The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that’s it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn’t seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.
You have to get out there and do stuff. It’s hard because people have jobs. There was a surge in mutual aid organizing during the pandemic, in large part because a lot of people had more free time. I would say that if you have the time and people for a regular book club, start doing some community outreach. Find a need in your area, and help with it in some way. Call it mutual aid, call it charity, call it helping your neighbors. It’s a way to interact/build positive relationships with people we need to develop class consciousness within. Don’t beat them over the head with ideology, but don’t hide it either.
The only active ‘left’ group I see in public in my area are part of some well funded Trotsky communist group. They will have a table telling people to join a communist political party but they charge money for even a tiny sticker, it just gives a bad impression that they don’t even have a flyer or something to hand out, or actually do anything helpful for anyone around.
I am part of a (not-well-funded) Trotskyist group and the stated reasoning for charging for papers and buttons and stuff is that people are more likely to read a paper or put a button somewhere important if they paid for it. I have a drawer at home full of free stickers. We have leaflets that are free though.
But you should look on social media and ask around. I know about a bunch of orgs in my area that I’ve never crossed paths with organically.
I get that, and it makes sense for fundraising, those things aren’t free. This group has high quality large posters in full color all over, nice banners, but yeah they didn’t even have a free leaflet or business card, seemed like a basic thing for any org in my experience. True about social media, I am sorta new to the area so I haven’t delved into that, there are some other groups I’ve seen posters for. Long ago I would use twitter to get info from orgs, I have avoided that for a while, what do people even use these days?
Oddly enough I’ve seen a lot of announcements on Instagram. “Upcoming events” posted by a leftist bookstore or church nearby may also be helpful - yesterday I found out this way that apparently there is a Chicago chapter of Extinction Rebellion. But word of mouth is the best way, a lot of orgs just don’t have good social media or get squashed by the algorithm.
Don’t worry about them. Start something yourself if you need to. In my experience, there’s a lot of people out there that are just looking for opportunities to get involved. If you build it, they will come kind of thing. Please resist the urge to bring sectarian frictions into your organizing though. Focus on broader aims.