>>2452456>So when I talk about building networks, forming cells, using physical space to push power? That's what the goal is. Not to make good money telling you nothing can be done, but to actually build the infrastructure needs to be built.I'll just reuse something I wrote earlier.
The relative success of historical revolutionary movements, particularly the RSDLP in Tsarist Russia, emerged from conditions where the brutal exploitation by an autocratic state created clear, unambiguous class antagonisms. In contrast, the modern imperialist state actively manufactures consent and produces what has been termed "one-dimensional" thought, systematically stifling revolutionary imagination and limiting opposition to symbolic protests or fragmented riots that fail to challenge state power fundamentally and target individual private property.
This challenge is compounded by the prevalence of private individuals indifferent to public life who prioritize personal existence centered on family, property, and stability. This separation of private and public life creates obstacles to meaningful political action.
Within the left itself, this stagnation manifests through tendencies that reproduce different forms of one-dimensionality. There's hardly anything the left offers, ideologically let alone materially. The movement is a historic husk of itself, for the time being, but it is the phase of slow and burdensome recreation.
We can address these challenges through patient construction of independent structures for communication and education. This methodical approach responds directly to the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois state and the political disengagement of the masses. The Marxist struggle thus operates on multiple fronts: against the sinking pull of bourgeois society, against its ideological current, and against the temptation to pursue premature political actions before establishing necessary organizational foundations.
The core strategy at the start involves preserving individual intellectual independence while building permanent channels for collective work. Engels insisted revolutionaries must avoid all "official appointments" in existing parties to maintain capacity for merciless criticism. Marx, in his 1846 letter, advised German communists to break their isolation through local reading circles, distribution of cheap pamphlets, and establishment of regular correspondence systems. This groundwork enables clarification of ideas and strategy without the risk of exposure through premature public actions that would reveal the movement's weakness.
Lenin argues similarly, for founding a political newspaper as the initial step, conceptualizing it not as mere publication but as "collective propagandist, collective agitator, and collective organizer." The point is not the newspaper, but the technical demands of producing and distributing such a paper—the collection of information, regular correspondence, and organized distribution networks—actively necessitate creating a framework of local agents. This logistical requirement itself becomes a revolutionary organizing tool, forming an organizational skeleton that develops the capacity to respond flexibly to diverse events while maintaining political independence from compromising alliances before achieving adequate preparation.