there once was a man who saw an orphanage on fire. he rushed inside and saw that the children were unattended, and were sitting around playing with some toys. he called for the children to run outside, but they were having too much fun playing around. so he yelled “outside there are amazing gifts from me for you to enjoy!” this grabbed the children’s attention, and they hurried into a nearby field. as they left the house it collapsed into fiery rubble. when the children looked around, they asked where these gifts were. the man replied, “don’t you see, the gift was getting you out of the burning house!”

revolutionary organizing works the same way.

if you approach the average person and start telling them about how great it is when the economy is planned in a socialist way, they’ll probably ask you to leave their apartment, adding something rude about how you broke in through a window. but if you can get the same person to agree that everyone should have safe and affordable housing, you might be able to get them to drop breaking and entering charges and start organizing for change. the transitional demand is the bridge between the demand for housing today and the demand for socialism in the future.

of course, just going around encouraging people to make demands on the system won’t change things in itself. it could end up being a “christmas list to santa” if it’s just words on your socialist paper that you sell outside the campus cafe because they won’t let you in there without buying a coffee anymore. you’ve got to have an overall strategy.

you might start with unionization efforts. democracy at the workplace is fundamental to socialist strategy, because people learn things in the struggle. people who spend all their time painting in the plain air (en plein air) don’t think about socialism much because they struggle with choice of colours and whether to wear a stained tunic to a picnic. people who work in factories work close to each other and do similar work, so they can talk about fighting for a raise or getting a pool table in the cafeteria. people start to realize that their boss, who looks a little like steve jobs, is a bit of a flake and not really the genius who deserves their respect that their e-book they wrote and made them read says they are. when the boss refuses to stock coke zero in the vending machine, even though everyone prefers it to diet coke, workers start to build links and learn experiences that will help them govern in the future.

an apolitical labour movement is not enough, because the boss isn’t the only problem. there’s a whole political system that hangs overhead, and the politicians employ a bunch of cops and soldiers that can ruin your day if you go anywhere near them or also don’t go near them. your first instinct is to try to run worker candidates in those elections they have, so that the government looks more like people in your factory or app developer open concept office, but that’s a dead end. the truth is that the state is a lot bigger than just a bunch of politicians, it’s really being run by business interests, and those interests aren’t going to let a bunch of labour officials start bossing them around and taking their stuff after a while.

so you’re going to need something called a revolution. a revolution is basically where you hash out your concerns with the existing government by telling them to screw off. you’ve got to start over, and have workers run society for themselves. the main problem is that the entire apparatus of the state gets testy at the idea that they’ve done a bad job and that they need a to go home. basically they are going to get so angry that you’re going to have to make sure they don’t ruin a bunch of people’s days more than normal. the best way to do this is to get everyone you can on board at once, and you can all either stay home from work or go out into the streets or basically just cause a big headache for capitalists. once the system grinds to a halt you can start just running things yourselves and letting the capitalists break rocks or whatever. it’s up to you.

one issue you’re going to face is that most people don’t want to go fight the government head-on on a daily basis. they’ve got bills to pay and they aren’t really sure things would work out. that’s why you need to organize together all the weird people who care a lot about socialism in the down periods. these people should get together and basically spend a lot of time trying to agree on what to do to advance the struggles and then do it. you can call yourself a party or a front or a cell or whatever. basically watch a bunch of movies about the 1970s and choose the organizational name which sounds the coolest afterwards (it’s fraktion). the name’s not that important. the point is that you’re all organized together so you can fight together when the moment comes.

sometimes people call themselves things like libertarian or fascist or conservative (these all mean the same thing) and they want to debate with you about communism. never talk to these people. it’s a waste of time. you’ll spend hours trying to prove to them that lenin didn’t think friendship was capitalist or something when you could just be working on ways to figure out how to take their stuff. you can argue a bit with reformists if you like because those people sometimes call themselves socialists, although they usually mean something by that like sweden or narnia. action is always better than debate.

there are lots of struggles other than the labour movement you should be attuned to. feminism, anti-racism, ecology, anti-war… there are so many. sometimes people think these are all connected. while that’s true, don’t debate about this too much, lest you start wondering where they are connected, as if there is some spatial factor involved, a mystical realm of oppressions that intersect. just learn about the different sorts of problems you and other people have and how socialism will completely fix them forever.

sometimes people want you to get really angry about stalin. there are people called trotskyists who basically do this all day when they aren’t running publishing houses. about this: there was once an american who loved buddhism so much that he went to japan. when he finally got to a remote temple, he saw that the zen monks were praying to a statue of the buddha. the american was stunned. he said that he had heard stories that the buddhists were great iconoclasts, and that they spat on statues of the buddha. a monk turned to the american and said “you can spit if you want to, i prefer to pray”.

https://medium.com/@getfiscal/the-getfiscal-guide-to-organizing-the-socialist-revolution-a3a4ea01652

Petrol posted:

I love you, donald.

thank you petrol

Petrol posted:

I love you, donald.

tpaine posted:

debating is like chess.

chess is a metaphor for race war

jeffery posted:

Petrol posted:

I love you, donald.

thats a white heart

Agnus_Dei posted:

P11: Stalin had nowhere near the wisdom of the Buddha.

TAKE IT BACK, FUCKRE

Agnus_Dei posted:

Alright, I waited a while so you could suck it up. Time for the honest critique.

Paragraph 1: The man deceives the children.
Paragraph 2: meme.
P3: It is impractical to give everyone safe and affordable housing.
P5: My workplace would not be responsive to unionization efforts, and would consider them a joke.
P7: This totally underestimates the difficulty in overthrowing the government. You act like being a nuisance is the same thing.
P9: Here you dismiss talking to the vast majority of people despite trying to build a mass movement.
P11: Stalin had nowhere near the wisdom of the Buddha.

Seems like you dont have much evidence. Till next time, joel