All year I’ve been making various attempts to found an organization. All of the books and zines tell me to get myself and some friends together and do an abarchy. I have 3 friends and they’re all some flavor of liberal. Our politics are incompatible and they have no interest in anything left of Bernie Sanders. Perhaps my rhetoric isn’t the best.
I’ve tried to get my coworkers interested in a union. Despite having terrible working conditions and recognizing the need for a collective voice, nobody wants to take the plunge with me. Nobody wants to make plans. Nobody cares enough to put the work in. I did the “educate, agitate, organize”, I printed the pamphlets, I talked the talk, I set dates. Nobody showed up.
I table by myself at a local arts market on Saturdays. I hand out cold water and zines, I have great conversations with people from all walks of life. I haven’t met a single anarchist and I haven’t had anybody show up to the reading group I’ve been trying to start.
All year I’ve been trying to join an organization. There’s a food not bombs run by social democrats in my city. They only want donations. There’s a community garden that isn’t looking for volunteers. There’s a DSA chapter that only does campaign events. That’s it. Those are the only secular, public organizations in my city that aren’t corporate nonprofits that I’ve been able to find after months of searching. Barring a Marxist vanguard group that dissolved earlier this year, and a women’s health ride share that fell apart two weeks into starting.
What am I supposed to do? I want to put the work in, I want to help build a better world. My state, my county, my city, and my neighbors seem determined to walk blindly into this catastrophe and it boggles my mind. Is there anybody out there who’s been in my situation and managed to make something of it?
This is kinda covered in the book. He talks about telling a story to someone where he said something nice to some guy and the listener asks “what did you want from him?”, and the author said something like “what did I want from him? What did I want from him!?” and says how making people feel good is just part of being a nice person, not about what they can do for you.
I can’t remember the details as it has been many years since I read it, but what I took from it was that people like people who are nice people, and you can work together for something mutually beneficial, it’s not about manipulating people to do what you want.
It’s also a nice, quick, easy read. Basically just a bunch of anecdotes.