if you call me a fed I'll call you a double fed who feds on the feds
The Reality Of Feds in Organizing
Every single org is going to have feds in them. Work around the bastards, keep them busy, and expect that ultimately they will probably compromise your group. At that point, you'll need to move on to your next project with one or two people you trust.
Orgs collapsing is close to inevitable in the imperial core. The Feds are lazy and terribly incompetent, but alsp have billions in funding. If an org doesn't collapse from wreckers and you present a real threat to empire, then they will eventually just start murdering you and everyone you trust until it does.
Fed-jacketing is an effective tool that feds ironically use to paralyze groups and remove figures that are threatening to them before they can gain momentum.
The trick is to inoculate your org from the beginning and mininize the behavior and damage the feds can inflict by having clear standards of behavior that you expel anyone shitty for. Treat anyone disruptive and incompetent the same way you'd treat a fed because there is no difference.
The 3 goals of a socialist in the imperial core
In my opinion, the three things that actually matter in the core are:
Goal 1: improving material conditions for the people who are suffering
Goal 2: through goal 1, raising class consciousness to create more comrades
Goal 3: with goal 2, slowing The Machine so it becomes even more ineffective and harms less people (in both the core and the periphery).
Join an org
join the best org you can that is doing goal 1 sufficiently well. Do not get choice paralysis, just pick one that seems decent. Will probably be DSA to start since they generally work with everyone. If you find out an org is SWERFs/ TERFs/ or another type of cult, then you can always leave.
You don't even have to "join" to begin with, just pick a local org and attend a meeting or event. That's it, just do something this weekend for an hour or two.
You'll gradually meet other people "who get it". Eventually, you'll wind up in an even better org when that one splits / collapses / or you find one you like more.
There is no such thing as a perfect org, you will always have people to work around when you are doing work for The People.
Conclusion (A Call To Action)
All Power To All The People. The beast is dying. Lift our brothers, sisters, and siblings out of the stomach acid so they can heal and then also help in the work. Do not let the feds feed you doom.
Join an org and get started. You're on this site, so you're ready.
It it looks like a fed, walks like a fed, oinks like a fed, it must be...
:fidel-si:
It's either a fed or an idiot. Either way it's a waste of our time and needs to fuck off.
Example: Local org I'm in expeled a guy who always seemed to overcomplicate or fuck up anything he volunteered for. He was unable to handle any feedback about this. We're not his therapist or his parents. Bye, we have people to feed and you're in the way of that.
Dude tried to smear the org on twitter after we kicked him out. We ignored him and he eventually moved on. Again, we didn't care what he was besides a waste of time.
Caveat: This is distinctly separate from situations where a comrade hits a rough patch and has fallen on hard times. Solidarity is important, but it also must be reciprocal.
I love it.
It's also worth mentioning that no one knows exactly what the organization that ends up toppling the Empire is going to be, but we all ardently want it to happen. We need to see it as an ecosystem, where we might have differences of identity or structure or whatever minutiae but we're all pushing in the direction of dismantling capitalism and minimizing the domination and objectification of humans by other humans.
:fidel-si:
Leftism in the imperial core has to be an ecosystem, it has to be a laboratory, it has to be a bunch of decentralized groups all working together and trying different things.
That's legit how you handle infiltrators: make them do all the busy work. They're getting paid to be there and you aren't, it's only fair.
the thing is though literally ANY ATTEMPT at doing shit that's beyond snide posting on here or twitter is an op to these lot. like we don't even get to 'feds will infiltrate' because even attempting to organise is considered to be the fed move
sometimes the fear of infiltration and it's paralysing effect can be worse than infiltration.
once in ww2 the Americans accidentally arrested all the british soldiers at a base as they were worried about German infiltrators in the region so started arresting everyone who couldn't tell them the professional baseball scores for the last week
Marx was a CIA agent sent back in time to create communism so the CIA could secure funding
No, it's literally true. Another name for stockbroker is agent, and he traded stocks on the London Stock Exchange. That's the joke.
The solution is to encourage critical thinking skills in all comrades to make identification of bad faith actors easier, of course.
easier said than done when the types of people who think everything is an op do have critical thinking skills and more than enough proof a lot of shit WAS an op. like I get why this happens, it's not that they're stupid and lack critical thinking skills, but it's more a case of paralysing over caution
I think the fundamental problem of the current left is that if you are a critical thinker, care about people, and actually try to practice what you think is right, you have to be a communist or anarchist of some sort. However, if you also analyze history, it seems impossible to get our work done in the world around us, and like we will all die before the capitalists let us do anything good. That's just a solid analysis of what has happened to our best movements and leaders. Remaining hopeful in this world is hard, but we have to do it for the good of ourselves and everyone else.
Nothing real ever happens, seize all activity
Just lay down on the floor and wait till it’s over, also I’m no fed I swear but if you leave your room I’ll call out your adventurism
Isn’t the ultimate goal to make leftists so suspicious of one another that they can never effectively organize? Pretty sure that’s in like the CIA training manual or some shit
objectively correct take. it's easily one of the biggest bones of contention i have with this otherwise wonderful site and its culture
e-leftists calling e-leftists who call things ops ops feels more like and op to discourage people from IDing ops than half the shit they call ops
e-leftists
calling every scrap of praxis and organising an op feels like more of an op to discourage doing anything than half the shit they callan opfixed
more the straw that broke the camels back. regardless of what you think about that action, it is true every single tiny actual piece of direct action is called an op on here
FWIW I don't know if Jane's revenge is an op, I just don't trust the source reporting on it. Both in the sense that he's clearly a useful idiot for the state department, and in the sense that I don't trust him and others like him to verify their own sources. It seemed like he's taking whoever gave him the info at face value.
Like not everything is an op, but we can use better sources than self-claimed experts on extremism, OSINT, and anyone whose solution to geopolitics is supply random groups with drones and stinger missiles.
I'm not gonna defend Robbert Fedivans, I'm just pissed off at the dismissive rhetoric 1 day we say kill cops bomb those who fight against womens rights then like... people do that and suddenly they're all feds
The issue with the Umbrella Man narrative was that it gave the libs an opening to label any kind of violence or direct action as done by fascists, rightists, or provocateurs. It supported the rationale for the peace-police, and strengthened the idea that fighting the cops is bad. To say that Umbrella Man was an undercover agent was to trade in the currency of "he did something that was bad because it ruins our peaceful reputation and we wouldn't do something like that".
If the Wisconsin Family Action building was damaged by their own people to collect insurance or something, though, there's no mischaracterization or wrong that's been done.
We shouldn't cry when we get a freebie.
if you call me a fed I’ll call you a double fed who feds on the feds
Not if I call you a triple-fed first :knifecat:
-draws Quintuple Fed card-
Ooooh this baby's gonna be useful later.
