Thread by @SocialismS4A

It's true that a lot of you never log off the Internet & haven't breathed fresh air in several years, but if you think it's possible to do a revolution without mass orgs, you really need to sign out, put down the device, open some windows, & get some oxygen back into your brains.

I started this S4A project literally just to read more Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.

It became popular, & people even started donating $ for me to spend more time on it.

I've since realized that many ppl aren't interested in action & just like to be read certain bedtime stories.

It's a fandom for many, little more.

I look around at a country like the USA, where mass orgs of all kinds have been gutted over the last ~50 years, and I think, if any of this is going to change, we need mass orgs again.

A vanguard w/o mass orgs is like a brain w/o a body.

People will log onto Twitter every day and say, we need a #generalstrike, or we need a revolution. Great, but how will you get it? Do you even know?

There are things that advance the struggle by pulling the masses into conscious action by the millions. Tweets aren't one of them.

Look at the US left & what most average households in the country know of it.

They know things like the mass uprisings in 2020 & the political campaigns of Bernie in 2015-6 & 2019-20.

That's what masses of ppl got involved in & what made the news for others to hear about.

With Bernie, the problem is not so much that he tried to gatecrash the Democratic Party; this was a great strategy for gathering up its left wing & using its promotional infrastructure to do propaganda. The problem was that, when it failed to take power, he stayed with the party.

So Bernie not only gathered up the disaffected Democratic left but also pulled many even more disaffected people out of the woodwork & back into the political fray. Great. But then what did he do with them?

He fed them into an unreformable party & told them it could be reformed.

Bernie knew better. He absolutely did. But for us, who stand outside of & to the left of the Democratic Party, it's not about him anymore.

It's about the people he rallied, the people who showed with their commitments of time & resources to that fight that they want change.

And that is just the Bernie people.

Even more people turned out in the streets during the 2020 uprisings that were sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a Democrat-led city where not enough has changed, judging by the 2022 police murder of Amir Locke.

All these people continue to want change that the system, including the Democratic Party, is never going to deliver, so the system needs to be confronted & broken down.

Pulling those people back into sustained, organized struggle to actually do that work is what's not happening.

Is every one of those people going to apply for membership & be accepted into a vanguard party? Absolutely not, nor do they need to.

But without any organization at all, they're useless to themselves & to their class more generally, which is exactly how the capitalists want it.

What is the solution?

The solution is mass organizations, & mass organizations need as many communists at every level of their membership as we can fill them with.

This used to be the state of things in the US before McCarthyism, when radicals were driven out of community orgs.

What are mass orgs?

They include things like labor unions, tenant unions, other community unions like public transit riders' unions, and all of the other local organizations that exist as the glue of working people's social & economic lives at & below the state-wide level.

They also include women's organizations, immigrants' organizations, student organizations, & so on.

Anywhere we can be in these spaces, pushing Democrats out of these spaces to make room for conversations about class consciousness (yes, all Democrats), we need to be there.

Where local government seats are gettable, we also need to get them, but w/o illusions as to how far this will take us in & of itself, & obviously not as Dems, which is where political parties/hubs like @GreenPartyUS & @DemSocialists (where they do not endorse Dems) come in.

The overall point is to advance the struggle on as many fronts as possible until we force a break, a crisis of demands which are only possible under a reorganization of the economy away from capitalism into socialism.

Getting into these orgs everywhere we possibly can is how.

If we do not get into these orgs & do the patient work of building relationships with the people in & around them, then we never gain influence, & our ideas remain unheard & untested.

If you want a revolution some day, a future without capitalism, you can't avoid this point.

Why do you think the capitalists drove us out of the mass orgs in the first place, under McCarthyism?

They had to cut us off from the masses so that we couldn't be there as their partners, encouraging them to engage in greater & greater forms of class struggle.

It worked.

The result is that, whether your vanguard clique has 10 members or 10K, you're mostly playing to an echo chamber that's not involved directly in solving the day to day problems of the masses' economic lives.

Socialists have to break this pattern & get back into our communities.

Especially watching the first sparks of the fire that may send #RoeVWade up in smoke this week, further ruining the lives of many working US people, I am literally begging US socialists to log off & get involved where you live.

For me, someone who's trying to make a contribution by doing human-read audiobooks + discussions of historical materials as well as some current events media commentary, I'm in a tough spot.

While many have told me that the material I put up is helpful, there's another side...

...and it's the "bedtime story" crowd, the cranks who want another reading to boost their fandom but aren't involved in the real world.

I 100% do not want to contribute to anyone's terminally online cocoon in any way, but no matter how much I challenge this, it's never enough.

Truly I can't speak enough against it bc the most online tend to be the most vocal about it, but make no mistake: we are not the same.

I don't come from an exclusively online background & know that's not a path to change. S4A's meant to reinforce IRL action, not be a substitute.

So while I'm writing this against the cranks who want to live in their fantasy bubbles, not learning from history but trying to hide in it, who is it for?

It's for the many of you who I know aren't like this, who can do the work of getting involved & rebuilding our IRL presence.

That presence truly needs to be everywhere that working people are coming together to meet their needs & solve their problems.

Our job is to help them with those struggles & to push them further, against the system that's holding them back, in ways that are strategic & useful.

Aside from organizations that are owned by the 1% & that truly wage war on any kind of socialist (thinking Dems here), we need to get out there & take up residence in every mass org available to us.

#RoeVsWade overturned & dying oceans are just the beginning if we do not.