i.e. “go organize” “do direct action”
like to me it very much betrays the fact that no one in the conversation has any idea What Is To Be Done at all. It feels like the Online Marxist version of “It’s not my job to educate you.” I genuinely think treating these words as shibboleths is extremely disorganizing if someone is signalling “I feel impotent here and I am horrified and want to help, how do I help in a way that matters.”
imo abstraction in general is a spectre haunting the American Left (i.e. demonstrating for demonstrations sake being diffusive). that and defaulting to “go do Propaganda of the Deed.” in my bones I feel that most of the time there is a specific action one can arrive at in which the premise is neither vibes nor killing someone that would materially address a specific issue.
tl;dr: NYC-DSA and NYC PSL should be actively considering the logistics of an attempt to dearrest Maduro
tl;dr 2: break into Weapons Factories and pour substances on the machines
This is the best policy imo, especially when you’re dealing with someone hostile who is demanding that you “prove” you actually walk the talk because:
Doxing yourself is bad but at least you have to live with the consequences of you choosing to comprise your pseudo-anonymity whereas compromising an org is really really bad and everyone has to live with the consequences of your poor choices.
If they are demanding proof then that’s sketchy and gives fed vibes.
It sets an expectation that we should be openly talking about our organizing efforts (beyond general “I went to an antiwar demonstration in solidarity with Venezuela” type organizing).
Hostile people will either accuse you of bragging or making things up, so it’s a catch-22 situation.
Libs especially have no idea what organizing actually looks like.
To elaborate on the last point I went through a whole guac is extra routine with someone on social media quite a while ago. They kept demanding that I tell them on a public social media platform of all the organizing I’ve done to “prove” that I actually care about causes and that I’m “allowed” to criticize Kamala Harris legitimately in their eyes (might have been a Russian bot come to disturb the peaceful waters of Yankee politics or something) and I explained that there’s no point because they won’t have a clue about the orgs I’m referring to and that they don’t have websites with hotlines you can call and signup pages like some DNC fundraiser or recuperative “grassroots” “activist” group. They kept pushing and I eventually relented and I said that I’ve been involved in AFA organizing for a number of years. I was intentionally being opaque and I chose that type of organizing for a reason which soon became apparent.
They immediately run to Google and the first hit they get is to a Wikipedia entry for a cold war AFA group from the Netherlands that went defunct in the 90s or something (revealing a lot about their own search bubble that they exist within - not good for opsec btw) and they started grilling me on my nationality and age so I messed with them for a little bit before I called them out on it, saying that I told them that they don’t understand what AFA actually means and that I’m not going to reveal my location and that, like I said earlier, even if you had enough info search this up you wouldn’t find anything to verify the org, let alone the actions that have been carried out, let alone that I have participated in organizing in that group because there’s no website and there’s no meeting minutes that get published online or anything like that. From memory, they seemed to be uncertain about AFA referring to antifascist activism in the first place and they also seemed very skeptical that there was any need for this work (in post-war western Europe btw - deeply unserious.)
I think I eventually got through to them but I knew exactly where it was going to end up from the outset. These are the types of people that consider themselves the resistance btw and they don’t even understand that orgs can be underground or semi-underground. Imagine if they found themselves in Chile the day after the coup and they were trying to do some actual organizing for resistance then ask yourself if there’s one single thing to be gained by seeking the approval of a political naïf like that.
Anyway if your organizing efforts are done for bragging rights or to “prove” the legitimacy of your politics then this is an extremely lib, individualistic mindset that you have and it makes you a hazard.