Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

This take responds to a tweet re: the CDC's reduction of the time guideline from positive test to return to work, with more cuts foreshadowed "[to address] staff shortages."

I've heard this clarion call before. There's something that I think the people who make it are missing.

So, I'm not saying that the take is wrong or bad.

I WILL say this: I have answered this clarion call before. I have showed up to DS meetings for 3 different orgs. I have showed up to trainings and movement-building meetings in this vein of various kinds.

In them...

...my experience at socialist organization meetings has been that they are universally, consistently, and by a wide margin some of the most uppity, sneering, un-empathetic, yell-over-each-other-y spaces I have ever visited.

For me and my low caucus score, it's an immediate nah.

Right so, to catch you up before I go on, here's an introduction to the caucus score concept.

I know the title looks unrelated. Just trust me.

chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why…

Anyway, I hesitate to speculate as to why socialist organization meetings are like this in practice...

Nevertheless I'll do it because, f**k it, this is Twitter, the bazaar of half-baked ideas

Here we go

The people with the time, energy, and leverage to organize socialist meetings also tend to be folks with...you guessed it, privilege.

So, #1, these spaces lean HEAVILY toward one demographic. Figuring out which one it is I'll leave as an extremely easy exercise for the reader.

#2, people with privilege (not just the dom demo btw—EVERYONE with privilege, this is what privilege IS) are socialized to believe that everything they have to say is a positive contribution to the conversation. They are accustomed to having the speaking floor.

So...

...in a meeting when someone takes it away, they are relatively more likely to be SURPRISED by that, and when people are surprised and upset, they behave badly.

Another thing in these spaces is that...

...the people running them lean kinda policy-wonk.

Theoretically, this is fine. In practice, policy wonks share some...uh, characteristics with the programming community that make them kinda hard to spend time with.

https://twitter.com/HeyChelseaTroy/status/1467223526419611655

For example, at these meetings I have watched organizers pick apart the WORDING of someone's earnest question like chickens at a millet pile.

I have seen this, like, drinking game levels of often at these meetings.

For another example...

I have heard someone say at a meeting, and this is a direct quote:

"We are right. That's the end of it. I do not want to have to convince anyone."

And you know what? This, right here, is fundamentally the idea that I think is making retention in these groups so hard.

The bottom line is, if you want to build any kind of collective effort, let alone a f**king supermajority, you have to convince people of shit.

You have to be able to empathize with others, change your mind, see things you didn't see before, admit you were wrong, and do other...

...coalition-building tasks that the people actually running these meetings seem to consider to be humiliating and/or beneath them.

Look. I'm not here to denigrate a movement.

But the truth is, "encouraging" (or guilting, which they also do) people into coming to or staying at these meetings will work on, i dunno, 6 people.

It won't hold, and it CERTAINLY won't amass, a supermajority.

In fact, here's my distillation: even rejecting capitalism requires you to be willing to sell.

"You should want this and if you don't your wrong" is not a sales technique. It therefore feels better to self-righteous anticapitalists to use, but the thing is, it doesn't work.

Ya gotta be able to sell your idea, your movement, your plan

And you've gotta be able to inspire AND INCLUDE the needs, boundaries, and abilities of A LOT of different people in that plan in order to build a big enough coalition to actually fix anything.

Until socialist orgs figure out they need those skills and then humble themselves enough to build those skills, they'll continue as struggling clutches of self-righteous privileged people lamenting on the internet how no one comes to their thing.

What I'd recommend if any of these orgs asked me what to do (which they definitely won't) would be:

- Learn to notice when y'all interrupting or droning on
- Seek out the most marginalized perspective in your movement and center it
- Work thru this book:

books.google.com/books/about/Fr…