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Kind of want to expand on this idea, because I remember an Amber A'Lee Frost appearance (Chapo? Red Scare?) where she played normie-whisperer and dumped on people whose political engagement isn't purely instrumental, and might be based in a need for personal fulfillment 1/ https://twitter.com/warendenkform/status/1346211515779735553
If u look at classical historical radical labor movements, whether the SPD in its "classic" phase, or (my personal favorite) the IWW, there was a sense in which these organizations were not simply alliances of expedience between atomized individuals fighting for material gains 2/
rather, these organizations were legitimate _countercultures_, mass-based countercultures, that offered their members a sense of community and personal fulfillment that was not offered by bourgeois society, or no longer offered by a dissolving estates-and-religion-based order 3/
so, in responding to Nate's numbered typology of theories of engagement or organization, I glibly responded in favor of my own "number 5", namely that people should do "XYZ" if they legitimately enjoy doing XYZ and gain some sense of fulfillment and camaraderie from it 4/
but I think a lot of people don't like to admit that they actually _enjoy_ "political activity", whether it's handing out leaflets, or organizing demos, or studying Capital or Marx or whatever, it's shameful to admit liking that, because then you'd concede politics is a "hobby 5/
or that you're "LARPing"; but the truth is, any mass communist movement would have to offer something to people that allows them to transcend the banality and alienation of everyday life, and that means something more than just an instrumental association based on "interests" 6/
this is one reason people should read more labor history, BTW. Whether you're talking about the IWW or the CIO in its (pre-Taft-Hartley, pre-McCarthyism) glory days, or German social democracy or Spanish anarchism, these were prefigurative communities 7/
