Is there any community on Lemmy dedicated to political/union organizing?
Is there any community on Lemmy dedicated to political/union organizing?
While there are plenty of spaces for debate, news commentary, "political internet culture", memes, and so on, I still haven't found a single community dedicated to any form of collective action, either IRL or in digital spaces. There are some communities dedicated to unions, but it seems mostly news commentary and very little action, educational material, events, or projects to plug yourself into.
I understand that the core user base of lemmy might not be the most prone to collective action, but I'm still surprised there's nothing even on the most political communities.
Any suggestion?
Genuinely, it makes more sense to join an org local to you than it does to organize over social media.
I'm part of many local orgs and I'm not talking about "organizing over social media", but rather to discuss the topics surrounding the practice and theory of organization building with other people interested in the topic and practicing it.
Copying my other answer to your other response:
Oh, well there's a decent deal of that, mostly on Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. I even made an intro Marxist reading list and linked it on my profile, and share it frequently. There are several communities dedicated to learning and sharing.
I love giving advice on organizing, but I tend to agree with the other person that social media is a poor format for building long term collective action. The best place to share this stuff is with a union. I learned everything I know about organizing from my union CWA, including the classes needed to learn how to organize (they're free and offered every weekend).
I'm fighting an unjust firing, and went to my union. When we had a violation of status quo, we turned to our union. When we're unsure how to organize, our union forms a committee to figure it out. When we need more people, we recruit among coworkers. When we have an idea for political action, we talk to our local president to get it proposed during membership meetings. When we have questions we can't answer, we talk to our executive board.
There is space for a community like what you're proposing and I'd participate in it, but I don't know how much active interest there would be.
I'm one of the people organizing such activities, not within a union but through a similar dynamic. While that's a great way to build capacity and know-how, it's very narrow and slow to evolve. There's plenty of research and discussion on how to build democratic organizations more effectively, and this kind of discussion doesn't happen within a single org. When it does, it's often very disconnected from reality and uninteresting. This kind of know-how can totally be circulated through social networks (not necessarily social media, but also) when the exchange is on topics of interest on a global scale.
What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion? To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems. One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time. Like for example I created a shortened organizing training for my campaign, we were able to turn a 4 hour, 2 class course into a single 1.5 hour session because we tailored the info specifically to the ongoing campaign. It could be useful for some very limited purposes, but by and large it's just a relic of my campaign history.
Unions can be slow, but they also move incredibly fast. CWA still has work to be done, but members won't allow it to be anything other than democratically controlled. The labor activist world is small and full of plagiarism, the conversation is never held to just one group with unique ideas. Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di to 1970s teachers to modern examples that were just implemented.
Why would you go to Lemmy for that? I'm politically active in several local organisations and if I have anything to discuss about that I discuss it with them, not with random people on social media. This is just not the platform for that.
because the techniques, practices, assets, learning material and so on should circulate and the format of social bookmarking platforms like lemmy is good for that.
I have several telegram groups, discords, facebook groups, and slacks, together with traditional forums hat collect people from all over the world interested in organization building, facilitation, strategy development, tooling, and so on and so forth. On lemmy though, there's very little and it's a pity.
I guess my experience with open social media is that there are far too many radlibs who insert themselves into communist discussion spaces. On platforms like Twitter the effect is less bad as you can select who to follow and your followers will select themselves too. But the maximum extent of discussing organising strategies etc I do with online people I don't organise with, is discussing things with a private Matrix group of some online friends who all have solid politics and are good organisers in their local scene (we mostly live in different countries). I think a lemmy community around organising would probably attract a lot of low-quality discussion, based on what I've seen of organising talk on public social media.
And I just don't see the necessity of going beyond your orgs to discuss strategy. People do write articles about strategy you can share and discuss with your org, but we've never discussed social media posts about strategy. You can discuss union strategy with your union; unions should provide organising training to its members. Unless unions are practically nonexistent where you are and you're starting from scratch, but at least here you can join the union for your trade and you'll be trained on how to organise by union organisers. For non-union orgs, if it's self-sufficient and large enough you can get plenty of fruitful discussion among your comrades, and it will be tailored to your specific context and organisation. I don't even know what country you live in; how am I supposed to give you the most effective advice as an internet stranger?
because the techniques, practices, assets, learning material and so on should circulate and the format of social bookmarking platforms like lemmy is good for that.
I'd have to disagree, these sites aren't really designed for archiving such knowledge for easy access. Wikis and libraries, for example, are more suited to purpose, although they're less social and less about discussion. Even other types of messageboards, like traditional internet forums are alright. But on here, older conversations tend to leave the front pages and become near undiscoverable within days or weeks. reddit and the like are designed to for news and novelty more than real information sharing.
Exactly. Lemmy can be a cool place to discuss theory and check up on the news with likeminded comrades, but that's close to the extent that it can handle with political organization. Actual org work is handled in orgs.
Actual org work is handled in orgs.
I fundamentally disagree. This mindset is why so many leftist orgs still operate through processes, governance structures, and methodologies invented when the horse was the main vector to transfer information. There are plenty of spaces to become better at organizing, and digital spaces to exchange expertise and grow are important.
Because some of us have no cars and transportation, and online spaces could help with arrangements for people willing to do the groundwork.
There should be, i should make one
Edit: not solely for organizing