We’ve grown up in a deeply anti-social society that has abolished and punished existing in public for youth and the oppressed and priced out the poor from leisure but if you’re going to call yourself a communist you can’t be promoting social isolation and alienation as “understandable” via identity politics.
That’s how we lose and we all get killed. YOU need to be social if you consider yourself a revolutionary and not merely a sympathizer. How are you going to organize the masses without leaving your house and encouraging others to do the same, because it’s discomforting, potentially risky and won’t be easy? Revolution is risk. If you wanted to avoid risky social interactions, you wouldn’t go down the path of being a black sheep by calling yourself a communist revolutionary.
There’s risk in socializing, there’s also risk in organizing and you can’t organize if you can’t socialize! Socializing with your coworkers and neighbors, building connections past alienation, and discussing shared conditions and grievances as workers and tenants is the practice and your homework for organizing a union, a vanguard party or a people’s army.
I’ve had to overcome social anxiety in order to achieve goals greater than myself. This is a skill, not an inborn talent. Challenge yourself because ultimately what we need is to build the conditions to meet the moment, those final series of crises, and that includes at a very basic level that doesn’t exist in places like the United States is community.
You as a communist should be someone who (if able) can be relied upon by your peers. You should be concerned and investigative. You should genuinely care about the lives and the conditions of those around you, because people can smell a salesman.
As a communist you’re not trying to sell somebody on an advertisement for your lifestyle brand, you’re trying to organize people to realize their own capacity for creating social change and leadership. You need to at least attempt to be charming, charismatic, educated, humble and selfless.
Combat your own anti-social tendencies. The ruling class wants you isolated, alone and alienated not only from labor but from humanity itself.
We are trying to win a new future for global humanity in the face of our ongoing climate change induced mass extinction event and the resurgence in fascist and far right politics globally. Take it seriously. Engage with what the masses around you are experiencing, immerse yourself amongst their ranks.
You already are a proletarian and a tenant likely, you’re around workers and tenants all the time, but you haven’t broken the capitalist programming that has told you to resent other people for wasting your valuable time and peace which is money lost, to fear social risk and failure so much you avoid socializing altogether, and prevents you from gathering in too large a mass of your class comrades in the explicit interest of the bourgeoisie’s counterinsurgency efforts.
Stop listening to tumblr’s glorification of the loser and why it’s okay if you just bedrot forever. If the only thing keeping you from leaving the house is fear of socializing and not a disability, I’m sorry but communism is a philosophy of action and as a fellow traveler you have a responsibility and obligation to protect the people around you by collectivizing into a unified mass movement. You also have to do it for the people who genuinely cannot leave their homes. They also deserve protection from a worsening fascist government.
