the unfortunate reality is any work that will get us out of this mess of neoliberal isolation, politics as optics, conspiracy theories, and rampant white supremacy, will take a lot of time. it's still work worth doing. no one currently in power will do that work, it's up to us.

Here are some principles I'm using in 2021 to decide where to spend my energy. I think there are lots of different issue spaces and tactics that work with these principles, so treat these as suggestions for whether something is worth doing, not as prescriptive instructions.

1) Focus on material realities:

An unfortunate amount of energy is spent on work that won't actually touch people's lives, and we all need our basic material needs met before we can do political work. Most projects that makes someone's life a little easier to live are good.

2) Rebuild the public:

We have no sense of shared fate. Worse than having no public health infrastructure in a pandemic, we have no conception of a "public" with health we can maintain! We do this by creating opportunities for us to invest in each other materially and communally

3) Redistribute power:

Any work I do in 2021 will be done democratically. I can't do work on behalf of people, make all the decisions, and expect them to trust me. If I want a sense of shared fate, I need to put my own fate in my community's hands as well. Mutual aid > charity

4) Create spaces for co-learning:

Our education, political or otherwise, is awful. Nobody knows shit about our history, change, politics, health, or anything useful. We have to create spaces where we learn together communally (rather than teach to a target audience).

5) Support political art:

Fascism is the aestheticization of politics, and art is one of the ways we can fight against that. Everything is a bullshit optics battle, and culture work can remind us that politics are actually political. Support independent, political media.

There are probably some things I'm missing (and these are all very short snippets of ideas in my head), but all of these values are for creating a world where we care for each other. Neoliberal capitalism tells us we have to fend for ourselves. We beat it by carrying each other.

It will take a long time to build the kind of solidarity we actually need, especially after 5 long decades of it being stripped away piece by piece by the rich. But once we have this solidarity we can actually control and govern ourselves.

There's no "pushing left" for democrats. They'll always choose their class interests over your lives unless we MAKE them surrender to our demands. The pressure we need can only come from massive solidarity. Massive solidarity can only come from mutual care.

I imagine a lot of you are stuck not knowing what you can do to fight back against fascism like we saw yesterday. Meet your neighbors and care about them. Make political growth easier for each other. Build actual community invested in itself. Then you'll have power.

Some examples of projects I like that come to mind are mutual aid food pantries, prisoner support and letter writing, relationship skills workshops, @socialistdogmom's city council coverage, democratizing workplaces, etc. There's so much to do and so many ways you can do it.

Last thing I'll say in this thread is to just try shit. You'll get it wrong sometimes. But we can't let organizing become the realm of celebrity. We all have to organize for each other. We all have to do things wrong enough times so we can do them right.

Regardless of the issue space you're working in or the tactics you choose, fully invest in each other, let people invest in you, and share in your successes and failures. We'll build actual power when we all actually try materially improving each other's lives.

Many folks reading this are too scared to try new projects or working on existing projects with new people, but it will always be scary until you do it, and it will always be necessary work. If you're able, please do any amount of work to create and sustain your communities.

(this probably will turn into a more expansive essay, but I wanted to get some thoughts out quickly after seeing people's reactions to yesterday)

i'm so sorry i've become a [THREAD] person, I promise it won't happen often