People commenting on the internet from thousands of KMs away in their room: “this is not enough, they should have done more”. It makes you feel good, because you are making a moral point about the insufficient morality of others. It makes you feel better than them.
Never punish somebody for taking a political step in the right direction. This is not about you feeling good but it’s about them building change. We can argue if change is possible within Israel’s society, but it’s not on the people who decided to do something.
Its impossible for the consciouss mind to not experience anything
Lot of people would disagree on this. A lot of spiritual practices are exactly about experiencing the non-experience, experience what cannot be described, explained or thought. If you’re lazy, a big enough of an LSD dose will bring you there in a couple of hours.
Spirituality is the system you use to create reality. Reality is not a given, it’s something you build for yourself. What you’re describing is also a very specific spiritual and metaphysical system.
I’m talking about a private individual invading the physical and digital spaces of public institutions with the president providing political cover and stopping other parts of the state to intervene. That’s a self-coup. Nothing like that happened in Italy and so far the government is operating within legality.
No self-coup happened yet, most constitutional freedoms are still respected, there are no political extra-judicial arrests (or at least not that many). Except for some repression of communitarian spaces and public protests, it is not sensibly different from any center/center-right neoliberal government.
Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.
How are you defining mass parties? Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as “parties designed for a mass society”, where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.
When did they stop working, and why?
There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.
The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you’re working with don’t change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.
What does that mean? The PCF is pretty much a dying party with basically no relevance.
Have you ever spoken with an urban young mainlander? They are the most individualistic people on Earth. Beats any gun-bearing Texan everyday.
History does matter. In the same way mass parties wouldn’t have worked in 15th century Europe, they won’t work now. Learning history is useful to understand how entire system of thought and action survived way past their relevance, doomed and incapable of understanding their own demise.
Mass society in the West doesn’t exist anymore. You’re unfit to achieve anything you want to achieve and you lack the tools to elaborate to yourself why you keep losing. The world moved on and so should your politics.
“Virtual backgrounds as the norm” is an interesting practice, pretty much like school uniforms erasing difference in class by dressing everybody the same.
virtual and blurred backgrounds still signal a lot. Not only they let the viewer know that your environment is not nice, but they also become aware you’re somewhat ashamed of it, enough to be willing to hide it.
I wouldn’t say the fediverse is established. It’s a very small and niche phenomenon compared to mainstream social media. By now it’s clear it’s not going to ever grow to an impactful size. It’s here to stay, but it will stay as a minor, geeky thing.
They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of
For that, I’m already collaborating on activisthandbook.org and I curate my own lists of content. What I see social bookmarking is good for is circulation of less structured knowledge, short-lived information (i.e. about events or courses), news like publication of relevant books and so on. Wikis take a lot of effort to curate and are the last step of a process of information discovery and processing from certain environments that starts somewhere else. Lemmy or other social media can work at an intermediate level between personal knowledge and structured, consolidated knowledge shared in the commons.
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.
I think you’re a bit confused here, Democratic Centralism and the Mass Line are organizational principles. They are primarily for party structure, not only mass societal structure, and Liu Shaoqi’s work is on behavior within orgs. Any union, political party, etc. can and would benefit from learning these and discussing them.
Fair enough, but I don’t believe mass parties can be built anymore without a mass society, so it’s stuff I don’t really read about because again, it’s not really actual or usable.
Is there something specific you are asking about? Like, how to file for specific legal status or something?
In other spaces like the ones I would like to find on lemmy, the areas that get discussed are stuff like organization design, process design, software and software practices, facilitation, mediation, consensus building, effective communication and so on and so forth. You know, the stuff you need to build an organization that is effective in the world.
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.
Purist brainrot is thinking that criticizing moralistic politics means siding with zionists and being racist. Same energy of calling anti-semitic any criticism of Israel.