For me it was the importance of differentiating between professional militants and casual supporters. Yeah, debate as old as Lenin but it’s really counterintuitive how better it is to turn away people who can’t dedicate themselves to full militancy.
It was also weird to notice how many organisations desperately waste a lot of effort trying to recruit any casual unorganised supporter without good criteria which either ends up turning off a lot of supporters or recruiting a lot of low theory or half-engaged militants. Those usually either end up going into cult mode, taking all responsibilities, then burning out (low theory ones), or not pulling their own weight, reducing morale and eventually dropping out (the half-engaged), often causing a lot of stress to other members in the process. It’s a very wasteful process, specially since these people could’ve remained very useful as supporters with minimal responsibilities.
Another corollary to that is that orgs should explicitly define what sort of militants its looking for, otherwise recruitment processes will define it implicitly through disorganized practice anyway. I’ve seen many (non-ML) organisations unintentionally end up being just extensions of groups of friends, centered around specific university courses/classes or even a single person due to undefined and thoughtless recruitment processes.
helping people who are homeless, drug addicted, single parents, foster kids, exploited at their jobs etc. i think that a lot of organisations focus on people willingly coming in but the harsh truth is that the middle class does not really care. the whole point of the “middle class” is a percentage of the population being docile and comfortable enough with capitalism to not act.
more communist organisations should focus on building people up. how do you think soviets/communist won over half of fascist indoctrinated europe? they built countries up, gave people housing and a purpose… the US 🇺🇸 police is known to disrupt mutual aid and support communities. if you have a community garden without “permits” they will come in, destroy your vegetables and bleach the ground to prevent any further farming activities. they hate these things so much because it does help communities and the cause we have.
Autonomous communist here, I know I’m from another instance but you might find this interesting.
Not having a defined “list of names of people who can speak for the space/org” felt like it would protect people from catching flak, and avoid ending up with a small clique of people that everyone would defer to.
In practice, it meant that no one knew who to ask, it was harder to enforce the norms we wanted, and people could very easily make complete fabrications about what “the people at [our space]” said and did and thought. The rumor mill was very easy to spin, and there was no way to counteract it.
In the future I would have designated spokespeople, and make this a completely different role from the everyday coordination of decision-making.
Another insight is that no matter how principled you are, no matter how ideologically aligned people are, some people will find a reason to be completely incompatible with certain others. Trying to enforce overlapping coexistence is a losing battle.
target nationals of the “bulwarks against communism”. japan, southkorea, post soviet europe etc. all serve as important anti chinese and anti russian shields and are immensely important to the american empire. it might be scary at first because of how fervently anti-communist they are… but, after they’re done yelling that you’re an authoritarian loving anti ukrainian genocidair who is personally responsible for whatever manufactured national trauma they have, you will have planted a seed of class conciousness in the mind of the empire… this is how i became a communist
