1) There's two things that work: Direct Action and pressure campaigns.
in a pressure campaign, you've got to figure out who's got decision making power and target them specifically. It can be a politician who's a swing vote, a boss who's refusing to recognize a union, the bargaining team for the police officers guild, or a landlord who's refusing repairs.
Figure out your leverage. Workers have leverage in that they provide labor. tennants have leverage in providing rent. voters provide votes. There's other kinds of pressure too, for example, landlords often care about impressing neighbors, coworkers, charitable organization board members, and fellow congregants. Universities need to retain students. But! you might not have leverage over every target! A massive chain's shareholders might be able to eat the impact of a strike, but a local manager might lose his job because of it. In that case, your leverage is over him, not the shareholders.
Every action should be part of an escalation campaign. In other words, start small (petitions, buttons, pins, etc.), build up bigger, maybe to flyering. Then work up to pickets. After that, protests, after that, vandalism and blockades, etc. This way, the longer things go on, the worse it gets for your target. They can make it all stop by giving a raise, or doing repairs, or freezing the rents, or ceasing construction. It is not enough to just protest!
In direct action, you make what you want happen yourself. Churches hate hunger, so they organize food banks; food banks are now the most effective form of welfare in america. Animal rights activists hate mink farming, so they sabotage the farms; the PNW fur industry is now a 10th the size it was in the 80s. Puerto Ricans were being denied aid after a hurricane, so they snuck into the aid warehouses and delivered it themselves. The IWW hated having bosses, so they elected their own and refused to recognize the company's. Revolution is direct action on a mass scale
2) Don't be a weirdo! The other day, a Maoist came up to me in a red scarf and started asking me questions about my struggles as a worker. The maoist asthetic is off-putting and corny. Acting like you're a third party outside of the working class is cringe. You're a worker, I'm a worker. If you want to find out about my struggles, gripe about work with me. Calling it social investigation makes you think of yourself as a detective. You're not a detective, you're my pal getting drinks after work.
DSA grew so fast because they called themselves "democratic socialists." That's just optics. A lot of DSA work is the same as ML party work: strike support, salting, socialist education, mutual aid, shooting practice. But they got more members because they used words and asthetics americans are comfortable with. Ditch the red scarf and the hammer and sickle and the fealty to Mao. It doesn't mean don't read and apply Mao, it just means be normal.
3) you've got to be engaged in struggles in your own life. You can't just ask other people to have a revolution for you. In the 70s, socialist parties had their members all take jobs in the same factories and organize fighting unions in them. Your party can go into warehouses, hospitals, meatpacking plants, even universities! Anywhere there's thousands of workers. The IWW helps general membership organize each others workplaces. Salting or organizing where you stand doesn't matter. What matters is that you're helping each other to organize in your own lives. you can do the same thing living in the same apartment building or forming a solidarity network to fight for each others stolen deposits. You can even go to the same church!
Protests ask other people to act. Organizing in your own life prepares you and your community to act. If you're raising awareness about imperialism, you're asking other people to act. On the other hand, if you organize with the diaspora, in their apartments, in their workplaces, in their churches, you're creating the capacity to overthrow their oppressors with them.
4) You can't win without people
Militancy is good, but you've got to warm most people up to it. You do this through one on one conversations or by fighting and winning to demonstrate it can be done (and then through more one on ones).
If you're not sure if you can pull off a big action, do a structure test! You can test individuals by asking them to do something like "get so and so to sign a petition." You can structure test coworkers through petitions, getting people to wear pins or holding a mock strike vote. You can structure test neighborhoods by going door to door asking people to sign pledge cards or give you their contact info.
If your structure test fails, it's time to do more one on ones. If you act with a small group, you'll get retaliated against. There's safety in numbers, so build numbers.
what might this look like? A few hypotheticals:
Stop cop city:
What if local groups ran escalation campaigns against local offices of contractors and funders associated with the project? What happens to the project when investment managers at local banks are subjected to pressure campaigns? When regional directors of building contractors are as well? How about when shareholders start getting phone zapped?
Defund the Police:
What if the next time the cops were bargaining a contract with the city and putting up resistance to reform, we mounted pressure on their bargaining team? How dedicated to qualified immunity would their bargainers be when there's a pressure campaign on the landlords and their pastors? What if we were in power in the unions and could threaten to kick the police out of the labor council if they weren't open to reforms?
Covid 19:
What if our response to Covid had been to organize for sick time and ventilation upgrades in our workplaces? If we were in warehouses and could win those reforms in a 5000 person workplace, that would have a huge impact on viral spread.
In short: Stop protesting, start organizing.
I've heard managers complaining about shit like "every week this lady comes in and steals half the baby section and I'm not allowed to do anything!"
Like, dude, listen to yourself.