I’m going to keep agitating this at the general cohort of Unalloyed Posters, especially now. There is no excuse at this point. You will not imagine socialism into reality. You will not imagine us out of capitalism. You need to do what you can as soon as you can and the time is and always has been Now to start locking in.
Go outside and organize. By organize, I specifically mean join a local chapter of an existing socialist organization that exists and is real and is comprised of socialists and go to their meetings and events and demonstrations as much as life allows you to.
(EDIT: And if there are no local chapters–even if there ARE local chapters–get to know your neighbors and get to know your coworkers. An antisocial socialist is a contradiction upon themself. Talk to the people around you. Push yourself to put yourself out there. Combating alienation is praxis. The more communal a community is, the more will to resist it can summon. You hear it in Minneapolis right now–the people on the ground right now are fighting for their neighbors! Take the community out of communism and you get sadomasochism.)[1]
I genuinely don’t care if there’s no organization that is aligned 1:1 with your sensibilities/preferences. If you actually care, you need to do the work to move the one that is closest to your sensibilities in that direction. Stop whinging over which specific one you join for fear of missing out on the vanguard party or whatever. My local DSA and PSL chapters coordinate with each other when prudent. Stop treating this like it’s team sports. It’s an unserious approach. You are not locked in forever to a specific org when you join it. You can change orgs. Membership is not a blood pact. You need to join an org first to do that, though. You need to join an org and you need to be an active part of your org.
Otherwise, please spare the world from irresponsible, ungrounded ‘critique.’ Without grounding in reality, without real organization and the insight it provides, it is utter drivel. Stop pre-emptively guarding yourself against disappointment. It’s cowardly and pathetic. It’s even more embarrassing than terminal vote-brain. At least voters walk their talk (voting and doing nothing for the next four years).
communism↩︎
This is, to varying extents, also true anywhere in the core vassal states.
We need revolutionary optimism now more than ever
Good call to arms. This-type-of-post is often very guilt-trippy but I thought you did a good job of trying to motivate people without being too insulting or whatever.
This is such an epidemic on reddit. That is, people in left-wing spaces always talking about “Americans aren’t doing this, Americans aren’t doing that, why won’t anybody do something”. Like you said, that’s US, that’s YOU as socialists or whatever. Who the hell else is supposed to change things? DSA/PSL/FRSO/Code-Pink/Samidoun/whatever are the opposition in the US. There is no other “adult in the room” that you can just whine at and have things fixed. There are no official rules. There is no bigger plan. What we have now is what exists.
Was listening to the most recent ChapoTrapHouse episode and they do the same crap. Endlessly complaining about Democrats. Like what do you want Democrats to do? You hate them. They’re evil. Why are you complaining that they’re not doing something you know they aren’t going to do? (It’s because they need something to talk about on a podcast, I get it, whatever)
That is a good point, if you want (insert newspaper club here) to be the opposition, talk as if they’re the official opposition , not the dems. That’s half the reason Mamdani won, the DSA acted as if they were the actual contenders, rather than running as “The Squad” or some other kind of dem+
This is such an epidemic on reddit. That is, people in left-wing spaces always talking about “Americans aren’t doing this, Americans aren’t doing that, why won’t anybody do something”. Like you said, that’s US, that’s YOU as socialists or whatever. Who the hell else is supposed to change things? DSA/PSL/FRSO/Code-Pink/Samidoun/whatever are the opposition in the US. There is no other “adult in the room” that you can just whine at and have things fixed. There are no official rules. There is no bigger plan. What we have now is what exists.
it is much easier to get an internet connection than to be within driving distance of so much as a food not bombs cell
A number of organizations, such as PSL, have remote events now and then.
DSA/PSL/FRSO/Code-Pink/Samidoun/whatever are the opposition in the US. There is no other “adult in the room” that you can just whine at and have things fixed. There are no official rules. There is no bigger plan. What we have now is what exists.
Wish I had a PSL chapter near me but my DSA chapter does good work with the situation we work under
then that DSA chapter is exactly where you should be at this moment in time
Hell yeah I RESPECT the TROOPS.
“Nooooope. Not getting out of this chair.”
I have probably been a bit too vitriolic towards Americans in the past few weeks. It’s easy to make fun of them, but as someone in another Imperial core country, my own country’s people aren’t much better when it comes to any sort of class consciousness and geopolitical understanding. It’s easier to make fun of someone for the worst opinion possible, than it is to actively agitate and educate in a country full of “almost as bad but not quite” opinions.
You cannot be too vitriolic towards Americans
t. American
I presume?No thank god,
W.
could the admins amplify/pin some posts which assist in local organizing? maybe that’s a service that’s actually helpful and constructive, rather than, you know, merely pinning dozens of inane megathreads.
Which megathread should we unfeature? Please ping me or any other admins if you find a post you would like featured.
If you don’t have an organization or can’t join one or anything then you can also just go get to know your neighbors. That sounds super small and inconsequential but neighbors who know each other work together, and neighbors who don’t just assume that everyone else deserves the bad things that happen.
Get active in your community, socialist or not. Help each other with small things or big things. Be there. If your community sucks this is how you change that, by being part of the community that doesn’t suck. And when the time comes all these little communities who are already helping each other will absolutely come out and help their nearby communities and it spirals into revolution before you know it.
fix it from the inside
What are you questioning here? There is no ideology in existence where you aren’t living in a community, its not something you join like the military or whatever. You improve your community or you suffer through what you have.
it is highly unlikely that one person in a shitty community can de-shit that community. I want to live in the magical world some of you are apparently in where approaching strangers is anything other than misery and communicable disease.
The average human is not some evil monster lol. This is literally the most basic step of organizing, you do it or you just let the fascism wash over you
people don’t need to be evil monsters to be miserable to interact with or to breathe covid at you.
our shitty society enforces shitty norms, it doesn’t matter if the person reproducing that is ontologically evil or not, they’re still spreading disease and still bigots if you don’t stare a hole in their eyes.
If you’re so afraid of COVID that you’re not willing to speak to any person not wearing a mask, I’m not sure why you’re even in this thread. There’s not anything meaningful you can do politically without going outside.
Do you know about this disease? Do you know what it does? What it is currently doing? Do you know that there is no cure? Why are you not so afraid of it? Why are you not trying to avoid it? This is baffling to me.
If you have an HOA or neighborhood association, join up to make these connections and make sure there aren’t any boomers up to funny business about how people should now their lawns and stuff.
If you live in city limits, attend city council meetings and get to know your city leadership.
Join any group that does a land acknowledgement and hold them accountable to that (if anything, by further educating them about the people of the stolen land they are acknowledging), even if its a bunch of liberals who don’t want to do anything cool.
Go to a volunteer workday at a local park/green space.
Very submissive
I specifically mean join a local chapter of an existing socialist organization that exists and is real
If only there was one. I’ve been talking with the nearest PSL chapters. DSA doesn’t exist here. PSL doesn’t exist anywhere near here. The guy I’m in contact with at the PSL isn’t even in my state.
You can start your own fnb.
Talking to my org tonight about escalating past protests. The locals are good at organizing emergency pickets but need a push to go past that.
yeah seriously. honestly, unless you live in the global south or imperial periphery, quit with the performative “we’re doomed because the American proletariat sucks so much ass, wah wah wah” bullshit. if you’re American you want an excuse not to do shit while simultaneously feeling better than the Rest of the Treatlerites, if you live in another imperial core country you benefit from the same fucking satanic exploitation (and honestly your working class gets a bigger slice of the suffering-pie since a lot of yall are social democracies).
if you already do stuff or idk live deep in CHUD country and there just aren’t any orgs near you, disregard this post it is not directed at you.
The reward, also, is enormous.
A developed western socialist state would be an enormous force for good. It would embolden the left in China and other Socialist countries to live their priciples, it would weaken the global hegemony massively, It would provide, finally, an ideal model to develop a socialist economy as Marx intended.
Just one, and the dominos begin to fall.
I think many of the users who did this eventually stopped using the site
Nope
i, against my better judgment, am still here
I spend too much time here, but TBF there’s not much else I can do on a phone in short bursts that doesn’t rot my brain and get me in trouble during breaks. This and Lemmygrad are the only “good” communities besides maybe a few “tankie” spots on
no shame in it. most of our lives are structured such that we need to spend downtime at a computer/phone with a decent degree of regularity, even if we are doing the grass touching organizing thing
I still have time to post, sometimes even two or three times in one day.
