wrote a bit of a screed in response to a tumblr ask today. talking about political disempowerment, access to power, and the importance of developing long-term goals and projects as a leftist
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in reply to @sarahzedig's post:
what good is community organizing? what good is any of this talk? how do we actually DO the fucking revolution?
for what it's worth, I think the reason to community organize is because it buys time to figure things out, and if it can't buy time, you now have many informal communications networks that trust each other somewhat, that can come together and have coherency when a crisis does happen. Whether that's a natural disaster, or a crisis that ratchets towards rev. We need them at the very least to build institutional memory, because without an institution -- a group, anything one personally learns leaves when they do, or they're the bottleneck when others need to learn. You want to reduce that as much as possible and widen that bottleneck before we're responding to the crisis.
but local matters, because diffuse on the internet means it's very hard to concentrate actions. Outside of that, those structures are already being built and already exist, we just need to figure out how to pivot that to hyper-local.
revolution is like enlightenment. You can't really build to it directly, not really. You build the support structures, and then one day suddenly there's enough room to just, do the things. You've built enough of the scaffolding, people feel they have odds that might even be winning odds if they're a little lucky. Everyone's already pissed. But a lot of the more vocal leftists are bringing firewood to the camp and forgetting about tinder.
there's other reasons to do community stuff, sure. But having the networks is the primary reason, and that's why you can be more ideologically flexible than people think. Because most people will realize when things are popping off, but lack people to work with, and being alone increases personal risk.
i tried to gesture in this direction but you nailed it perfectly.
one of my big takeaways from the history of the USSR is that the bolsheviks were running to catch up with the revolution-in-flight because it got going before they were prepared to get in front of it, and because of that everything after was them having to make a lot of bad compromises because there weren't enough people who could advise on like, "thats a bad way to set that up, comrade, because we've seen it fail before" once the dog caught the car.
Oh huh, i got halfway through reading this and then Tumblr blocked me on my phone with a "please sign in" thing i couldn't get past. Wtf. Good words from what i was able to get through though
Just picked up Casey Plett's On Community last night, good, yes, please, harmonizing beautifully with this. We must love one another! slowly and despite the mess!