Yayyy everyone got a second job :D this must mean economic prosperity for the people

Dialectical materialism can be applied to basically anything and it takes awhile to develop it. I’m still not an expert by any means but I have certainly built a better understanding of it over the last 6 months as I’ve touched grass a lot, lot more and also re-read a lot.

It’s a pretty broad question, asking how we apply it to broader society. So I’ll just do an example I guess.

When looking at an issue, the first thing(s) I look for are the contradictions within it and the contradictory relationships it has with other things. We know literally everything is interconnected, and that everything exists in a state of contradiction until it is resolved (and then transforms into a different contradiction but blahbababa) so that’s where I usually start.

Thinking about a gas station near my home, in isolation, is just a gas station. It operates perfectly well and statically to our liberal friends or if you’re not paying attention. But taking a diamat lens to it I would say that there exist tons of contradictions and interconnected relationships that drive the success or failure and the overall conditions of that station. There exists obviously the contradiction between the workers and capital owners there, the one we all know. This contradiction, the primary one in economic life under capitalism, sets the stage for others to pop up - a worker may recognize the futility in how hard they work there, and leave certain tasks undone. Contradictions like that within the gas station build up until they are resolved by either another worker taking the task up, the worker getting fired, or people neglecting to come to that station if it’s bad enough, leading to its closure. This is not static, and is constantly developing and in relation with everything else in the material world.

Connecting the gas station to society is easy from there, you just take off the magnifying glass and look outwards. The station exists in one part of a country that operates under that same economic system. So more contradictions pop up that are not internal to the station. Perhaps the piping that flows the fuel is not properly maintained because those workers are on strike, and ceases to function. The station is now defunct due to contradictions of the economic system, due to no fault of its own other than existing under this material reality.

Everything that happens affects everything that happens. The universe is a dynamic interconnected place and using the diamat framework is immensely helpful for making sense of things.

I could give a kind of abstract math equation, which can be helpful, but for me examples usually do the trick better. The more examples you hear the easier it will be to formulate your own and yeah.

Nobody has dialectical materialism “figured out” either, btw. The best analyses require many people, many years, much PRACTICE -> THEORY -> PRACTICE etc.

Hope this made sense, and if anyone with a better understanding of this than me wants to chime in feel free.

Given the political conditions of the US at the moment, fucked as the material ones are, I’m going to say adventurist. There would not be MASS support for that kind of thing in droves large enough to spark revolution.

Now, many folks would be in support of it, and it would likely radicalize people further/spur them to action. But again, the primary contradiction in the US today is not having a communist party leading the working class. Because a majority of people aren’t in tune/don’t know who these guerillas are, it would be framed as individual terrorist activities and swept under the public eye, no matter the effectiveness.

We aren’t there yet, in my opinion. But give it time, trust.

What do you mean? If you’re talking about in a red setting or a summation after an action or something then think back to the problems that happened and how you contributed to them. Point them out to others in that summation setting.

If you are talking about on like, a personal level, do the same thing but apply it to everything you’re doing. What exactly happened, how did I contribute to it happening? What were the good/effective things I did, what were the things that hampered effectiveness or hurt someone?

Write it down if you have to, or just take note of it in your head. There’s no universal process for self-criticism. Never stop (while being healthy about it obviously). Criticize your critiques, criticize your actions, criticize your thoughts. Don’t beat yourself up but always be trying to disprove or poke holes in what you think.

No. This amounts to throwing your hands in the air and giving up. Work needs to be put in to build something of value. And not all of them are revisionist or whatever. PSL and FRSO are both good options.

Typically I respond with the obvious “they’re not” answer - but even if they were - it’s important to realize who the real enemy is in that situation. These people are often coming from war-torn or poverty-stricken countries, primarily BECAUSE OF U.S. CAPITALISM AND IMPERIALISM. They wouldn’t even be here if they weren’t forced by horrific material conditions.

I ask the person to consider if they would want to leave everything, their family, common language, homeland, for no reason other than “my life might be a little better there” and the answer is obviously no. The immigrants they are concerned about (the poor, desperate brown ones - not the rich French or x “white” ones) are coming out of absolute desperation and taking shitty jobs that often aren’t even ones they’d be doing in the first place. They are the most exploitable and therefore most exploited people. They have much more in common with you (the x ignorant or racist person) than you do with any of these people you see on TV. Why don’t you stop blaming them and punching down and focus that energy on uniting with others like you - working class people - and take some action instead of posting racist memes on Facebook?

Hahahaha I wish I had the tech knowledge to do that 💀 “I’m deleting reddit. Gone 🗿”

Further, FRSO is one of the only existing parties to have been raided by the FBI, and we wear that badge with honor.

There are plenty of members, though our focus is less on building up members in FRSO (that is important though) and more on agitating the masses and getting them involved in mass organizations. We understand that there is not a dominant working class party in the US, and that there likely will not be a major uptick in explicit communist organizing in time before shit really hits the fan (climate change, serious war, etc.)

The goal is to funnel the masses to organizations that are not explicitly communist but hold similar principles that are easier for the average USian to grasp and get behind - local anti-war, anti-bigotry, unionization, things of that nature. They are not fronts for the party and they are ran by members of the “masses” themselves, i.e. I as an FRSO member could in theory be removed from the local mass orgs I am in.

The mass line is very important to FRSO’s method of organizing and important to successfully enacting a revolution in general. FRSO or any other explicit communist party will never reach the numbers that a mass organization would, especially in the US.

So while you’re correct that there aren’t (as) many cadre in FRSO proper compared to other orgs, there exists a large base of GMs and almost every single organization that is not a front for some other party exists because of FRSO. Take Students for a Democratic Society as an example.

This is not to say we don’t want FRSO to have a solid influence on these mass orgs; in practice the most dedicated and hard-working organizers in them are FRSO and we celebrate that as communists because then the socialist movement has a solid way to influence and educate the masses. But we cannot go about organizing just recruiting for communism in the US, at least not yet.

There’s more reading on the website, frso.org

But all in all, we are a deeply serious organization with cadre who go through extensive political education and exercises, and many of them have years if not decades of experience. I don’t want to throw shade or anything of that sort to other parties, but I can confidently say when the revolution comes busting through the US, FRSO will have had the largest “market share” in terms of impact/credit for it.

FRSO is brilliant.

Exactly lol it’s always like “wait he’s spitting facts” then he has to eat babies or something to make sure we know those crazy tankies are out for blood

He was a member of a communist party, and spit some good things so I’d say so. Not sure if he was a tankie nerd like some of us but had good intentions for his people definitely

???

jesus christ