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?

  • chobeatOP
    3·
    3 days ago

    What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion?

    My goal is to build more effective political organizations. I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant, I do this as a volunteer for the orgs that cannot afford me, and I do it in the orgs in which I’m politically active first-hand. Building communities of experts and people interested in improving, on a global scale, is part of the process.

    To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems.

    There are effective orgs with problems and there are orgs with no chance of having a positive impact because they spend all their resources reproducing themselves. No problem joining the first kind, but I don’t believe there’s a point beating a dead horse with the second.

    One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time.

    I’m not American, so campaign organization is not really the frame I’m immersed in. I do a lot of organizing with Americans, so I understand the context, but if you want to build a political org that can last a century and it’s able to evolve and fit changing needs, that kind of know-how is generic and reusable. There are intrinsic dynamics of how humans behave within organizations and how organizations grow, and anything pertaining to those aspects is knowledge that is transferable and can live a long time. If you build for the short-term, you are subject to the ebbs and flows of the current moment and your impact will be short-lived. I’m not against this way of doing things, but I just don’t find it interesting or ambitious enough.

    Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di

    A suspicious amount of my peers are past-IWW members who are now part of VerDi, lol.

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 days ago

      I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant

      It makes me feel much better knowing you’re (probably) familiar with my type of questioning, it’s become too ingrained to stop.

      Now that I understand how this would differentiate itself from actual orgs, I’m definitely on board. I have some good things worth sharing already for tenant organizing