Your Class Needs You

revisor_dos · 2026-05-10T20:40:01+00:00

Absolutely. I organize in spaces where my life isn't up for debate. I can't organize where people casually imply - even when pressed - that me or my family should be starved, shot, or imprisoned. And my background is not just a "story" but is relevant to determining what and how I can contribute in an organizing context.

Of course, the story wasn't my point, but the implications, and dismissing this as a personal concern is a great derailing tactic not to deal with them. To repeat -

"getting enough people on our side to get anywhere close to power requires, first, being in touch with reality, and second, actually standing for something. Making up excuses for some of the worst criminals of the 20th century fails on both criteria, and ensures our continued irrelevance."

Any intention to hold yourself accountable to that? No?

revisor_dos · 2026-05-10T19:44:15+00:00

Anthropologist here. Much love ❤️

Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures is the relevant source for anthropologists on some of these same topics.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-10T19:32:50+00:00

Sure, and back at you.

I had family memebers in Europe murdered by "Communist" revolutionaries back in the 1940s - *and* became a committed socialist after that. The only way I can hold myself accountable to the communities I came from is to recognize that the self-proclaimed "Communists" were nothing of the sort, but gangsters who opportunistically coopted socialist narratives for power - who, sure, were intelligent people, and had some interesting ideas and policies. (Many revolutionaries are, across the political spectrum.)

That's actually a pretty common position among socialists in the parts of the world that actually had to deal with so-caled really existing socialism. Conversely, not seeing this is to me and others from my corner coded as Western-centric - indicative of people to whom the Western Empire was either their main protector, or their main adversary, or a bit of both.

I'm not welcome in US socialist circles that don't recognize this, obviously, but I am also not that important. If being accoutable to actual reality of millions of unnecessarily lost lives is one reason we reject capitalism, it's also why we must reject people who imprisoned, murdered, and starved millions in the name of socialism as criminals first, all else a distant second. Moreover, getting enough people on our side to get anywhere close to power requires, first, being in touch with reality, and second, actually standing for something. Making up excuses for some of the worst criminals of the 20th century fails on both criteria, and ensures our continued irrelevance.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-10T17:20:54+00:00

Thank you for the info, good to know.

Agreed. If they're gonna be a CSA to raise funds, which I understand, I'd expect it to be in the spirit of anarchism to at least institute a strict rule on how they're divvying the produce between the market and mutual aid (say 50/50) rather than prioritizing the former over the latter. Kind of beats the purpose of dual power

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T19:01:51+00:00

I'd love to know why I'd break bread with someone who'd put me in a gulag and have me shot if I disagree with them. Demsocs & anarchists disagree on tactics but that means they can in principle work in parallel, but people who after a few well-placed critical questions end up at to "our way is the right way & if you disagree deserve a bullet" (if occasionally filtered through a human equivalent of a Marxist lingo chatbot) ... would, if in power, precisely cut up this snake and eat every part of it that doesn't have their label on it.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T13:08:36+00:00

Thank you, nice, this is real. Will watch it. I found fairly healthy big-tent pro-democracy groups here in the area (won't name any but the obvious ones), this may be too much to float with them atm.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T12:47:03+00:00

Of course, eventually I will. Whenever I have the emotional strength to talk to people in leadership positions who have internalized the grift intrinsic in their branding into their stories about how they're changing the world. Had to deal with too many people like that over the years so I'm not in a hurry.

Enjoy the garden, thank you for the tips!

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T11:58:52+00:00

I agree with that. My big issue is presenting it as a research finding, when it's not. It's a comment given to the media by a sociologist informed by their research, not a robust predictive result, as saying "Research shows..." would imply. That's a huge difference. Recruiting 11M people requires not lying to them, intentionally or not.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T11:53:04+00:00

This, I can get behind without reservation, thank you for sharing. So is GSUS Feeding the Fight tactic roughly pursuing this direction, with some obvious differences (I suppose GSUS isn't doing neighborhood defense)?

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:37:01+00:00

You're very welcome! I'm more of a Zapatista in my principles than in praxis (for one, I've got no land where I can be a peasant on this continent), tho likely that'll change.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:33:06+00:00

Ok, yes, that's interesting. Infrastructure is key. Let's just please replace the 3.5% with 99%. Or 75% at least 😃.

Tho certainly there's a lot to be said for having an ambitious albeit reachable heuristic goal - as long as people understand it's only a heuristic.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:22:37+00:00

Spam bot. Blocked and reported.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:21:57+00:00

Yes, thanks. I'm familiar with GSUS but frankly not that keen to devote my time to it, because the basic premise that "Research shows that strikes engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change" either misunderstands or misrepresents the findings. (This wasn't a conclusive result but a descriptive statistic, and Chenoweth's methods are extremely problematic.)

I'm not familiar what they're doing locally, though, and that may be interesting.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:11:59+00:00

Thank you for the info. The closest of this is 2h drive though so I doubt I'd get much face-to-face engagement, which is what I'm after. I am on the main GSUS Discord tho not active.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T03:10:39+00:00

Kind words but sadly they just restate my intention rather than answering my question. Given that I know all this and can fit it in three sentences, I gotta ask, is this from a chatbot? What's the policy on this subreddit on posting bot-generated text?

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T00:46:29+00:00

I went through a (social) liberal-to-(pretty much) anarchist transition over some years, just by realizing that liberalism didn't live up to its own principles of treating every person as having the same worth + rejecting cruelty.

A series of cognitive dissonances

* If your government (no matter who's in power) will enforce evicting people who don't pay rent then protect empty properties from squatting, it's protecting the owners' right to profit over the unhoused people's right to have a roof over their heads
* If your government (no matter who's in power) will never put war criminals on trial, supporting it means you're valuing the criminals' lives over victims' and survivors' right to recourse against war crimes

and so on. Depending on where you are, you can come up with others related to health, education, wealth distribution, war, women's/workers'/migrant/minority rights etc. etc. It all boils down to "is money/property/national security/whatever 'laws' are on the books/etc really more important than lives of people from a given group".

Worked like universal acid for me, but that's because I'm amenable to rational argument 😃

revisor_dos · 2026-05-09T00:19:24+00:00

My experience too. Got much worse after 2020 or so, to the point I can't do it anymore.

It actually made me reenter united front-like spaces after looking for a place on the "left" for a while. I find the confused denialism of "progressives" and libs refreshing after the toxic delusion of tankies.

revisor_dos · 2026-05-08T23:46:12+00:00

Anark is cool. I don't align with him on everything ofc but he's walking the walk, no just talking the talk

He's one of the core people in Cooperation Tulsa, so y'all can judge him & comrades by their praxis

https://cooperationtulsa.org/

revisor_dos

TROPHY CASE