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.
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. :)