Both of those are very active projects that require an embedding in community, particularly a community that is going to be around for a while.

Most left groups in the US make no attempt whatsoever to build within and among a community. Many of the seeming exceptions get rerouted into a charity pipeline. They might call it mutual aid but it tends to be structured as charity with the money and labor coming from outside the community to simply provide a service for the most destitute inside the community, plus other little telltale signs. There is little work done to radicalize, incorporate, learn from the community itself, including the whole community, not just those deemed worthy of charity.

The other challenge is that communities are in transition. You try to set up shop somewhere and maybe 10 years later it's an entirely new set of people due to increased property values + increased cost of living + stagnant paychecks. To me this means you can't half-ass it, as you're going to need to create a resilient network that can move and connect across the new places people need to live and work.

But to me the main issue is that groups don't even really try in the first place. Sometimes this is even for ideological reasons.

“Mutual aid” is not transformative and so will not “get us anywhere.” Huey P. Newton called the Panthers’ stuff like that “survival programs,” which were meant to keep the poor alive/healthy until the coming revolution.

It's non-trivial now. There's a lot of regulation of facilities, lot of licensing, lot of shit. People don't trust anyone with their kids bc of decades of media propaganda. The alienation and destruction of community we all experience extends to people with kids. Folks don't know their neighbors, they don't live in the same neighborhood very long.

All the conditions that make things shit right now make community child care very difficult. Not just caring for kids, but even getting the idea that people could be trusted to care for your kids off the ground. And people still do it.

Pretty sure because the government has made it illegal or really expensive to do those things. You will go to jail if you try and feed the hungry without the right permits. Not to ensure that all involves parties are safe or being safe, but because the State has decided only it can decide who can feed the hungry.

I was thinking about this today in the sense that there are so many leftist podcasts, but you can't name a single leftist leader who comes from that sphere, and is organizing on a big scale. The best ones that I'm aware of are the Trillbillies. They at least walk the walk with community outreach. They even took time off from the show during that big flood to help people out.

The rest of them do what? Come up with an hour and a half of glib reactions to the news every week?

Here are people that a lot of us on the left have parasocial relationships with. The least they could do is some sort of Jon Stewart lib ass rally for sanity. Instead most of them sell expensive tickets to bougie ass venues so we can listen to them fart into a microphone

I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult

I mean if you know why the Panthers did provide school breakfasts, you're probably aware that it's more than a matter of simple organisation. The American state has nearly a century of practice crushing leftist movements, so just going out and doing something to make the world a better place will paint a target on your back.

On top of that, mainstream media doesn't report it. Even when things do get off the ground, they're either incredibly local and won't turn up in national news, or will be explicitly ignored by the media because of their leftist roots. Protests are big and disruptive enough - and involve specific press releases about the event - that they usually have to be reported on, even if it's negatively, so you hear about them in a way you'll never hear about mutual aid programs.

Everything is spectacle. Those are the conditions. Leftism is a fandom. Things will have to significantly change for a lot of people for anything to happen.

You have to get out there and do stuff. It's hard because people have jobs. There was a surge in mutual aid organizing during the pandemic, in large part because a lot of people had more free time. I would say that if you have the time and people for a regular book club, start doing some community outreach. Find a need in your area, and help with it in some way. Call it mutual aid, call it charity, call it helping your neighbors. It's a way to interact/build positive relationships with people we need to develop class consciousness within. Don't beat them over the head with ideology, but don't hide it either.

When I was in college free childcare and tutoring where things we'd help the community out with, I think its a more local small niche thing than any large org per say.

We're very much in a building stage, providing awareness, a sort of tilling the soil for conditions in the core and it moves very slow since conditions we're in are comfy for many who would otherwise be totally in (this will change in the upcoming future), we're dealing with such propaganda and oppression even a free afterschool tutoring/food/whatever program or shitposting on an obscure forum makes the bourgeois tremble and drop fat checks and pull all the legal and illegal ways they can to make it stop. Societal economic changes don't happen overnight.

My excuse? I’m getting a degree and training to become a white collar tech worker. The mindset is a mixture of hatred for the violent, imperialist country I live in and still chasing the bag. The cope is that I would reach a comfortable position and “donate” my money to people who are actually useful to society to do the work. It’s rather pathetic because the western, capitalist notions of “charity” and individualism have infected me in ways I don’t know how to recover.

It’s unfortunate that fascists have claimed the “good times make weak men” bullshit, but I find it to be true. Relatively good times, created by a the murder and exploitation of millions across the world, have made me complacent and complicit. It has made me lazy. It has made me weak.

Much of the militant left actions are being done in exploited countries in the global south. They have to witness the the violence and exploitation imposed upon them by people like me and they either fight back or perish. I’m not saying I would automatically be like them or that I would be a successful organizer if I was working alongside them, all I know is that my priorities and mindset would change. And I’m not even working for the MIC or ever plan on it - I work for customer service on a computer, and I still truly mean it when I say “violence and exploitation imposed by people like me.”

I’ve worked manual labor before and currently have family in manual labor. Nothing has made me more hateful of humanity than when I worked there. Sometimes it was the coworkers. Sometimes it was the customers. But primarily it was the physical and mental toll, and I never stayed long enough to “organize.” Yet it was the only times where I felt everyone around truly understood what it’s like to experience the bullshit dealt by glorious capitalism. Now I’ve been spoiled by getting paid the same or even higher wages as a warehouse or outdoor job while sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours, and everyone is too comfortable to rock the boat.

I don’t encourage anyone to fetishize poverty, but you have to be aware that escaping it can do great harm to your mind. It’s the labor equivalence of paying off all your debts and your credit score drops. Labor aristocracy brainworms are real. The PMC brainworms are real.

https://redmenace.libsyn.com/what-is-to-be-done-with-breht-oshea-and-alyson-escalante-upstream-interview

Shit man even in the internet I’ve maybe heard 3 other people mention PSL, not all that many, not all that grouped together, and thus not all gonna be able to come together to help out large communities consistently (especially those you’re talking about DAILY and at the same time and for free. That’s just an unpaid job. Hard to get people to do that cuz people gotta live.) Doing activities people are interested in participating in or getting people together for a protest on occasion are WAAAAAY easier than having a consistent set of volunteers who are willing to continually give up their free time to their communities. Especially if those are people who may already be doing so in other ways.

I suppose they could take donations and use those to pay people to do so, but that’s barely “free” especially in a party that’s very small.

i've been thinking about this lol, is there a handbook or something on the communist side of things that tell you what to do - cause i am so lost with all this stuff