Living in the States has me genuinely frightened. I’m not so naive as to suppose it’s not always been rough, but it’s clear we’ve entered a qualitatively different era. The moderate wing of fascism has died, and barbarism is all that remains.
I want to fight back in a substantive way, even if it’s small. I want to participate in institutions which protect the vulnerable, myself included. I don’t want to lock my doors and peek out the windows, but I know better than to engage in adventurist, individual “resistance.” I also don’t want to be in a social club where we sit and congratulate each other on having the right opinions. I’m past wanting to be on the “right side of history,” where I content myself with personally disagreeing with the nightmare we live in. Something needs to be done; the window for taking action is swinging shut.
I have almost no experience in organizing. I’ve attended a handful of protests which mostly felt like a venting of frustrations for everyone there. I’ve associated with a few comrades who had good intentions, but never accomplished much. That’s about it.
How do I actually go about being a part of something effective?
I’m not sure how you took away from Lenin’s WitbD that secrecy is so much more important than democratic centralism, organised action or the party publishing apparatus for agitation and propaganda (in their case, a newspaper). If anything what I took from the book about secrecy was more along the lines “sadly we can’t go too much in detail due to secrecy”. I also don’t remember it tying back much to guerilla warfare (specially since they were too far away from civil war at that point), though it’s been a while.
Of course do engage in opsec, but this seems like some anarchoid deviation from Marxism-Leninism. Specially considering the US is still too far away from a guerilla warfare situation. There is action that requires secrecy, but that wouldn’t be handled by people like OP with no previous experience organising. I’d be genuinely interested to hear where you got those ideas from in Lenin and Mao.
Please don’t use public and federated with cache forums as a place to connect with others if secrecy is that necessary. You might as well doxx yourself, the fediverse is an OSINT nightmare.
This is the Mao influence in my rant. The WITBD influence is more the ideas of the tricks of the state to repress revolution, and the importance of agitation and propaganda in motivating the masses. The class consciousness of Russia was much higher when Lenin wrote what is to be done than it is in the first world now. Considering the blanket anti communist sentiment and the advanced state of the surveillance apparatus in the first world, Marxists need to adjust our tactics especially as repression is growing. Democratic centralism is an issue for when we are not 5% of the population.
Based off what we have seen in communist revolutions I think it would be short sighted for 1st world communists to not expect a protracted civil/guerrilla war in the process of revolution. I think that the spread of propaganda and agitation should be organized along the lines of a guerrilla force to facilitate our transition from intellectual insurgency to an armed one.
I didn’t mean to insinuate that people should organize or discuss openly their revolutionary actions and plans on here. You’d never DM an IRL comrade and say “wow that bust was crazy did you make it out? we are planning on regrouping at whataburger next tuesday”
I mean more so using social media as a signaling system. If you see a post from a username that you know IRL you know they are alive, you can use highly personalized language to communicate a message or use prearranged codes.