1) There's two things that work: Direct Action and pressure campaigns.
in a pressure campaign, you've got to figure out who's got decision making power and target them specifically. It can be a politician who's a swing vote, a boss who's refusing to recognize a union, the bargaining team for the police officers guild, or a landlord who's refusing repairs.
Figure out your leverage. Workers have leverage in that they provide labor. tennants have leverage in providing rent. voters provide votes. There's other kinds of pressure too, for example, landlords often care about impressing neighbors, coworkers, charitable organization board members, and fellow congregants. Universities need to retain students. But! you might not have leverage over every target! A massive chain's shareholders might be able to eat the impact of a strike, but a local manager might lose his job because of it. In that case, your leverage is over him, not the shareholders.
Every action should be part of an escalation campaign. In other words, start small (petitions, buttons, pins, etc.), build up bigger, maybe to flyering. Then work up to pickets. After that, protests, after that, vandalism and blockades, etc. This way, the longer things go on, the worse it gets for your target. They can make it all stop by giving a raise, or doing repairs, or freezing the rents, or ceasing construction. It is not enough to just protest!
In direct action, you make what you want happen yourself. Churches hate hunger, so they organize food banks; food banks are now the most effective form of welfare in america. Animal rights activists hate mink farming, so they sabotage the farms; the PNW fur industry is now a 10th the size it was in the 80s. Puerto Ricans were being denied aid after a hurricane, so they snuck into the aid warehouses and delivered it themselves. The IWW hated having bosses, so they elected their own and refused to recognize the company's. Revolution is direct action on a mass scale
2) Don't be a weirdo! The other day, a Maoist came up to me in a red scarf and started asking me questions about my struggles as a worker. The maoist asthetic is off-putting and corny. Acting like you're a third party outside of the working class is cringe. You're a worker, I'm a worker. If you want to find out about my struggles, gripe about work with me. Calling it social investigation makes you think of yourself as a detective. You're not a detective, you're my pal getting drinks after work.
DSA grew so fast because they called themselves "democratic socialists." That's just optics. A lot of DSA work is the same as ML party work: strike support, salting, socialist education, mutual aid, shooting practice. But they got more members because they used words and asthetics americans are comfortable with. Ditch the red scarf and the hammer and sickle and the fealty to Mao. It doesn't mean don't read and apply Mao, it just means be normal.
3) you've got to be engaged in struggles in your own life. You can't just ask other people to have a revolution for you. In the 70s, socialist parties had their members all take jobs in the same factories and organize fighting unions in them. Your party can go into warehouses, hospitals, meatpacking plants, even universities! Anywhere there's thousands of workers. The IWW helps general membership organize each others workplaces. Salting or organizing where you stand doesn't matter. What matters is that you're helping each other to organize in your own lives. you can do the same thing living in the same apartment building or forming a solidarity network to fight for each others stolen deposits. You can even go to the same church!
Protests ask other people to act. Organizing in your own life prepares you and your community to act. If you're raising awareness about imperialism, you're asking other people to act. On the other hand, if you organize with the diaspora, in their apartments, in their workplaces, in their churches, you're creating the capacity to overthrow their oppressors with them.
4) You can't win without people
Militancy is good, but you've got to warm most people up to it. You do this through one on one conversations or by fighting and winning to demonstrate it can be done (and then through more one on ones).
If you're not sure if you can pull off a big action, do a structure test! You can test individuals by asking them to do something like "get so and so to sign a petition." You can structure test coworkers through petitions, getting people to wear pins or holding a mock strike vote. You can structure test neighborhoods by going door to door asking people to sign pledge cards or give you their contact info.
If your structure test fails, it's time to do more one on ones. If you act with a small group, you'll get retaliated against. There's safety in numbers, so build numbers.
what might this look like? A few hypotheticals:
Stop cop city:
What if local groups ran escalation campaigns against local offices of contractors and funders associated with the project? What happens to the project when investment managers at local banks are subjected to pressure campaigns? When regional directors of building contractors are as well? How about when shareholders start getting phone zapped?
Defund the Police:
What if the next time the cops were bargaining a contract with the city and putting up resistance to reform, we mounted pressure on their bargaining team? How dedicated to qualified immunity would their bargainers be when there's a pressure campaign on the landlords and their pastors? What if we were in power in the unions and could threaten to kick the police out of the labor council if they weren't open to reforms?
Covid 19:
What if our response to Covid had been to organize for sick time and ventilation upgrades in our workplaces? If we were in warehouses and could win those reforms in a 5000 person workplace, that would have a huge impact on viral spread.
In short: Stop protesting, start organizing.
Ditch the red scarf and the hammer and sickle and the fealty to Mao. It doesn’t mean don’t read and apply Mao, it just means be normal.
Follow the Belden Program. Pull your weight at work, do the hard work of reading & organizing and be normal
Pull your weight at work
This is where "antiwork" rhetoric you see in left-adjacent spaces gets it wrong. If you don't want to work, period, people will see you as lazy. They probably aren't going to respect that and they sure as shit won't follow you anywhere.
Instead, you have to strike the balance between working competently and putting finite, worker-friendly limits on the job. Make your coworkers' jobs easier with what you do, but don't take it to the point of working for free or cutting corners (think safety).
I honestly think a lot of antiwork stuff is an op, or at least seriously misguided. I'm not antiwork I'm anti-surplus value extraction. I like my job and I like performing labour for the betterment of society.
Yeah me too. I wonder if the length of the work day has anything to do with surplus labour. I bet someone wrote a book about this once
it's progressive petty bourgeois politics. These sorts of things have always emerged and are primarily rooted in anarchism and tend to gain influence among the middle classes and sections of the proletariat. It's not "correct" but because it's a historic phenomenon I doubt it's an op
anti-work is right. Working (or volunteering) should not be a prerequisite to being in community. Even if you're getting all your surplus value. Shirking work under capitalism is a great way to keep yourself sane and healthy. That said, if you want to organize effectively, you've got to get people's respect, and that often means working hard.
Weaker imperial core, more relative strength to the periphery. Of course at some point that might lead to a new hegemonic power, if the CPC fails in achieving socialism.
we should still do parts of our job that makes other worker’s lives easier, because that isn’t work, it’s solidarity
I would imagine this applies to all labor necessary for the maintenance of society, and we're redefining "work" at this point. "Antiwork" is similar to "prison abolition" in that respect. It has a solid core but favors sloganeering over speaking plainly, and no matter how many caveats we throw in the :grillman: response will be "that just doesn't make sense."
Just being a genuine person goes very far, I can find common ground shooting the shit about issues me and my co-workers are dealing with and doing a little bit of communist dog-whistling without explicitly saying it. Use your education to guide them towards the contradictions but don't openly say you are quoting Mao.
I don't deal with too many right wingers (though I did work with a Joe Rogan guy from an ex-communist country who could not stop bringing up trans kids) so I don't know how you'd deal with more prejudiced coworkers, but if you don't outright say you're a communist most people will assume you're some sort of pro-union Bernie guy who they can agree with sometimes and the red scare implant in their brain doesn't go off.
Raises important question, what does “being normal” entail? Are openly queer comrades working in hostile environments not ‘normal’?
It means don't call people fascist for every little thing
this is great but how we are defining “every little thing”?
Being bigotted/not as socially progressive as you are.
There are plenty of working class people who think telling people not to say slurs is “being weird.”
Depends on the slur but...talk to them about that if you want but don't call them a fascist in person just to be done with it
My point is don't throw someone out entirely for being problematic, maybe they can't be a good communist but their material interests are likely aligned with yours so they can still be union members and strike
I’m asking you to explain how marginalized people can stand up for ourselves and not be treated like we’re “being weird”
I never said standing up for yourself is being weird, in fact I think being insulted and just standing there isn't normal at all but I guess if you're queer and you're tasked with talking to someone who is openly bigoted against you then someone else in your organization should do it, that's the benefit of being in an organization even if you're, understandably, not ok with doing something (that nevertheless should be done) there might be someone who is.
Being normal: "hey, so that word is kind of rude to people like <coworker>, they might not want to help us out if you keep saying things like that. This kind of stuff works if as many people are involved as possible, so even if you don't like <coworker> we should be open to working with them to make the group stronger. [Alt. I know you like hanging out with <coworker> so you want them to feel chill working with us, right?]"
Not being normal: "your use of slurs is a textbook example of racism. It's exclusionary and jargon jargon jargon."
The second one is technically correct, but doesn't actually teach the person you're talking to that racism/sexism/etc is a dividing strategy used by the bourgeoisie. The former spells it out but frames it in as simple of terms as possible. People understand the concept of being on friendly terms with someone to achieve a larger goal rather intuitively. They just have to be convinced it will work.
It's very case dependent but the key is to try to think as strategically as possible (of course understanding that we're also humans with emotions and needs). People you're trying to agitate with are never going to be perfect.
In the case of reactionaries, it's okay to respond to their nonsense by calling it fascist, but something being justified doesn't mean it's strategic and achieves your goals. If you've determined they've got revolutionary potential (i.e. they're working class and not financially comfortable) then you've got to try to meet them where they're at.
Of course a lot of people are not worth the effort, in which case do whatever serves you.
Star Wars is fascist, Harry Potter is fascist neo-feudal dreck, selfie-obsession is fascist, British soap-operas are fascist, sci-fi is generally fascist, ironic detachment is fascist, porn is fascist. Masscult under imperialism is inherently fascistic. Sorry to spoil your 'fun'.
To invoke one of this site’s greatest copypastas, always stray away from forming a maoist cult that deems visa silver signature rewards cards and phones to be fascist and claims that it’s bad vibes to use “bourgeois apps” such as doordash
As someone who lives in and organizes in Portland, I have no idea. I've always just been openly queer and it's never been an issue. It often draws out progressives and helps me vet people.
Meeting people where they're at and putting in reasonable effort to understand social norms/cues to effectively influence people.
It's essential to separate the tactical concept from the value judgement here, because we don't want to become norm enforcers that bully people who aren't "normal", but we do need to put constant effort into achieving our goals. If certain behaviors or patterns aren't conducive to our goals we need to critically assess and engage with them. There's obviously a ton of nuance involed, but we need to be able to give and take criticism, internalizing some amount of dynamicity and growth potential both personally and socially.
Everyone is capable of improvement, and someone unable to take criticism isn't going to be useful to any movement.
There's a distinct difference between "criticism" as a value judgement, used to enforce in-group/out-group behavior, and constructive criticism coming from within a group towards other members of that group. The former is toxic and unhelpful, the latter is necessary for any level of relationship or organization to function.
I'm not a neurotypical social butterfly, this isn't me pointing at an Other and telling it to be more like me. This is me, a part of a larger group, saying that we as a group need to help each other improve. We're not going to get anywhere in our current form.
Fortunately, everyone is dynamic, in a constant process of becoming who we are, full of tensions and impulses and energies that we can influence. We aren't stagnant objects to be cast aside just because we don't presently match a necessary ideal.
Neurodivergent (autistic) people who force themselves to constantly be in the lookout for social norms and police their own behavior are statistically more likely to hurt themselves. This isn’t a thing people can just improve on. I don’t think neurotypical people can even improve when it comes to social interaction. I’ve never seen a single person fundamentally change their behavior in a way that makes them more likable or charismatic, only curbing behavior that hurts themselves or others directly, or practice for specific scenarios that come up often.
This is completely untrue for all the NT and ND people I've dealt with. At a bare minimum, there's a reason why teenagers are socially awkward relative to adults. It's because teenagers, by virtue of lacking experience, have poor social skills which they then improve on so that by the time they're adults, they are no longer socially awkward. I would say your average 30 year old ND is less socially awkward than your average 13 year old NT. On a more tragic note, people who have abusive parents tend to be better at reading people's body language and facial expressions, and it's not just a case of them being NT (because they're good relative to NTs with supportive parents). It's because living under the roof of abusive parents force them to be good at reading their abusive parents' expression so they know when the abusive parents would lash out at them.
As an aside, it's completely unhelpful to conceptualize social skills as some charisma stat point. It's like conceptualizing physical prowess as simply athleticism when athleticism is completely multifaceted. Someone who is good at swimming doesn't predispose them to be good at gymnastics. This extends even to seemingly similar physical activity (sprint running vs marathon running). Social skills are the same thing. You can be good at giving a presentation but suck at dating, be good at actively listening to a distressed friend but suck at selling yourself in a job interview.
Having said that, I also believe there's a cost/benefit metric towards improving any given social skill and that the cost/benefit metric for certain social skills is too high for certain NDs, meaning there's no real point in wasting time and effort just to marginally improve those social skills that no one would notice or appreciate.
This isn’t a thing people can just improve on.
Speak for yourself, jackass. If you want to argue that you're completely incapable of improving some skill or another be my guest, but don't do it by arguing that I am incapable and imply that someone who doesn't agree with you is being bigoted against me.
I legitimately believe that skill improvement is an illusion
Well you're wrong and should reconsider such silliness.
Well I have done it myself, I'm sorry to hear that you don't know how to build skills :edgeworth-shrug:
More the former. Not speech drills specifically because I don't have those kinds of problems, but stuff like actively consciously learning stuff like body language, facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, etc. None of that came naturally to me so I learned it.
curbing behavior that hurts themselves or others directly, or practice for specific scenarios that come up often.
I mean this is a great example of what I'm talking about, realizing certain thoughts/behaviors aren't useful to one's goals and trying to change them, or putting effort into practicing things one isn't good at but wants to be better at, that's all part of the dynamic process of becoming. This idea that neurodivergent people can't improve or alter their behavior is significantly more ableist than the idea that they can. I've altered my own behavior that I realized was toxic many times. I've altered my thought processes significantly in order to better interact with myself and the world around me. The person I was 10 years ago is unrecognizable to the current me. Similar potential and processes are there for every single person I know in real life, neurodivergent or otherwise.
The idea that anyone can't change is idealist and defeatist and easily disprovable by observing anyone for a moderate period of time. That doesn't mean that they should necessarily, but the idea is if a person has goals and is part of a group that has goals, some amount of effort is reasonably spent achieving those goals. Conforming to arbitrary norms doesn't matter in and of itself, though.
And yes, this dynamicity can and should also happen at the group level, not just the individual level. If a person in a group doesn't feel comfortable or isn't effective at being the spokesperson for the group, then that role should be filled by someone else. There's a lot of work that needs done.
But most of us are interacting as individuals with other individuals since we don't have access to an org. In which case it's generally a good standard to try and do the best we can, as well as try to improve and practice at it.
It's certainly a problem with the phrase "be normal", which acts as a signifier for a broad array of concepts, only one of which is particularly useful. I know the intent of it was good faith so I interpreted it as that useful concept instead of the others. But if it came from anyone who wasn't a comrade I'd react differently.
This discussion has an interesting meta aspect to it in that we're hashing out the concept of communicating criticism or need for improvement without reinforcing unnecessary or harmful norms.
:be-normal: has some :bateman-ontological: vibes though. Even though I have nothing against it (and think an emote for it would be neat) used here, but outside of this place "be normal" was used quite a lot to deal violence out against people like me.
The phrase's brevity gives it some overlap with a lot of different concepts, many of which are unfortunately associated with norm policing, otherizing, and oppression.
But the core essence that Brace was trying to communicate is essential. Not that acting outside the norm is bad or that atypical people are less human, but that as a tactical process, we have to be aware of how we're perceived by the people we're trying to influence and meet them where they're at. Just because we're right doesn't mean people will listen.
A phrase better than "be normal" would be nice tbh. But it is concise.
IDK seems pretty clear to me from the context of OP's post that that's not what we're talking about here comrade
Emphasis on be normal. Also helps if you got a buddy who is also normal and is a communism enjoyer so you arent the only person saying 'wild' things
Great post obvs, but thank you for pinning these kind of posts.
In short: Stop protesting, start organizing.
Protests are networking events for agitated workers. Use them as such.
Holding a witty sign does nothing by itself, but you can use them to serve as a litmus test for who would be decent to organize with or agitate.
Networking is another great case of "be normal." A lot of marxist orgs do it really badly. SAlt is a great example. They'll come up to you agitating on an issue and then pitch joining SAlt or coming to a SAlt-members-only rally. If you push them outside of their rapport structure they'll try to steer you back into it and it feels like you're talking to a salesman. Or like, a lot of Marxist orgs will just ask you to join or hand you a leaflet or newspaper and by the end of most protests I've got a stack of socialist pamphlets to throw away.
I think the best way to do it is "if you're interested in organizing on this particular issue, we're the folks to do it with" or "if you want to use this particular approach, come talk to us"
Protests aren't just networking events, they're also a show of power. If you're also organizing, the a protest is a way to say "these are all the people we can mobilize to fuck with you."
If you're doing direct action, a protest can be a way to do it en masse as propaganda of the deed. The anarchists who organized protests during the UC strikes and then took over buildings and erected blockades are a great example. By the end of the strike, many non anarchists were using the same tactics (much to the picket Marshall's dismay)
Eh, I'm probably not going to "be normal" even if I try real hard. In fact, my attempts to try real hard are so obvious that it makes seem both weird and desperate. Also, I need to get a job to be able to do workplace agitation. idk, I can believe in a project but also be really really bad at evangelising.
I'm not saying "pretend to not awkward" I'm saying don't be the guy with the uhsanka and a newspaper
I believe in you. I'm an autistic weirdo and I am pretty confident that I come across as such irl but I've been able to improve and have some pretty good organizing conversations. You don't need to evangelize, rather: educate, agitate, organize - it's not just a slogan
