Organizing requires meeting people where they are, not where you want them to be. If you expect everyone to hold acceptable lines on every issue before they engage with your org, you will remain relegated to the furthest margins. This doesn’t mean you should concede points or adopt reactionary positions (tailism), especially when protecting marginalized identities of comrades. It simply means that peoples reactionary positions are responded to politely and on a personal level, without an unrealistic expectation of overnight change. Think of how you would want to be corrected if a comrade saw an error in your line, or even how you would want to be corrected by a colleague at work if you were making a mistake. try to treat people expressing reactionary ideas in this way, Even when it is absurdly obvious to you that they are wrong and even hurtful in what they are saying. It is not obvious to them, so treat them with patience and respect.
Public humiliation, exclusion from spaces and performative debate tend make your space unwelcoming to newcomers. People see these things and become uncomfortable speaking In your spaces, fearing they might say something wrong and be subjected to the same treatment. This is not a good thing. If the masses don’t participate in your revolutionary project, it isn’t successful. Public humiliation or exclusion from spaces might be appropriate when dealing with people who are obviously arguing in bad faith, engaged in behavior that is deeply and actively harmful etc. however it should be a tactic of last resort, not a go to one.
The cadre I work with is focused on providing mutual aid to and organizing with the precariously employed informal economy workers in a rather poor rural area. Probably 40% of that demographic either voted for trump at least once or would have voted for trump if they could be bothered to vote. Probably 80% are at least somewhat transphobic. And that’s just scratching the surface of the anti communism, bigotry and reactionary brain worms we are working through. The bipoc women we work with tend to have the least reactionary brain worms (surprising almost no one) yet they are not immune in the slightest. I’ll talk the most about the transphobia because that perhaps the most widespread form of reactionary views. The way I personally handle transphobic statements is to talk to the person who said the statement about how it made me feel (or how it might make others feel). The way I approach such a conversation varies based on the specific issue and the person im talking to. I will set hard boundaries at times, depending on context, but will more often be patient. One older logger took multiple months before he would use my correct pronouns and now asks peoples pronouns preemptively. The only thing I have found to deprogram peoples bigotry is to get them to respect the very openly trans inclusive/anti racist etc folks on a personal as well as political level, by proving we are principled, helpful, friendly and genuinely care about our collective liberation.
Revolutionary organizing is a cyclical process of learning. some “communists” seem to think the task of a cadre is to study theory and then take said theory to the masses in a dumbed down form, thus showing them the correct path to their liberation. This is incorrect and you will be rejected by the majority of the masses as out of touch weirdos if not outright hucksters. Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary action and without revolutionary action there is no revolutionary theory. There are only empty, untested ideas. Revolutionary study must always include going to the masses and learning from the masses. Challenge the theory you read in books against what you learn about material conditions when you engage with the masses. Synthesize both to analyze your specific material conditions. Then test your analysis through your activities where you are engaged with the masses. The relationship between an organization and the masses it is engaged with is a reciprocal one of mutual learning, where you work together to learn how you might successfully do a communist revolution in your current material conditions, which is a fundamentally experimental question.
speak on it! i think this is really what the Trueanon podcast was getting at with the “be normal” catchphrase we have half a struggle session about on here every other week (or at least that’s the charitable reading). it really just means don’t be antisocial (in the “hostile/socially destructive/insular & myopic & solipsistic” sense of the word, not antisocial as in “shy or introverted”)
as long as you can learn to get along with, relate to, and moreoever fucking listen to normal working class people, then you can be as quirked up a motherfucker as you want. it really does boil down to, idk, just trying your best to be empathetic and decent toward and interested in others.
I agree with the spirit of the “be normal rule” but it’s too vague in itself and easily leads to misunderstandings. Personally I have faced little abuse relating to my identity and frequently talk to bigoted people, but I have friends who literally can’t “be normal” to a bigoted person due to the trauma response they experience when talking to someone who could be their abuser.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is true for organizing as well. Our burden is a shared one, and not everyone has the ability to organize bigoted people. I think that everyone should learn how to talk with working class reactionaries (as long as they don’t face an immediate danger) but I’m also empathetic that for some people their qualities lay elsewhere and thus they take up roles that allow them to not have to interact with reactionary people much.
I’m rambling a bit and my mind is half asleep but my point is that it’s understandable for people to push back when they are told to “be normal” when talking to bigoted people, when they have been abused by these people. So we should not expect marginalised people to put themselves in harms way, and be clear about that, while still saying that these reactionaries should be talked to by comrades who can do so relatively safely.
yeah you make a lot of good points. when we throw “be normal” around it’s so devoid of its original context that i’m sympathetic to the view that maybe we should just avoid saying it. i just think there’s good advice at the core of it that should be teased out, and then maybe we should say what it actually was meant to mean (“be prosocial, be grounded, be empathetic”) instead.
this is an excellent point. we have marginalized comrades for whom wading into the organizing trenches with super reactionary types might be straight up unsafe, and in that case folks who don’t face these forms of oppression as directly should be prioritized in taking up those organizing tasks. and when not unsafe as such, dealing with these attitudes is exhausting in a way those who are less marginalized can’t immediately empathize with (which i think is the sympathetic core of where the old “it’s not my job to educate you” slogan came from, it’s exhausting and psychologically corrosive to constantly have to advocate for your basic existence).
i didn’t really mean what i wrote yesterday to be a totalizing thing that covers every organizing scenario, more a general call for more grace & empathy toward our class & for more humility in our relationship to ourselves. i also do acknowledge there’s a (sadly much higher than any of us would like) swath of the reactionary working class who are too far gone.
the one last note i wanted to hit is that, when we talk about the reactionary tendencies in working class people, it’s easy to jump to thinking about the extremes of bigotry (like hardcore committed MAGA types), but i guess what i’m more referring to is the broad spectrum of reaction/the larger brainwashing reactionary soup we’ve all been raised in that crops up in everyone in various different ways and degrees. libs are gonna have reactionary tendencies, communists are gonna have reactionary tendencies, apolitical folk are gonna have reactionary tendencies, and we should try our best to build spaces/processes/structures that welcome all of us into the process of unlearning and re-learning.