>>9554I think it might actually be more productive to just volunteer at a soup kitchen rather than engage in much of the fruitless, self-defeating, burnout-prone radlib nonsense of the left in my region, or to engage in this kind of charity adventurism I have observed in micro radical groups here.
Sometimes, communists should try to evaluate their actions in terms of labor value.
For example: a number of times, tiny radlib groups where I live have done "food drives" where they'd bake some food and then sell it (with some claim that the money would go towards XYZ cause or the organization) or give it away to the hungry. To determine how successful they were, we can ask some simple questions:
- what were the material costs of the ingredients?
- how much time did they spend cooking and selling the food or giving it away?
- what is the actual SNLT of their output?
- how much money could they make working for an hour at their job (if they have one)?
If you don't have the same MOP to produce food as an industrial kitchen has, then you will likely be giving less SNLT to your organization or the hungry than the actual labor time you spend cooking. Sometimes this could be OK, other times this is such an extreme disparity that your org will be better off just outright buying food in bulk or from some restaurant with their own wages and giving that away instead. On the other hand, if your charity/volunteering is at a comparable rate of productivity to the rest of industry, by volunteering for an hour, you are actually giving more value to the org or the hungry than you would be able to do by outright donating an hour of your wages, since your wages will by definition be worth less than your total labor value.
If your donation drive nets less revenue per hour than the average wage in your org, it might be a big farce (what I have observed).
Of course this doesn't take into account the propaganda or recruiting aspects of such activities. But wasting your efforts and being inefficient is going to hurt those aspects as well, as workers are less likely to take you seriously if you aren't being smart about your approach to things.
Leaving all of that aside, if you are trying to organize for a communist revolution, you have different obligations from just engaging in charity, which take precedence. We need communists who are really serious, are educated in Marxist theory (old and new), and have the necessary skills. If you don't have even a small group of people like that, you should not be wandering around individually trying to recruit random strangers (to what organization? with what process to bring recruits up to speed? with what activities and aims? etc). I think history shows that communist study groups are an effective way to form groups of really capable communists who can proceed to test themselves in more practical ways.