All year I’ve been making various attempts to found an organization. All of the books and zines tell me to get myself and some friends together and do an abarchy. I have 3 friends and they’re all some flavor of liberal. Our politics are incompatible and they have no interest in anything left of Bernie Sanders. Perhaps my rhetoric isn’t the best.
I’ve tried to get my coworkers interested in a union. Despite having terrible working conditions and recognizing the need for a collective voice, nobody wants to take the plunge with me. Nobody wants to make plans. Nobody cares enough to put the work in. I did the “educate, agitate, organize”, I printed the pamphlets, I talked the talk, I set dates. Nobody showed up.
I table by myself at a local arts market on Saturdays. I hand out cold water and zines, I have great conversations with people from all walks of life. I haven’t met a single anarchist and I haven’t had anybody show up to the reading group I’ve been trying to start.
All year I’ve been trying to join an organization. There’s a food not bombs run by social democrats in my city. They only want donations. There’s a community garden that isn’t looking for volunteers. There’s a DSA chapter that only does campaign events. That’s it. Those are the only secular, public organizations in my city that aren’t corporate nonprofits that I’ve been able to find after months of searching. Barring a Marxist vanguard group that dissolved earlier this year, and a women’s health ride share that fell apart two weeks into starting.
What am I supposed to do? I want to put the work in, I want to help build a better world. My state, my county, my city, and my neighbors seem determined to walk blindly into this catastrophe and it boggles my mind. Is there anybody out there who’s been in my situation and managed to make something of it?
It’s all I’ve ever been able to do to get co-workers to discuss their salary, I’ve been told it’s illegal so many times. But honestly I don’t blame people, organizing is a great way to not have an income anymore.
That’s fair and I get it. However, we’re in a great position to be making demands. I work in EMS and, on top of a dire worker shortage, our company has a hard time retaining what few EMTs and paramedics there are and we’re always incredibly short staffed. Our regional management is sympathetic to our problems and works hard to help us, but our corporate overlords routinely fuck us over. There’s more to it than that but nonetheless, my company is ripe for unionization and it’s frustrating to see this golden opportunity be wasted. Especially because I know we can do it in a horizontal fashion and fill the organizational void in my city’s medical field with something anarchic
I’m probably going to get shit for this here, but you have to meet people where they are. If elections are where they are, that’s where you have to go. The best way to get people to work with you will always be working with them first. That’s going to involve doing shit that you don’t want to do. In the same way that a good teacher in school is in a two-way relationship with students, effective organizers don’t organize at people, but build meaningful and mutual relationships with them. People will open up to you when they feel you’re open to them.
So my advice is to join the DSA work, do their elections, but take it upon yourself to keep up the organizational momentum once the election is over and work on something else. Yes, you’re going to have to canvas for some shitty democrat, but, if you knock enough doors, you’ll really learn the situation on the ground where you live, and you can roll that over, hopefully with a few friends. If your personal philosophy doesn’t let you compromise enough to go that route, so be it, but that’s what I’d do.
Can’t believe I’m about to say this, but hear me out … take a gander at “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.
For the record, every time someone mentioned this to me, I’d cringe with disgust. I avoided it for most of my life because I viewed the content as a way to manipulate people. And yeah, maybe it kinda is, but at its core, it explains human psychology and the way our brains really work. We’re just kinda selfish, ya know? Most of us need to get before we even think about giving. We’ve got a lot to worry about and too much to focus on sometimes.
Idk, maybe there are better books out there, better references, etc. But that book helped me with a lot of my social issues, improved relationships with my coworkers, etc. To me, it’s more than just a “Tell them why they want it before even asking them” type of thing, it helped me understand the other person’s point of view better, helped me empathize with their needs before charging through, full speed ahead. Instead of thinking “this is a really good idea, everyone should back me”, I think more about how it would actually benefit others instead of “this is what I want, we should do it”.
I’ll give it a go, thanks for the recommendation. I definitely could be better at articulating solutions in a convincing way. I know what convinced me and why I believe what I believe, but I’m also neurodivergent as fuck and my reasoning doesn’t always translate 1:1 to normal people’s reasoning haha
I avoided it for most of my life because I viewed the content as a way to manipulate people.
This is kinda covered in the book. He talks about telling a story to someone where he said something nice to some guy and the listener asks “what did you want from him?”, and the author said something like “what did I want from him? What did I want from him!?” and says how making people feel good is just part of being a nice person, not about what they can do for you.
I can’t remember the details as it has been many years since I read it, but what I took from it was that people like people who are nice people, and you can work together for something mutually beneficial, it’s not about manipulating people to do what you want.
It’s also a nice, quick, easy read. Basically just a bunch of anecdotes.
Instead of thinking “this is a really good idea, everyone should back me”, I think more about how it would actually benefit others instead of “this is what I want, we should do it”.
This, right here!
i was a little bit luckier than you were when i tried. in my case there were a dozen or so of us and we tried similar things and got similar results; but i’m glad i did and it taught me that; there are VERY few leftists out there; liberals self sort into cities for the same reasons that all leftists self sort into cities; and there’s a MASSIVE disparity in both numbers and realities from city to city.
my mind sometimes boggles at how mind boggling huge that numbers disparity is between cities and at how randomly they’re dispersed throughout the country; or atleast the enclaves i’m aware of.
