(instead of starting with the motivation behind this approach, or listing the problems with other approaches, I'll just launch right into it.)
We need an expanding network of co-ops, secretly coordinated, behind the scenes, by some kind of vanguard party.
The network attempts to assimilate local businesses and, eventually, entire local economies, and use the profits to buy out residential land from the banks and landlords. We lower rent (almost?) to nothing. We then cut the workweek and spread less work across more people.
With a much shorter workweek and higher net income, workers now have the time and morale to 1) volunteer in community life, 2) attend political meetings, and 3) develop a revolutionary consciousness, preferably without even realizing it.
To help that along, we assimilate (or displace and replace) local news outlets to reduce the impact of propaganda. We start removing billboards and advertisements from public spaces. We also organize our own on-call social services which essentially function like citizen police. These services gradually supplant the local police.
Throughout this process, we avoid using marxist language. We hide the communist character of the whole thing, even though we are literally doing communism. We gotta keep everything low-key as long as possible. Our goal is to grow this network as big as we can before capital gets wise.
When capital does get wise, we'll see 1) media attacks, and 2) maybe attempts to frame vanguard members for various crimes. These are under-the-radar attacks. Somehow we need to prepare defenses against these. We want to force capital to respond above-the-radar, in ways normal people will perceive as attacks, so that each response radicalizes more and more people.
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How we assimilate businesses and economies is its own conversation. I think there are numerous ways to do it, and the approach will depend on the situation. Personally I think we should couch this assimilation as a social movement, not just an economic process. But I don't want to distract from the main post.
Ok, tear my idea to shreds folks, let's hear it
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it sounds pretty difficult to me, my brief post here doesn't even begin to touch on all the things we'd need to think about before this becomes a viable idea. It was not fun to read a wall of text addressing me like I'm the sort of person who thinks this sounds easy.
I guess it's kinda my fault for putting that ambitious title on top of this short post, and also not specifying how long I thought we could "hide the communist nature of the whole thing"
like,
I mean, no shit. Like any other revolutionary process, it's difficult, in fact probably impossible without some kind of external crisis (but we have a few of those brewing), and the people at the tip of the spear are gonna have to be pretty smart, like the revolutionaries of the past all have been. That's just how the game works.
When you judge only by the scale of the change, the formation of the Soviet state was also an impossible task and should have taken a lifetime. But the Soviet state didn't form under normal circumstances. It didn't plod linearly into being. Right now neoliberalism is less and less able to provide for people, and that helps a project like this gain traction, and makes people madder when the state inevitably crushes it.
Yes, of course. Like I said in my original post, they're going to attack sooner or later. Our job when that happens is to attempt to force them to respond in a way that normal people will perceive as an attack, so that the attack further radicalizes people and we enter a vicious cycle, the sort that we have seen in history before.
Eventually there's going to be chaos. The goal here is to improve our position as much as we can before that point, so we can influence the outcome.
That it's being coordinated isn't the secret. The end goal is the secret, for however long it can be kept. The operational goals in the intermediate future are secret. The extent of coordination is, if not secret, obfuscated to the best of our ability.
And yeah, fuck, nothing stays secret, but that's missing the point.
The whole gambit here is just a race to make one rate stay above another rate: the rate of growth of your power must stay higher than the rate of increase of state resources dedicated to destroying you, until you are strong enough to survive when all hell finally breaks loose. You get me? Whether or not this is possible might even be beside the point, since success is not all-or-nothing.
I don't even think that's how vanguards work. Maybe we're talking about two different things, but to me a vanguard, at this stage in the process, is just a web of people who, after scheming together, go out and help to coordinate local activities. Each person wins over their own local community. None of the regular Cubans Frank Pais organized knew the extent of the project they were involved in.
This is just the embers of communism, flaring up in some subset of communities before the state stamps it out and pisses off those communities. You're saying I'm skipping to the end goal but I'm not, the state still exists.