jack

I think Mamdani's gonna win

If you are organizing a protest and there isn't a "next thing" everyone is being made aware of, the organizers are myopic and likely naive. If you're not building lists, how are you mobilizing for the next thing? If you're not doing direct reach-outs based on lists, how are you recruiting?

we are doing those things

We've been working closely with 50501 for a while, making strong relationships with the organizers and taking on tasks to help them get things done. Over time, we've gradually taken on more of that load and have gotten the corresponding say over the political line at these protests. We're setting the time, place, schedule, providing all the materials and labor, etc. It is our established capacity to effectively run events like this that allowed us to take leadership simply because we are the most effective at putting in the work.

I don't want to dive too far into the details, but essentially Indivisble started to realize this was totally out of their hands and scooped the 6/14 date as soon as it was announced, before we put up our own call to action. That meant they were getting their position out there before ours using their standard co-optation platforms. We utilized our own outreach capacity and carried forward confidently to put on a protest we thought could rival theirs in number and far exceed it in political consciousness, professionalism, and organization. The protests ended up being very similar in size, and their head organizer literally ran screaming into the middle of our action, tried to interrupt a speaker with the siren mode on her megaphone, then proceeded to have a full-blown mental collapse when the crowd was hostile to her. In the end, we came out looking like the far more competent segment of organizers and got a lot of interest from exactly the type of folks we're looking to connect with: queer, black, working class, for the most part.

To what end? I am essentially already a public figure in my city. Anybody can dox me as much as they want.

It's not hyper local like some town of 20k people, but it's not a quixotic presidential run.

What if that presidential run doubles the size of your revolutionary party? The point of engaging in elections is not to win power (cool if you do though!) but to advance your platform among the people. Elections are only the best way to do that under pretty specific circumstances both internal and external to the party.

You have to get them to attend an event that you organize

Maybe I'm not making this clear enough. Communists organized many of these protests. That's what we did locally. The No Kings/50501 branding is open for anyone to use, and we utilize it to get people to our events that we run and set the political tenor of.

And even more effective for joining members than going to a very lib protest as well.

In my experience this is generally not true. We've done a lot of door knocking and a lot of protests. That door knocking tends to get very few contacts per comrade hour, so we only utilize it carefully. We'll be using it for the people's program I mentioned above pretty extensively this summer.

And, again, we aren't going to a lib protest. We are putting on a communist protest that uses the lib branding to attract people.

There are piles and piles of queers at these things, they are bursting at the seams with queers eager for political engagement. Not that your other avenues for that are invalid, but don't misrepresent the opportunity presented.

Everyone has their own part to play in something like this using their own personal talents, you can't make a chicken to flap its wings and fly across the atlantic.

Sure, but it is in a chicken's nature not to flap its wings and fly across the ocean. It is not in a human's nature to be static and unchanging. I'd argue that talking to other people is one of the things we're pretty fundamentally geared to do, so your analogy gets about as far as that chicken does on its trip to Portugal.

You are infected with the same american brainworms that make people think everyone can improooov themselves into becoming a millionaire.

Nah. It's far more an American mindset to believe that people are born with a certain capacity and improving it is impossible. Or your interpretation that personal growth is closely linked to economic outcomes. That's idealism. The truth is that we, as communists, believe more strongly in the capacity for human growth and improvement than anybody else - we just know material conditions are what bound or encourage that growth. Dismissing the human potential for self-improvement because it gets cynically twisted to blame poor people for their circumstances is way off.

I believe that @[email protected] is capable of that growth. He already lays out one rhetorical area where he has strengths - why should he not be capable of building and expanding those skills into a broader and more applicable capacity for face-to-face political discussion?

Then you need to get better. Being a revolutionary is a constant process of self-improvement in service of the people. Join an organization where they will train you how to do the work.

There are other avenues where people can win small, personal campaigns that radicalize them and while they don't necessarily get connected to a larger political party that seems more worthwhile to me than the new lib fest of the month.

That, by far, is the bulk of the work we do. My branch is almost a hundred people and about five of them were needed for a few weeks to prepare the last protest and twenty to run it day of. The rest were doing work in the community.