Side-eyes all those pedophilia charges against the Catholic church's 'celibate' clergy. :scared:
I think the issue is that people join groups expecting the group to give them something. This is pretty typical of the "exchange" basis of relationships under capitalism that colonizes even the way we perform basic emotions. Like if you go to the group expecting it to actualize you, fulfill you, and provide something for you (like sex) in exchange for your labor and time availability, then the whole thing becomes transactional and transaction violations (like @ButtBidet addressing friction and the necessity of non-transactional effort to rectify an issue) become frustrating distractions instead of instances for the group to perform self-maintenance.
Most of the research I've done on indigenous societies points to a different method of community where the individual, instead of expecting the world to help them transcend in a metaphorical Hero's Journey, gains the maturity through life experience to help the community transcend itself. In this way, the community as an entity should be nurtured like a child, and raised by a village.
IMO, this difference in perspective is why indigenous organizers tend to express distaste for most western leftists. They see leftists as copycats who somehow lose the essence of what makes indigenous movements function, that being a love of their community.
Adding to this, I think the transactional mindset colonizes the way we date and view romantic love too. Westerners hold the idealistic crystalization of their nuclear family as their primary life goal, at the expense of their surroundings and their new family members. Dating isn't a method of participating in a community as much as it is acquiring a renewable "happiness" resource.
I think a change in mindset would rectify both problems to the degree that you can simultaneously organize and have family, polycules, whatever in the org. Otherwise historical revolutionaries wouldn't have had the families and children that we know exist.
Honestly, based on the work I've done in my own relationships, you have to open yourself up to the idea that you are fundamentally wrong about everything you know. My partner and I basically broke each other down and built each other up from scratch, not to suit some selfish needs mind you (like it's not a hentai manga style competition to see who can dom the other person into being the best sex slave or whatever), but it was mostly picking apart dysfunctional habits that came from selfish mindsets or could be connected to patriarchy/white supremacy (and it's surprising how much of that is built in to the things people perceive as "normal").
The subsequent rebuilding came from establishing rules for communicating effectively and ensuring everyone feels heard and that problems are to be solved together. There are a lot of tiny complaints throughout the day and some sit down discussions critiquing unhealthy behavior, but they're offset by compassion when things get real. And we're secure enough with each other that saying out loud these things that we need doesn't poison the well. Because the desire to act and be helpful to see the other person happy/thriving is far more powerful than the little prickles that we know are just maintenance behaviors.
Of course, not everyone is the same. But I've been with them for years and the limerence and empathy has only increased over time where most people in the west report a decrease over time (usually 2-5 years is when people stop feeling intense passionate feelings and everything else goes with it).
I'd also recommend downloading The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky. It's basically given me the tools to put the things I've learned irl into words and materialist analysis.
I think I'm on the middle on this one. I've dropped out of several leftist orgs because it felt like nothing was being done. If I couldn't even get satisfaction from helping people or learning things, or help from others when I needed it, what was the org even doing? I already work 50 hours per week and I'm regularly exhausted, but most orgs I've been in didn't do much other than hold reading groups or desperately flail around confused, but would still hold a ton of meetings, hand out newspapers, assign reading, that kind of stuff.
Main exception being Food not Bombs. I adore them. They're the real thing. They're completely scatterbrained ideologically, but they're good people doing real work with the homeless and hungry.
Also I have no community attachment and I'm basically asocial. No friends or anything. Don't know how to rectify this if I'm gonna work with people.
You haven't really said anything I disagree with tbh. My point wasn't that you shouldn't expect orgs to do things it's that the nature of the doing shouldn't be transactional. More or less: if you're working as part of a transactional relationship then you're still operating with capitalist brainworms. If that makes sense?
Yeah I understand. I was in situations where I was putting in work that got wasted, so at some level I did feel like I wasn't getting anything in return. An org should at the very least take your work and apply it somehow, and if they aren't, why work with them?
You're conflating the long-term benefit of social cooperation with evolutionary-psych level machiavellianism. If your reasons for joining a social movement are calculated like you're an investor buying stock options, then when it comes down to doing things that don't directly benefit you like community work or challenging your own racism, or internationalist activity then you become a liability to the community. This isn't new shit. A lot of western leftists are just too inward focused and navel gazey to notice when they exclude minorities within their ranks or build what basically amounts to a book club where a bunch of middle class people circlejerk without any thought toward direct action.
People keep asking "why can't movements get off the ground?" And when minorities point out what they don't like about leftists they get shat on and find out that socialism isn't for them. The benefits of organizing need to come from being in a community and the positive effects that naturally confers. Mao-Zedong-style being concerned with the well being of the masses will come when the resources are there and the group decides how to handle that. But setting up an org for immediate satiation is just making a cult.
I think you and the above poster are not in contradiction. You are both talking about distinct phenomena.
Time economy
Non-transactional community
These things both need to be accommodated. If an organization doesn't respect people's time then it will fizzle out due to sheer attrition. Humans can only spread themselves so thin and revolutionary zeal even has its limits (the limit here being that the org is deemed ineffective, so the zeal isn't being meaningfully channeled by the org). While capitalism has a variety of motives to inundate and physically/mentally/emotionally exhaust its subjects, a very prominent reason is so that the working class is simply too tired to organize politically. This can't be ignored by leftist orgs - leftist orgs that want to last a meaningful amount of time need to find a way to decrease the burdens/stresses of living within capitalism for their members lest the members abandon the org - not due to any disagreement in ideology but simply because they cannot sustain what the org requires of them in tandem with what capitalism requires of them. Leftists love to harness economics for their critiques of capitalism but then they fail to employ economics as a sound basis for their organizations - dooming them to deterioration.
When I work with an org I don't expect them to only focus on my personal struggles - I do expect them to be realistic; the more energy they use from their members, the more the org needs to reimburse those people in some manner - not because the people are selfish, but because their energy is finite. Every victory in terms of freezing rents, raising wages, securing benefits, etc is a rejuvenating property which will allow the org to continually renew the participation of their members.
I like this comment. I think I'm just still kinda butthurt about how ego-centric libs can be. But you're right that there's a difference between an org spinning its wheels vs being effective/actualizing. I just think like the idea of selling actualization as a product is a bit counter-intuitive/closer to being a weird yoga class. It's especially prevalent when talking to people with utopian ideologies.
No you're absolutely right that organizations should not be actualization projects for radlibs/nascent leftists and they often are treated that way. That's a definite problem.
Side-eyes all those pedophilia charges against the Catholic church's 'celibate' clergy. :scared:
I think the issue is that people join groups expecting the group to give them something. This is pretty typical of the "exchange" basis of relationships under capitalism that colonizes even the way we perform basic emotions. Like if you go to the group expecting it to actualize you, fulfill you, and provide something for you (like sex) in exchange for your labor and time availability, then the whole thing becomes transactional and transaction violations (like @ButtBidet addressing friction and the necessity of non-transactional effort to rectify an issue) become frustrating distractions instead of instances for the group to perform self-maintenance.
Most of the research I've done on indigenous societies points to a different method of community where the individual, instead of expecting the world to help them transcend in a metaphorical Hero's Journey, gains the maturity through life experience to help the community transcend itself. In this way, the community as an entity should be nurtured like a child, and raised by a village.
IMO, this difference in perspective is why indigenous organizers tend to express distaste for most western leftists. They see leftists as copycats who somehow lose the essence of what makes indigenous movements function, that being a love of their community.
Adding to this, I think the transactional mindset colonizes the way we date and view romantic love too. Westerners hold the idealistic crystalization of their nuclear family as their primary life goal, at the expense of their surroundings and their new family members. Dating isn't a method of participating in a community as much as it is acquiring a renewable "happiness" resource.
I think a change in mindset would rectify both problems to the degree that you can simultaneously organize and have family, polycules, whatever in the org. Otherwise historical revolutionaries wouldn't have had the families and children that we know exist.
I feel called out. What can a honky such as myself do to practice healthier social bonds than the ones we were taught?
Honestly, based on the work I've done in my own relationships, you have to open yourself up to the idea that you are fundamentally wrong about everything you know. My partner and I basically broke each other down and built each other up from scratch, not to suit some selfish needs mind you (like it's not a hentai manga style competition to see who can dom the other person into being the best sex slave or whatever), but it was mostly picking apart dysfunctional habits that came from selfish mindsets or could be connected to patriarchy/white supremacy (and it's surprising how much of that is built in to the things people perceive as "normal").
The subsequent rebuilding came from establishing rules for communicating effectively and ensuring everyone feels heard and that problems are to be solved together. There are a lot of tiny complaints throughout the day and some sit down discussions critiquing unhealthy behavior, but they're offset by compassion when things get real. And we're secure enough with each other that saying out loud these things that we need doesn't poison the well. Because the desire to act and be helpful to see the other person happy/thriving is far more powerful than the little prickles that we know are just maintenance behaviors.
Of course, not everyone is the same. But I've been with them for years and the limerence and empathy has only increased over time where most people in the west report a decrease over time (usually 2-5 years is when people stop feeling intense passionate feelings and everything else goes with it).
I'd also recommend downloading The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky. It's basically given me the tools to put the things I've learned irl into words and materialist analysis.
I think I'm on the middle on this one. I've dropped out of several leftist orgs because it felt like nothing was being done. If I couldn't even get satisfaction from helping people or learning things, or help from others when I needed it, what was the org even doing? I already work 50 hours per week and I'm regularly exhausted, but most orgs I've been in didn't do much other than hold reading groups or desperately flail around confused, but would still hold a ton of meetings, hand out newspapers, assign reading, that kind of stuff.
Main exception being Food not Bombs. I adore them. They're the real thing. They're completely scatterbrained ideologically, but they're good people doing real work with the homeless and hungry.
Also I have no community attachment and I'm basically asocial. No friends or anything. Don't know how to rectify this if I'm gonna work with people.
You haven't really said anything I disagree with tbh. My point wasn't that you shouldn't expect orgs to do things it's that the nature of the doing shouldn't be transactional. More or less: if you're working as part of a transactional relationship then you're still operating with capitalist brainworms. If that makes sense?
Yeah I understand. I was in situations where I was putting in work that got wasted, so at some level I did feel like I wasn't getting anything in return. An org should at the very least take your work and apply it somehow, and if they aren't, why work with them?
Oof, that sucks. I'm sorry you had to deal with that. :(
deleted by creator
You're conflating the long-term benefit of social cooperation with evolutionary-psych level machiavellianism. If your reasons for joining a social movement are calculated like you're an investor buying stock options, then when it comes down to doing things that don't directly benefit you like community work or challenging your own racism, or internationalist activity then you become a liability to the community. This isn't new shit. A lot of western leftists are just too inward focused and navel gazey to notice when they exclude minorities within their ranks or build what basically amounts to a book club where a bunch of middle class people circlejerk without any thought toward direct action.
People keep asking "why can't movements get off the ground?" And when minorities point out what they don't like about leftists they get shat on and find out that socialism isn't for them. The benefits of organizing need to come from being in a community and the positive effects that naturally confers. Mao-Zedong-style being concerned with the well being of the masses will come when the resources are there and the group decides how to handle that. But setting up an org for immediate satiation is just making a cult.
I think you and the above poster are not in contradiction. You are both talking about distinct phenomena.
These things both need to be accommodated. If an organization doesn't respect people's time then it will fizzle out due to sheer attrition. Humans can only spread themselves so thin and revolutionary zeal even has its limits (the limit here being that the org is deemed ineffective, so the zeal isn't being meaningfully channeled by the org). While capitalism has a variety of motives to inundate and physically/mentally/emotionally exhaust its subjects, a very prominent reason is so that the working class is simply too tired to organize politically. This can't be ignored by leftist orgs - leftist orgs that want to last a meaningful amount of time need to find a way to decrease the burdens/stresses of living within capitalism for their members lest the members abandon the org - not due to any disagreement in ideology but simply because they cannot sustain what the org requires of them in tandem with what capitalism requires of them. Leftists love to harness economics for their critiques of capitalism but then they fail to employ economics as a sound basis for their organizations - dooming them to deterioration.
When I work with an org I don't expect them to only focus on my personal struggles - I do expect them to be realistic; the more energy they use from their members, the more the org needs to reimburse those people in some manner - not because the people are selfish, but because their energy is finite. Every victory in terms of freezing rents, raising wages, securing benefits, etc is a rejuvenating property which will allow the org to continually renew the participation of their members.
I like this comment. I think I'm just still kinda butthurt about how ego-centric libs can be. But you're right that there's a difference between an org spinning its wheels vs being effective/actualizing. I just think like the idea of selling actualization as a product is a bit counter-intuitive/closer to being a weird yoga class. It's especially prevalent when talking to people with utopian ideologies.
No you're absolutely right that organizations should not be actualization projects for radlibs/nascent leftists and they often are treated that way. That's a definite problem.