(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
The point of "hiding the communist character of the whole thing" is to delay a serious response from the state, not get ordinary people to go along with it
Similar thing for avoiding marxist language. The word "socialism" is gonna occur to people almost immediately. But the more jargon we use the more culturally foreign we are, and the less accessible our ideas are, and the easier we are to win court cases against or bash in the press, and the harder it is for people involved with us to explain to those not involved what exactly their job is.
The act of organizing and wielding power is what radicalizes
That's the whole point of this.
How does a vanguard party work when it can't even source ideas from marxism?
They would source ideas from marxism. They'd all be marxists. They just wouldn't use weird jargon in public. "If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it" and all that. Avoiding jargon makes ordinary people feel more comfortable involving themselves with what you're doing. They won't worry so much that others might judge them, or that the media will tar and feather them.
The state hasn't crushed REI. There is a range of behaviors that the state won't crush. The aim is to pretend, for as long as possible, that this is what you are.
As you're perceived to leave that range of behaviors, the resolve of the state to crush you increases the further away you get. It might be possible (and this discussion cannot determine whether it is or not) to build up your resistance to ways of crushing you, at the same rate at which the state increases its resolve to crush you, so that you remain ahead for a little while even outside the range of acceptable behaviors.
This is sort of responding in platitudes. Like "propaganda can reinforce a material argument but not replace it" has a nice ring to it but it's not specific enough to argue against. Both your perspective and my perspective are way too complex to compare using sentences like this one. It's a great way to end up talking past each other.
I kept editing this because it was hard to put into words why this bothered me.
the CIA targets leftist movements? Wait for real? These guys sound bad.
more difficult than it sounds
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,
we might need that, but we don't have that. How do you propose...
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.
before long the existing forces of capital would in no way allow the expansion or acquisition of resources (including land).
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.
There is no way to secretly coordinate a shadow economy
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.
popularly accepted vanguard
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.
Comrade, this is communism
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.
We need an expanding network of co-ops, secretly coordinated, behind the scenes, by some kind of vanguard party.
I don't see how, or even why, this could be kept a secret. If the co-ops are themselves communist, the word would immediately get out. If they were not, why would they listen to this vanguard party? An organization that helps and guides co-ops is a good idea, but I don't think it will lead to a revoultion.
The masses can't and shouldn't be tricked into doing a revolution. Avoiding marxist language in propaganda can sometimes be effective, but educating the masses should be done in openly marxist terms. How long can a growing organization that avoids marxist language remain marxist in any meaningful way?
No one's being tricked into revolution. This isn't the revolution, it's just prep work.
Also, co-ops are businesses. They're separate from the community organizing stuff. To control them we just set them up that way, like a franchise. We make their material operation depend in some way on cooperation with the larger organization.
I can explain it more if you want, but the entire crux is having the numbers. We do not have the numbers. None of this works without broad support.
Co-ops are potentially a good way to swell the numbers. People join for a paycheck and then they are immersed in a leftist internal culture at work.
But you need help from people who don't work at co-ops. The numbers have to be bigger than what exists inside the coops.
What we're essentially talking about is dual power. Sure you can have the co-ops of true believers. But people aren't stupid, they'll figure out what's happening. They're not going to just let you buy up businesses without a fight. So you need people in positions that help you but hurt them. Like city councils. Like county budget offices. Like law enforcement. Like courts. So you need the people inside the co-op and you need people in other places. To get people into those places you need electoralism. Which means you need broad support of the community, and to some extent, around the community. Otherwise you'll be a progressive city government surrounded by reactionary county governments and they will sabotage you. Then you need leftists to hold those seats of power while you expand further into the existing power structures. The businesses that don't cooperate and have more capital than you need to be unionized. To do that the workers have to be convinced despite not being immersed in a culture of leftism.
A lot of this is just trying to work around the problems of our movement without addressing them.
No, the co-ops would not consist of true believers. Most of the co-ops would consist of normal people who might have no idea what they are involved with. The first aim of the co-ops is to starve capital, gather money for buying residential land, and put a network of communication in place for later use.
Co-ops already exist in real life that do not have this problem.
Coops already have business associations, credit unions pool risk, etc. Coops unsurprisingly already coordinate (without a vanguard even!). They have to rely on solidarity and community goodwill because they exploit their workers at a lower rate and so aren't competitive.
Okay what if we just gave everyone guns and a lot of adderal tho
