The larger left youtubers unfortunately are mostly either radical liberals aka SocDems or Anarchists and to me an Anarchist view of leftism is too basic
tbh online anarchists are mostly just radlibs who like leftist aesthetics. Plenty of actual leftists in the anarchist movement IRL, but online? Very rarely do I run into an anarchist online who is anything other than a liberal in denial.
Communists no doubt need to be engaging more fully in online agitation - memes are essentially just propaganda posters and fliers, and videos are not much different than corner speeches and community hall rallies. Communists have not ever really relied on reading as an agitation method, they’ve relied on popular media - pamphlets, hall rallies, and posters in the early 20th century. With the hulling out of the public sphere and communities, making use of online media formats (videos, podcasts, memes) fills those roles.
However I’d caution an over-reliance on the example of the young fascist/nationalist movement for radicalization - these are most often the children of the middle class, petty-bourgeois or bourgeois, whose interests are diametrically opposed to any form of socialist politics. The gaming community is overwhelmingly young, and a lot of the demographic data suggests that the reason why lower income and education groups are more often gamers is because they are people pursuing higher degrees, rather than it being working class folk who are more likely to play videogames.
More simply, that demographic is not necessarily being radicalized to the right because the right exists online and is accessible to them - it’s because those demographics have a material interest in right wing politics. We shouldn’t give that ground to the right, obviously, but they’re also not the demographic we should be spending the majority of our efforts online in radicalizing.
Online agitation on the left needs to be happening, but we should not replicate the strategies of the right simply because it seems to have worked for the right - they’ve specifically targeted the groups they’re targeting because those communities are already sympathetic to right-politics. The left should be doing the same, but consolidating influence and power in groups which have interests which can be served by left-politics.
It was the sheer number of anti-colonialists in the mid-20th century who fought imperialism using Marxism-Leninism as a way to approach politics. I was an anarchist for a good long while, and the great examples of anarchist success always were cases where there was significant capitalist retrenchment, or outright victory by fascism. M-L revolutionaries, on the other hand, shrugged the yoke of imperialism off the backs of much of the colonial world, and in some cases rose to be powers in their own right to counter imperial capitalist powers.
M-L’s focus as an ideological school in self-criticism and a recognition that different conditions require different responses and strategies just made sense. The sweeping manifestos I had read from anarchists laid down ideas about how society would be organized “after the revolution”, waving away the challenges of entrenched capitalist power, and ultimately usually turned into some form of federation of communes. They were inflexible about how they viewed the future, whereas Marxism-Leninism is more of a toolkit, not a dogma.
To me Marxism-Leninism had a history of working, even if the outcomes are not always perfect. Anarchism did not have that track record, and frankly I am beginning to get to the point where I want something that can win, because I can’t imagine living under these conditions and the capitalist regime the rest of my life.
I’m still learning theory, but that’s what made me change from anarchism.