A guide to organizing from scratch
Category:Guide to organizing
Seeing the conversations around this topic in the post Most Western Parties Are Ossified and Failures I thought some folks might find value in this organizing guide created by USU. It draws from numerous articles they’ve written about organizing ML orgs from the ground up.
Really good stuff. Watch the Cops and Keep Your Eyes Open is an excellent article.
Forming a study group seems like a no brainer now that I realized Lenin, Mao and even Marx had their starts in study groups
Unfortunately I think I alot of people would be turned off by it being marxist, even if they dont have a real conception of what marxism is. I'm kinda wondering if its worth going straight to marxist texts, or maybe start with something more borderline to attract liberals that can potentially be converted.
You can get them with stuff that doesn't have Marx attached to it. Think of it this way, in the late 1800s when Lenin was translating Marx to read him, he had no reputation yet in Russia. So we can do the same thing. Bring them stuff that doesn't necessarily directly mention Marx etc but is written by marxists nonetheless. There's even more palatable communists, like Ho Chi Minh is generally "accepted", Engels, in some places Castro is also regarded more neutrally.
It really depends on the people who are interested but for the more borderline I've seen suggested Angela Davis's Gender Race and Class or Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds and then Engels The principles of communism.
But most Western parties aren't ossified and failures
Name one successful socialist revolution in the West.
I don't get why you're being downvoted for this. To say they are failures is a relative view with a very specific definition of failure, as far as I can tell. The implication it's now getting simplified into in this thread seems to be that because they haven't tried or succeeded at a revolution, they are failures. If that's someone's standard, that's their standard, but there are other metrics to measure, like what kind of influence they've had on the political landscape of the given country as a whole; whether they have made a difference as opposition or not (or another way to look at it: would the given country be more reactionary/fascistic/etc. without them in the picture?). I don't think the Black Panther Party in the US ever got to the stage of attempting revolution, but they still made strides toward their goals and no doubt had an impact on things. Just comes across as reductionist to me.
The goal of a communist party is to bring about communism.
If they exist for 75 or 100 years without even trying to bring it about, then they're a failure. It's not reductionist to recognize that these parties are more interested in collecting dues and funneling their members into doing electoralism. It's something the parties need to sort out; whether they will or even can is a different thing.
Yeah, the BPP wasn't a failure.
In addition, most Western parties are still around despite fierce repression and propaganda. The org I was apart of lasted 105 years so far despite it all.
Neither was the IWW a "failure."
Or the CPUSA during its heyday.
Or the anti-war peace movement for Vietnam.
Or NAARPR and NAIMSAL
Pretty cool, thanks comrade!