Living in the States has me genuinely frightened. I’m not so naive as to suppose it’s not always been rough, but it’s clear we’ve entered a qualitatively different era. The moderate wing of fascism has died, and barbarism is all that remains.
I want to fight back in a substantive way, even if it’s small. I want to participate in institutions which protect the vulnerable, myself included. I don’t want to lock my doors and peek out the windows, but I know better than to engage in adventurist, individual “resistance.” I also don’t want to be in a social club where we sit and congratulate each other on having the right opinions. I’m past wanting to be on the “right side of history,” where I content myself with personally disagreeing with the nightmare we live in. Something needs to be done; the window for taking action is swinging shut.
I have almost no experience in organizing. I’ve attended a handful of protests which mostly felt like a venting of frustrations for everyone there. I’ve associated with a few comrades who had good intentions, but never accomplished much. That’s about it.
How do I actually go about being a part of something effective?
Helping people is great but directly tying that in with your communism is a good way to ruin both. The goal of revolutionary communists is to raise class consciousness and overthrow the bourgeoise. (the completion of which is the ultimate form of “helping people”) This requires secrecy because the capitalist do not want to be overthrown. Mutual aid can be a means to our end but must always be seen as that. Join existing non revolutionary orgs to help people and agitate within those orgs.
I've been reading some of Mao's work about guerilla tactics and its been comingling with Lenin's What is to be Done and this rant has been brewing in my brain. It is by no means complete or definitive
I don’t think any first world communist organization is worth joining. “The gendarmes” have a infiltrators in every public communist org. They are a trap. Secrecy is one of the most important aspects of a revolutionary org as laid out by Lenin in What is to be Done.
Agitation should be the primary focus of communists in the first world. If you want to help people go work at a non communist mutual aid org and agitate among the other workers. Read lots of theory and history so that when someone asks you “where did you learn about all that” you can give them a book recommendation. The goal of communists is not to “help people” it is to raise class consciousness in order to bring about the revolution.
First world communists need to stop looking to join an organization and start building their own from scratch. McCarthyism was a declaration of war and the communists need to start acting like it and not grouping together where we can be easily targeted. We need to stop building a party and start building a guerrilla style web of agitators educators and propogandists.
If you are successful in agitation it should naturally evolve into revolutionary cell of your own. Don’t trust individuals who seek you out trying to join the revolution. If someone has read theory and wants to “organize” tell them to go start their own cell. Feds read theory. Only trust ignorant people to join your cell. If you watch someone be radicalized you know they are not a mole. Keep your cell small enough that you can manage it yourself like 10 people.
Cells should have innocuous unassuming names (like randomized reddit usernames) that can be used as identifiers for the group but not to identify what the group is and does.
As members of your cell get better educated they can go off and agitate on their own and they should never to introduce you to their recruits or to the other members of your cell. We need to keep things compartmentalized.
Come up with a code phrase that your cell can use to tell each other if you have been compromised. When your cell has been compromised cut face to face contact completely. (The Russian gendarmes used to let the most active revolutionaries escape a raid and keep tabs on them to line up the next bust. On one occasion they allowed a high level political assassination go unmolested in order to build trust for their operatives inside the org.) An online space like lemmygrad is a great way to keep in contact after cutting ties without risking security. Just never let on that you know each other IRL.
If you are always working on the ground floor radicalizing people and always cutting contact at the first sign of trouble you will raise class consciousness while avoiding becoming a lure for the feds.
If you are contacted by a member of another group, exchange names of the groups and some sort of contact information. Tell them to tighten up their OPsec because the feds are out there. Warn against individuals who are part of multiple orgs/cells as they both inflate the perceived number of total revolutionaries and they are also a security risk.
On initial contact tell the other how many other cells you have made face to face contact with and roughly how many revolutionaries you have 2nd hand contact with. (like if you know a guy in a group of ten people and you know another guy in a group of 5 and there are 4 in your group, you know of 3 cells and 20 revolutionaries.) Keep a running tally of names of groups you have met and how many people they have and how many revolutionaries they have 2nd hand contact with. Never share any more detailed than the number of groups and the number of members of all the groups you know of. (these numbers are like how some viruses release a signal protein so that they know when they have enough numbers to switch out of their dormant phase.)
Your group should always tell eachother when they meet ofther groups and develop a script for how to deal with contacts. “I am aware of your group. It is nice to know we have allies out there. We need to keep each other safe by keeping our distance.” Do not merge groups. We need more cells not bigger ones a smaller cell is more secure.
You can’t raise class consciousness effectively if you pretend communism doesn’t exist and act like you have no affiliation with it. Are there situations some of the time in history where some groups have to act in near total secrecy? Yes. Are there situations where you need to be wary about how obvious you are, especially if you’re in a more vulnerable situation / among a more reactionary group? Yes. But if you’re wanting to organize people, you won’t lead them by pretending you’re something you aren’t. Just as an example, the people who hang out on this forum, I think it’s safe to say many of them would not know it exists and would hardly know what communism is if everyone they had encountered who had communist views had pretended not to.
Tying together communism and helping people on an organized level is actually one of the most effective things that you can do. You help because you believe in helping, but you also tie it into what your aims are, or else people will just assume you’re being charitable because you feel like it and will fill in the blanks with their own narrative about how the world works. Some people awash in western Christian thinking might find it feels icky to combine the two, like you’re somehow undermining the act of kindness by relating it to communism. But the reality is, people seeing that a group consistently does good for them will make them believers far easier than trying to get them to read thick books. And for good reason. People tend to like those who help them get their needs met and do it consistently, without there being some kind of trick or catch to it that undermines them in the process. It’s a sensible reaction. And part of getting past the existing propaganda is showing people that there is an alternative that can not only get their needs met, but do it without all the class/racial/etc. divide and means tested BS.
Where did I say this?
Again where did I say this? Its like you read one sentence decided to inject the worst possible meaning into it when the explanation was right there.
As individuals, 1st world communists need to be loud and proud but as organizations, we need to only exist in secret. A 1st world communist org that is open about what it is, is either co-opted by the feds or is going to get shut down regardless of whether it is a book club, a political party or a mutual aid focused org. McCarthyism never ended they just ran out of communists dumb enough to stick their necks out.
If as individuals we go and volunteer at an existing soup kitchen we can interact with non-marxists who are willing to work to help make things better and have the time to do so. At the worst we might get told not to come help the soup kitchen because our politics are too radical. but people are still gonna get fed even if we have to find a new place to sling soup.
If we organize a communist soup kitchen, the only people who will hear the message of marxism will be hungry people, too preoccupied getting dinner to think about overthrowing the bourgeoise and we will spend all our energry running a soup kitchen. If we are lucky we’ll get out there a second time only to get a cease and desist from local government delivered by pigs with tazers. If we are unlucky a black van will show up and take all the volunteers away.
The only way for a marxist org to actually operate a soup kitchen would be to… pretend the org is something it is not.
Your clarification does not meaningfully change anything about what I was addressing. In fact, it makes even less sense than the idea that communists should be secretive both as individuals and organizations. If you truly believe the state is going to put you in a black van for being a practicing communist, being “loud and proud” as an individual communist, but not as an organization means putting a target on your back and now, not only do you not have anyone to back you up if things go south, you will just be (according to the black van narrative) disappeared quietly and without a fuss since nobody even knows what you’re doing. What you’re describing sounds like adventurism. The concept of some groups and their operations being guerilla in some historical contexts does make sense. The concept of communist efforts as a whole solely being guerilla, but not even fully, because they’re actually calling attention to the fact that they’re communist while pretending not to be in orgs, is contradictory nonsense.
In any case, a premise like “Helping people is great but directly tying that in with your communism is a good way to ruin both.” is a terribly misleading way of talking about things. If you use a premise that is bad, you can’t depend on a lengthy explanation to supposedly fix it. You need to go back and do a premise that is better.
Again you didn’t read what I wrote. I never said “dont ortganize.”
I am done talking with you. Your arguing against things I didn’t even come close to saying. If you want to argue in bad faith there’s a whole fediverse out there full of libs and chuds.
You literally said:
Which is an incredibly misleading way to put things. This doesn’t need to be about you or I as ego, but about the points of view. And trying to make it about ego does no one any favors.
Yes I said that and then I went on to explain what I meant by this but you decided I was saying a bunch of other stuff.
You didn’t raise objections to anything I said. You keep batting at your own misrepresentation of what I could be meaning ignoring the fact that there is an explanation of what I mean right there.
I already went over that in another post, the one where I said: “Your clarification does not meaningfully change anything about what I was addressing.”
Then instead of going through and telling me which parts are supposedly still a “misrepresentation”, you told me this:
I’m still not sure what is supposedly a misrepresentation. As it is, I never said that you said not to organize (that is a mouthful). I was addressing the idea of being openly communist as an individual, but not as an org. The idea of being secretly organizing with other communists was taken into account in my criticism of the point of view.
I even emphasized it as an attribute of what I was talking about here:
So how is this claiming that you said “don’t organize”?