Weโve grown up in a deeply anti-social society that has abolished and punished existing in public for youth and the oppressed and priced out the poor from leisure but if youโre going to call yourself a communist you canโt be promoting social isolation and alienation as โunderstandableโ via identity politics.
Thatโs how we lose and we all get killed. YOU need to be social if you consider yourself a revolutionary and not merely a sympathizer. How are you going to organize the masses without leaving your house and encouraging others to do the same, because itโs discomforting, potentially risky and wonโt be easy? Revolution is risk. If you wanted to avoid risky social interactions, you wouldnโt go down the path of being a black sheep by calling yourself a communist revolutionary.
Thereโs risk in socializing, thereโs also risk in organizing and you canโt organize if you canโt socialize! Socializing with your coworkers and neighbors, building connections past alienation, and discussing shared conditions and grievances as workers and tenants is the practice and your homework for organizing a union, a vanguard party or a peopleโs army.
Iโve had to overcome social anxiety in order to achieve goals greater than myself. This is a skill, not an inborn talent. Challenge yourself because ultimately what we need is to build the conditions to meet the moment, those final series of crises, and that includes at a very basic level that doesnโt exist in places like the United States is community.
You as a communist should be someone who (if able) can be relied upon by your peers. You should be concerned and investigative. You should genuinely care about the lives and the conditions of those around you, because people can smell a salesman.
As a communist youโre not trying to sell somebody on an advertisement for your lifestyle brand, youโre trying to organize people to realize their own capacity for creating social change and leadership. You need to at least attempt to be charming, charismatic, educated, humble and selfless.
Combat your own anti-social tendencies. The ruling class wants you isolated, alone and alienated not only from labor but from humanity itself.
We are trying to win a new future for global humanity in the face of our ongoing climate change induced mass extinction event and the resurgence in fascist and far right politics globally. Take it seriously. Engage with what the masses around you are experiencing, immerse yourself amongst their ranks.
You already are a proletarian and a tenant likely, youโre around workers and tenants all the time, but you havenโt broken the capitalist programming that has told you to resent other people for wasting your valuable time and peace which is money lost, to fear social risk and failure so much you avoid socializing altogether, and prevents you from gathering in too large a mass of your class comrades in the explicit interest of the bourgeoisieโs counterinsurgency efforts.
Stop listening to tumblrโs glorification of the loser and why itโs okay if you just bedrot forever. If the only thing keeping you from leaving the house is fear of socializing and not a disability, Iโm sorry but communism is a philosophy of action and as a fellow traveler you have a responsibility and obligation to protect the people around you by collectivizing into a unified mass movement. You also have to do it for the people who genuinely cannot leave their homes. They also deserve protection from a worsening fascist government.
