We aren't prepared for this moment
America has thousands of advocacy groups, many with millions of dollars in the bank that actively do work on the ground. However, for however many of those big groups exist, there are thousands of small people working together to do mutual aid on a state, local, or neighborhood level.
When we look back in history, we see groups like the Black Panther party, the women suffrage groups like NAWSA, the SSOC, and many others who fought for a radical change of the system they lived under.
These groups had something we don’t: the ability to enact radical change without the fear of something to lose. In many ways, we can see that our inaction comes from complacency in modern society: many people are surrounded by a massive majority of individuals who will financially be fine, though what “fine” means is ever changing.
We have dissociated from our radical beginnings and now many groups simply attempt to nudge the status quo in a direction instead of demolishing it as originally intended.
For example, groups like the ACLU, NAACP, and many trade unions have become far more liberal in nature- accepting the capitalist system and integrating it into their group’s system of thought.
We won’t solve the issues by capitulating to capitalist ideas with a progressive lens: progress comes from the demolition of capital and the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment.
To quote a post by
, writer of “New Means”,“I think there’s a necessary humility needed right now, that a lot of folks lack for various, very American reasons, and that humility is the acknowledgement that most people have never really done politics. Very few people have really done organizing. Even fewer have done non-electoral organizing. I myself have only done a little, relative to many people I look up to. Most people haven’t done the sort of work we need right now, and to accept that truth frightens us. Yeah, we mostly aren’t prepared for this moment. We have a lot of learning to do, and it’d be best if we did it quickly. Accepting that is hard and a lot of folks understandably but unfortunately refuse to do it. They stay in old grooves that don’t serve us. The first step is accepting how little we really know, and without that not much can happen.”
We, me and you both, need to get out and start with what we know. Find a chapter of a socialist group in your area like DSA, PSL, SRA, etc. and learn from the people already attempting the work.
While divided now, these groups are radical— therefore survival with necessitate collaboration in a way that we don’t see in our current “progressive capitalist” advocacy groups. However, that will be for naught if we continue to stay uneducated and not learn the minimum we need to help others who are struggling.