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.
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.
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.