i.e. “go organize” “do direct action”
like to me it very much betrays the fact that no one in the conversation has any idea What Is To Be Done at all. It feels like the Online Marxist version of “It’s not my job to educate you.” I genuinely think treating these words as shibboleths is extremely disorganizing if someone is signalling “I feel impotent here and I am horrified and want to help, how do I help in a way that matters.”
imo abstraction in general is a spectre haunting the American Left (i.e. demonstrating for demonstrations sake being diffusive). that and defaulting to “go do Propaganda of the Deed.” in my bones I feel that most of the time there is a specific action one can arrive at in which the premise is neither vibes nor killing someone that would materially address a specific issue.
tl;dr: NYC-DSA and NYC PSL should be actively considering the logistics of an attempt to dearrest Maduro
tl;dr 2: break into Weapons Factories and pour substances on the machines
Mutual Aid is another term that has been rendered meaningless by social media.
i really hate this its basically just charity that makes the giver feel better, it has nothing to do with trying to build an organization where people in need help each other which is the actual definition
I have been saying to people that mutual aid won’t achieve revolution without more radical action. The church has been doing “mutual aid” for a thousand years. Community defence, tenants unions and other acts of organising the local community are significantly more effective actions to take.
Idk if the church did mutual aid, they’re very extractive. They did charity. Good mutual aid serves its purpose, it saves lives for the revolution and is great for turning people into hardliners. It also is good for organizational and logistical experience
The church provides therapy services. Catholic confession is an early form of therapy service. Clergy are community therapists. Not to mention providing a free space for all kinds of clubs and services.
I don’t think you know anything about mutual aid in theory or practice. Mutual aid is not just “people do things together”. You also know little about history, the tithe was obligatory (and in some countries still is). They would burn your fields and torture your family if you didn’t seem christian enough and perform the tithe. Therapy also is arguably not mutual aid. Mutual aid is about material change in a material world. You can keep consoling people as they starve to death, but that doesn’t really help them, does it?
I’m done with this conversation.
My favorite is mutual aid, not charity posters and then it’s an org collecting donations for not closer defined purposes.
it’s hard to give specifics on organizing because it depends on the local situation and the things we should be arming up and doing are very get arrested or killed kinds of things so people are rightly not talking about that online.
Yes. That’s absolutely fair. Just yesterday I commented that, as a rule, I don’t talk about my offline actions/organizing online.
I do think OP is on to something, though. I feel like even pointing people in the direction of Food Not Bombs or telling folks to just look at community bulletin boards (lots of organizing around me still happens by way of physical bulletin boards, posters on light poles, etc.), or even like… “hang out at your local crusty coffee shop and wait for the lefties to show up, and make friends with them” would all be more helpful than “GO DO DIRECT ACTION”.
Lots of people are pretty isolated from leftist ideologies in the real world and their only connection to them may very well be online, and it’s easy to forget that someone asking “What can I do??” Might likely be best served by a gentle nudge in a much more productive direction.
as a rule, I don’t talk about my offline actions/organizing online.
This is the best policy imo, especially when you’re dealing with someone hostile who is demanding that you “prove” you actually walk the talk because:
-
Doxing yourself is bad but at least you have to live with the consequences of you choosing to comprise your pseudo-anonymity whereas compromising an org is really really bad and everyone has to live with the consequences of your poor choices.
-
If they are demanding proof then that’s sketchy and gives fed vibes.
-
It sets an expectation that we should be openly talking about our organizing efforts (beyond general “I went to an antiwar demonstration in solidarity with Venezuela” type organizing).
-
Hostile people will either accuse you of bragging or making things up, so it’s a catch-22 situation.
-
Libs especially have no idea what organizing actually looks like.
To elaborate on the last point I went through a whole guac is extra routine with someone on social media quite a while ago. They kept demanding that I tell them on a public social media platform of all the organizing I’ve done to “prove” that I actually care about causes and that I’m “allowed” to criticize Kamala Harris legitimately in their eyes (might have been a Russian bot come to disturb the peaceful waters of Yankee politics or something) and I explained that there’s no point because they won’t have a clue about the orgs I’m referring to and that they don’t have websites with hotlines you can call and signup pages like some DNC fundraiser or recuperative “grassroots” “activist” group. They kept pushing and I eventually relented and I said that I’ve been involved in AFA organizing for a number of years. I was intentionally being opaque and I chose that type of organizing for a reason which soon became apparent.
They immediately run to Google and the first hit they get is to a Wikipedia entry for a cold war AFA group from the Netherlands that went defunct in the 90s or something (revealing a lot about their own search bubble that they exist within - not good for opsec btw) and they started grilling me on my nationality and age so I messed with them for a little bit before I called them out on it, saying that I told them that they don’t understand what AFA actually means and that I’m not going to reveal my location and that, like I said earlier, even if you had enough info search this up you wouldn’t find anything to verify the org, let alone the actions that have been carried out, let alone that I have participated in organizing in that group because there’s no website and there’s no meeting minutes that get published online or anything like that. From memory, they seemed to be uncertain about AFA referring to antifascist activism in the first place and they also seemed very skeptical that there was any need for this work (in post-war western Europe btw - deeply unserious.)
I think I eventually got through to them but I knew exactly where it was going to end up from the outset. These are the types of people that consider themselves the resistance btw and they don’t even understand that orgs can be underground or semi-underground. Imagine if they found themselves in Chile the day after the coup and they were trying to do some actual organizing for resistance then ask yourself if there’s one single thing to be gained by seeking the approval of a political naïf like that.
Anyway if your organizing efforts are done for bragging rights or to “prove” the legitimacy of your politics then this is an extremely lib, individualistic mindset that you have and it makes you a hazard.
-
I’ve thought for a long time there needs to be a master list somewhere that gives you links to local organizations by state. A directory. I’ve been told by others though that building a list is doing the feds work for them. Frankly I think they already have that list.
I’ve been told by others though that building a list is doing the feds work for them. Frankly I think they already have that list.
Yeah 100%, that’s ridiculous, it’s all public info it’s just not collected well. Obviously any intelligence/law enforcement agency has already paid their employees the relatively small amount of money required to go through the effort of collecting it. People really have the strangest ideas about how agents work and how to guard yourself against them.
At least there are surface-facing “safe®” orgs that can be points of access forother types.
fair point. I do think it as a term is wielded as a shibboleth by armchairs in a chastising way towards alienated proles that can be hard to filter out from opsec-aware attempts at vagueness though.
as always the test is “is this person part of an org” but the internet uniquely blends all commentary into faceless slurry so it just generally demotivates
Sometimes you can also say “buy a gun and join an union” but that’s advice that’s similarly not super actionable for a lot of people, especially the more alienated they are.
It’s not a shibboleth, it’s a buzzword.
It can be an inverted shibboleth where the person saying it then gets to recognize themselves as being part of the in-group they want to be in.
Oh, fair enough. I hadn’t heard of that use before, but it makes sense.
I hadn’t heard it before either, we’re negating and sublating freestyle.
Can I be honest? Like 90% of serious hexbear vocab words mean nothing to me anymore.
BMF FUTURES LOOKING GOOD, BUT BEAN WATCH IS ON RED ALERT. PET YOUR LOCAL OUTSIDE CAT OR YOU’RE A REVISIONIST.
Both of these terms have very clear definitions to me but I they can be vague if you have no experience with then.
Organizing as far as I understand it means to grow a well structured movement. It usually consist of a series of escalating actions that bring more people to your movement. It can take place in any structure, but the classic example is workplace or union organizing. Which is to bring workers together in order to build collective power to use at the bargaining table against their employer.
To start organizing you usually try to single out one or more issues within a structure that people seem to be very worried/annoyed about, and then try to get people together to join a workgroup with the goal to build collective power in order to fix that issue. You build a plan that involves a communication strategy for how to get a large majority of the people within your structure to join your campaign.
To build this plan you need to learn organizing theory first, otherwise you will be wasting a lot of time trying to reinvent the wheel and might demotivate those around you to take further action due to unnecessary losses.
There are many writings about organizing, I recently discovered the extensive list in the labor union community here on hexbear. I recommend the book secrets of a successful organizer as it very directly answers most questions a starting organizer might have about organizing their workplace. The same theory can be applied to community organizing as well.
Anyone who tells others to ‘just organize’ without explaining what that means is a really bad organizer. Probably the most important skill of a good organizer is being able to communicate in simple terms to people what steps they should take in order to successfully fight for their own interests, and then convince them to do it.
I do wonder how many people here on hexbear have actual organizing experience since I rarely see people talk about it. But it can be hard to discuss your organizing endeavours while protecting your identity, at least I struggle with that. Anyways I’m happy to answer any organizing related questions people may have.
Direct action is not something I’m specialised in. The idea seems simple as as far as I understand it is to disrupt any type of activity that you deem harmful. Like weapon shipments to genocidal entities. However I imagine there is a lot of strategy to come with it as it can be very risky and consuming so you want to choose the right targets. Personally I think direct action is most effective when it’s combined with some type of organizing as you want there to be masses of people to echo the demands of the activists and bring attention to their case to make sure that the state can’t just hide them away in order to silence their message.
deleted by creator
The rev neeeeeeeds civil engineers though. And that’s not necessarily a matter of unionization.
deleted by creator
Mostly it would be really nice to have certification of code compliance for natural building projects, or alternately, in the event of institutional collapse to know how much extra sturdy to make a structure, for everything from a regular one-story dwelling to a complex with a green roof in a seismic zone.deleted by creator
Yeah - might be time to start including examples to learn from (e.g. palestine action)
Just go organise brah, i organised my desk this morning what did you do liberal?
it’s because fedposting is not allowed. im not saying fedposting should be allowed, it’s just how it is. like anything beyond saying go organize or do a peaceful and non obstructive protest is not allowed, so people self censor.
Yeah.
Also, reading boring technical/field manuals about “how to do things” is … just… really unappealing to most people.
deleted by creator
