Welcome Welcome, please make yourself at home, have a chocolate milkshake. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Asked this in my group chat, figured I ask it here as well. Why don’t any of these parties apply anarchist tactics within the party frame work to build dual power and do praxis? My experience with organizing IRL is mostly stuff like Food Not Bombs Things like tactical urbanism
I see this a lot in my neighborhood, most of the bus stops lack shade or a place to sit, so you’ll have old and disabled ppl forced to stand. Saw a old lady with a walker having to wait like that. Tactical urbanism would be getting together and building benches for those bus stops no cross walks in my neighborhood, we could fix that
communists tend to be more educated than average, we could be helping people get their GEDs, holding classes funded and organized by the party, this appeals directly to the masses, you help someone get their GED? You’ll have a loyal comrade.
I have a friend who is a school teacher, a science teacher. She has four classes of students, each with about 30 kids in it. She’s given $300 at the start of the school year to buy all of her supplies. Not only would it be an incredible propaganda win to go, Hey, look, the Communist Party is supplying schoolteachers with the supplies to teach your kids. Because the current regime won’t provide for your kids. You see what I’m saying? We have to build that dual power. We have to improve the material conditions of the working class.
I mean, this could range from anything from helping the homeless have food in their belly, setting up mobile libraries, setting up coat drives, cooling centers, building bus benches, running workshops, building impromptu third spaces, guerrilla gardening, lot cleanup, Alleyway restoration. Like, if a party has numbers and has people paying dues, those people should be being put to work, and those dues should be being spent building the dual power and improving the work that can be done.
To me, if I join a party, that’s what I want to be doing. I want to be put to work. I want to be with a leadership that is trying to get work done. I’m trying to stack W’s, and my concern is that I’ll join one of these parties, and we’ll just be selling newspapers, which is, I guess, important. I mean, I run a blog, but I want to do things that I couldn’t do alone and have zero interest in reformist electoralism within this settler state. Maybe they do these things already and I’m just ignorant.
Totally agree, ChunkaLuta’s doing stuff like that, but not in cities yet afaik.
Sadly that would probably be another justification for defunding schools and going on witch-hunts.
Problem is that a lot of the times this is illegal. Those benches could be removed or worse there could be consequences for those who install it. Not saying you shouldn’t do this, but just saying that there is usually a lot of resistance even to simple projects like that.
Our party’s student wing does that. It’s a really good effort.
Also agreed with Grain Eater that I wouldn’t call them anarchist tactics.
Your first part is kind of why they’ve become known as anarchist tactics though, because it seems to me, and this might come off some type of way, that anarchists are the ones who are willing to take that kind of risk. And sometimes you just gotta take that risk, I feel. I mean, it’s putting benches up. You can make them with wood, and you could probably do a bunch in the afternoon. And maybe they get taken away, but you just build new ones. I mean, hell, in LA there was a group of people who were doing crosswalks, and the city started removing them, and it caused a bunch of problems in the media, because people were like, why are you removing these crosswalks? Why didn’t you build them in the first place? And then it became a propaganda win, which is what we need.
I’m also really glad that you guys are doing that GED stuff. I think that that is a winning strategy, a winning move. You know, I think about my own father, who had to get his GED when he was like 23. And, you know, he’s kind of like an apathetic Gen X conservative, and I wonder if that could have been, way back then, a kind of starting point to make him not that.
Lets not get hung up on semantics though!
these are good ideas, although I wouldn’t call them anarchist tactics
Why not?
There’s nothing specific to anarchism about them. The Black Panthers weren’t anarchists
Fair, fair. I only went with that because the orgs I’ve worked with in the past, IRL, whether it’s, FoodNotBombs, or putting out fridges and food and stuff, they’ve all been very explicitly, yeah, we’re anarchists. Which, which is cool, but limiting, to say the least. Fractured and limited. (We need a Vanguard)