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Extremist Book Clubs — Thoughts on Praxis

anon_fala said in #5513 1w ago: received

Radical political organizing today seems to be best carried out through the form of a book club. Just as Bolshevik and Maoist cadres formed radical reading groups to build solidarity amongst partisan cells and nucleate and distribute ideological doctrine, we can do the same with our own ideology today. Book clubs do not attract a great deal of attention from either political authorities or media groups hostile to our projects. They are low-cost, and they hit both the need for intellectual formation and the human contact necessary to create solidarity amongst radical, aligned elements. I've had some success organizing radical book clubs in our scene in my own city.

With all that said, how can we use this form factor better? What did the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks and Maoists do that we are failing to do?

I think in general, in-person organizing on the extremist right is, to say the least, problematic. We have some activist, active club organizations like Patriot Front that are involved in marches and rallies that undoubtedly have an effect on widening the Overton window and building solidarity, but they're attracting a lot of heat, and it's unclear how they're really helping to build a national network. It seems like there are inherent trade-offs between publicity and security, as well as between networking and containerization.

An ideal system of right-wing cells would involve something like a hierarchy of formally disconnected groups, with various organizations doing top-of-funnel, less explicitly radical work that serves as a feeder for more radical groups that are more covert and open only to pre-vetted, aligned individuals. As it stands today, we seem to have a decently good network of individuals who are our guys both in America and abroad. But the networking between these people is informal and maybe low-bandwidth, and the more "top of funnel" feeder system to propagate ideology and to recruit high-value individuals into our sphere is very lacking. Right now, it seems all there is is the public internet and our media space, which can introduce people to our ideas and then pull them into in-person organizing, but at the cost of low recruiting throughput and middling success in transmitting our worldview.

How can the discerning individuals of sofiechan.com build out this network and optimize our organizational process, whether in the book club organizing space or generally? What are we missing? Any discussion of pros and cons or successes and failures would be welcome.

Radical political or received

jewishman said in #5515 6d ago: received

Is this another internet thing? If not, a converted twelve-step program. A birdwatching club. Father-son touch football. DIY camera repair workshop (I want someone to help me take apart the shutter on my old folding camera). Range day. Show-and-shine. A course on public speaking. These might still attract people the disaffected weirdos who want to debate Thomas Carlyle—but there will be other people there, too. And then you get into the extreme stuff.

referenced by: >>5517

Is this another inte received

anon_fala said in #5517 6h ago: received

>>5515
Maybe in the hinterland you can have non-internet right-wing groups, but I'm not sure this is really viable.

If you want to connect the most capable and the most radical people in your area, how else are you going to find them? Maybe if you happen to live in a right-leaning and very tight-knit community, this is possible, but I think in the vast majority of cases the internet is the only game in town.

This doesn't mean that once you find the internet people, you shouldn't do offline activities — shooting, lifting, hiking, etc. — but rather that the top-of-funnel stuff really does need to happen online. IMO it's just a matter of logistics. Would be interested to hear how you've fared with non-internet groups.

Maybe in the hinterl received

jewishman said in #5519 5h ago: received

You're probably right—about the impossibility of organizing offline, at least for most people. What I'm about to say probably doesn't apply outside of my own particular context. And maybe we have different goals. And I don't want to pretend it's not useful to chat on the internet.

I want to maintain my anonymity. But I live in a big city that is neither infamously liberal, nor, judging by the politicians my neighbors elect, particularly conservative. I have more friends than most people my age, but I'm not particularly outgoing or charismatic. I join clubs. I attend religious events. I go to rallies (sometimes for causes I wouldn't support in a Sofiechan post). I volunteer. I hang around. It's rare that I meet a level-headed man that has anything but surface-level progressive politics. Conversations I wouldn't risk online are much easier to feel out in person. The kind of man I meet out in the world tends to be more comfortable getting their hands dirty—in the sense of sticking their neck out for a friend, in the sense of showing up somewhere in person when called upon...—whether I met them at an anarchist picnic, or outside my kids' school, or at a gallery opening. You get to know who lives around the corner from you, and what they care about.

We do need to be fishers of men. Hang out and do some ideological work; and then call the usually rather timid men you meet talking politics at internet book clubs out into the world to meet them. But yes, maybe this is a tiresome riff that doesn't make sense anymore ("You want to find true love, you should be talking to women in the supermarket—oh, but I guess everybody orders their groceries online now, right? Well, alright, you got me there...")

You're probably righ received

anon_mwpe said in #5521 4h ago: received

Online and IRL are not mutually exclusive. We should think about ways to connect them, create pipelines from one to the other.

Online and IRL are n received

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