While there are plenty of spaces for debate, news commentary, “political internet culture”, memes, and so on, I still haven’t found a single community dedicated to any form of collective action, either IRL or in digital spaces. There are some communities dedicated to unions, but it seems mostly news commentary and very little action, educational material, events, or projects to plug yourself into.
I understand that the core user base of lemmy might not be the most prone to collective action, but I’m still surprised there’s nothing even on the most political communities.
Any suggestion?
Why would you go to Lemmy for that? I’m politically active in several local organisations and if I have anything to discuss about that I discuss it with them, not with random people on social media. This is just not the platform for that.
because the techniques, practices, assets, learning material and so on should circulate and the format of social bookmarking platforms like lemmy is good for that.
I have several telegram groups, discords, facebook groups, and slacks, together with traditional forums hat collect people from all over the world interested in organization building, facilitation, strategy development, tooling, and so on and so forth. On lemmy though, there’s very little and it’s a pity.
I guess my experience with open social media is that there are far too many radlibs who insert themselves into communist discussion spaces. On platforms like Twitter the effect is less bad as you can select who to follow and your followers will select themselves too. But the maximum extent of discussing organising strategies etc I do with online people I don’t organise with, is discussing things with a private Matrix group of some online friends who all have solid politics and are good organisers in their local scene (we mostly live in different countries). I think a lemmy community around organising would probably attract a lot of low-quality discussion, based on what I’ve seen of organising talk on public social media.
And I just don’t see the necessity of going beyond your orgs to discuss strategy. People do write articles about strategy you can share and discuss with your org, but we’ve never discussed social media posts about strategy. You can discuss union strategy with your union; unions should provide organising training to its members. Unless unions are practically nonexistent where you are and you’re starting from scratch, but at least here you can join the union for your trade and you’ll be trained on how to organise by union organisers. For non-union orgs, if it’s self-sufficient and large enough you can get plenty of fruitful discussion among your comrades, and it will be tailored to your specific context and organisation. I don’t even know what country you live in; how am I supposed to give you the most effective advice as an internet stranger?
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.
I wonder if the easy win for this situation is to redirect any radlibs to designated communism101 communities with learning resources to avoid them derailing discussion among communists. That way, they’re not simply rejected and banned (that is, alienated and possibly offended) for their arrogance, they have an opportunity to learn without the community either getting annoyed or wasting time in arguments.
I’d have to disagree, these sites aren’t really designed for archiving such knowledge for easy access. Wikis and libraries, for example, are more suited to purpose, although they’re less social and less about discussion. Even other types of messageboards, like traditional internet forums are alright. But on here, older conversations tend to leave the front pages and become near undiscoverable within days or weeks. reddit and the like are designed to for news and novelty more than real information sharing.
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.
I think you’re right but I just keep chuckling at the irony behind your username and then your comment haha
? What irony? I don’t think the username of communism implies you’re… organising on Lemmy lol
You don’t see the irony there? In your username being [email protected] and your comment being
It just tickles my humor. Its not a dig at you or anything. Local organization is most effective.
No, I don’t see the irony, and I didn’t take it as a dig either. I just don’t see the two being contrary to each other. “I don’t think political discussion on social media is particularly fruitful” doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I’m not a communist or not mention it at all online.
Ahh. Well, you gave me a chuckle so thanks for that and have a great day!
Which part is ironic?
“This is not the platform to discuss organizing,” [email protected] said.
Obviously there is more to their comment, and they are totally right. But it’s ironic because it subverts your expectation of what a user called [email protected] would say
I think it’s perfectly in line, Communists more than anyone know that “organizing” on Lemmy isn’t practical in any way, discussing theory and the news sure, but not organizing.
it could be interesting for discussing the practice of oeganization, not for actually organizing through lemmy. Like there are forums for discussing self-hosting online services and so on.
Yep, there are good spots for that on Lemmy.
Alright, sure… we’ll just move past it then lol
Exactly. Lemmy can be a cool place to discuss theory and check up on the news with likeminded comrades, but that’s close to the extent that it can handle with political organization. Actual org work is handled in orgs.
I fundamentally disagree. This mindset is why so many leftist orgs still operate through processes, governance structures, and methodologies invented when the horse was the main vector to transfer information. There are plenty of spaces to become better at organizing, and digital spaces to exchange expertise and grow are important.
You can use digital communication to organize large-scale orgs, I never disputed that. My point is that an open forum based social media platform is not going to be the vanguard of the revolution, or even a good union platform. Security and privacy are far too important for organizing, and social media is far too easy to attack from bad actors.
I’m not talking about organizing on social media platforms. I’m talking about learning, sharing expertise, and interesting material on how to build organizations.
Oh, well there’s a decent deal of that, mostly on Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. I even made an intro Marxist reading list and linked it on my profile, and share it frequently. There are several communities dedicated to learning and sharing.
Indeed, but these seem to be mostly focused on political topics, rather than organizing per se. I’ve rarely seen content about organization design, facilitation, effective communication, process design or other similar topics. It’s usually sociology/economy/political theory stuff for what I’ve found.
The lemmy users have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.
There’s a good deal on org theory as well, such as theory on Democratic Centralism, the Mass Line, how to conduct yourself within orgs such as Liu Shaoqi’s How to be a Good Communist (on my reading list, in fact), and more. If you have specific questions, there are also comms for asking those as well.
I was thinking more about practical knowledge to employ today, rather than political speculation on hypothetical societal/political structure. I need people to get better at facilitating meetings, tracking tasks, and writing notes. Until then, discussing democratic centralism is sterile escapism.
Because some of us have no cars and transportation, and online spaces could help with arrangements for people willing to do the groundwork.