The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that’s it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn’t seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.
Both of those are very active projects that require an embedding in community, particularly a community that is going to be around for a while.
Most left groups in the US make no attempt whatsoever to build within and among a community. Many of the seeming exceptions get rerouted into a charity pipeline. They might call it mutual aid but it tends to be structured as charity with the money and labor coming from outside the community to simply provide a service for the most destitute inside the community, plus other little telltale signs. There is little work done to radicalize, incorporate, learn from the community itself, including the whole community, not just those deemed worthy of charity.
The other challenge is that communities are in transition. You try to set up shop somewhere and maybe 10 years later it’s an entirely new set of people due to increased property values + increased cost of living + stagnant paychecks. To me this means you can’t half-ass it, as you’re going to need to create a resilient network that can move and connect across the new places people need to live and work.
But to me the main issue is that groups don’t even really try in the first place. Sometimes this is even for ideological reasons.
I can affirm this with experience. My own personal hope is that because the American communist movement is just being resparked that it’s simply smouldering in the kindling right now before really catching fire. which unlike a nice campfire, can take months to years to actually see results.
That said, like you’ve mentioned, having kindling catching fire - growing a connection to your community - is something I do notice is the biggest shortfall of the many communist parties in the United States. I also say that with the caveat that I’m aware that a lot of the actual groundwork of building connections tends to be more clandestine, interpersonal, and quite dull, so it usually goes unnoticed and unrecognized, so outside of my direct circles of knowledge and into the whispering void, I do know that this is occuring at a crawling pace in the U.S. So it’d be best to probably get used to seeing what we’re seeing now for a decent while, or not seeing in this case.
Quite frankly I’m of the opinion we need more nose-to-the-grindstone communists, something I try to strive to be myself and help others I know work towards as well.
Yeah despite the critical tone I used I’m optimistic that American commies are getting better at this stuff. I see competent comrades peeling away from troubled orgs and doing cool things all over the place and I think those seeds you mentioned are being planted.
ok prob awful thought, if folks (i.e. population at large) are already OK with subscribing to influencers, personalities, etc. is it possible to do the same for like a few communists? like bolshevik being a smaller group than the mensheviks…
IDK just spitballing don’t @ me pls
There are comrades getting funding for projects through patreon or ko-fi, and there’s also stuff like comradery.co
Quite frankly I’m of the opinion we need more nose-to-the-grindstone communists, something I try to strive to be myself and help others I know work towards as well.
Could you explain this a bit more? I’ve met enough comrades that got burnt out because their effort was not met with success. (This is a well-meaning question, I feel like it does not read that way, sorry)
So I had a big thing typed out and then had to step away before posting it because I hadn’t finished the last sentence, and then had my phone reload the page leading to it getting deleted. So I’ll shorten it like it’s not butter.
Folks need to go get jobs and live their lives among their coworkers as open, honest, reliable, and comradely commies, preferably in heavy industry or logistics or critical light industrial sectors, to both normalize and organically grow a rooted network of comrades, allies, fellow travelers, and friends in both the community and the workplace. Basically long-term dull shit.
thx for going through the effort of retyping and I agree with your point. :)
“Mutual aid” is not transformative and so will not “get us anywhere.” Huey P. Newton called the Panthers’ stuff like that “survival programs,” which were meant to keep the poor alive/healthy until the coming revolution.
This is one of those radicalizing things I came across as a teen. I remember it went something like this:
“Charities are a good thing…”
“Why don’t charities ever seem to solve problems?”
“Why do charities need to exist? Don’t we pay taxes for this kind of thing?”
“Ohhhhh! They’re pocketing the bulk of the money, and using the clout to get courtside seats at basketball games under the guise of ‘awareness’?”
Even the most well meaning charity or mutual aid is still a band aid. Don’t get me wrong, feeding, clothing and sheltering people is never bad. Grifting the families of cancer patients is. Looking at you, Susan Komen foundation
It does capitalism’s reproduction for it, so they can increase profits. Sadly many anarchist want to provide for people’s needs without “imposing” ideology upon them, which is not going to help progress.
It helps those people have their needs met in the immediate term though, people still are dying of starvation and exposure in the US. Without a recognized ideology you will be less likely to be targeted by police or political groups, so I do see the reasoning behind separating aid and ideology. People that need food aren’t trying to be lectured, I have relied on food banks in the past and if it was required I attended a lecture or something before getting help that would be some bullshit, but they could have pamphlets available like Food Not Bombs.
Sure, but if you’re serious about being anti-capitalist maybe do something about it beyond temporary bandaids?
I think where things are in the US theres an arguemment for specifically survival programs and community building more generally whike perhaps not transformative, are probably the necessary step to “get us anywhere.” Atomization is so extreme in the US that i think strategies like that might be the best to focus on for building a foundation that can built on
So what is the strategy to build a vanguard? The mutual aid is just a way to attract people to the movement, sure, but it’s the best method of attraction there is.
Protests are good for agitation but the christofascists have so many well established, well funded churches any revolution would immediately be taken over.
The problem is a lot of the groups who do mutual aid in the US are also ideologically opposed to forming centralized vanguard parties.
Yep, the survival programs were explicitly for “survival pending revolution.” They were never the ends themselves but merely a means to an end.
It’s non-trivial now. There’s a lot of regulation of facilities, lot of licensing, lot of shit. People don’t trust anyone with their kids bc of decades of media propaganda. The alienation and destruction of community we all experience extends to people with kids. Folks don’t know their neighbors, they don’t live in the same neighborhood very long.
All the conditions that make things shit right now make community child care very difficult. Not just caring for kids, but even getting the idea that people could be trusted to care for your kids off the ground. And people still do it.
they don’t live in the same neighborhood very long.
Yeah this is a big thing, the American working class is far more transient now, people change jobs and houses far more frequently. The Bolsheviks were walking into villages that were 100s of years old, my neighbors seem to change every six months.
Pretty sure because the government has made it illegal or really expensive to do those things. You will go to jail if you try and feed the hungry without the right permits. Not to ensure that all involves parties are safe or being safe, but because the State has decided only it can decide who can feed the hungry.
But then what is the plan just do protests and book clubs until we magically build a dual power structure?
i guess it’s catch charges until nobody hires you anymore.
food not bombs exists. sure an ML version of that would be cool and i’d be down to help it monetarily but i can’t catch anymore charges
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How are you going to party build without mass organizing? How are you going to develop working class revolutionaries without engaging with the working class? Virtually all of the PSLniks in my rust belt city are middle class white men with advanced degrees and jobs very few understand or relate to. The same goes for the trotskyite organizations and most of the whiter anarchist crews.
The “middle class” is not a class in the Marxist conception, those people are as working class as anyone else because they have the same relationship to the means of production. You can say that these parties have failed to gain wider appeal without resorting to this liberal conception of class as a set of social signifiers.
It’s farcical to imagine a tony professor and a warehouse worker hold the same relationship to capital and society. If the entire powerbase of the capitalist class in human terms were just the 200,000 car dealership owners, 15,000 bank owners, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, they would be eaten overnight. There must be a broader base of support built through material conceptions and reinforced through superstructural elements or “social signifiers”.
These two groups do not “have the same relationship to the means of production.” one section is exploited in the main, the other is mixed and facilitates greater exploitation of others in exchange for security, comfort, and social prestige.
Where exactly is the cut off line for ‘middle class’ then?
White collar work is pretty thoroughly proletarianized.
I’m not here to point out a specific point of delineation; a mound of sand is not a few grains of sand even if the point where it becomes a mound is undefined. The important thing is to work to understand the structural forces on different segments of society. If the proletariat is just the proletariat, where do reactionaries arise? Where does the tendency to social chauvinism?
You correctly point out that white-collar workers are under a greater or lesser degree of exploitation at different times. Now as the empire weakens, they are going to be squeezed more. There interests vacillate but you can’t see and act on that by sticking your head in the sand and declaring all workers are equivalent.
I have yet to see a revolutionary organization in my city that is not terminally white and from a substantially different labor background than the people in my city. That gap does not exist for no reason! As marxists, we must examine the problem and work to solve it. We must build a movement of the broad masses and not just the intelligentsia.
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What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.
Here’s a few examples.
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:
The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.
Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:
Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.
You start with a single grain of sand and then you get a beach.
Same thing applies to childcare. There are a lot of rules and regs that make it very expensive to establish and run a child care operation. Idk if the penalties for doing it “wrong” are civil or criminal, probably varies by jurisdication.
My mom is a preschool teacher, she’s done everything from an aide to even owning a daycare for a few years before giving up due to the insane laws, especially the ones passed in the wake of the Satanic Panic.
It is a very hard industry to be in because of how hard it is to take care of other people’s kids and that you can easily be persecuted for the lightest mistakes and the business you work for shuttered.
Now, leftist could get away with in home daycare. Essentially the parent waives a lot of protections because the kids are being babysat by a “friend” but it gets more and more grey the more kids are involvedm
I was thinking about this today in the sense that there are so many leftist podcasts, but you can’t name a single leftist leader who comes from that sphere, and is organizing on a big scale. The best ones that I’m aware of are the Trillbillies. They at least walk the walk with community outreach. They even took time off from the show during that big flood to help people out.
The rest of them do what? Come up with an hour and a half of glib reactions to the news every week?
Here are people that a lot of us on the left have parasocial relationships with. The least they could do is some sort of Jon Stewart lib ass rally for sanity. Instead most of them sell expensive tickets to bougie ass venues so we can listen to them fart into a microphone
Tune in next week where I interview some random twitter book author about exploitation where we end the podcast with a call to “organize”
Maybe if we’re lucky, they’ll link the bail fund for the protestors at cop city
Podcasts are entertainment and news. Propaganda. Education. You shouldn’t be looking to podcast celebrities for neighborhood and city level organization.
Why not? That’s exactly how people with a literal microphone obfuscate their involvement in any movement.
“The country is fucked and here’s why, but really at the end of the day, we are just some silly bros who have the ear of an entire base, what clout could we possibly have?”
Bad message. Just like on here when people suggest we use this as a platform to spread information and organize them a bunch of people come out and say “nah, this is where we shit post”
There will never be organization on any scale if everyone with a presence hands it off to a nebulous call to “organize”.
I live in a town of less than 400 people. They’re all right wing. Ive even tried starting the conversation, and got destroyed. How exactly should I “organize” when I’m getting my ass kicked by capitalism, have to work a job with a bazillion hours and still manage to get my own shit done?
Why do the chapo boys who have to be millionaires with basically unlimited free time and a platform get to skate in the duty?
Why do the chapo boys who have to be millionaires with basically unlimited free time and a platform get to skate in the duty?
Because at the end of the day, they aren’t proles. If you want to be charitable, they are a modern iteration of the artisan class. If you don’t want to be charitable, they’re just petty bourgeois with the same fundamental flaws that the petty bourgeoisie has.
All I’m getting at is that’s not a principled stance from them, and I’m sick of seeing the “monster” that people like them create just get kicked to the curb. They basically created the “dirtbag left” and really popularized this thing we are all still doing. Then they got caught up in the Bernie bullshit, then they pivoted to movie reviews, and as I said earlier, glib takes on the news.
The Revolutionary Blackout folks all do organizing as well, they feed people, give out clothes and other necessities, and are even building a community library. They’re expressly following the example of Fred Hampton and the Panthers. So there’s another podcast/YouTube channel that walks the walk.
I am unfamiliar. I’ll give them a listen!
Thanks for reminding me of that one. I enjoyed a few episodes before the Youtube algorithm buried it.
I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult
I mean if you know why the Panthers did provide school breakfasts, you’re probably aware that it’s more than a matter of simple organisation. The American state has nearly a century of practice crushing leftist movements, so just going out and doing something to make the world a better place will paint a target on your back.
On top of that, mainstream media doesn’t report it. Even when things do get off the ground, they’re either incredibly local and won’t turn up in national news, or will be explicitly ignored by the media because of their leftist roots. Protests are big and disruptive enough - and involve specific press releases about the event - that they usually have to be reported on, even if it’s negatively, so you hear about them in a way you’ll never hear about mutual aid programs.
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DSA and IWW did work to get universal preschool passed in Multnomah county (Portland OR)
this is very illustrative: in Fred Hampton’s time does anyone think it was very well known and publicised that the Panthers were doing that? i’d wager 90% of Panthers coverage was about brandishing guns, arrests, & clashes with police.
Everything is spectacle. Those are the conditions. Leftism is a fandom. Things will have to significantly change for a lot of people for anything to happen.
You have to get out there and do stuff. It’s hard because people have jobs. There was a surge in mutual aid organizing during the pandemic, in large part because a lot of people had more free time. I would say that if you have the time and people for a regular book club, start doing some community outreach. Find a need in your area, and help with it in some way. Call it mutual aid, call it charity, call it helping your neighbors. It’s a way to interact/build positive relationships with people we need to develop class consciousness within. Don’t beat them over the head with ideology, but don’t hide it either.
The only active ‘left’ group I see in public in my area are part of some well funded Trotsky communist group. They will have a table telling people to join a communist political party but they charge money for even a tiny sticker, it just gives a bad impression that they don’t even have a flyer or something to hand out, or actually do anything helpful for anyone around.
Don’t worry about them. Start something yourself if you need to. In my experience, there’s a lot of people out there that are just looking for opportunities to get involved. If you build it, they will come kind of thing. Please resist the urge to bring sectarian frictions into your organizing though. Focus on broader aims.
I am part of a (not-well-funded) Trotskyist group and the stated reasoning for charging for papers and buttons and stuff is that people are more likely to read a paper or put a button somewhere important if they paid for it. I have a drawer at home full of free stickers. We have leaflets that are free though.
But you should look on social media and ask around. I know about a bunch of orgs in my area that I’ve never crossed paths with organically.
I get that, and it makes sense for fundraising, those things aren’t free. This group has high quality large posters in full color all over, nice banners, but yeah they didn’t even have a free leaflet or business card, seemed like a basic thing for any org in my experience. True about social media, I am sorta new to the area so I haven’t delved into that, there are some other groups I’ve seen posters for. Long ago I would use twitter to get info from orgs, I have avoided that for a while, what do people even use these days?
Oddly enough I’ve seen a lot of announcements on Instagram. “Upcoming events” posted by a leftist bookstore or church nearby may also be helpful - yesterday I found out this way that apparently there is a Chicago chapter of Extinction Rebellion. But word of mouth is the best way, a lot of orgs just don’t have good social media or get squashed by the algorithm.
When I was in college free childcare and tutoring where things we’d help the community out with, I think its a more local small niche thing than any large org per say.
We’re very much in a building stage, providing awareness, a sort of tilling the soil for conditions in the core and it moves very slow since conditions we’re in are comfy for many who would otherwise be totally in (this will change in the upcoming future), we’re dealing with such propaganda and oppression even a free afterschool tutoring/food/whatever program or shitposting on an obscure forum makes the bourgeois tremble and drop fat checks and pull all the legal and illegal ways they can to make it stop. Societal economic changes don’t happen overnight.
My excuse? I’m getting a degree and training to become a white collar tech worker. The mindset is a mixture of hatred for the violent, imperialist country I live in and still chasing the bag. The cope is that I would reach a comfortable position and “donate” my money to people who are actually useful to society to do the work. It’s rather pathetic because the western, capitalist notions of “charity” and individualism have infected me in ways I don’t know how to recover.
It’s unfortunate that fascists have claimed the “good times make weak men” bullshit, but I find it to be true. Relatively good times, created by a the murder and exploitation of millions across the world, have made me complacent and complicit. It has made me lazy. It has made me weak.
Much of the militant left actions are being done in exploited countries in the global south. They have to witness the the violence and exploitation imposed upon them by people like me and they either fight back or perish. I’m not saying I would automatically be like them or that I would be a successful organizer if I was working alongside them, all I know is that my priorities and mindset would change. And I’m not even working for the MIC or ever plan on it - I work for customer service on a computer, and I still truly mean it when I say “violence and exploitation imposed by people like me.”
I’ve worked manual labor before and currently have family in manual labor. Nothing has made me more hateful of humanity than when I worked there. Sometimes it was the coworkers. Sometimes it was the customers. But primarily it was the physical and mental toll, and I never stayed long enough to “organize.” Yet it was the only times where I felt everyone around truly understood what it’s like to experience the bullshit dealt by glorious capitalism. Now I’ve been spoiled by getting paid the same or even higher wages as a warehouse or outdoor job while sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours, and everyone is too comfortable to rock the boat.
I don’t encourage anyone to fetishize poverty, but you have to be aware that escaping it can do great harm to your mind. It’s the labor equivalence of paying off all your debts and your credit score drops. Labor aristocracy brainworms are real. The PMC brainworms are real.
Relatively good times, created by a the murder and exploitation of millions across the world, have made me complacent and complicit. It has made me lazy. It has made me weak.
Why would any person do more than necessary? Isn’t one of the goals of communism to achieve self-determination for all? If there are no options available to you that allow you to pursue your own interests (e.g., living without violence), are you at fault?
I’m angry at this system, which prevents me from self-determination, which prevents me from living such that I do not cause harm to others. But I’m not angry at myself, I’m neither lazy nor weak, I’m powerless to determine my own life.
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Shit man even in the internet I’ve maybe heard 3 other people mention PSL, not all that many, not all that grouped together, and thus not all gonna be able to come together to help out large communities consistently (especially those you’re talking about DAILY and at the same time and for free. That’s just an unpaid job. Hard to get people to do that cuz people gotta live.) Doing activities people are interested in participating in or getting people together for a protest on occasion are WAAAAAY easier than having a consistent set of volunteers who are willing to continually give up their free time to their communities. Especially if those are people who may already be doing so in other ways.
I suppose they could take donations and use those to pay people to do so, but that’s barely “free” especially in a party that’s very small.
i’ve been thinking about this lol, is there a handbook or something on the communist side of things that tell you what to do - cause i am so lost with all this stuff
Most of the leftist organizational writing is regarding armed struggle and political structuring. Few, if any, are about financing and legalese.
All the best organizations undermining progressivism and liberties are laundering money and financing violence and legislation through shell corporations and dark money. I think many of us, myself included, are still stuck in the “civility” stage and getting held back trying to do any of this shit in an honest fashion.
ahck yeah, i was talking with some lad in an activism group and i’m like, are we suppose to have fun doing activism? we’re exhausting all legal routes and working within the confines of our system, so that we know we have no other choice - but i honestly just feel like a liberal.
was listening to proles of the round table with deathnography and he was saying “yeah the activism in hong kong was fun, and all the dude were like lowkey communists” and i’m like where is the fun, how do we have fun?
but ahck also stuck in the civility stage here
The usa spent most of the last fifty years strengthening and expanding the police state and the prison system in part to crush anyone who strays out of the civility stage.
Fundraising by doing crimes is real, real, real, real hard these days. The fbi, treasury, and irs have better tools thant they did in the 60s and 70s, you can’t really make any money robbing banks, smuggling cheap consumer goods isn’t really viable. To launder money you’ve got to have money coming in from somewhere. There aren’t a lot of sympathetic criminal enterprises that need someone to run their money through the laundry right now.
I’ve had the dream of drop shipping trump tshirts and donating the money to leftist orgs but I lack any and all business acumen. I can barely haggle on craigslist
What if we put our collective heads together we could make a single functioning capitalist/entrepreneur to funnel money into the movement
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