So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I've spent more than a few hours chatting with "the guys," and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I'm extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the "good" ones that provide their treats. (They're also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we "really needed" a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has "made some money" through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA's future (and climate change) and has said that he'll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It's wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that's a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.
What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from "collectivist" to "individualist." Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers' political views much easier to understand. They're individualists. They don't like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they're happy to be rich (at everyone else's expense) and to have the same police protect them.
As an aside, I've been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you'll see that I'm a communist, which means that it's impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I'm writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there's so much money in this field and I'd like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There's tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it's more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I'm interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
Lol. Good luck. Dozens of fascists and libertarians have planned this and failed miserably, and they have the money and political connections (and most don’t even want to change the status quo). I can’t imagine a communist with only money being successful. People generally don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere just because the community aligns with with them no matter how romantic the idea may be, and people generally have no idea how to form and run a brand new community. It’s highly unlikely it’ll become American Chiapas and more likely to become the libertarian town where bears drove away its residents
I'm just going to take it one step at a time and see how far I can go. It wouldn't be the first worker co-op in the USA. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do, aside for "wait for a revolution." I know people here are like: "organize." And I'm like: I am literally the only communist for a hundred miles. There is no one to organize. I am surrounded by liberals and fascists. The only proletarians around here are seasonal laborers, many of whom don't speak English and have numerous reasons to be distrustful of a random white person talking about communism in broken Spanish. Etc.
Your only choice is to agitate among the people who are there. Lots of reactionary people are just inadequately educated, and things get much easier if you can build a small base of people. The people discouraging you are worthless doomers waiting for more-overt-fascists to take over, don't listen to them.
I feel like you'd have more success just organizing a community space within an existing town or city, along with a worker coop. Like the other guy said trying to form a rural commune usually just ends up either in failure or things getting culty.
Yeah the cult potential for a rural co-op is an issue.
Well the worker co-op is a fine idea. I encourage it. But I just don’t see how anyone, not just you, can manage to turn that into a full community.
Do people actual live in this area? If so you’ll have to take their thoughts into consideration or else they’ll make enough noise to actually attract the authorities. And it’s unlikely you find many communists here, so you have to go with the second option of working with locals and radicalizing them.
You say that you work with oil burners and that they could be replaced. What then? Will it just turn into Detroit or Appalachia where the town is abandoned and there’s nothing to do?
You say the community/town will be defended with guns. What is there to defend if there are not enough jobs for everyone, especially if climate change or substitutions phase out the primary and most lucrative job (I.e. the one you have now)? Given the current capitalist system, it’s unlikely that most people are okay with a large portion of the community doing whatever while being subsidized by the other portion working - that’s just commune brain and it rarely works, if ever.
There's nothing illegal about anything we would be doing, not until the final stages, when there are hundreds or even thousands of us here and we're too powerful to stop.
The locals consist almost entirely of reactionary blue collar workers, retirees, and landlords. I'm not sure anything short of ten years in a re-education camp for each of them would radicalize them.
It’s not illegal to do your plan. But I suspect a population that’s almost exclusively reactionary will not combat this with the full support of more powerful forces
And yeah it’s hard to persuade them of anything, but usually existing communities aren’t big fans of other people coming by and benefitting from them without any consideration for them. I’m not suggesting you compromise down to their fascist politics, but they will be there.