Red Paw Collective was a failure as a space because of the apathy that gradually settled into the community. Apathy breeds apathy, and, as one friend and ex-member put it to me, it self-selects: People who care in an otherwise apathetic space end up leaving for the sake of their own sanity.

I'm hoping to form another community on Matrix, with these lessons kept in mind. If you're viewing this post, you're invited.

This will be a community of anticapitalist solidarity, open and inclusive to all revolutionary anticapitalists in solidarity with the entirety of the working class without discrimination. This has been the three-point membership requirement for years, and it has been extremely effective, allowing Leninists, Maoists, anarchists, classical Marxists, and plenty of others to engage progressively with one another.

We will also retain our democracy. RPC's democracy was very successful and effective in empowering its members and creating a community that felt safe and appealed to people.

RPC was, as the community-chosen name implies, a fairly furry-heavy community, as that was also a focus of its founding members. This new community will eschew that focus. I would like to be more inclusive and less intimidating to people outside this subculture. I believe this secondary focus is also partly the cause of the apathy that would eventually lead to the community's downfall.

Finally, in correcting for those past mistakes, this new community would have the additional requirement that active members are also active in some form of organization within the space. This may be as simple as starting out with a reading club or mock debate, building our theoretical foundations, but as time goes on and hopefully we grow, we will branch into more depending on the interests and talents of our membership. For this reason, we will be on Matrix and only on Matrix, on a privately hosted server outside of the United States. Although we encourage relationship-building between comrades and may have rooms pertaining to shared interests, they will not be a focus, and if a member is engaging in only these secondary rooms without engaging in foundation-building or organization, they will be invited to self-criticize.

If you are interested in being a founding member of this space, leave a reply or send me a DM. There are a few of us already, and once we have a good small group going, I'll pull the trigger, and Workers of the World will have a new live space, ready to be built from the ground up.

#anticapitalism #communism #anarchism