Join an org, by the way! I’m just fantasizing here about what could have been. Organizing with DSA or PSL or whoever is really important and can help the proletarian cause a lot!
Where’s the genuine dual power organizations, the revolutionary party groups? Why is everyone here focusing on local elections (not that they aren’t important, they are) and sectarian issues? There’s so much cool shit we could be doing as organizations but my local DSA chapter just does electoral stuff and my local PSL and even more left-leaning organizations just seem to sort of be doing absolutely nothing? I could be wrong, I haven’t checked the news or anything, but I feel like every time I see an event for an org it’s always just a social meeting, an electoral-politics related protest or canvassing session, a protest for a serious issue like abortion rights or Palestine but nothing further, or a regular meet.
A lot of this could be due to a lack of resources, but our cause(s) aren’t just milquetoast liberalism, why are there no attempts to secure funding through illegal or unhinged means? Why are there no networks of power being built? Surely we’re more creative than this. Where are the armies of communist prostitutes spending their free time procuring money for their org? Where are the lefty organizations doing insane Ponzi schemes? It feels like everyone in every org is just running their wheels and doing basically nothing. Why? Surely there’s better ways to procure worker power than trying to protest to get specific bills passed? I mean, it isn’t useless by any means, but there has to be more?
Cool groups are local or underground. Find an org that is focused on one or two key issues and works in coalition and you'll find communists. Sometimes they are front groups and sometimes they are an independent project.
The people who join those lib or sometimes seemingly incompetent orgs you mentioned and have the same frustrations end up at these kinda of orgs.
The left is too small and disorganized and powerless in the US for robbing banks and so on. What would they even spend the money on? Poorly-designed flyers to sheepdog for Dems? A newsletter that nobody reads? We've gotta build from scratch, as most orgs don't even have a program or strategy, they're too busy copying the aesthetics of Bolsheviks or just generally fucking around. Example: dual power is not something to plan on or work around in the US. Even talking about it in an org is a waste of time.
For example, dual power is unique to a situation in which a socialist party has sufficient influence and capacity to rival a weak government. The contribution of Bolshevik thought here was to seize the opportunity to depose the government, not to carefully plan out how to create the situation in the first place.
In the US, we cannot plausibly imagine this scenario. It would require an oracle. We do not know how a destabilization of the imperial core would go, nor what, exactly, a comparable increase in socialist power would look like. We live under very different conditions where we have neither a large peasantry producing food nor an industrialized city core to seize. We will have to learn and adapt accordingly in order to build towards conditions where we could imagine winning. If there was a governmental collapse right now we would be irrelevant at best (aside from mutual aid groups) and scapegoated and murdered at worst.
We will have to survive and become popular enough, regardless. That is a clear prerequisite. And most orgs are too distracted by unimportant things or their own incompetence to build a strategy for growth and survival. We will also have to contend with the settler mindset and the imperial mindset, as it is a barrier to joining the left. Imperial core leftists that adopt a labor orientation will eventually confront this when they encounter military contractor unions and nationalist unions. They will try to pull you into supporting the war machine and imperialist trade policies and then you will need to either adopt their positions (unfortunately common) or strategically adopt an angle where you can remain in a labor space while rejecting entire unions that nobody else does. That requires planning and care, both rare things in Western leftist orgs.
Anyways, hopefully the theme is coming through. We need our orgs to be better and to be focused on real local conditions, with a reality check on how much we model after Bolsheviks or 19th century anarchists, etc. The thing that is missing is rarely a sufficient aping of past successful revolutions but a disconnect between the material realities in which we are embedded, our long-term vision, and how we want to truly build towards that with successful (with self-criticism) strategies.
But also a counter-trend: a disproportionate amount of immigrants and racialized people in unions. Less so in the staff, but commonly active and networked/informally organized in the rank and file.
Unfortunately that is not a counter-trend to imperialism. Unionized "defense" workers have drawn from those communities for a long time and it works in their favor, as they are more exploitable. Despite some expectations that those facing oppression would be more likely to fight against an employer that, say, makes the bombs that kill their families back home or people that are part of a diaspora with which they identify, the trend is in the opposite direction: there's basically zero anti-imperialist work in these unions.
It would be theoretically nice to work in that direction, but having personally tried to get such things going, including with the rank and file, it's extremely difficult to get people to organize themselves out of a job if they're not already ideologically committed to the point that they'll make themselves and their families suffer to achieve it. That's very, very few people, including a number of self-proclaimed socialists I found working at these companies. You can get them to go to a BLM march but never consider a slowdown due to genocide in Palestine. There is a disconnect.
Hell I knew a Palestinian refugee that went to work for a Zionist doing Zionist things for a pay cut because they were bored with their previous job. We can't expect coherence, we have to fight hard for whatever we can get and need to build up trust and knowledge from scratch within our communities, and that goes double for anti-imperialism because it is unintuitive for most people. We are very privileged in our exposure to relatively coherent political theory and history and have to approach folks living in an entirely different bubble.
I dont know about the defense industry, but transport/logistics/shipping is nothing like that. Folks are militant, tired of bullshit, and willing to fight over any issue that comes up, from wages to palestine. Since you raised some anecdotes: my shop steward is a transfem communist who keeps taking sick days to do DA at local arms manufacturers. Sorry your industry sucks I guess, but it's not like that everywhere.
Oh yes you can definitely get truck drivers and so on in certain locales. It's not a cakewalk in the US to get them to do anything for Palestine, but it is actually conceivable and there have been a few examples here and there.
Luckily I'm not in a MIC industry or adjacent to one, I just do a lot of organizing.
I know a lot of radicals in unions, but I don't think it's the imperial core unions or union jobs that radicalize people, generally speaking. I think lefties are drawn to unions/union jobs and see them as their natural homes. But as institutions, they are fundamentally flawed, usually only capable of representing localized worker or national industry interests, and can be easily turned against the working class as a whole, particularly internationally. MIC unions are just the most blatant and obvious example of this, as they literally make the brown-people-destroying machines. Realistically, many industries have less obvious versions of these elements even when they have organized labor (tech, academia, resource extraction, agriculture). Communists have historically learned this in direct and unpleasant ways, where they must butt heads with the trade unionists, even outlaw them as they exist, as part of achieving or protecting revolution. Despite having members in the trade unions, despite attempts to build support for revolution via worker power, the successful revolutions tended to notice that the trade unions and union workers, when it came time to make the big changes (e.g. nationalization) were being mollified by and fighting on behalf of only their localized economic interests and confrontation was necessary. We are obviously not at that point, but we do have to deal with, say, the actions of the AFL-CIA.
Anyways I think I keep writing overly long messages, sorry about that. I just really want folks to take a critical and proactive approach to trade unions. They can really backfire on us and I want our folks to be as safe and strategic as possible. I've seen folks that call themselves socialist but are clearly unconcerned about imperialism enjoy widespread uncritical support for their work in the MIC. I've also seen socialists enter union spaces assuming they were left spaces (e.g. calling people comrades when nobody else was using that language) and eventually realize how reactionary the space really is, and even get hounded out of it by the reactionaries. Unions, as social institutions, are very little more and very little less than organizing shops against management. They can create that very limited form of class consciousness. Anything more requires deliberate and intensive organizing by people who are already radical. We should be in them and we should engage very strategically with them, understanding their limits and what we hope to achieve through a relationship.
But, with all this, it sort of feels like we should be hyper-optimizing orgs for mass reach? Not in the sense that we should be watering down what we believe to make it more appealing, but that we should be spending the majority of our resources on outreach. If electoral politics is mostly a waste of time and we can’t do anything because we have no class consciousness in the US working class, isn’t building that class consciousness not only our primary goal but basically our only goal in the foreseeable future?
But most orgs, even the smaller ones I’ve seen, don’t really seem to internalize this? Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like I should be getting junk mail from the 10 different small secular Maoist cults if this was the case.
I know this is what mutual aid and stuff is partially for, but it’s only every anarchists doing it?!???
There's no single direction to address because we have to do all of it at once. It can't just be outreach because you will fail to engage and retain if you don't have a fruitful internal program. You will fail to retain if you alienate people from the org, so onboarding and de-escalation and conflict resolution are extremely important. You will be weak in many ways if you fail to embed in community so your projects need to be relevant to and draw from community. If your membership is not relatively representative of community, you are failing to embed. You need to build leadership constantly in order to be resilient to turnover and to expand your capacity. You need to protect yourselves from all threats while being vulnerable enough to address internal problems. PSL has a reputation for circling the wagons and I can tell you that it has certainly limited their capacity to grow in my area of the world. They have done basically nothing to reverse course on that, which also means we need to ask not just our own members what they want to prioritize, but why people we think should join us have not yet done so and what it would take to earn their support. It requires self-criticism.
Luckily this is addressed by experience. Get 20 people who have seen failures on these myriad challenges in a room and they will make a better org. So really, they key is to build experience, do our best to do all of these things all at once, and locate and organize similar people into a new org or to revive a flagging one.
Anyways that was my rant, lol. I'll try to actually answer your questions!
Electoral politics is not mostly a waste of time if you approach it correctly and critically. You won't waste your time if you have realistic goals for it and don't overinvest in it. For example, if you quietly support a piece of legislation that bans X, a realistic goal may be that libs will fail to enforce it because it is against the interests of capital or the military industrial complex and that you can recruit from that failure, an impetus to radicalize. So you'd spend a small amount of resources on supporting it and a much larger amount on trying to recruit from the likely failure.
The problem is that electoral politics can draw people into wasting time pretty easily because it's the politics we grew up with and the mechanisms we are told to use only work for bourgeois parties. You can't just run a candidate and hope for the best because you can easily create a politician that directs your organization rather than the other way around and that politician is likely to personally become coopted by the system. The only way to avoid this is to either (1) tie their political future to your org so they are beholden to it or (2) be incredibly selective about who may run for office in your name, make them jump through a ton of hoops and otherwise demonstrate commitment so you know they won't betray you. Only then does it become practical to run a socialist candidate and fight for things electorally.
Building class consciousness is an important goal but we have to ask whether it includes any subclass consciousness. There is a nascent class consciousness among younger people but it currently tends to get redirected into an imperialist labor class consciousness or to an anti-imperialism consciousness that does not contend much with class. It's challenging, psychologically, to handle the contradiction of class consciousness, of personal exploitation and being of the imperial core. You may end up strengthening imperialism and creating a bunch of ghouls if you spread class consciousness as, "boss makes a dollar, I make a dime" and don't push something much harder.
The Western left is struggling to learn how to organize. It is getting better. Our primary risk is in not being coopted into labor imperialism or settler logic while still being relevant. Psychologically, folks seem to have a challenge with being critically supportive of something or adopting a strategic angle, they want to find a simple, "you're either for it or against it" approach to every issue and this leads people astray. It leads people to position themselves in favor of the war machine by supporting their workers simply because they have a union. It leads to releasing facile rah-rah messages of support for milquetoast union contracts (PSL, FRSO, and PSL are all guilty of this).
irl mutual aid groups are usually full of commies, demsocs, and anarchists.