While there are plenty of spaces for debate, news commentary, “political internet culture”, memes, and so on, I still haven’t found a single community dedicated to any form of collective action, either IRL or in digital spaces. There are some communities dedicated to unions, but it seems mostly news commentary and very little action, educational material, events, or projects to plug yourself into.
I understand that the core user base of lemmy might not be the most prone to collective action, but I’m still surprised there’s nothing even on the most political communities.
Any suggestion?
I guess my experience with open social media is that there are far too many radlibs who insert themselves into communist discussion spaces. On platforms like Twitter the effect is less bad as you can select who to follow and your followers will select themselves too. But the maximum extent of discussing organising strategies etc I do with online people I don’t organise with, is discussing things with a private Matrix group of some online friends who all have solid politics and are good organisers in their local scene (we mostly live in different countries). I think a lemmy community around organising would probably attract a lot of low-quality discussion, based on what I’ve seen of organising talk on public social media.
And I just don’t see the necessity of going beyond your orgs to discuss strategy. People do write articles about strategy you can share and discuss with your org, but we’ve never discussed social media posts about strategy. You can discuss union strategy with your union; unions should provide organising training to its members. Unless unions are practically nonexistent where you are and you’re starting from scratch, but at least here you can join the union for your trade and you’ll be trained on how to organise by union organisers. For non-union orgs, if it’s self-sufficient and large enough you can get plenty of fruitful discussion among your comrades, and it will be tailored to your specific context and organisation. I don’t even know what country you live in; how am I supposed to give you the most effective advice as an internet stranger?
Indeed context matters and a lot of knowledge cannot be transferred across domains, legal frameworks, or even outside an org. Nonetheless a lot of this knowledge is indeed transferable. How to effectively facilitate a meeting can have culture-specific details, but most of the know-how is transferable. To discover which software is best to adopt to build a CRM is a discussion that can be had before knowing any specifics of your org, and when you know the specifics, you can apply what you know about CRMs to pick the best one. Organizational models can and must be discussed across orgs and countries, to understand if some problem is just an accident or a model is fundamentally unfit for a specific goal.
I wonder if the easy win for this situation is to redirect any radlibs to designated communism101 communities with learning resources to avoid them derailing discussion among communists. That way, they’re not simply rejected and banned (that is, alienated and possibly offended) for their arrogance, they have an opportunity to learn without the community either getting annoyed or wasting time in arguments.