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The leftwing activism experience needs to be improved - Lemmy
lemmy.mlRight 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.
I’m sorry but I’ve never gone to a right wing protest to network. This person is jumping back and forth between left wing orgs and right wing orgs for what exactly? Giggles?
I can’t speak on the IWW, but I recently took part in some organizing with the PSL. Applied one week, talked over email for a few days, and went organizing the next week. I guess I didn’t get invited to any BBQ’s but the PSL does hold these boba meetups occasionally, but even then, I didn’t sign up to be a pseudo frat bro.
Yeah, this is why reading books is an important part of an org’s curriculum/ program.
i guess it is just comparison, see how the organization of the “enemy” works. i think, right wing movements are kind of famous of their meme culture and mobilization potential over things like 4chan.
when you study the tactics of the enemy it is easier to defeat them
and yes, i fully understand that both of your experiences is vastly different.
i think this has a lot todo with how such groups work: many times, the email account is operated by 1 person and from experience i can tell that sometimes it is difficult to shift responsibility if your own live has some trouble. which means that emails are forgotten and such.
especially: i think systematic approach to answering/working on emails makes a huge difference to not forget things. But you have to learn that somewhere first, and i think many people don’t know that.
(with systematic i mean: how to not loose the overview when you receive 20 mails per week or something. like: what still needs some work, what is done, what is important what can be done later, etc.)