one of the most useful things I learned working on the Bernie campaign is that complexity is the enemy of scale.

your job, if you want to organize on the level of mass politics, is to lower the bar to take action.

one of my favorite ideas is from Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish theologian & civil rights activist: "A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does."

that's how people change: they do or experience something, which makes them think about the world differently -- not the other way around.

[this is one of the big reasons socialists are so obsessed with strikes, even though strikes usually lead only to some short-term reform; they constitute thousands of usually apolitical workers having a collective political experience, and often being transformed through it]

in the US in the cursed year 2020, we are experiencing and doing a lot of things, and people are changing through that experience, hopefully towards justice for the working class, but definitely changing.

but for the most part, across the advanced capitalist world, most people are doing less and less, politically. or being told what they're experiencing is not political.

"there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." -Thatcher, 1987

so our job, as a generation trying to reconstitute anything like "a left" [which is to say a section of society that knows what it wants and wants it all the time -- socialism, justice, etc] is to create the openings for more people to take more action, & to be transformed

so lower the bar, standardize the ask, make it as easy as possible for people to have their first political experience, to take their first political action!

and for god's sake, don't have every chapter write its own bylaws.