I always feel like I'm hanging out in a punk/hardcore music scene (various anarchist groups, psl to some extent) or with lame improv nerds (dsa). I don't see either of these groups connecting with very many working class people. This is obviously a huge problem but (at least where I am) there is very little attempt to organize or recruit people making minimum wage, fast food workers, service industry, manual laborers etc. I mean shouldn't this be the main priority right now? I don't know I'm just venting but I'm baffled by how bad at organizing these groups are. Do they really just like being this cliquey group that is hard to get into and that's what really matters?
There are reasons why:
social class antagonisms. The left very much has a "college kids who didn't get the careers promised to them" feel to it right now. We don't recognize enough that a big part of college is upping your social class, and that doing so can alienate us. In general, since economic class is getting flattened into two strata, social class is our last refuge. And people on the left have a real problem discussing social elitism.
we ourselves struggle in the same capitalist reality as everyone else. The most effective organizer is going to be someone who works with you who radicalizes. But that same person is under threat of the same consequences if they talk about unionizing, and that shit sucks. Capitalism keeps our jobs under threat at all time to keep us docile. So even leftists who do work in those jobs have to reckon with that.
it is impossible to overstate how non existent the left was 20+ years ago in the US. We are rebuilding, and right now we can't be terribly particular about who with. So we take the dilettantes, the cranks, the weirdos, the outsiders, the people who want to use power but definitely shouldn't be given it, the people with disordered personalities. You know, the people who would be interested in a movement that rejects traditional elements of success. We have weak material and we don't really know what to do with power yet. This will get better, but at the small group levels like you're discussing, the catalyst can be literally just one person with good charisma who convinces the group to swap a reading night for a canvassing night or a tabling night.
The reason the left is mostly young and consists of college or recent graduates today has its historical contexts and reasons traced back to the new left in the 60s after having been previously purged from union leadership positions in the 50s and earlier by the HCUA and McCarthy and undergoing a major split and a shifting demographic by moving to cities. When that happened the left started orienting itself around the student movement and organizing marches and demonstrations through the 60s and 70s and saying things like "the students are the revolution", something that has virtually no historical context, nor any particular strategic implication that can often translate beyond mere spectacle. This largely shifted the socialist movement from its previous strong presence in organized labor, which hasnt been able to recover till now.
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yeah when the left gets full of normal people, hopefully we'll still have this site to be queer and mentally ill together
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If we enable people with abusive personalities, people will leave our movement or will drastically underperform compared to how well they'd do in recovery/away from an abuser.
People with trauma and personality disorders are a valuable part of the movement but we cannot afford to enable harmful behaviors.
This is just plainly not true. The "Left" is about as strong in 2020 as it was in 2004 or 2008, and that's arguably weaker than it was in 1996. Social attitudes have become more liberal, and the public faces of "the Left" are a lot more young and diverse than they were 20+ years ago (the Squad vs Kucinich and Sanders for example), but I mean come on. The Sunrise Movement ain't shit compared to what Greenpeace or the Earth Liberation Front were doing 20 years ago.
Rage Against the Machine was one of the most popular bands in the world 20 years ago, and they did things like shut down the NYSE for half a day because they filmed a music video there, caused a riot at the 2000 DNC, and openly supported left-wing guerillas in Chiapas.
If you go back slightly further, even in the mid-90s, there was more strike activity than in today's "record-breaking" time of unrest.
I know this is largely due to how young the 2020 Left is, but it's a serious case of erasing history to try to claim that the Left has made progress in the past 20+ years. We hit a nadir under Obama that we've barely started to crawl out of.
The openly socialist left of the 90s was a hollow joke, not taken at all seriously. Labor was stronger then, but still operated under neoliberal constraints, and its decline was very much in progress.
But I will give you that I should have said socialist instead of Left in my original post. Don't post multiparagraph statements 10 minutes before bedtime, folks!
All of this applies even more so today than it did back then. Modern one-day wildcat strikes that barely even match what the piss-weak, neoliberal unions were doing out of memory 25 years ago. Yes, they were in decline and lead to the situation were in today, but you're talking about Radlibs, not "the Left", if you try to claim that socialism is stronger now than it was back then. The big difference is that liberals have started to co-opt the term "socialist" more than they used to, though even back in like 2007/2008 it was pretty common for Lefty-ish people to say that they want to be "socialist like Denmark or Sweden".
The only part of the Left that is stronger than in the 90s is the PC-crowd, who now absolutely dominate the entire conversation.
I don't think a lot of people "on the Left" understand how much of a joke the rest of the world views, for example, Bernie or Corbyn supporters. "Silly kids".