JACOBIN MAGAZINE
Means of Production is a socialist film production team based in Detroit, Michigan. Last year they released their debut electoral campaign video. The candidate wasn’t your average baby-kisser. It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The ad wasn’t played on television but still got millions of views, going viral on social media and attracting national attention far beyond the congressional race itself. On Twitter, influential activists and journalists hailed it as “the best campaign ad of 2018.”
A few months later, Means of Production dropped two ads for Hawaii congressional candidate Kaniela Ing. Again, one was crowned “the most remarkable political ad of 2018.”
Means of Production’s Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes kept their foot on the gas pedal. By the end of the year, they’d made videos to mark the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) 50,000 member milestone, for the campaign to establish a public bank in Los Angeles, for an academic labor union in Ypsilanti, for democratic-socialist candidates in Ann Arbor and Rhode Island, and for Progressive International, a joint project of Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders.
Jacobin’s Meagan Day talked with Burton and Hayes about busting American class myths, creating a new socialist vocabulary, preparing for Bernie 2020, and about Means TV — a “post-capitalist subscription-based streaming service” coming in 2019.
Meagan Day:
Everyone seems to agree that the Ocasio-Cortez ad was not usual campaign fare. What made it different?
Nick Hayes:
It’s socialism. This ad performed well because it communicated a working-class story with a socialist politics behind it.
We spent a lot of time in pre-production talking through her whole story, talking about her politics, about the community she’d represent and what it’s like to live there. We wanted to root the ad in that community, so people would watch it and recognize it as the place they live, addressing the issues they face, like how insanely expensive it is to raise a family in New York City.
Naomi Burton:
The reason we were so struck by her in the first place is that she was just a normal working-class person who shared our politics. She’s our age. She lives in an apartment that has the same shitty yellow tile that mine does. And she’s someone whose experience is incredibly important to her politics, so we tried to create an authentic portrayal of that experience, and give it a pace and an energy that would make people want to watch the whole thing.
Meagan Day:
The goal of a typical campaign ad is usually just media saturation and brand recognition. Most campaign ads are devoid of political content, because the candidates and the filmmakers treat them as marketing, not as political messaging. Where does your approach differ?
Naomi Burton:
Yeah, a typical campaign ad is just like thirty seconds, three vague talking points. Sometimes an emotional scene, but there’s never any substance behind the words that they’re saying. Even the more substantial ones are often just using platitudes.
We’re a generation who, or at least I did, totally bought into the Obama hope-and-change messaging. That’s what consultants tell political candidates to do, to use this flat language. We’re trying to stay away from that. We want to talk about actual things that could change people’s lives.
Nick Hayes:
We don’t work with candidates who take corporate money, and we’re even cautious around progressive candidates. We’re looking for socialist candidates who are comfortable calling themselves that. And we’re looking for people with a story to tell that will speak to the working class.
If we were to put all this time and energy into like a video for like Hillary Clinton or somebody, we can do all the filmmaking in the world and it’s still going to come across super robotic, and make working-class people feel disconnected.
Meagan Day:
Not long after the Ocasio-Cortez ad came out, you linked up with Kaniela Ing and gave him the same treatment. I know they’re both DSA members, and so are you two. Can you tell me more about the political vision that unites the candidates you’ve produced work for?
Naomi Burton:
They’re socialists, and they’re able to articulate that. Kaniela is someone we’ve admired for years, because he’s had the courage to continuously push and lead the conversation left. We created all of the videos in this election cycle to really build on each other and to introduce a new socialist vocabulary for viewers.
We don’t have any language around socialism in the United States. People barely know what “austerity” means. I barely knew what it meant until 2016, even though I was being affected by it.
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