I listened to a few podcasts recently that had some very knowledgeable guests with interesting opinions, but it occurred to me that not only had these guests written off basically they entire American working class as useless, they also had reached that conclusion only through reading shit, not actually trying to organize them. Chances are they hadn't even talked to a worker in years without giving them a tip afterwards. This is petty bourgeois academia that is detrimental to the left by masking material conditions with ideology.
Another thing that struck me was a coworker, a self described anarchist, who wants to help organize a union, but doesn't know the first thing about how to. I realized they probably have never organized anything in their life, and while I haven't either, I've at least been organized by others and read about how to organize. This anarchist learned their anarchism solely from memes and is lost, now I've got to try and train them while figuring out a lot of this stuff for myself.
I now realize that this is what almost the entirety of the online left amounts to. Whether it's twitter dunks, breadtube, or formal academia, it's all people having takes and not actually doing anything, certainly not organizing. The algorithms and our own self isolation have cut us off from trying to organize a revolutionary movement in the West (the US in my case). Even if ultimately these people are not capable of being revolutionaries, we need to try, and spending all of our time posting and reading posts means we aren't organizing. This is tough for me because propaganda is important and I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for this website or the subreddit that preceded it, but I think I need to get my head out of the clouds and return to the ground. Grand notions of vanguard parties, higher stage communism, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics are so far flung from the actual material reality I live in that they might as well be from Tolkien or Le Guin. They just aren't that relevant to me and certainly not to the masses that surround me.
I think I'm going to log off for a little bit. As amazing as this website is, I feel like now more than ever we need to be talking to people in real life rather than online. The revolution isn't going to come about by good memes or grand proclamations shared on anonymous forums. The revolution will come from talking to our neighbors, coworkers, and maybe even total strangers. Learning their names, about their lives, struggles, hopes, and dreams and trying to mobilize them to fight for those things is the challenge we face and we have to live up to it in the real world, not the virtual one. I'll come back of course- I can't miss out on all the hot takes, but I think this is what needs to be done. Hopefully I can bring some good news when I come back too.
Please wait for me to return before starting any good struggle sessions though. We've gone a while without having a serious one and the next one must be right around the corner.
The mistake was being encouraged by these idiots in the first place. Whether deliberate or not, the Virtual Left has become a relief valve to bleed off excess revolutionary thought whenever pressure builds too high. Instead of walking out of your house and throwing a brick through a window, you yell at someone on the internet because they have the wrong position on who-gives-a-fuck that no one actually has the ability to do anything about. It is the antithesis of organization because it takes place on a medium that is controlled by the ruling class and has been engineered to promote discord instead of cooperation.
There are some good little bits of organizing that happened on this site, because it's run by people who specifically do not want to promote discord over cooperation, but it's a tiny tiny corner of the online leftist space. The rest of it is mostly useless.