How do you create a structured and disciplined organization out of the mess that is today's Left?

How do you create a structured and disciplined organization out of the mess that is today's Left?

I'm starting to think that access to serious socialist parties should be restricted, at least in its initial stages, to those who attend a number of lectures and spend enough time in study groups organized by said parties.

So you want people to have had to take a course to join your party?

Its like you actively want to remain in obscurity

sure sounds like a revolutionary mass movement to me

it's like you actively want to be murdered by cops

I'm not a Maoist or anything but seeing the left in the first world makes me think that life is too easy to produce anyone hard enough to do revolution

I think it should be an on-and-off process. A micro party can't do that, of course, that would be stupid, but micro parties don't need to worry about being selective. If people with shitty ideas come in and refuse to learn anything just tell them to fuck off.

But once it grows a bit past that and it reaches something let's say DSA-level, you could restrict membership and focus on consolidating a cohesive set of theories, values, assumptions, etc. You offer courses, you create study groups, you get the more active members to learn important skills in propaganda, and so on. At this stage, the party would focus less on electoral politics or labour agitation and more on the intellectual side of things. We'd create propaganda organs online, promote debates and events, partake in theoretical discourse, etc.

I agree, as everybody knows, revolution happens when the Party(tm) injects the correct views into those filthy prole shits, I'm especially sure the ones working long hours in order not to starve will be especially interested in devoting whatever remaining free time they have to those study groups

I don't think being hard is everything. I mean, it surely was in Russia or China where the brutality of the state was exposed and all you needed was the strength to destroy it, but in the West the conflict is a lot more hidden, the developments in communication, the way civil society was shaped and so on make the struggle multilayered. You need to be as intellectually equipped to deconstruct mainstream narratives and Ideology in a convincing manner as you'd need guns if class war morphs into a civil war. And without this, it's all futile. The Black Panthers for example were certainly hard, and they had the numbers for a while, but they couldn't fight capitalism in a war of communication so they collapsed.

Learning how to fight this war of communication is as important for us as it was for a chinese communist to learn how to fire a gun. The internet offers us a chance of doing so for the first time in almost a century, but we haven't really adapted ourselves to new tools. We need a party that, for at least a stage, will focus on training people for those purposes and in spreading left-wing narratives around. Once we have that figured out we can try to grow in numbers again, and make it a sustainable growth this time. But we can't have sustainable growth if we're joined by people who don't have the slightest idea of what Socialism is and will turn it into Occupy.

Because, as we know, left-wing Parties (tm) never helped those proles (tm) by decreasing their work hours and increasing their wages (tm), right?

Thanks a whole fucking lot.