Im sure as someone who does it everyday you do think that

I don’t do it every day. But I do it often enough to be reliable and have good capacity.

But it’s not just me nor has it ever been. People from all nations have done this. People in far worse conditions. It is necessary and, historically, feasible so long as you can break false consciousness.

This is the largest point I’m trying to make the time and effort it will take cannot be completed before the election. I mean you even agreed

To begin building the necessary project you have to reject the political election myopia that our masters impose on us. Politics does not restart every 2-4 years. Only long-term engagement and the development and wielding of leverage will ever liberate us.

Do you think every American agrees and will just jump on board?

No, but why do they need to? Our task requires work and time. You keep acting like this makes it impossible. I suggest that this is a learned helplessness, of internalizing the false idea that there is no alternative. In fact, there has always been an alternative and others have blazed trails.

No defending it I hate it but stop acting like it can change before the election, it is not enough time which is my point, not a defense.

It is already a defense in that it is a form of apologetics for the genocidal status quo. It defends and entrenches the idea that your job, politically, is to decide who to cheerlead with a vote. It normalizes accepting and tolerating the genocide of Gaza, as even that us not enough for you to take sufficient pause. You are lost in propaganda, but you can free yourself through education.

Couple hours after work, 10 mins before work, and while shitting. Drive times alone wouldn’t be meet with this time.

A common dedicated organizing commitment is 1-2 meetings per week (often online) and around one action per month. Though there are often opportunities to do what works around anyone’s schedule.

Don’t know what I took credit for but sure

There is a tendency in bourgeois electoralism to dramatically exaggerate the impact of a given activity. Usually, but not always, voting. The purpose is to make the target audience feel like what they were told to do matters, was worthwhile, and to keep them doing it. This is what I am referring to by credit - of an exaggerated assignment of value to the activity I was responding to.

Do you even live in America?

Why would that matter? My question to you does matter: if you don’t live in a swing state your presidential vote is as worthless as it gets.

What would your point be if I were or were not American? Please don’t be xenophobic.

My contributions to this thread have upheld a single liberal value and that’s voting

Au contraire.

Lesser evil arguments against GOP:

“It’s just that one party also wants to use those structures to surveil women’s bodies, ban books, delegitimize science, push religion, and extract capital from natural resources and workers without restriction.”

Both sidesing genocide with a bonus suggestion that you have no idea how to oppise it (even while you left punch people actually fighting against it):

"We have a choice between one person publicly calling for a ceasefire and another who says Israel needs to finish the job.

I’m not sure what you want us to do here."

You then kept asking what else you’re supposed to do and I answered you in good faith. You don’t seem to like the answer, though. You clung to the rhetoric of bourgeous electoralism and ignored most of what I said while trying to tell me I was agitating incorrectly.

You declaring that you’re going to vote for a pro-genocide candidate with more lesser evil genocide (listen to yourself) logic:

“edit: Like idk who’s out here praising Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democratic party for their soft-as-shit stance on Israel, but I still gonna vote for her […]”

Here’s you pretending you can lecture others about what American leftists respond to, trying to push back against those calling out support for genocide:

“No offense dude, but I think you are pretty ignorant about American leftists.”

You’ve been a busy little beaver for reaction.

which I don’t even think has that much value when you look at the opinions of the majority of Americans on core domestic and international issues vs the actual policies that are implemented by those they vote in

If it doesn’t have much value why are you arguing with me and why are you telegraphing who you will vote for (genocide supporter)? Why do you act as if nothing else is posdible? This is just the typical liberal position that treats myopic lesser evil voting as the beginning and end of politics.

Not once have I defended Democrats complicity in the genocide

When people call it out you push back and declare your unconditional support for Kamala.

[rambling lesser evil claims]

Yes those are some if the claims that actually defend Democrats and try to make people feel okay with support for genocide.

at least I can do that and try things outside the political system.

If you’re doing something against empire you’re doing something political. And earlier you were acting like nothing else was possible, jncredulously asking what else you’re supposed to do aside from pretend to hand wring and then be the same pro-genocide lever pull as any imperialist. Make up your mind.

Whereas not voting is not only symbolically useless, as they’ll just see me as another person on the couch, at least voting has a small amount of practicality.

I cannot tell you how much I don’t care about your vote. Why are you still talking about it?

And regarding methods of converting liberals to leftists, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

You will learn that I am right when you actually try to build a left organization IRL and need to both recruit and maintain political lines against liberal tendencies.

Again, I’ll refer to the meaning associated with the terms socialism, communism, and anarchism in the US – they are demonized to the point where people simply dismiss you if you mention them, and then you’ve lost your opportunity.

This is completely at odds with the experience of anyone doing IRL agitation and recruitment. Younger people in particular are open to socialist positions if you aren’t trying to trick them into it or triangulate in the genocide they oppose. Your strategy is very old and always fails. It’s called opportunism.

Edit: Also, I appreciate your genuine response, but at the same time the gatekeeping of “well, what have you organized?” is pretty lame. The truth is, nothing. I’ve organized nothing.

Yes, that was obvious. This is why you have wrong ideas of how to agitate. You’ve never had to do it and see what works and what doesn’t.

You asked what else to do aside from voting and I tried to nudge you towards organizing and self-education. You should go join an org.

But I still believe that unjustified hierarchy is harmful and that at the end of the day what a state is is the ability to use force to uphold that hierarchy.

Of course unjust hierarchy is harmful. Otherwise it wouldn’t be unjust. But the question, inevitably, is how we will concretely do necessary work to defeat our enemies, and to identify who those enemies are and prioritize. To do that you need to be politically educated and you need to be organizing IRL so that you can see what fails and why it fails.

Its just gonna entrench them even more because it’s so outside their realm of political understanding.

I disagree. You can’t soft-pedal someone fully embedded in the propaganda sphere. There are multitudinous ways for them to be recaptured and they will not be inoculated against it if you pretend their positions are valid.

Also your contributions in this thread only reinforce liberalism and the pro-genocide position. Why should I trust your advice?

I mean, I’m anarchosyndicalist.

So far, you appear to be a liberal. In what way are you furthering anarchosyndicalism here? Are you in an org? Do you believe that anarchosyndicalism is served by feeding into bourgeois electoral falsehoods? Your predecessors were burning down bosses’ houses.

I’m aware of how fucked up the voting system is and how little power I have as an individual, and it pisses me off to be scolded at like that.

These are inconsistent positions. If you already agreed and understood you would not be getting “scolded” at all. Though I would say I’m just politely correcting you despite your liberal actions.

Ive read People’s History, and the manifesto, and Kropotkin (not to mention, a fair amount of chomsky and a lot of David Graeber).

So about 2 months into a yearlong leftist onboarding reading group. I’m glad you are reading, but this still makes you very new to these topics.

Imagine how moderate liberals feel when you slam them with a wall of text? They are not fucking initiated yet.

They will respond in different ways. There is not just one way to push people into taking their first steps. Several strategies and roles should be employed.

My “wall of text” is something like four paragraphs in approachable language.

What does your defense of their pro-genocide electoral stance accomplish?

Like I said to the OP, you gotta meet people where they are.

That is incorrect. You need to know where people are and then dislodge them. There is no meeting. You must pull and agitate.

You’re right that the left is disorganized, and that most Democrats aren’t really leftist but socially progressive capitalists

Most Democrats are incoherent liberals that pick up their positions via exposure to various media outlets. I would not describe them as socially progressive, overall. Some of the most racist people I’ve met have been Democrats.

but if you’re gonna convert them you need to ease them into it, not immediately shock them with walls of text and accusations of supporting a genocide.

Ease them into it how? Your approach so far is not agitational whatsoever. Your rhetoric can only help them retreat to their former positions.

There is an actual genocide happening right now with Dem support. They are, in actuality, supporting a genocide by providing unconditionsl support. This is exactly the kind of topic where you must agitate, as you can motivate those who care about the genocide to seek out a better position. You will lose all of those people if you don’t agitate, or worse, help them resettle into the mainstream pro-genocide position.

Because they’ll just recoil into their somewhat cozy capitalist shell.

Some will, some won’t. This is always how agitation goes. Have you ever built an org IRL? Opportunism is always self-defeating.

Nah it’s easy just rewire the whole government in your free time, that’s what I don’t understand about these people. They have all these great ideas about organizing and starting this and changing that. The suggestions they give are just not realistic in our society currently, but they act like you’re the problem for voting.

As an organizer in my free time it’s hardly unrealistic to suggest other people do the same. These are also well-demonstrated strategies, whereas individualistic lesser evil voting is not. You just disempower yourself.

And as you can see, this false logic also leads liberals to begin defending the lesser evils. Right now, they are defending genocide. My hope is that a few of them may break free of their propaganda and become true allies of people around the world and their own neighborhoods.

Y’all understand that your little suggestion of starting a whole ass movement with the only resource of “unified voters” in one of the most diverse countries in the world will take a ton of time right ?

God forbid political power take work and time. Better to be ineffectual and rhetorically entrench the sociopathic status quo, eh?

Do you think this can be organized 1 before the election, 2 before the election with enough time to actually change things in it

No. It requires shedding the political myopia that ensures your complacency. But you should begin building it now, and it is okay for its birth to be fitful. Begin having conversations now to see who would be interested. Join a left org that may be interested in this. Stop defending genocide.

3 by people working full time jobs and probably living paycheck to paycheck

Yes. This is how it has been for hundreds of years. People with less time and means did far more than this. You just have to actually believe that politics is important.

How much time do you spend on social media, for example? Why not spend that time organizing meetings?

4 while being fought back against the entire time by media oligarchy?

Our enemies include that but are even larger and more powerful.

No it isn’t realistic

Far more has been done before. You gave been taught complacency. And to defend the status quo.

What is realistic is trying to save the country from a centralization of powers into the executive branch (project '25) that will almost surely lead into fascism, which will then in turn fuck the rest of the world even worse.

You aren’t saving anything. Your strategy makes you a complacent individual that simply allows the same system chugging along into depravity, like open support for genocide. You aren’t even organized. How on earty could you ever take credit for anything? Pure fairy tales.

Do you even live in a swing state?

Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.

Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.

Piped should build out better error messages so that users know this is a problem with Piped getting the video from YouTube.

Copy + paste small business tyrant investment. Like a ghost kitchen. They all just copy each other because it returns a consistent profit.

There is probably some kind if grotesque item in the menu as a “draw”, too. The Tower of Cheese. The Bacon Bun. The [town name] challenge, a dish made of 34 kinds of flesh. Get in here, techbros! Get your grub.

The PSL ticket

The answer is that it doesn’t really matter. You are placing too much emphasis on your personal voting decision. This is a line handed down to you by ruling class interests. Voting could only ever matter as a block with clear interests and discipline. And even then it will be highly limited, you cannot vote out the root driver of dispossession and marginskization, the economic system itself. They will destroy every bourgeois electoral structure you try to use, and probably you, before you even get close.

So acquire the knowledge and political tools that can change the economic system.

Is there anything more hateful than genocide and supporting it?

And the reps will ignore you because what are you going to do, not vote for them? You already telegraphed that you will vote for them anyways.

In the party database, you show up as: Last Name, First Name, likely voter, donor yes/no. Literally, this is how much they think about you.

PS I thought genocide was an unconscionable, intolerable crime that required your specific action to ensure it “never again” happens. Now it’s just “bad”, like high housing costs? Do you see how your own soul is distorted by this naive partisanship?

The point of red lines is to not cross them. If you consider supporting a genocide a red line, which is certainly what I was taught, that means the system has moved beyond the pale and you must now take a different approach to politics than the horse race lesser evil logic that you were taught by the ruling class.

Namely, start working on other ways to build political power. The other ways are actually stronger. The ruling class, logically, teaches you to only see politics through a lens that disempowers you. It gives you playdough when you need a knife.

What is the math on how much your political opinion needs to be accounted for when you are an automatic lever pull for a given party?

Serfs and people working 13 hour days found the time to organize for revolution while working for depressed imperislist wages. Working without a doctor less than a day a way. Working without any transportation aside from their own two feet. Walking 10-20 miles per day when fighting militarily.

The US left us not weak because it faces long or harsh working conditions. It is weak because it has bought into liberalism. It is fully propagandized and is convinced of its own anemia. And, if anything, it fails to fight because it is comparatively overcompebsated, living off of cheap goods provided by the working poor of other countries. The US left does not riot over shortages because there usually are none and when there are they just take it. They are disorgsnized, so they have no voice. They are miseducated, so they parrot the logic the ruling class tells them to follow (such as your logic in voting).

Now that a larger, whiter proportion of the US working class is proletarianizing through high debt, high commodity prices, lower wages, and longer hours you are seeing forms of radicalization. We should be building on that, not carrying water for the genocide of Palestinians. Feel free to check whatever voting box you want, but don’t tell me you’re “leftist” for doing it, lmao.

I don’t generally care how you vote. The idea that your vote, as an individual, matters at all, is a construct intended to disempower you. Turn you into an individualistic lever pull that can be counted on regardless of how many horrific things they do.

If you care how you vote, you should be getting organized with likeminded people to create a voting block that makes demands. “Move in our direction or we will vote for you, otherwise we won’t”. This is literally the only way you could ever have meaninfulg voting power. If you are a reliable voter for X party, literally nobody cares about your positions anymore, and certainly not as an individual. Political party X just tries to get you to turn out and to turn you into a donor. You could also try to take over the party from a grassroots level, but you will quickly find that they will ruthlessly oppose you and would rather lose forever than give up their party positions.

But the latter point leads to my actual suggestion, which is to understand that your voting power is incredibly limited and constrained under bourgeois electoralism (like the American system). They will never, ever let us win through their political system. We may make very slow gains in a few arenas, largely reflecting social changes that do not threaten the interests of those at the top of the core economic system. Those changes are valuable. But they hit a hard limit pretty quickly because everything is tied to the economic system. And backslides are also possible so long as the economic interests at the top aren’t threatened. So sure, vote, but don’t let electoralism dominate your political activity. It takes a few minutes to hours to vote per year. Spemn the rest of your political energy on building non-electoral power.

To build Non-Electoral power, we must spread political education (theory, history, geopolitics) and organizing skills (engaging in action, recruitment, support). To help with that process, you must become politically educated yourself - politically educated in mass political power and identifying the economic forces we are up against - and gain organizing skills yourself. Both are facilitated by joining a socialist organization, though it is also 100% A-Okay to just start reading and questioning and gaining skills in thought. I usually recommend that people start with media criticism and (re)learning history. For example, start perusing FAIR.org and read A People’s History of The United States.

Now, keeping in mind that I don’t care very much how you vote, to answer your question about what to do when the “Democratic” system gives you two options (chosen by the ruling class, not you, by the way)…

If you care about voting, work to form the aforementioned voting bloc and develop political discipline that lasts beyond single elections. If you succeed, your bloc will mean the “lesser evil” (try measuring the evil, is it even always lesser?) loses an election. But then you will have established power as a bloc, a set of votes that must be won. And you will learn something very important from the result. One option is that you will be cut off from the party you are most trying to influence. They will be declaring that they would rather lose than make the change(s) you care about. Like not doing genocide, Christ. Then you will know you cannot win through their system, or at least that party, and can change your effort. Try (and still probably fail) at a third party. Or focus your efforts on non-electoral political work. The other possible outcome is that they relent. Then congratulations! Keep making demands and start voting strategically for them until they inevitably balk, rinse and repeat until they consistently refuse (this will happen).

Or you can skip the process if realizing the bourgeous electoral system is an expression of the ruling class’s power and begin working against it. End the thought process of thinking you can somehow have a lesser evil genocider, mass murderer, country destroyer, child impoverished, Jim Crower. Engage in the political education and organization I mentioned before and give up agonizing over your meaningless solitary vote.

Should we fix the system so that people both want to and can vote for candidates they want?

No, that wouldn’t be American. Make something punitive that can be disproportionately leveraged against the poor and marginalized community neighborhoods.

SCOTUS has always been a sham. They are just being more rude about it now.

It should be abolished.

A real head scratcher

In my place I’m seeing communal polarisation increasing. Or it is becoming more evident. How would one oppose that in a populace where religion and caste hold good sway, without the opposition giving it more power accidently?

That is a very difficult question to answer! You may already know better than I do, being embedded in your local context. But I can suggest some things to consider.

The first is that religion is not a simple good or bad thing when it comes to organizing. It is another consciousness that can compete with or work with a liberation project. It will depend on its structure, how it exerts powers and who it antagonizes vs. helps. There are two big negative forms of political religiosity that are dangerous to liberation. The first is the obvious reactionary conflation of religion with tradition and factionalization, where it is used as a way to create a societal rift and oppression on the basis of religion. This is largely a distraction from the material basis of oppression, but is it very effective and harmful. The second is when religion is used to “check out” of struggle. For example, I know a local religious leader that tells people that it’s okay that so many children are killed by Israelis in Palestine because they are martyred in heaven, the only thing that really matters. While this soothes some of the pain, it can also lead to a form of material apathy and turning away from action. With that said, there are also things like liberation theology and working with religious groups towards liberatory ends. It’s something that has to be navigated on a case-by-case basis. It is not wrong to, for example, adopt the position that X group is copptonf Y religion and that this should be rejected, even if you do not personally subscribe to religion Y in the first place. You will be more powerful if you (as in, any organization you may be in) find a group that focuses on religion Y from an angle that is compatible with yours and for you to keep each other safe and strong.

Regarding caste, does this mean you are in South Asia or otherwise interacting with th concept of caste as derived from it? This is also a very challenging thing to consider and there are very good points to be made for addressing caste first vs. class first and how they overlap and are different. If you are in India, I would focus on how you might oppose Hindutva from an angle that is caste-critical and whether there are people in your area that are interested in opposing both. People who have been assigned a lower caste will be more likely to see the injustice and be able to act in their own favor and build momentum, though you can also find and make good use of “caste traitors”.

Anyways your question is really about communal polarization. This is not something you can simply prevent as its own quantity. What you can do is build towards the better factions within that community and push your own projects. Our enemies create this polarization, they create and maintain fascists and the false consciousnesses that divide us against ourselves. We can’t create unity that centers those false consciousness, is what I’ll suggest. Class consciousness is at least a correct consciousness that opposes this division and if you include the additional valid liberation struggles you’ll be able to build from firm ground.

I should say that this is not the kind of thing anyone can do alone. All of this would only be realistic to discuss as part of an organization to which you would be contributing your efforts and knowledge. So my real advice is to see if you can identify an anti-capitalist group in your community that seems at least 70% good and see if you can join it. And please do so as safely and securely as possible (in-person communication is best, do not use Whatsapp or Facebook etc).

I’ve seen leftist n leftish organisations being affected by this.

Lefty orgs are basically always in some form of drama or crisis, so this isn’t necessarily an odd thing, haha. I can’t give a useful opinion without knowing more about how they’ve been affected, though.

Thank you.

Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.

Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.

There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you’re really interested in, in particular.

I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It’s simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.

There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.

Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson’s Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it’s the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.

If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won’t be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx’s main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich’s summary and then Michael Roberts’ commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you’ll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.

I’ve been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don’t have the foundation and context(didn’t understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.

That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It’s a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren’t like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It’s a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren’t making a lot of sense.

Are there any books that you’d recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?

For the skills I personally don’t think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven’t read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it’s a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just… not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it’s the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you’ll end up in jail or something.

Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.