I’m looking for places to work, and I’d love to find somewhere where I don’t have to hide my political or economic positions from people I interact with on a daily basis.
When I search for “communist businesses in the US”, I get a long list of historical organizations that were the targets of HUAC, plenty of articles about investigations by senators into Chinese military companies, and other unhelpful garbage propaganda.
Surely there are some companies or organizations that are looking for employees, not just volunteers, but man are they hard to find.
Holy shit lmao
There are none. Small business owners are mini-hitlers
EDIT: ask around in your community
I ordered medieval bestiary stickers from OP and the return address said Langley, VA
They were delivered by the guys in the usual surveillance van, though, so that was nice of them
Hey, I think I might have left my badge in the package I sent you, and they won’t let me back into the building without it. Can you mail it back to me when you get a chance?
Mini-hitlers
Yeah, that’s my experience. The trick is that I live in a less-populated area, so my options are slim for non-remote work.
How many people, roughly, in your county?
170k, and it’s by far the most populous in the state.
I didn’t need anything that specific, it narrows it down to 3 counties.
Where I live is a bit less than that but there are surrounding counties that bring up the population in commutable range to at least that. I wouldn’t say it’s past the economic/social diversification threshold where you’d expect at least one local worker’s cooperative (if there even is such a point), but I see the surroundings as more something to create in than something to just plug in to.
Anything above 100k is enough to have a bit of variety for someone who’s not poised to go into business for themselves. The options won’t be great but they’re there.
I’ve been toying with the idea of “which among these smaller (cheaper, bikeable, less overwhelming) cities is worth trying to attract revolutionaries to, in order to maximize our base and our influence on specific municipalities and small regions”.
Hi yes I’d like to sign up for the pacifist army
Yeah, I was planning on putting something about the inherent contradiction of the search in the body of the post, and then I thought it was pretty obvious…and I forgot.
You are answering your own question. Any openly communist business is bound to be harassed by fascists and reactionaries, as well as the state.
I can only assume getting the funding for a business like that will be very hard.
So that’s why there aren’t many communist businesses. At most, as someone said , you might find small anarchist co-oops
Yeah, when I looked them up, my first thought was “well this seems curated”. Anarchist co-ops are few and far between where I live, but I’m hoping something more national would have remote work.
I’d love to design for Iskra Books, but it seems like a pretty lofty goal.
Your best bet is a co-op, but realistically any business where known comrades work so that you can back each other up. I still haven’t t joined the PSL, but once I participated in a few functions and got to know some members, they were pretty open to networking.
I’m looking through all of the local co-ops, and while my state does seem to have a proportionally-large amount of them, I’m also trying to bring money in from out-of-state by working remotely. Based on these responses, they’re looking like the best avenue going forward.
Thanks a ton for the suggestions.
What’s “hiding your positions”? I’m a Marxist but I don’t explicitly say that at work, if someone paid attention to my statements over time they might piece it together but I find that the vast majority of people do not give a fuck about politics and are incoherent on the subject. Now, a lot of them are CHUDs, if you mean you want to avoid that then it probably comes down to what area you live in more than anything.
I think spending time on this site skews our perception towards the idea that normal people know what a communist… is
I’m in a pretty isolated part of the US, and despite what we’ve got on here, the skewed idea of what a communist is isn’t hidden in my local community. People put up signs in their yards about how Biden was a communist during the last two election cycles, and I resisted putting letters in their mailboxes saying I wished he was the monster they think he was. Even most of my friends are very much on the chud side of things. It’s…difficult.
Based on how I’ve left my last two jobs and the search for a new one has gone, I started to wonder whether one of them realized what I was selling and how blacklists are still used.
search cooperatives/worker owned etc, there are hundreds of them last i heard (worker owned is not usually fully worker owned, but with some splits of profits)
(they aren’t in anyway communist (as in promoting/being friendly to) to be clear, but with different management structures, with self-management being explicit goal of coops) and they deny profits to porkies, which is pog
In the cracking neoliberal order the only good jobs are the ones we carve out for ourselves.
Work the regular job (regular hours but go for stuff you’re unfamiliar with), practice talking about your positions a bit more vaguely or esoterically or based on simpler ideas that are universal in people’s education/familiarity/experience. E.g. “I just don’t think anyone’s all that special or so much better than anybody else”; “I just want other people to have good things as well as myself”; “I don’t think most of our lives should be a dictatorship”; “In the old days on the frontier you could provide everything with your own skills, instead of having to buy it from god-knows-where”; “I don’t think threatening people and invading them or locking them up does any good for the world”.
Pipeline the people who are most closely aligned with you and see if you can bring them into a group. Learn as much as you can about the job, and try to put together a model of how the operation works. If you hit a wall where you’re not learning much, or it’s not paying much, or it crosses a certain threshold of misery, quit and find a new job. Fit the puzzle pieces together until you can feasibly start a business for cooperatizing. Worst case scenario, you end up a bit richer and with a few friends that you can do more radical stuff with.
Or, bite the bullet and work whatever fulltime job pays okay, then buy a house in a smaller city that still has a cool culture going on, and share it with comrades.
We have economic warfare to wage.
, practice talking about your positions a bit more vaguely or esoterically or based on simpler ideas that are universal in people’s education/familiarity/experience.
The last one is good advice, the first two are bad. Don’t be vague, be specific, and don’t be esoteric, be accessible. Just use words that people actually know instead of words they don’t know. “Communists disdain to hide their views,” etc.
Unless you’re in actual danger, in which case you may as well lie about it instead of being coy like this, so it’s still not helpful advice.
Americans are so propagandized that if you lead with “communist”, a majority of even working-class people will put up mental defenses and pigeonhole or compartmentalize you.
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views” was written a whole century before the Red Scare- or modern psychology, for that matter. People evolve their positions gradually by reflection instead of by leaps and bounds. To get a reasonably educated person to come around you will need to establish a philosophical foundation that you can then smoothly connect to altruistic values and socialist politics, rather than in the reverse order.
The state apparata of the imperial core have 100 years of successful domestic strategy of making sure anyone identified as “Communist” is rigidly out-grouped and discounted, and they’ve been running circles around leftist parties that easily revert to the approach of 1848 or even 1917 as if organizing was mathematically solved. You’re not going to clear that hurdle by slamming into it.
Note how successful the fascists have been by dissimulating as “reasonable conservatives” or even as “radical centrists”.
I said “words they actually know,” but maybe I should have phrased it as “words they actually know the meaning of,” i.e. the word communist isn’t very helpful with most audiences, but you should still explain the actual content of what you believe in a way that they understand.
There is only a very limited symmetry between communists and fascists, and core to their asymmetry is that fascists must lie to the masses* but also have the wealthy forces of reaction on their side, paying to proffer versions of their views.
*not in a “Germans didn’t know about the Holocaust” way but a “making people misunderstand economics and politics” way.
Everybody starts out politically unaligned/indifferent, and the prevailing winds (hegemonic cultural ideas) push people into either of two different varieties of liberalism.
I have met a lot of people in the workplace who consider themselves “progressive”, and I position myself as more than just that. Usually anti-establishment and radically egalitarian. I would rather aim to build up ideas and then connect them to a historical movement than to build up what is effectively a personal brand and subsequently play catch-up trying to defend that brand against people’s preconceptions.
This sounds really good but I have to ask, are you talking from experience or is more like how bourgeois economists (astrologers to the wealthy) talk?
I get a lot of good responses from people and find out who’s worth further association, without outing myself.
Ask the victims of the HUAC and Hollywood blacklists how it went being openly communist.
should be pretty easy to find all 6 of them
Not sure if this is common elsewhere but in the SF bay area (esp in Berkeley) there are a lot of worker-owned/syndicalist businesses. Cheeseboard is probably one of the oldest and most famous, but Arizmendi also comes to mind (and they have long ties to the Mondragon cooperative).
From your question I’m not quite sure if you want places that will hasten the revolution (e.g., involved in activism) or just places that operate under a different economic model where your politics would be the norm. For the latter I’d search “worker cooperatives [your city]”
It’s gonna be a cooperative or a union shop tbh
check George Soros’ stock portfolio 😏☝️
Perhaps Equal Exchange? They seem to source products from friendly nations and farms. Though I don’t know if they are explicitly communist.
https://www.info.equalexchange.coop/articles/our-model-authentic-fair-trade
Cincinnati Reds?
Start a worker-owned co-op?
