Chana [none/use name]

Malcolm X had a pretty wild journey and while he never fully shed some reactionary and huckster aspects of his past, he became progressively communist.

The workers losing their struggles will come to different conclusions if left to themselves, which really means left to capitalist propaganda and their personal biases. Some can radicalize, others cynical but fearful of any future workplace organizing. This is another place where direct and honest socialist involvement can help, ideally at the stage of inoculation. If you tell people how things can go but convince them that it is worth the fight anyways, they won’t feel misled or betrayed and can point fingers in the right direction. Without that inoculation things tend to go worse.

I think the US will have several vanguard parties develop. My hope would be that they can move towards each other and merge rather than digging in heels when there is disagreement. The ones with wrong lines figuring this out, changing, and then merging. Or maybe a large membership shift to just one org. These are nice problems to have compared to today, with low memberships.

That USSR flag subliminally messaged you into being a commie.

Oh for sure. There are Workers United people in a lot of local socialist groups. They have a strong base for radicalization and militancy. My critique is at the organizational level. I’m only aware of sporadic Trot and DSA attempts to work directly on their campaigns and I wouldn’t describe either group as really knowing what they’re doing, i.e. being able to provide mentorship.

SWU was basically floundering for over a year with minimal support from SEIU. A perfect group to integrate with, they were also left floundering by most socialist groups. Part of this is also capacity, since socialist groups are small. It’s just part of the reality of why it is challenging to develop organizing skills.

No worries, friend. Take care of yourself! I know some folks in similar situations that are recharged by organizing and feel worse when taking breaks, but that’s definitely not everyone. Do whatever is best for you and consider this stuff when you’re ready.

I recall WhatsApp previously claimed e2e but actually they kept an unencrypted copy for themselves. After all, they control the clients.

I could never be responsible for that kind of thing. I’d immediately want to bomb the palace, aka worst idea ever.

This is somewhat like saying the only solution is revolution. Yes, 100%, but also there are important steps to highlight between, “0.1% of the population would mobilize” and, “civil war time”.

Union density is decreasing in the US. Proletarianization is increasing but the formal structures of organized labor are either eroding or hewing to nationalist imperialist angles. These are big problems! We should emphasize how we would tackle them. How does one build consciousness for a wildcat strike? What does production look like in the imperial core? What happens when people strike here, “illegally”? Etc etc.

Formal labor unions in the imperial core will disappoint. They will fight in their own interests, which are essentially petty bourgeois and nationalist. This doesn’t mean they are evil instead of good, it just means they won’t, of their own volition, press the communism button as part of a general strike and they are likely too beholden to feds to even do a proper coordinated strike. Entering those unions to reform them is difficult work, it requires years and years and actually working there and building relationships and not getting booted by careerist liberals (who currently run the show). It’s harder than salting. It’s called peppering, which is cute.

Anyways you’re right, not wrong, I just want to emphasize that the path there is very long given our current circumstances and I think it is good to focus on more immediate tasks. I also think the imperial core will probably require a series of catastrophes before these become viable things.

Mao condemned Kruschev for not starting a war with the US over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like a hot war.

He was fairly adventurist before he became communist. But in Bolivia he just miscalculated on how he could build support. The same strategy that worked in Cuban countryside did not work in Bolivia, it did not balloon with basically universal support. His understanding of local conditions was insufficient.

Hell yeah

I think it’s less extreme of a problem now than it was within the last several decades. The US is recovering from settler idealism and the red scare, with reproletarianization leading the charge. The Starbucks union kids were some of the earliest and most militant pro-Palestinian groups in the US after Oct 7, for example. But they aren’t getting much help in the way of seasoned organizers (outside of SEIU bureaucrats), let alone socialist ones. They make mistakes and figure it out on their own. Who would bring them into coalition and develop their approaches? The largest ML groups basically ignore them and the groups that do talk to them (like DSA) are routinely incompetent at organizing. PSL is insular (a Trotskyist tendency holdover) and FRSO is very focused on Teamster boondoggles. So this radicalizable group is basically ignored as a whole, with individual members joining orgs ad hoc, and has challenges developing. The things I listed, like adventurism, are the course that people take when they aren’t brought into socialist organizing.

Ha, nice. I had a socialist acquaintance in high school that put me off it for a bit. They didn’t actually know anything about socialism, they were just an asshole who was critical, on a personal level, of everyone else’s choices as “bourgeois”. Telling them to keep their shoes on their stinky feet was bourgeois. Having a job was bourgeois. I went the Socdem direction at first, having no concept of imperialism or the mechanisms of capitalism.

Ah, right, I actually forgot what OP had said, ha.

Then don’t worry about that particular task, friend. There are many roles in organizing and it isn’t just the socialist versions of cold calling, ha ha. Some example roles that don’t require this:

• Writing agendas and facilitating meetings

• Doing logistics for events (food, water, medical, transportation)

• Internal education

• Propaganda and art

• Booking locations for events

• Teaching / ensuring opsec and infosec (but not personally doing de-escalation)

• Research

• Making connections with friendly orgs

Haha, a feather for my cap. I exist in the ultraleft-liberal superposition. Good on you that you were cool before the SocDem Bernie Buzz.

I think the challenge with young people isn’t that they inherently have less experience due to being young but because they are surrounded by counterrevolutionary forces and don’t have many discoverable mentors of quality. They have to figure it out alone surrounded by careerist activism, adventurist tendencies, idealist affinity groups (aesthetic), etc etc. Older people are more likely to have gone through this already. But if you get young people into a good program they can run circles around veterans in just a couple years!

All of them are annoying. Okay black people can say brother but definitely not white people that’s always annoying.

So what so you think of an ironic, “brah”?

“Oh brother this guy stinks” is an essential part of the repertoire

Thank you, Ethan Klein

I’m excited for Mayor Mamdani to mobilize The People’s Safety Cadre to engage in urban guerilla warfare with the NYPD.

He’s learning

Ha ha, I guess it depends on how old a person is, but my impression is that Hexbear is a somewhat evenly distributed for ages 15-40 and then dwindles off. And I don’t really have any idea what the age distribution is on organizing here but I would not be surprised if the younger people had more experience and practical knowledge. A lot of millennial commies are burned out ex-Bernie supporters that never took many steps past canvassing and arguing online (no shade, this is a mass phenomenon with understandable causes). Of course, only older Hexbears can have decades of experience.

I do prefer to think of libs and ultras as being very different, though I acknowledge their formations are shaped by similar forces. Ultras are failed socialists, they made an attempt and reached wrong conclusions that, not coincidentally, tend to align with what the feds would want them to do. They are usually truly sympathetic to “the cause” and, outside of opportunist formations, can be reached and reintegrated into praxis without needing to be convinced of the necessity of socialist revolution. I have had lots of success integrating ultras into an ML cadre. Libs can be basically anything remotely allowable under the status quo. Gotta really suss them out during onboarding.

Personally I haven’t been called ultra by any younger people. But I’ve been called a lib! The only person that comes to mind who called me an ultra was a middle aged Trot that literally could not frame agitation in any way that wasn’t electoralist and didn’t mention Bernie Sanders.