We need to get out ideas out there, and heard. Our ideas are ones respond to immensely positively if you don’t just say “communism” because then they think Stalinism and have no idea what you’re actually proposing.
For this we will need people with expertise and influence in PR and marketing, we will also need innovative marketing solutions, the kind underdog startups use to kickstart shit on a shoestring because we’ve had some very negative PR due to bourgeois propaganda and we need to rebrand.
I suggest simple, punchy, memorable messages that stick in your mind. Broad anti-capitalist/labor theory of value inspired stuff like “What is your boss costing you?”
We need functional active visible mass organization so that the disillusioned, the enraged, the disaffected have a place to plug in, organizations that prove their value through tangible results.
We need money to fund projects like free schools, advertising campaigns, businesses to fund organizational activity (the FAU in Uruguay have no dues because they fund the organization with print shops, with industrial printers bought with money from bank robberies many years in the past), legal aid, strike funds, and the like. I do not believe that bank robberies are profitable or wise in this era, but also it has been shown that the voluntary donations of an already impoverished proletariat do not provide enough capital to effectively build the infrastructure needed to build a mass movement. I suggest we find another way to separate the bourgeois from their money (perhaps we could market some kind of cleanse, superfood or dietbook or perhaps even a motivational or management seminar of some sort, those all seem to be effective ways to get a few bucks from the rich)
We will also need information systems people, computer science people, behavioral psychology people and similar. I believe that socialist experiments’ past failures in the realm of consumer goods are many ways IT problems. With capitalism we have made money a mechanism for distributing goods and services roughly where they need to go but it works so poorly that people die because of it, while others due to its myriad flaws. We need a better, smarter system for anticipating what goods will be desired, in what quantities and where. We live in a society that produces far more than enough of everything, there is quite enough to go around, it’s simply a matter of working out a system that makes sure Anton gets his lemonade when he wants it and Laurel her violin and Peter a new living room rug as the old one wears out or becomes displeasing. A system that allows for goods and services not to be given on the basis of exchange but intelligently directed to those that need or desire them.
Basically, we’ll need a great IT department.
I believe we will also be deeply in need of dissent, I believe deeply in unity between many tendencies of the anti authoritarian left, and even (provided they’re small and kept well in check so that we don’t have Stalin problems) the more authoritarian left (but not too authoritarian so we don’t have Stalin problems). None of us know exactly what will work in practice, the path to communism is as yet unbuilt, unpaved, and to get to our goal we will have to stop and adjust and stop and readjust repeatedly when elements of our program turn out not to work in practice. We must be willing to rework, to tinker, to tweak until the system runs smoothly, no dogmatic clinging to a program that has proven itself a failure. Do not execute or shun those of dissenting leftist tendencies, they are not our enemies but our friends, do we not, after all, share the goal of a bountiful society founded upon a belief in the innate value of human life, upon the need for a society where no one goes hungry, no one is left out in the cold, where no one is forgotten or ill used. A society free from oppression and bigotry in all its forms, where each of us is more free for all this?
There’s more, but yeah.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 