I would definitely check out some of the resources that our cadre (theory experts) comrades are recommending. There is a wealth of information throughout human history, many cultures and time periods that form a solid basis of understanding everything you need to know, from how capitalism operates naturally to asymmetrical warfare to psychology and everything in between.

There are definitely many overlapping features of successful socialist revolutions. For just one example, many use a system of “democratic centralism,” where all members put forward ideas on an even playing field and vote on decisions but where all agree to strictly adhere to the outcome unanimously and remain loyal to the final decisions. Many also had to build a strong base that was very in touch with average people very slowly for many years, with a core comprised of cadres, that exploded in popularity when they managed to exploit very sudden and unpredictable crises within capitalism.

There are definitely similarities between successful revolutions, and there is much wisdom to be gained from the many wins and loses that everything from ragtag rebels to giant civilizational superpowers have experienced over the last few centuries.

However, one key secret sauce of Marxism-Leninism? Is the understanding that the conditions and context of your exact time, place, history and material circumstances are CRITICAL. No two revolutions have been exactly the same, they had to tweak and adjust their methodology to meet the demands of their very specific problems and resources at their disposal.

Take the United States for example–I live here, of course I am terminally interested in a socialist revolution here. However, as much as I love to learn as much as I can from the wealth of information from the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many many other places in the world, I must also recognize that there is no perfectly laid out strategy to win. The U.S. has some unique problems: for starters, there has NEVER been a successful socialist revolution in the “developed world,” in the imperial core, in the West; it is completely unprecedented. And let me tell you, the gig-economy anticommunist proletariat in America in the late 2020s is not going to respond to the same messaging as the peasants of China did in the 1950s. Whether we want to talk about the social media, or American anticommunism, or Wokeism, or declining attention spans, or Western fragility, or fentanyl, or climate change, or deindustrialization, or American descendants of slavery and white supremacy, or 3D printers, or post-modernism, or deepfakes, or A.I., or vaping or anything and everything in between, there are many circumstances that are VASTLY different than any other country, any other time period, and any other setup of the game board. What would Stalin have done if he had to deal with all his young men dealing with crippling social anxiety and porn addictions? What would Castro have done if his enemies had CCTVs on every corner and depleted uranium drone strikes? What would Sankara had done if every time he tried to speak everybody had already been trained to dismiss every word on the subject he had to say? Of course, these things can be boiled down to bad luck, overwhelming odds, enemy propaganda–none of these concepts are new. There ARE similarities between the Hundred Years’ War and World War Two. But if the generals of WW2 had looked back into the Middle Ages for all the answers of how to conduct themselves in the battlefield…they would have all died. They had to learn how to be in touch, to have their thumb on the pulse, to truly understand the situation, to have the ingenuity to come up with a new solution and the guts to try it even if it has never been tried before.

The idea of an underground propaganda campaign is a very cool one, in my opinion. It is not very dissimilar to what I want to do and am in the process of doing with my life. My grand strategy involves, among many other things, to bludgeon my way into the rap scene where I want to reach apathetic and impoverished American youth in a way that combines spiritualism and trendy liberal “self love” discourse with a principled and wholesome but pragmatic and sexy program. I have many ideas ranging from AR to mass graffiti to solicitation to an app to a book to shock value clout chasing. Right now I am nothing but a rapper who is trying to feed myself by learning how to tattoo and my girlfriend wanted to one day turn a piercing booth into a community center where she can provide counseling, and where we can do everything from art night to open mic to book clubs to [MEMBERS ONLY]; community is definitely something American capitalism has gutted and which will be absolutely a major component of any effective solution that the American masses will gravitate towards, if they aren’t made to be too irreversibly misanthropic.

Really, the sky is the limit. You can join an existing socialist organization and assimilate to their doctrine. You could try and form your own. Will it be organized more like a corporation, a paramilitary, a mutual aid network, a social club, a family, a cult, a mob, a soviet? The forces of American capital have made the board so convoluted that it will take an incredible amount of combined arms, a wide variety of tactics and strategies, to pull us out of this mess.

It is good you are giving yourself some time. Just know that there will never be the perfect day where it just “feels right,” where the epic music cues in and you start you save-the-world-in-one-swoop montage. A lot of the work that goes into a successful revolution is mundane and unsexy. I can’t tell you how many times I have failed not just as a socialist trying to fight for what I believe is right but as a person just trying to get by another day. I would begin not only learning from the vast pools of knowledge from the socialist tradition, but I would begin having your own private imagination of problems you can identify and how YOU think you should solve them. Don’t forget to ALWAYS talk to other people–put the “social” in “socialism.” Try out a few methods, maybe you will find what niches and methods within the revolution are not for you, and which ones are more your style. Above all, make sure to care for yourself, as if you are not a functioning decently well you will not be able to be as productive as you would like.

I think your attitude is badass. Don’t let this cynical society take it away from you, because the first thing the system will do when it detects you are deviating is it will try and neutralize you softly.

Also, just whatever you do, don’t be an anarchist, and don’t even shake hands with a Democrat. Don’t use the methodology of either decentralization nor electoralism unless you fully understand the failures of both and use them as but a small part of a grander M.O. and strategy. Be kind but be assertive, and be prepared to eat complete shit 99,999 times, because that 1 time it finally pays off is invaluable for the human race.