They wanted the police to give them a participation badge, a pat on the head, and a "good work, buddy."

Well?

I think they were saying that's fine because it stops American imperialism.

Electoralism I always took to mean "trying to achieve your goals through politics."

in a nutshell: fascists can get bold under Trump. Trump himself isn't the threat.

I couldn't stomach voting for Trump.

Personally, I think the odds are higher in the Trump timeline, enough so that I consider a Trump win the better outcome, but I also think the risks are higher. It's just that the risks are outweighed by the broader risks we face from climate change.

Under Trump

Something sure as fuck is gonna happen, but it may or may not be something we like. The left is weaker and less prepared than the right. While fascist aggression under Trump would probably galvanize a subset of everyday people into action, and the ranks of the left would probably swell, it might be too little too late.

However, and for me this is the key point: if the police lose legitimacy under Trump, then a lot of things become possible. The left can act outside the law without the entire public condemning it immediately, and the state will have to temper its retaliation to avoid further public backlash. I can imagine success this way.

Under Biden

I think lib support for protests and riots would dry up completely. Lib support is a weird thing, because libs themselves don't do anything, but I think their feelings still have an effect. I think a Biden 2020 timeline slows down the protests enough that they don't go anywhere.

On the other hand, we have some breathing room to gather strength and prepare ourselves before shit hits the fan. The question is, in my mind: do we have time for the Biden route? Personally, I really fear that we don't.

What about state opposition?

...oh man, that does sound plausible.

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The tradeoff is that, while a crisis is more likely under Trump, fascist opposition might also be more effective under Trump.

Might be better to do a tagging system instead.

more difficult than it sounds

it sounds pretty difficult to me, my brief post here doesn't even begin to touch on all the things we'd need to think about before this becomes a viable idea. It was not fun to read a wall of text addressing me like I'm the sort of person who thinks this sounds easy.

I guess it's kinda my fault for putting that ambitious title on top of this short post, and also not specifying how long I thought we could "hide the communist nature of the whole thing"

like,

we might need that, but we don't have that. How do you propose...

I mean, no shit. Like any other revolutionary process, it's difficult, in fact probably impossible without some kind of external crisis (but we have a few of those brewing), and the people at the tip of the spear are gonna have to be pretty smart, like the revolutionaries of the past all have been. That's just how the game works.

When you judge only by the scale of the change, the formation of the Soviet state was also an impossible task and should have taken a lifetime. But the Soviet state didn't form under normal circumstances. It didn't plod linearly into being. Right now neoliberalism is less and less able to provide for people, and that helps a project like this gain traction, and makes people madder when the state inevitably crushes it.

before long the existing forces of capital would in no way allow the expansion or acquisition of resources (including land).

Yes, of course. Like I said in my original post, they're going to attack sooner or later. Our job when that happens is to attempt to force them to respond in a way that normal people will perceive as an attack, so that the attack further radicalizes people and we enter a vicious cycle, the sort that we have seen in history before.

Eventually there's going to be chaos. The goal here is to improve our position as much as we can before that point, so we can influence the outcome.

There is no way to secretly coordinate a shadow economy

That it's being coordinated isn't the secret. The end goal is the secret, for however long it can be kept. The operational goals in the intermediate future are secret. The extent of coordination is, if not secret, obfuscated to the best of our ability.

And yeah, fuck, nothing stays secret, but that's missing the point.

The whole gambit here is just a race to make one rate stay above another rate: the rate of growth of your power must stay higher than the rate of increase of state resources dedicated to destroying you, until you are strong enough to survive when all hell finally breaks loose. You get me? Whether or not this is possible might even be beside the point, since success is not all-or-nothing.

popularly accepted vanguard

I don't even think that's how vanguards work. Maybe we're talking about two different things, but to me a vanguard, at this stage in the process, is just a web of people who, after scheming together, go out and help to coordinate local activities. Each person wins over their own local community. None of the regular Cubans Frank Pais organized knew the extent of the project they were involved in.

Comrade, this is communism

This is just the embers of communism, flaring up in some subset of communities before the state stamps it out and pisses off those communities. You're saying I'm skipping to the end goal but I'm not, the state still exists.

Co-ops already exist in real life that do not have this problem.

the CIA targets leftist movements? Wait for real? These guys sound bad.

This is sort of responding in platitudes. Like "propaganda can reinforce a material argument but not replace it" has a nice ring to it but it's not specific enough to argue against. Both your perspective and my perspective are way too complex to compare using sentences like this one. It's a great way to end up talking past each other.

I kept editing this because it was hard to put into words why this bothered me.

No one's being tricked into revolution. This isn't the revolution, it's just prep work.

Also, co-ops are businesses. They're separate from the community organizing stuff. To control them we just set them up that way, like a franchise. We make their material operation depend in some way on cooperation with the larger organization.

No, the co-ops would not consist of true believers. Most of the co-ops would consist of normal people who might have no idea what they are involved with. The first aim of the co-ops is to starve capital, gather money for buying residential land, and put a network of communication in place for later use.

The state hasn't crushed REI. There is a range of behaviors that the state won't crush. The aim is to pretend, for as long as possible, that this is what you are.

As you're perceived to leave that range of behaviors, the resolve of the state to crush you increases the further away you get. It might be possible (and this discussion cannot determine whether it is or not) to build up your resistance to ways of crushing you, at the same rate at which the state increases its resolve to crush you, so that you remain ahead for a little while even outside the range of acceptable behaviors.

The point of "hiding the communist character of the whole thing" is to delay a serious response from the state, not get ordinary people to go along with it

Similar thing for avoiding marxist language. The word "socialism" is gonna occur to people almost immediately. But the more jargon we use the more culturally foreign we are, and the less accessible our ideas are, and the easier we are to win court cases against or bash in the press, and the harder it is for people involved with us to explain to those not involved what exactly their job is.

The act of organizing and wielding power is what radicalizes

That's the whole point of this.

How does a vanguard party work when it can't even source ideas from marxism?

They would source ideas from marxism. They'd all be marxists. They just wouldn't use weird jargon in public. "If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it" and all that. Avoiding jargon makes ordinary people feel more comfortable involving themselves with what you're doing. They won't worry so much that others might judge them, or that the media will tar and feather them.