One thing I think is a good place to start is building social connections. I think there could be a lot of space in reviving the left-wing social club. The average US citizen is extremely isolated, and one way we can fight against that isolation is finding ways to rebuild that social network we’ve lost. I’m talking about building clubs where the socialist perspective dominates but isn’t always the focus.

I mean, I could just rattle off a list here, just off the top of my head:

• Parenting clubs
• Sporting clubs
• Reading groups
• Health clubs or neurodivergent & disabled support groups
• Wilderness clubs
• Gaming clubs

I think we can also draw inspiration from sources like the survival programs of the BPP for example.

Describe the shape of the problem first, let the solution emerge. Don’t try to be smart about coming up with solutions. Be smart about describing what is happening.

The US economy, and the Western economy more generally, is failing. Unemployment and underemployment are massive. Cost of living is out of control. The ecosystem is changing dramatically in ways that strongly affect human society.

The Democrats just won an electoral victory and have a particular narrative that will be shaped in the coming days and weeks.

BRICS is gaining economic leverage on the West every month. The US, however, has been doing what it can to disrupt them.

Maduro and his wife are still on US prisons. The US military is still the most vile force in the planet and still deployed and ready for devastating Iran. The Russo-Ukraine conflict is still raging and fuel and fertilizer are being threatened.

What was the harvest like this year in the northern hemisphere? What will see in the harvest in the southern hemisphere in 4-6 months? How will planting season go in the northern hemisphere?

We need to understand all of this and more if we’re going to have any success in advancing socialism. Yes, people need to be educated and their consciousness needs to be raised to understand their role in class society and the historical processes they participate in, but before educating, there must be a connection. We cannot make that connection without having a better understanding of the things impacting everyone’s lives and understanding where it’s going and what politicians might do next to prevent revolt.

The Ds might try some Keynesian intervention a la FDR. What might that look like and where will it struggle against the present where it did not 80 years ago? How does the propaganda of the intervention change people’s beliefs and how will the failings of that intervention be understood, explained away, and felt?

Describe the problem. The solutions will emerge from the problem, because solutions to problems are dialectical

Revolution needs both a mass revolutionary socialist party that the working class looks to for leadership, and a class conscious working class. The primary tasks right now are to build up a revolutionary socialist party, as well as channel the energy currently going towards the social democratic movement into revolutionary socialism. Both are accomplished by building up the cadre membership and periphery membership. The two best orgs in the US at the moment are PSL and FRSO, and I would say that the PSL is far bigger and a bit more theoretically correct than FRSO. If a group splinters from the DSA and takes a solidly revolutionary line, it might surpass them in numbers, but it will take a long, long time for the entire cadre to be as politically developed as anyone in PSL and FRSO.

In short, revolution isn’t just something you do, or something that falls into your lap. It happens when there is a large, revolutionary socialist party, a class conscious working class, and a crisis in the capitalist class. We can directly contribute to the first two by getting involved with a socialist party. Both Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have two tiers of membership, general membership which is low commitment in time and money, and cadre membership, which requires significant time and money. See which is more active near you (almost certainly PSL, but varies), and consider joining the general membership!

What is to be done? Build the party of the working class.

In all seriousness though, we cannot even take for granted that self-described “socialists” in the imperial core are anti-capitalist. We need to build a real worker’s party, and we need to educate people on what socialism is and why it would benefit them. I think the DSA’s strategy of trying to take over the Democratic Party is showing itself to be a failure, as I think it was bound to be from the start.

i’m not convinced the elections are indicative of a lot. see this article for the numbers and analysis but to make a long story short, the proletariat excluding the labor aristocracy/PMC is already fed up with bourgeois electoralism. what this means is that the PSL and DSA are not radical enough, at least not at the national level. that doesn’t mean you definitely shouldn’t be a party member/cadre in one of these organizations, just that some local branches will be better than others.

the same organization that published the other article also makes a convincing argument that the vanguard party arises, in the very early stages, from the study group; that we must form groups that are intimately familiar with marxist theory before those groups can be developed into cadres. that’s not to say that communists shouldn’t act in other movements, just that the party itself must have iron discipline and a deep understanding of marxism-leninism before it can possibly act.

I don’t believe in an “American communist” because your set of ethical and moral values - not to mention your forms of socialization and even fulfillment - are very alien to communism.

One could even say that the mental processes of Americans are very different from those of the ordinary human being in general. You don’t swap out a ROM stuck in a blob of epoxy. That is the American mentality.

But whatever the mitigated right-wing political form you call socialism that you want to make prevail, the solution is to occupy spaces.

It took the outright fascists 50 years to solidify control over the functions of state. They organized, took over mass media, took over the churches, redefined the terms of debate and engagement, and leveraged the angst of generations and the white supremacy latent in the culture to create a reliable voting block out of single issue voters.

The same has to happen on the left. We need to find where the people are, undertand their needs and desires, and sell them on solutions that feel good, and that make sense to them, while also being genuinely pro-social and pro-worker. We need our own communication and media platforms that don’t allow the technofascists from blocking our messages. We need to get people off of corporate social media and into spaces we can actually reach them, and we need to do it without actively pissing them off and getting them frustrated with us.

And we need to embed ourselves mainstream political parties. We need the more moderate, more socially acceptable of us to be on internal political party committees, to run for office, and to sell our ideals. Possibly without ever mentioning the “C” or “S” words. And we need a spillover party that both collects the more radical and, uh, grating members of the movement, and to promote more radical ideas and positions, providing an ideological anchor for the comrades in the mainstream parties, making them look more reasonable.

Now is the opportunity to make moves. The working class is angry at the right. Collect them now. Pull them away from their echo chambers, and from technofascist websites, and redirect their anger. Bring them here. Give them someplace new to feel a sense of community and belonging. Send out leaflets and newsletters. Create an alternate media ecosystem that laughs at the messages of individualims and exceptionalism.