#left #organizing #labor #no-shortcuts #basebuilding #cohost-repost
2023-08-05
I get that progress is slow and talking to people is hard, but Just Doing Things or Telling People To Do Things gets less people on our side per time investment and we need to aim for scale.

maybe it's different in the big cities but I doubt it, outside of having more people who are curious.

but maybe that's because I view movements as pedagogical and logistical more than about action -- once the background is there, the rest flows from it.

so many previous movements that chased the car and then caught up with it ended up falling apart because people were driven by fervor and FOMO and pressure, so were doing the actions but didn't have their brain in the right place and helped things fall apart.

party building, commune building, etc are pulling carts before horses. You have to build the popular support first imo. Which we don't have and never really did.

Sure, people support them with their words, but that's not what I mean.

I guess I'm just tired of people repeating the same things every 3 years with no real changes outside of what vocabulary people use. Maybe I've been to a lot of cities and sampled a lot of proto-movements, but the ones that work are the ones that don't really have much structure. Informal networks of people that can be mobilized when necessary, with the skills to know when and how to act, and the structures to enable that. From strike support to disaster response to etc.

But doing those things as your goal instead of building up that motivation and framing in the people around you, means that you aren't doing anything, really. You're ahead of the majority of people who would otherwise be on your side because you haven't bothered to build that up. But when things are your focus, instead of building the capacity to do the things, it means once you burn out, there's no one there to replace your group. Or if your group has to have other priorities due to emergency, etc.

The left has a problem of overpromising and under-delivering, all I ask is that you help stop doing that.

You'll need 50k people per city to make much of an impact. The left, nationally, is at about 750k BEST CASE if we're talking people both knowledgeable and able to act on it. Probably closer to 250k plus people who know the theory but can't put it into practice, and people willing to act but don't have the theory bringing it to that 750k number. the US is 330m, or 330,000k. the US Left as it stands isn't even 1%, and doesn't have much to show for it.

I'm not saying don't do other things, but I am saying that if you aren't raising up the average rando, the base, who's around you and involved in your communities, enough that you have popular support in your area, something's wrong.

The math is way worse outside of dense urban areas.

Recruiting isn't an answer, because that's both self-sorting, and means if you don't educate people, they'll risk slowly being a thorn in your side as they often (not their fault) misinform more low-information members if you end up with a critical mass of progressives who don't know how things work outside the dem party palace-intrigue Machiavellianism.