A bunch of white guys screetching at black folks about Lenin is shitty and removes the solidarity we need to build. Especially when we need to focus on reaching out to BIPOC and making them feel welcomed and invaluable in these spaces.

Overall, there’s a lot of work to be done & and it’s about building positive relationships with people in order to build a larger coalition strong enough to take down the most capitalist/imperialist country of all time.

Hmm I see so my org has a dirth of white guys in it and I assure you where I live doesn't so my experience hasn't been like yours at all. I just see all of us working on fragmented projects, realizing the problems we want to solve have insane structural barriers like this federal law or this state provision and then all we are reduced to is doing bandaid stuff. That is why I feel that at the very least organization over the entire state is necessary.

Also I am curious many states would have BIPOC people as an incredible hyper minority right? I mean your local DSA preaches to BIPOC people about Lenin? Like I would imagine the more common thing happening would be that you tell some random unhoused person to read lenin. Which I am also inclined to thing is stupid and premature. But the idea behind reading Lenin is to learn from the people who were active in the past, had to answer a no of strategic questions and tried to give an answer to that. Reading them sounds like a decent idea to me for at least organizers who are deeply involved in their orgs and trying to figure out the best way of distributing resources and deciding on strategies? Also not just saying you only read Lenin. I am just starting out on trying to read books on organizational questions. The books I suggested just gave answers and pointed to problems which I often feel confronted with in my organizing time :)

Edit: Also I kinda feel there is some inherent mismatch between the ideas that the stuff to do outside of labor organizing is 'stop prop 22' and 'make colleges free' while the problem is 'we don't listen to BIPOC people' and 'people screeching at others to read Lenin'. Or maybe the latter is an answer to some different problem. I will be honest I dunno anyone around me reading Lenin but definitely a lot more reading Dean Spade, Mariam Kaba, etc (not saying that is bad but just stating that there is a lot of emphasis on reading ideas from LGBT and BIPOC people. I hardly tell anyone about Lenin because that just sounds like a terrible way to communicate his ideas in this country - there is just too much anti-communist and USSR bias so I just try to talk in terms of strats.)