The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that’s it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn’t seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.
Both of those are very active projects that require an embedding in community, particularly a community that is going to be around for a while.
Most left groups in the US make no attempt whatsoever to build within and among a community. Many of the seeming exceptions get rerouted into a charity pipeline. They might call it mutual aid but it tends to be structured as charity with the money and labor coming from outside the community to simply provide a service for the most destitute inside the community, plus other little telltale signs. There is little work done to radicalize, incorporate, learn from the community itself, including the whole community, not just those deemed worthy of charity.
The other challenge is that communities are in transition. You try to set up shop somewhere and maybe 10 years later it’s an entirely new set of people due to increased property values + increased cost of living + stagnant paychecks. To me this means you can’t half-ass it, as you’re going to need to create a resilient network that can move and connect across the new places people need to live and work.
But to me the main issue is that groups don’t even really try in the first place. Sometimes this is even for ideological reasons.
I can affirm this with experience. My own personal hope is that because the American communist movement is just being resparked that it’s simply smouldering in the kindling right now before really catching fire. which unlike a nice campfire, can take months to years to actually see results.
That said, like you’ve mentioned, having kindling catching fire - growing a connection to your community - is something I do notice is the biggest shortfall of the many communist parties in the United States. I also say that with the caveat that I’m aware that a lot of the actual groundwork of building connections tends to be more clandestine, interpersonal, and quite dull, so it usually goes unnoticed and unrecognized, so outside of my direct circles of knowledge and into the whispering void, I do know that this is occuring at a crawling pace in the U.S. So it’d be best to probably get used to seeing what we’re seeing now for a decent while, or not seeing in this case.
Quite frankly I’m of the opinion we need more nose-to-the-grindstone communists, something I try to strive to be myself and help others I know work towards as well.
Yeah despite the critical tone I used I’m optimistic that American commies are getting better at this stuff. I see competent comrades peeling away from troubled orgs and doing cool things all over the place and I think those seeds you mentioned are being planted.
ok prob awful thought, if folks (i.e. population at large) are already OK with subscribing to influencers, personalities, etc. is it possible to do the same for like a few communists? like bolshevik being a smaller group than the mensheviks…
IDK just spitballing don’t @ me pls
There are comrades getting funding for projects through patreon or ko-fi, and there’s also stuff like comradery.co
Could you explain this a bit more? I’ve met enough comrades that got burnt out because their effort was not met with success. (This is a well-meaning question, I feel like it does not read that way, sorry)
So I had a big thing typed out and then had to step away before posting it because I hadn’t finished the last sentence, and then had my phone reload the page leading to it getting deleted. So I’ll shorten it like it’s not butter.
Folks need to go get jobs and live their lives among their coworkers as open, honest, reliable, and comradely commies, preferably in heavy industry or logistics or critical light industrial sectors, to both normalize and organically grow a rooted network of comrades, allies, fellow travelers, and friends in both the community and the workplace. Basically long-term dull shit.
thx for going through the effort of retyping and I agree with your point. :)