Thread: What does "organise" mean? How do we engage in political activism when there's no election to be won?

1st one should understand that elections in the US necessarily exclude or suppress massive sections of the struggling population. The US has THE highest prison pop. in the world, yet even ex convicts, let alone inmates, can't participate in our elections. Elections ≠ Democracy.

The term "organise" comes from a very simple idea.

The working class has a massive strength: its NUMBERS

But one massive flaw:
it's a mess. And it's purposefully made a mess that's disorganised and tempted to turn against itself, fight for scraps thrown at it by the 1%, etc.

When we talk about "organising," we're talking about creating order from the chaos. We're talking about taking as many angry, cheated working people as possible and establishing organisations through which they can communicate and cooperate to tap into the power of their numbers.

A working person alone is disempowered, and cannot stand up to their landlord, their corporate boss, their administrators, their local government, etc.

In order to successfully stand up to the forces that exploit the working people, we need to form working class organisations.

What can a working class organisation do? What does it look like?

Working class organisations include unions and left wing political parties that necessarily EXCLUDE the ruling class and its influence, and refuses to have its agenda morphed or manipulated by them, unlike the DP.

Unions are organisations of workers in a workplace, across a field/industry, or in a locality that exist to stand up to the people who have revealed themselves to be the true exploiters of the public during this crisis: landlords, big businesses, banks, and often the government.

Contrary to what the US has trained you to believe, a political party can do OTHER things than run in elections or collect money to fund promotions. It can exist as an organisation whose goal is to support and create unions, and connect workers across unions.

It can serve as a means by which workers can inform one another regarding developments in local or national politics that could be good or bad for them or their class allies across the country or the world.

It can serve as a tool for working people to fund and create mutual aid infrastructure, in other words, a system where members of a community fulfill their needs by providing for each other, rather than relying on the government or on rich people's grants to survive.

That last bit is especially important: how will or can workers respond if they go on strike and get fired for it? Workers won't strike in the first place if they know it can risk the little they have to live off of already; developing mutual aid networks protects us from this.

Please realise this: developing CLASS POWER means taking advantage of our numbers so that we don't EVER need to rely on the 1%, the Democratic Party, etc. to win us our rights. For every challenge and problem the ruling class poses us, there is a grassroots solution.