It would really warm my heart if these concepts were more popular in the left:
Being right wins you exactly nothing if you have no power.
If you don't choose your battles, your opponents will choose them for you.
In the context of political contests, collective discipline is at least as important as autonomy.
Politics is not something you "have." It's something you DO. If your "politics" doesn't involve building and wielding collective power, it's not politics.
Organizing (in the classic grassroots organizing sense) means organizing people into a cohesive political force that can contest power. Planning an event or starting a FB group of self-selecting likeminded "comrades" may be a fine thing to do, but it's not the same as organizing.
The statement "The ruling class, united, will never be defeated" is probably more true than "The people, united, will never be defeated." Fissures among elites are as important for our success as the unity of our base.
Eschewing universalizing meta-narratives will not protect you from being written into your opponent's.
Our work is not to build from scratch a special sphere that houses socially enlightened/woke "activists." Our work is to align and politicize everyday social spaces; to weave politics and collective action into the fabric of society.
Knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge. (Too many critics fail to grasp that having the former does not automatically confer them with the latter.)
Revelations of misdeeds of the powerful induce only popular resignation if there is no viable counter-power to take advantage of the opening.
You can develop a robust political critique without bothering with questions of power and strategy, but not a robust political operation.
A leader without a social base is not a leader. Effective leaders emerge in tandem with effective organizations, campaigns, and movements.
If you’ve made it this far maybe buy my book which elaborates on all of the above.
Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals
http://hegemonyhowto.org
Woke signaling is an enlightened variety of elitism.
Politics only cares about public opinion when public opinion is organized.
Organizing a popular political force requires meeting people where they are, in the spaces they frequent, in familiar language.
Clubhouses, on the other hand, require people to learn a special vocabulary and assimilate into a subculture in order to join.
Which are you building?
It is always unwise to underestimate the strengths of your opponents.
But it’s far worse to believe your opponents are all-powerful, invincible, or monolithic, as if they are somehow destined to win.
Temporary alliances are a strategic necessity—the norm, not the exception. To grow our forces and win, we can't eschew ready allies because they weren't with us in the past (or we think they'll screw us in the future). "No permanent enemies or friends, only permanent interests."
We can complain all we want about fair-weather friends and ephemeral allies throwing us / our movements under the bus—our grievances may be righteous—but in politics it's ultimately up to us to build the power, incentives, and deterrents to prevent them from being able to do so.
80/20 rule:
80% of your time doing work that engages a broader base and creates strategic forward momentum
20% of your time doing damage control / curbing other people's dumb shit and toxicity
I was a political organizer for 12 years before I realized I had the ratio flipped.
There is a mistaken idea in some pockets of the Left that you shift the Overton Window by saying things that sound extreme to most people.
You shift the Overton Window by framing bold demands as popular demands; by framing your values and agenda as common sense.
Hegemony How-To is a practical guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about questions of power, leadership, and strategy. Hopeful about the potential of today’s burgeoning movements, long-time grassroots organizer Jonathan Smucker nonetheless pulls no punches when confronting their internal dysfunction. Drawing from personal experience, he provides deep theoretical insight into the all-too-familiar radical tendency toward self-defeating insularity and paralyzing purism. At the same time, he offers tools to bridge the divide between social justice values and political strategies, tools that might just help today’s movements to navigate their obstacles—and change the world.
Activism
Politics