Right wing experience: Walk past a right wing protest literally by coincidence, spoke to the demonstrators just for giggles. They wanted to give me a sign to hold, wanted to network. So I networked with them. They invited me to another few protests which I didn’t go to. I had some time and went to 1 of their protests. Afterwards they invited me to a house party and I went to that lol.
Leftwing experience #1: finally found a leftwing group, Which was rather difficult because my city is right wing. Extremely eager to go out and do praxis. My contact there got in touch with me via email. She didn’t want to progress from email to call or anything in person. When I asked about irl Praxis she said they didn’t need anybody right now (???). The back and forth emails felt like mostly a waste of time. She’d throw in the occasional low-key insults. Eventually revealed that singular they wanted to spend God knows how long “vetting” me before anything further would happen. This was happening at around the same time I met those right wing activists above.
That leftwing above wouldn’t allow me to network with anyone else in their org, extremely strong gate keeping. Judging from a few things she said, I’d only speak to someone in the same manner as her if I thought they were a murderer on the run.
Eventually i just gave up.
Leftwing experience #2: Different City. Networked with my local iww. Gave me the union training over zoom. I didn’t have money to pay for their dues, but told the organizer to invite me to protests they go to. Long story short, organizer said they wouldn’t invite me for any protests unless I put cash on the table.
In the 20 years I lived in that City, I never saw or heard anything about that iww. Pretty sure they never did anything besides closed door zoom meetings.
Tldr: the left wingers I met or either incompetent or douchebags.
It’s literally easier and faster to approach women for dating/sex stuff, at least in my experience, than get lefties to do something. in my country. I’m not a Chad or anything either.
My suggestions: Drop the gatekeeping bs, actually do shot that isn’t zoom meetings or reading books, drop the financial requirements. If the right wing icons didn’t spend so much time bashing minorities, I might have believed capitalism works.
Biggest problem with leftists is that they’re more busy fighting each other than they are getting anything done. And I say this as a 30-year leftist. The right-wingers are dangerous because they’re UNITED. The left could stand to learn a few things from them. Just one guy’s opinion, of course, and your mileage may vary…but that has been my overall experience.
Its easy to unite around hate
So you don’t hate capitalism?
Hatred of capitalism by itself doesn’t get you anywhere, though. Without a careful study of history and materialism, it’s not obvious that communism is the counter-force to overcome bourgeois democracy. And without overcoming bourgeois democracy, you get tepid ineffective social democracy or “democratic socialism” which isn’t real in that it doesn’t exist outside of a communist-led dictatorship of the proletariat.
Hatred of immigrants, minorities, etc. just encourages you to reinforce the status quo, which can be done by:
A) doing nothing
B) actively supporting Western police and military
C) Jan 6 style insurrections to bring about even more repressive regimes
Ultimately none of these change the underlying system other than to tweak the dial of violence.
Yes, yes, I’ve heard all of this many times before. It still does not change the fact that leftists in this country are a divided and disillusioned lot. We can’t get out of our own way long enough to get any real work done. At least that’s what I’ve seen for the most part over the last 30 years. There’s no real unity, which was my original point. And until there is, we’re all just spinning our wheels. Careful study and research is great, but is far too often a cowardly excuse for inaction.
Yeah, I don’t really disagree with your overall point. I was just nitpicking at the idea that we could get a bunch of people together to unite under a shared hatred of capitalism. IMO unity will come and go, and we need to just keep spending our time organizing locally according to the material conditions surrounding us.