drives far-right voters, or rather, as sociologist Félicien Faury has pointed out, “a series of purely material interests, where racial hostility is intertwined with economic concerns”? [2]

We agree that it is necessary to wrest those whom the author disparagingly refers to as “little whites” from the clutches of the far right and propose a common policy of alliance with immigrant and racialized working-class communities. To achieve this, what must mobilize us theoretically, strategically and practically is to share our desire to change the world, to make it a material reality. And if we seek to build convergences of struggles between the different sections of the working classes, white and non-white, this can only be achieved on this basis. For we are convinced that there will be no other way to push back the far right other than to advance the emancipatory left. But the left for what it is, or rather what it should be. And this must be done starting from reality, from the materiality that is its own, that is ours. While claiming – like us – to be a communist, Houria Bouteldja asserts that the “internationalist” left, the left of “human fraternity”, which she considers “too generous”, is doomed to “dream alone”. We agree with her that the legacy of the 20th century, the horrors of Stalinism and the betrayals of social democracy weigh heavily in the balance. However, no shortcuts, no patriotic “stroke of brilliance”, no abstract arguments from a vanguard that claims to have discovered the “secret” of the emotions of the working classes and their need to “become French” can replace this. This discovery is nothing but a fantasy, and its promoters run the risk of setting themselves up as self-proclaimed strategists for both non-racialized and racialized popular sectors, which they see as homogeneous, essentialized groups that are largely lost to any anti-capitalist perspective.

In reality, there is indeed a social reading in Houria Bouteldja’s text, but it is highly problematic. To dismiss the collective power of labour with a stroke of the pen is audacious from this point of view. For when the class ground gives way beneath our feet, all that remains is to fall into the void. It is certainly true that the labour market is “fragmented, divided, stratified” and that “the working class is much more heterogeneous and competitive” than in the past – but to conclude from this that there is no longer any class consciousness or possibility of class struggle is a cliché contradicted by the facts and invented by our neoliberal opponents. The triangular social consciousness described by many sociologists of the working classes, complicated by its intertwining with social relations of race and gender (incidentally, where is this central issue addressed in her text?), is a major challenge for the left and must be a basis for reflection on alliances between classes and between subordinate social sectors.

We could add that the “labour market” referred to by Houria Bouteldja is a theoretical construct that only makes sense from the point of view of capitalism. For what really exists are classes in struggle. The 300,000 jobs destroyed by the redundancy plans of recent months are a stark reminder of this. What is called the proletariat, which cannot be reduced to the industrial working class, is far from having disappeared. The fact that large concentrations of workers, all the “Billancourts” [3], are no longer part of the landscape is one thing (incidentally, this may be a French reality, but it is not a European one, let alone a global one). Houria Bouteldja deduces from this the inability to “experiment with collective power” in time and space. But this concentration is not a constant in the history of the proletariat: trade unionism, the labour movement itself, was invented in a network of factories and trades that were just as fragmentated as today. Moreover, reserves for a fightback remain: there are strikes, and there are possibilities for organization and alternatives, no less today than in the past.

And for those who, through their work, make this society function every day, the dream of being able to withdraw from capitalist subordination at work – retirement is nothing else – is not “too small”, just as it is not a dream to want to live longer and in good health, to work less, all of us, and differently. It is quite concrete, quite material. Concrete enough to have brought out crowds of protesters, more than a million on several occasions, something no other “dream” has ever achieved. That this is not enough, that more or better action is needed, is obvious. We agree with the author and all anti-racist and decolonial activists that we must take into account all dimensions of the realities experienced by workers, the intersectional diagonal of domination, and in particular the racial and gender division of labour and systemic state racism, especially Islamophobia. Thus, the mobilization against pension reform, among other things, shows that there is a solid and concrete basis for “collective power” in the experiences of labour – although here too, we need to take stock of what needs to be done better next time, in terms of self-organization and the participation of working-class neighbourhoods, particularly people of colour.

The “labour market”, on the other hand, is precisely conceived by neoliberals as a transcendence, something that goes beyond human will, to the point of imposing its “iron heel” – fascism.

So yes, we are materialists. We persist in believing that it is women and men – based on their real living conditions and struggles – who make history, not abstract ideas such as “patriotism” or “the Nation”.

This is why we were involved not only in the strikes in defence of our pensions, but also in the Yellow Vest protests and the march against Islamophobia in 2019. We never felt “dirty”, and we strongly reject this contemptuous conception of the “dirty little people”. Not that we think we are more virtuous than others or unconcerned by the sad passions of a period marked by nationalism, masculinism, racism, hatred and wars. But rather than calling in an incantatory fashion for people to “get dirty” in this swamp in an attempt to overturn the equation, we believe that we must respond by fostering solidarity and encouraging participation in real social struggles (anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, internationalist, etc.) as tens of thousands of activists, including trade unionists, collectives and neighbourhood associations, are already doing on a daily basis – yet this is not mentioned once in this text, which is supposed to address the question of “how can we dream together?”
A “patriotic” left... in the imperialist France of 2025?

Once again, there is a lot of exaggeration and caricature in Houria Bouteldja’s opposition, this time to the radical left. For our part, we were not at all “horrified” by the presence of French flags in the Yellow Vest protests or in the march against Islamophobia, well aware of their simple meaning for those who were waving them at the time: “we are also this country!” Moreover, these flags were not the rallying point for these movements: the yellow vest was the physical symbol and rallying cry for one, while the rejection of racist and Islamophobic hatred was the driving force for the other.

Nevertheless, what a surprising – and dangerous – idea it is to want to make the blue, white and red and the homeland a strategic banner in the context of France in 2025. For it is in this light that we must discuss the issue: the trajectory leading us to the possibility of fascism in France, as in Europe, is clear. We believe that there is, at least, common ground on this point. Chauvinistic nationalism, racist policies and nauseating rhetoric are already in power, and we are supposed to add to this by seeking to mobilize “patriotic” sentiments? We cannot help but think of Daniel Guérin’s warning:

“In France [in the second half of the 1930s], we saw neo-socialists successively place the nation at the forefront of their credo, while our communist comrades shouted themselves hoarse about “loving their country”. But most “patriots”, thus stimulated in their chauvinistic hysteria, but still distrustful of the left, felt that fascism was better qualified than the left to embody nationalism.” [4]

We will not be among those who, here – in the heart of a Western capitalist imperialist country – and now – in a context of fascism and widespread rearmament – make the national flag and the homeland a rallying point for our social camp.

Houria Bouteldja, a long-time decolonial activist, seems “disturbed” by the “patriotic” Houria Bouteldja, when she nevertheless insists on quoting Césaire and explaining why “France is indefensible”: after the Code Noir, the colonial massacres, Françafrique and the neocolonial continuum in the four corners of the globe (from Mayotte to Kanaky via French Guiana)... And, of course, we are aware that the revolutionary homeland of 1792 or the Paris Commune is not that of the counter-revolutionary nation, of the slaughter in Verdun or Sétif. We even claim to be part of “the France of struggles and dreams”, of the great strikes, of the youth and working-class uprisings, of the “zones à défendre” (areas to be defended), of the conquest of rights, of feminisms, etc. [5] But it is also in France that, for a long time now, nationalist-patriotic discourse has been dominated by conservatives and sovereignists of all stripes, making us take bladders for lanterns and the BBR [bleu,blanc, rouge: blue, white, red] flag for a sign of democratic or “republican” rallying. As Daniel Bensaïd wrote:

“As early as 1848, the Communist Manifesto put its overcoming [of the nation state] on the agenda: “Workers of all countries, unite!”. Class solidarity thus opposes the sacred union and the national Holy Alliance between opposing classes. This youthful internationalism responds to senile nationalism, for which the nation no longer represents a step towards global citizenship, but becomes an end in itself, rooted in the romantic quest for origins, roots, land and the dead.” [6]

This nationalism is even more poisonous today, and there is no need to add to it. Nevertheless, it is true that, despite the globalization of capital (and because of it too), the scale of the nation state remains, in many cases, a fundamental scale for the construction of the politics of the oppressed, popular sovereignty and the struggle of the subaltern for hegemony. We experience this in practice every day. It is at this level that major ruptures could occur again in the future, that those at the bottom could rise to the forefront and even raise the question of political power. We do not forget this aspect of things, nor do we take refuge in a kind of abstract or disembodied internationalism. In the magazine Nous no. 3 published by QG Décolonial, Stathis Kouvélakis (also a comrade of Contretemps Web) defends the strategic options of the author of Beaufs et Barbares (Rednecks and Barbarians) to “dialectize our relationship with the nation state”, while supporting Jean-Luc Melenchon’s calls for a “new France”. [7] Stathis thus emphasises that “the only concrete internationalism is that which assumes the mediation of the nation”, citing Marx and Engels (who called on the proletariat to “set itself up as the ruling class of the nation”). But it would be more accurate to say that this is one of the mediations, because many experiences of transnational struggles and recent “grassroots” internationalism show, at the same time, more complex dynamics, which can, for example, combine several levels and territories (local, national, multinational). Think of the strength of the “intergalactic” Zapatista movement or the alterglobalization movement in the 1990s and 2000s in the reconstruction of a new internationalism, to the dynamics of the trans-Andean and even transatlantic feminist strikes since 2016, to the Arab Spring of 2011 or the popular uprisings in 2019 in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador), to trade union and youth solidarity with the resistance struggles of the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine, to Kurdish resistance movements in various national territories, etc.

This is not to deny the existence of class struggles and internationalist solidarity at various levels, including of course the national level, nor to deny the importance of the imaginary, symbolic and identity-based communities that nation states represent for millions of individuals. Rather, it is a question of criticizing a strategy of unifying the working classes which, instead of establishing hegemony through struggle and the defence of an anti-racist and anti-capitalist front, seeks shortcuts, for want of anything better, through the glorification of patriotic France (and therefore of its state), which would be transformed – by magic? – the imperial and chauvinist stigmata: from a shrivelled pumpkin, it would become an internationalist fairy.

In this respect, it remains essential to make the distinction, following the theorists and activists of anti-colonial struggles, between nationalism in dominant, imperialist countries and nationalism in dominated and/or colonized countries. The Palestinian flag in Gaza symbolizes national liberation struggles. The French flag is in the hands of Zemmour, Le Pen and Retailleau. However, Houria Bouteldja’s patriotic transcendence and “return to the nation” reproduce the prevailing political confusion and disarm us in the face of the far-right discourse that portrays the “French nation” as the victim of the “great replacement”, the “globalist conspiracy”, “Europeanism” – a word that the text adopts – etc.

In the game of “who is the most patriotic” (“the so-called patriotic far right only has the confidence of the ruling classes on condition that it submits to Europeanism and therefore betrays the nation”), we always lose, and Houria Bouteldja diverts the more than legitimate criticism of neoliberal Europe and its necessary deconstruction by thinking she can use patriotic sentiment to rally the victims of neoliberalism. Apart from the fact that the most violent forms of capitalism can easily accommodate the most acute chauvinistic sentiments, there is an additional shift here: we are moving from a perspective of breaking with the European Union as a tactic at a given moment in the face of neoliberalism, to break a link in the chain in situations imposed by the EU (Greece, etc.), to a nationally centred perspective of “Frexit”, which is not justified by the need to break with the rules of free and undistorted competition, but by the need to “reclaim national-popular sovereignty”.

However, without denying the imperialist nature of Fortress Europe, which must be fought, the problem is that in reality, “Frexit” or not, it is often the French state, its bourgeoisie and the Fifth Republic that are responsible for the dispossession of all democratic sovereignty in France. The construction of a “decolonial Frexit” once again appears rather risky at a time when white and non-white working classes are being unified, without breaking with the bourgeois nation-state itself, combined with another European construction.
A patriotic and internationalist transcendence?

But what is the theory, what is the strategy, what are the militant practices that flow from a statement such as this: “This transcendence has a name. It is called France.”? We are, at best, perplexed, at worst appalled, and in any case opposed to the conclusions that can be drawn from it. All the more so since nothing in the text clarifies the meaning of the concepts and references. The notions of homeland, nation and state are mixed up and muddled, leaving us unable to see clearly. The historical references are sometimes flawed – the Paris Commune did not defend any kind of “progressive patriotism”; on the contrary, internationalists were active within it – and sometimes downright dubious – the quote from Otto Strasser inspires nothing but deep disgust: we know that it was W. Reich himself who referred to it in The Mass Psychology of Fascism and that this same reference is taken up by Selim Nadi in the magazine Nous., in an article which, incidentally, seeks to show the connections between Bouteldja... and Wilhem Reich. But Houria Bouteldja’s column merely repeats this reference without explaining it, and the man was certainly not “left-wing” (even with quotation marks), but a Nazi, albeit opposed to the line embodied by Hitler. For if we follow the analogy, should we now speak of a “Le Penist left” or a “Trumpist left”? That is nonsense.

All this to defend, moreover, a banal idea in the labour movement, namely that the emotions, desires and thoughts of the working classes must be taken into account. Defend the “left hand of the state”, as Bourdieu called it, yes. Public services, yes again – to which, incidentally, the entire working class is attached. But ultimately, that is not the “Fatherland”!

Despite its claim to be much more realistic than the radical left, Houria Bouteldja’s proposal appears in material terms for what it is: out of touch with reality. But after all, what else can we expect from ”transcendence”?

Historical precedents should alert us, however: the French Section of the Communist International became the “French” Communist Party. During the Cold War, the PCF exalted the flag, presenting the French “Fatherland” as being in danger from US imperialism and painting France as a dominated, almost colonized country. This confusion did not help it to take the side of the independence of colonized peoples when it was necessary, while others did. It is a confusion that leads to a narrow, impoverished view of the world.

To save her proposal, Houria Bouteldja attempts the oxymoron of “internationalist patriotism”. Without putting them on the same level in any way, we can say that National Socialism was another form of this and had absolutely nothing socialist about it, contrary to what Musk claims. For when two terms are opposed, one devours the other.

We therefore do not see where internationalism really lies in this proposal. There is no future for patriotism other than retreating into the nation in the countries of the imperialist centres. Unfortunately, this pseudo-internationalism, which is both patriotic and decolonial, is already systemic in the author, but also in other fringes of the left, with a statist campism that situates solidarity essentially at the level of nation states (and hemiplegic geopolitical readings) rather than on the side of all oppressed and colonized peoples, foremost among them today the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples. Here again, it is difficult to see where internationalism lies if one refuses to condemn the authoritarian regimes of Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Maduro or Iran (in the name of their anti-Atlanticism or their embodiment of a multipolar world), but we clearly see a one-sided “anti-Western” anti-imperialism that rejects any strategy for grassroots emancipation in these countries.
Continuing to invent communism

If something needs to be (re)invented – and it desperately does – our approach cannot be that of missionaries of transcendence. Perhaps that fits with a narrow and paternalistic avant-gardism, directing and supervising (to use the terms of the text) peoples and social movements. This is definitely not our approach.

For we are not missionaries, but activists. And even more so, activists of self-organization. Our communism, or our ecosocialism, for that is what it is, is not just an “idea” or a “dream”; it is both the goal and the movement itself. We want it to be both imaginary and practical. This does not prevent us from asking ourselves multiple strategic questions at a time when the far right is gaining power, a new neo-fascist international is emerging, and alliances between neoliberals and reactionaries are forming at the national level, particularly in France. It does not prevent us from recognizing the urgency of the moment and our limitations – and a thousand contradictions – in the face of imminent danger. We also agree that we must find ways to break the colour line that divides our class and unify it. Real social struggles are our compass and an essential vehicle in this sense. They alone allow us to truly raise the other strategic questions that need to be debated: that of the state, the need to build solid political organizations, whether or not to participate in elections or institutions, our projects for society, etc.

Revitalizing the democracy of movements is the guarantee of the vitality of tomorrow’s resistance and victories. Cultivating a concrete internationalism, against our own imperialisms, in support of migrants and all peoples in struggle, is what we believe must be done immediately. Trade unionists at the beginning of the 20th century spoke of strikes as “revolutionary gymnastics”. It is up to us to find new warm-ups, movements and exercises for the (bad) times we are living in. Everywhere in the world, without a homeland or borders.

10 March 2025

Translated by International Viewpoint from Contretemps.


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Footnotes


[1] For an English expression of Bouteldja’s thinking see Rednecks and Barbarians Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class published by Pluto Books.


[2] Félicien Faury, Des électeurs ordinaires. Enquête sur la normalisation de l’extrême droite [Ordinary Voters: An Investigation into the Normalization of the Far Right] Seuil, 2024.


[3] Often described as a “workers’ fortress”, the Renault factory in Billancourt in the outskirts of Paris was one of the largest car plants in France.


[4] Quand le fascisme nous devançait [When fascism got ahead of us], Marcel Rivière, 1955 – reprinted in the introduction to the reissue of Fascisme et grand capital, Libertalia, 2014.


[5] Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Les luttes et les rêves – Une histoire populaire de la France de 1685 à nos jours [Struggles and Dreams – A People’s History of France from 1685 to the Present Day], La Découverte, Paris, 2016.


[6] Daniel Bensaïd, Le Nouvel internationalisme. Contre les guerres impériales et la privatization du monde [The New Internationalism: Against Imperial Wars and the Privatization of the World], Textuel, Paris, 2003.


[7] There is much to be said about Mélenchon’s “new France” (which continues to claim that France is a power present “on all five continents”!).


Franck Gaudichaud
Franck Gaudichaud is professor of Latin American history at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France). His books on Latin America include Chili 1970-1973. Mille jours qui changèrent le monde, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. He is co-president of the association France Latin America and participates in the editorial committees of the site www.rebelion.org and of Contretemps magazine (France).

Vincent Gay
is a member of the NPA in France

Yoletty Bracho
Yoletty Bracho is a French academic working on questions of political activism.

Théo Roumier
Théo Roumier is a French trade-union activist.

Alexis Cukier
Alexis Cukier is a French academic and activist.


International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Strategic thinking

Revolutionary defeatism, yesterday and today

Thursday 8 May 2025, by Simon Hannah



“The masses take a practical and not a theoretical view of things.”
—V. I. Lenin

The debate on the Left over the war in Ukraine has exposed serious disagreements on international questions, ones that have been brewing and deepening for over a decade. From 2001 to 2011, there was general unity on the socialist Left about the question of imperialism and the response to it. This was a period of explicit and obvious attacks on sovereign countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States, United Kingdom, and other imperialist forces. This naked imperialist aggression triggered global mass movements against the so-called “War on Terror.”


For socialists, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was as straightforward as the U.S. invasion of Vietnam: oppose the war and also support the right of the people of that country to resist being colonized. You didn’t defend a country (or not) based on the nature of its government or the leadership of its national resistance movement, any more than you rejected the national aspirations of the Palestinians because of the reactionary politics of Hamas. It is a basic point, not even a socialist one but a bourgeois democratic one, that a nation has a right to self-determination and another nation should not carry out regime change using missiles and tanks. These are all pretty clear and obvious examples, so obvious that most of the socialist Left was united on them at the time.

But there was the beginning of a divergence, and a fracturing of the general perspective, in Libya in 2011. During the Arab spring there was an armed uprising in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi by various ethnic groupings that was initially disorganized and chaotic. This was the first war in the twenty-first century in which the question of imperialist division and re-division became more complicated. This was initially because of the role played by democratic movements against ‘anti-imperialist’ dictatorships. Then, increasingly, some on the Left began minimizing the role of other imperialist powers that were not in Western Europe or North America, namely Russia and China.

Sensing an opportunity to overthrow a regime that had often been a thorn in the side of the West, NATO intervened in support of the uprising, providing air support to prevent their total annihilation by Gaddafi’s forces. This wasn’t a celebration of popular revolt by Western imperialism, but a pragmatic calculation that overthrowing Gaddafi was in the interests of the Western imperialists. It was also in the interests of Libyans as well, of course.

Then Syria followed. The initial movement for democratic rights was brutally suppressed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which plunged the country into a decade-long civil war. The Western imperialists were far less reluctant to intervene in this case, though Russian imperialism gladly assisted its ally Assad, sending materials, mercenaries, and military advisors, and financially propping up the government. Iran and Hezbollah also intervened to crush the popular uprising. The United States intervened into the north of Syria to assist the Kurdish YPG (People’s Defense Units) in targeting ISIS, though they drew the line at helping to destroy the Syrian government’s military. This conflict caused a huge split in the international Left, with people either siding with the uprising and the Kurds or with the Assad regime because it was “anti-imperialist”, though in reality dependent on Russian imperialism. Some on the Left were ambivalent about the Arab uprising against Assad, but were very sympathetic to the Kurds because they saw them as a genuine national liberation struggle with Left politics. In the end, the popular revolution was crushed and some of the Left cheered the fall of Aleppo—the same type of “leftist” who supported Russian tanks invading Hungary in 1956 to put down a workers uprising there.

Now the war in Ukraine has caused a raging argument over tactics and strategy—and a complete disagreement over the role of imperialism in the conflict. The essential disagreement is over the degree to which Ukraine has a right to defend itself from an invasion by an imperialist power. Some on the “Left” are cheerleading Russia and believe this is a war waged by Russia to denazify Ukraine. I won’t deal with that argument because it is so obviously ridiculous. But others conclude that because Ukraine is in the orbit of the West—for example, it has asked to join NATO— Volodymyr Zelensky and his government are proxy agents of Washington/London/Paris/Berlin. Therefore this is seen as an example of an inter-imperialist war between Russia and the West fighting through its surrogate in Kiev.

Socialists who deny Ukraine’s right to defend itself from an invasion by an imperialist power because of the policies of the Ukrainian government are junking any understanding of the national question and the way that the people of Ukraine are actually responding to Russia’s invasion. They are in practice denying the right to self-determination because they don’t like the government of Ukraine, which is irrelevant to the principle being discussed. By extension, no one would support the Tamil Tigers, Hamas fighters, or even Irish Republicans, all of which had (or still have) reactionary positions on a range of issues and were pro-capitalist. Or they use the excuse of Ukraine wanting to join NATO to suggest it was essentially an imperialist power itself.

Because Ukraine is seen as a proxy for the West and it is receiving anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, some are drawing an equal sign between Russia and Ukraine, concluding that both sides should lose. How can both sides lose? In reality, that would be a long drawn out stalemate that lasts years, with countless dead.

Others try to be more nuanced, and say that the people of Ukraine should resist but they should overthrow their government first because their government backs Western imperialism. So, they argue, in the face of an actual invasion, with Russian tanks and armored vehicles making their way into major cities, the Ukrainian working class needs to magically form a class-conscious mass movement. Presumably, this would be revolutionary in nature, completely understand the reactionary role of NATO and Western imperialism, and successfully overthrow the government before declaring a Paris Commune–type government. Only then is it legitimate to wage a “socialist defense” of the country. How useful for the Ukrainian people for socialists in the West to wish that their political situation was totally different and much more favorable.

In response to the invasion of an army that is under the command of the people who oversaw the slaughter of the Syrian revolution and the flattening of Grozny, it is understandable that the Ukrainian people—even those that do not like and have actively opposed Zelensky and his policies—will defend their country and their communities from Russian occupation. As V. I. Lenin put it, “When the worker says he wants to defend his country, it is the instinct of an oppressed man that speaks in him.”

Now it is clear that the Zelensky government needs to be overthrown, just as Vladimir Putin’s does, just as Joe Biden’s, Boris Johnson’s, Viktor Orbán’s, and any other bourgeois government does. And the war in Ukraine offers a chance for a revolutionary explosion against the existing order. But in order to get from “the Russians have invaded, we need to defend our homes” to “all power to the Ukrainian Soviet” requires serious united front work alongside the great mass of the Ukrainian people mobilized into the popular defense units by the government. It means being one step ahead of the masses, not ten miles ahead.

The creation of the popular defense units means that there is now a militia in Ukraine that is armed and has incredibly rudimentary training in weapons. Socialists that are advocating boycotting these units are effectively pacifists, even if they quote Lenin to justify their position. In fact, Lenin argued that the “militarization” of society during a war was one of the few positive aspects of it:


“Today the imperialist bourgeoisie militarizes the youth as well as the adults; tomorrow, it may begin militarizing the women. Our attitude should be: All the better! Full speed ahead! For the faster we move, the nearer shall we be to the armed uprising against capitalism. How can Social-Democrats give way to fear of the militarization of the youth, etc., if they have not forgotten the example of the Paris Commune?”

Here Lenin is writing about an imperialist nation, not even a semi-colony or a colony, arming itself.

Some socialists have defended the Ukrainians right to resist occupation but argued that the Western imperialist nations should not provide any material or weaponry for the fight. Their view is that consignments of anti-tank weapons from London change the class character of the national resistance fundamentally, and therefore it is not permissible to send weapons to the Ukrainians. Others state that weapons should only be sent to working-class organizations in Ukraine, but unless people identify such organizations and make that a practical reality, it is only an excuse not to support the wider arming of the country. When faced with the Russian army, the call to disarm the Ukrainian resistance is essentially a call for Russia to win with ease.

Again, who provides weapons to a national liberation movement or a country resisting imperialist invasion is a secondary question to the fact of the legitimate struggle itself. It was right for the Kosovars to get weapons from the West in the 1990s. It was right for the Syrian resistance and the Kurds to get weapons during the Syrian revolution. Do these weapons come with strings attached? Sometimes, but we cannot ignore the autonomy of people fighting a legitimate struggle for freedom because of imperialist machinations.

Some on the Left have apparently concluded that, in the modern world system of imperialism, every poorer semi-colony is in some other imperialist country’s orbit, so the national question is redundant. This is not a new idea. In the Junius pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg argued that the world had already been divided up by imperialism, so all conflicts are to some degree or other imperialist conflicts. Therefore the national question is relegated to the past, and now only socialism is the order of the day. The problem with this is that it completely ignores any genuine national questions that might exist—for instance when your country is invaded by a much more powerful nation right next door whose leader has been publishing essays saying your country was a mistake and shouldn’t exist any more.

Writing in 1916, partly in response to these types of arguments, Lenin argued:


“The fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain circumstances, be utilized by another ‘Great’ Power in its equally imperialist interests should have no more weight in inducing Social Democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination than the numerous case of the bourgeoisie utilising republican slogans for the purpose of political deception and financial robbery, for example, in the Latin countries, have had in inducing them to renounce republicanism.”

These matters are crucial because we are entering a multi-polar world in which an analysis based on the Cold War won’t do. As Russia and China flex their growing imperialist might, there will be more conflicts in which a poorer country or ethnic group might look to the West for assistance, and if socialists use an overly simplistic view of international relations to guide their thinking, then the socialist Left will be wrong-footed. We cannot put a minus simply where the Western bourgeois class puts a plus. We must use theory to illuminate and explain, not set up barriers to reality.

The conflict in Ukraine has also seen some socialists call for the defeat of both sides in the conflict, basing their position on a policy Lenin advocated in 1914 to 1916. The rest of this article will examine what this policy meant—and did not mean—in practice and its usefulness to developing a coherent socialist policy around Ukraine today.
What does ‘revolutionary defeatism’ mean

Lenin’s view on inter-imperialist war appears simple:


“The bourgeoisie of all the imperialist Great Powers—England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Japan, the United States—has become so reactionary and so intent on world domination, that any war waged by the bourgeoisie of those countries is bound to be reactionary. The proletariat must not only oppose all such wars, but must also wish for the defeat of its ‘own’ government in such wars and utilise its defeat for revolutionary insurrection, if an insurrection to prevent the war proves unsuccessful.”

Any class-conscious worker will be suspicious of the actions of their government and their capitalist class in a war, regardless of whether the nation is imperialist or not. In an imperialist war, a class-conscious worker will be scornful of the war mongering politicians and the calls by the bosses for “unity in the war effort,” to work longer hours, speed up production, work for free at the weekend, forbid strikes and public meetings, and so on. You don’t want your government to be victorious because you know that the result will be unbridled nationalism, patriotism, and jingoism—the enemies of socialism. It will bind the masses to their bourgeoisie through the glorification of the successes of the nation, something that undermines and mitigates against class consciousness.

There is truth in the notion that an imperialist war going badly contributes to a growing mood of radicalization against the government. The Russian revolution in 1917 was possible largely because the war was going so disastrously for Russia that it was causing untold misery back home and the peasants sent to fight and die in the war were fed-up and wanted peace. If the war was going well and Russia was advancing into other countries to seize new territories, all under the brilliant leadership of the tsar, then it would have only caused a much greater feeling of nationalism among the people. The February and October revolutions likely would not have happened.

Likewise when the Vietnam war was going badly for the U.S., the sense of growing national crisis exacerbated and deepened other social contradictions in the United States, connecting with and radicalizing other issues, especially the fight against racism. The feeling that the government is in crisis and that its imperial power is failing helps give a sense of strength and purpose to the working class and oppressed to organize and fight back on other fronts—though it also makes the ruling class even more vicious and violent on the home front in order to maintain order.
Photo of V.I. Lenin, Red Square, Moscow, March 3, 1919.

The problem with taking every slogan issued at every point of the war as a practical and immediate call for action is that this collapses different levels of analysis and activity. Lenin’s position on defeatism was largely a propagandistic reaction to the betrayal of socialism that was defensism, namely when Social Democrats across Europe suddenly started supporting their own government war aims because they accepted that they were all “defensive” conflicts. The slogan “defense of the fatherland” was objectionable because it was clearly a lie to promote an aggressive war of expansion. A big part of the imperialist propaganda around World War I was that the war was always started by someone else, and every belligerent country was only reacting defensively to the actions of their belligerent neighbors. It was the capitulation of the socialists to the imperialist war aims of their ruling class that Lenin countered with his policy of defeatism.

There is a hard and a soft reading of what the logical practical conclusions of revolutionary defeatism might mean. The softer meaning is that in an imperialist war you don’t cheer on your own government’s war aims and you raise principled slogans like “not a penny nor a person for the war machine.” Any military defeats you use in your agitation to point out that the war is futile, is causing unnecessary bloodshed, and that the government should be overthrown for getting us all into this mess on behalf of the big industrialists. You continue the class struggle— and even intensify it where you can—regardless of pleas for national unity from trade union leaders and bourgeois politicians.

There is a harder reading, which Lenin sometimes pointed to and which has become a kind of orthodoxy for some socialists, largely as a result of a faction fight in the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s. In this interpretation, you not only desire the defeat of your own government, you should actively work for the military defeat of the war effort through sabotage, “shoot your officers,” and so on. Indeed, Lenin argued that the defeat of Russia by the German army was a “lesser evil” than the victory of tsarism, which Lenin argued was the most barbaric and reactionary government in Europe.

The problem with this view—as the socialist Hal Draper has pointed out—is it doesn’t really match what the Bolsheviks were saying in Russia or the practical consequences of the defeatism slogan. First, there was no real unity among the Bolsheviks on the question of defeatism because it meant different things at different times in Lenin’s writings. Most went with the softer reading, over which there was little disagreement from other anti-war socialists. But the defeatism slogan in its hardest form was not an operative policy for agitation among the masses of soldiers but a polemical reaction to the collapse of so many socialists into “defense of the fatherland” politics. (Imagine handing out leaflets to nineteen-year-old conscripted soldiers saying that your policy was for them to “come home in a body bag.”)

Look at the practical positions that the Bolsheviks argued for at international antiwar conferences, particularly the crucial one at Zimmerwald, where there was not a mention of “revolutionary defeatism” but instead a focus on prosecuting the class war at home and politicizing any industrial struggles into more general fights against capitalism and imperialism.


“The prelude to this struggle [for socialism] is the struggle against the world war and for a quick end to the slaughter of the peoples. This struggle demands rejection of war credits, an exit from government ministries, and denunciation of the war’s capitalist and anti-socialist character—in the parliamentary arena, in the pages of legal and, when necessary, illegal publications, along with a forthright struggle against social-patriotism. Every popular movement arising from the consequences of war (impoverishment, heavy casualties, and so on) must be utilized to organize street demonstrations against the governments, propaganda for international solidarity in the trenches, demands for economic strikes, and the effort to transform such strikes, where conditions are favorable, into political struggles. The slogan is ‘civil war, not civil peace.’”

If Lenin’s position on revolutionary defeatism carries a certain clarity, what did it mean on the ground? Lenin cautioned “this does not mean ‘blowing up bridges,’ organizing unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.” But what about agitation in the army? It is a popular view from some socialists that Bolshevik agitation in the army focused on radical actions, including calls for soldiers to shoot their officers and for whole regiments to rise up and fight the government loyalist troops and not the foreign power.

The slogan “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war” is understood to be an immediate demand for soldiers and workers to open up a second front at home, fighting to overthrow the government while your country is being invaded. It is a call that modern day socialists rarely think about tactically, however. They throw the slogan around as a principle as if, from day one, the immediate demand was for soldiers to turn their guns on their own government. But to transform this general revolutionary slogan into a tactical demand in the immediate outbreak of war is just ultra-left posturing. The actual consequences of attempting to launch a civil war when working-class consciousness is overwhelmingly focused on the desire to defend their national rights means isolation and death for the Left.

Instead the practical policy of the Bolsheviks in the army was to focus on general agitation against the class character of the war, educating workers and soldiers in what imperialism meant and denouncing the war aims of the government. After late 1916 through to summer 1917, the Bolshevik’s demands increasingly centered on the rights of soldiers.

The key turning point for the Bolsheviks in Russia was after February 1917 when tsarism was overthrown by a popular revolution and a liberal democratic regime headed by Alexander Kerensky replaced it, and said it would continue the war. Some people on the Left fell into line after February, arguing that the task was to defend a more liberal and democratic Russia against the German Kaiser now that the character of the government had changed. Lenin and his comrades doubled down on opposition, however, and when the war continued to go badly under Kerensky, it was this principled course that allowed them to eventually wrestle power from the capitalists in October 1917.

What was the material that the Bolsheviks were handing out on the eve the All-Russia Congress of the Soviets in April 1917?


“All power to the soviet of workers’ and soldiers deputies! This does not mean that we must immediately overthrow the present government or disobey it. So long as the majority of the people support it… we cannot afford to fritter away our forces on desultory uprisings. Never! Husband your strength! Get together at meetings! Pass motions!”

It is clear that the revolutionary strategy did not come from an immediate mutiny, refusing to fight, opening up a revolutionary fight against the bourgeois government, but from slow patient work in building up support for antiwar and revolutionary ideas.

Ultimately, the working class led by revolutionary forces came to power in October not on a policy of “shoot your officers” or actively agitating for the military defeat of the army, but on a policy of “bread, peace, and land.” These demands were only achievable by taking power from the Russian capitalists and their liberal politicians to secure peace for a country exhausted and destroyed by war. The Bolsheviks immediately sued for peace with Germany, signing the very unfavorable Brest-Litovsk treaty to take Russia out of the war, conceding a great deal of territory as the price for peace. It was during the debates on ratifying the Brest-Litovsk treaty that Lenin remarked,


“Boris [Kamkov, of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries] heard that we were defeatists, and he reminded himself of this when we have ceased to be defeatists…. We were defeatists under the tsar, but under Tseretelli and Chernov [ministers in the the Kerensky government] we were not defeatists.”

So after the February revolution, Lenin argues that the Bolsheviks dropped the defeatism slogan, though in practice it existed mainly at the level of propaganda between 1914 and 1916 and was shelved by 1917. It was replaced by a more concrete and specific call for democratic rights for soldiers and a push for dual power in the military as the revolutionary upsurge radicalized more and more regiments.

By September 1917, even Lenin was making statements that were no longer based on revolutionary defeatism but essentially advocated a revolutionary war of defense, couching it in the language of how to successfully defend the country from invasion:


“It is impossible to render the country capable of defending itself without the greatest heroism on the part of the people in courageously and decisively carrying out great economic transformations. And it is impossible to appeal to the heroism of the masses without breaking with imperialism, without offering to all the peoples a democratic peace, without thus transforming the war from a war of conquest, a predatory, criminal war, into a just, defensive, revolutionary war.”

This further demonstrates that Lenin was primarily using the revolutionary defeatism slogan in relation to tsarism and the idea that a defeat of the tsar’s army would create the conditions for a more radical democratic regime to replace it. And on this point, he was right.

Things move fast in war. When Lenin returns from exile and begins to actually talk to Russian workers and soldiers, he detected another mood, that it is entirely reasonable not to want your country to be invaded and occupied, and it is this sentiment that he now expressed, even using the language of a revolutionary defensist war that he had rejected in April 1917. The key point was to oppose the expansionist, imperialist war aims of the bourgeois class.
Practical conclusions

When an imperialist country is invading a poorer nation to try to carve up the world, advocating the latter’s right to resist and defending its right to self-determination is a basic democratic demand. Even saying you are in favor of the smaller nation winning is a principled and correct position.

Even if you are in an imperialist nation and you are being invaded by another imperialist nation, then it is inevitable that people will not want to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power.

In either situation, socialists should put forward general anti-war agitation and propaganda, draw out the class contradictions between what the imperialists want and working people being sent to slaughter each other for it. We should make links with socialists in the invading country, organize rank-and-file committees in the military and in trade unions, and make links between workers and soldiers, clearly saying that the government doesn’t speak for the people, that this barbarous war needs to stop, and only a socialist government can bring it to an end.

19 May 2022

Source Tempest.


Attached documentsrevolutionary-defeatism-yesterday-and-today_a8982.pdf (PDF - 946.5 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article8982]


Simon Hannah
Simon Hannah is a member of Anti*Capitalist Resistance and author of several books on political activism in Britain.


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