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.
Any organization that is incapable of including you in an online or offline social space in 5 minutes and give you something meaningful to do in 30 minutes is a dead organization.
Unfortunately it’s not enough to drop the gatekeeping because that gatekeeping is a result of years and years of cumulated trauma, bad praxis, dysfuncational organization, lack of self-awareness, performativism and/or sectarianism.
The American Right (I assume you’re American from how you write) doesn’t have all this weight: they are not afraid to go to jail because they completely remove it could happen to them. They are not afraid of infiltration. They are not afraid of having their organization devolve into something too similar to an adjacent ideological space (i.e. a heresy). They are free to experiment, to be flexible, to create new organizational forms and let information and people flow way more freely than on the left.
That said, there are plenty of spaces that have been rejecting this mentality for a while. Usually this goes along with rejecting any kind of leftist symbolism and identity in public, mostly to avoid cannibalism from the people you described but also to attract people that haven’t lived through decades of this shit and with the impulse to repeat those patterns. Keep your eyes open, because they are around you.
As a suggested read on this topic: Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal from Rodrigo Nunes.
This is definitely going to be useful filtering criteria in the future! Thanks!
Cross posting to c/best of lemmy