so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.
anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.
about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.
now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.
this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.
in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.
so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.
you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,
or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.
kianamaiart
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