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?
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.