Advice on forming an on-campus communist group

[comrade_al]

I want to get some people together who will do direct action. Such as distributing flyers and more. So how can I find such people to form a group with in my area? Have seen people with Communist t-shirts around.

[La Guaneña]

What country do you live in?

Is there any existing form of organization on-campus made by the students? If there is, what role does it play?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

In my experience, the best thing to do is not to start a "communist group" but to start a particular project - a communist paper/broadsheet, communist intervention in a particular struggle, running a space of some kind (a kitchen, a library, whatever), etc. That's more likely to avoid the reading-group circle-jerk that university socialist groups can easily become.

[Brutus]

Listen to VMC. I'd report on relevant issues to student from a communist perspective. That is to say, don't rant on about history or theory (maybe a little theory).

[Lokomotive293]

Well, first question to ask is: Are there any existing groups around? Who are they, what do they do? Second question to ask is: Do you have some sort of student parliament? If yes, how much influence does it have, who is in there, is there maybe some sort of left-wing faction you can get involved with? And then: What are the issues of the day that matter for students?

I agree with other posters that the most important thing is to actually do something that matters, and to avoid becoming just another reading-circle.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I want to get some people together who will do direct action. Such as distributing flyers and more. So how can I find such people to form a group with in my area? Have seen people with Communist t-shirts around.

Distributing fliers and handing out leaflets is not direct action, it is street agitation; direct action is when you and a group of people have a coordinated plan of action which brings you into direct contact with the opposing powers as part of a campaign aimed at accomplishing a specific goal. When undertaking direct actions you have a support group, a planning group, a telecommunications group, as well as the primary activists who will be engaged in the plan itself.

What kind of communist t-shirts have you seen around?

Furthermore you need to ask yourself what you want to accomplish-if it is simply distributing propaganda then you can probably do that on your own for a little while with some success. The more people the better but if it is only handing out fliers, leaflets, posters, and selling newspapers then you do not need a pre-existing apparatus, in fact most comrades I know have gone the other way around and recruited a group from their slow and steady propaganda actions.

I will be starting college soon and so I am interested in this topic as well so as such I have asked some of my more experienced college-centered comrades as to how their groups fared and received some... disheartening results: the woman who heads the Connecticut Youth for Socialist Action (YSA) branch at her local university said that by the time she began school there the cell had already been around for some time (this was interesting because I thought she started it). When asked about how she built the group she spoke of United Front demonstrations with other student organizations and advertising-via fliers-for the theory study groups; I do not think it was ever meant to escape from that pigeonholed outside of UNAC (http://unacpeace.org/) events.

In this vein I also asked the head of the Makato University YSA branch. The responses I received from her were even more bleak in that her branch only consisted of five regular attendees who were already anti-capitalist to begin with and whom she only discovered through working with her campus's atheist group via discussing socialism. When she asked if any of the members had any inkling to join the cadre branch (Socialist Action (http://socialistaction.org/)) they said no, and that essentially for them the YSA cell there was much like a radical hangout.

These are but only two examples, ones which you should not take as the norm but they do represent facts which indicate starting a college anti-capitalist group is a lot of work for relatively little pay-off. There are some success stories (such as the Revolutionary Students Union (http://www.uvursu.com/)) but again I would not take such stories as the norm either. Rather I would go into such undertaking with the belief that starting a branch of an already existing organization (such as the Students for a Democratic Society (http://www.newsds.org/)) would possibly be more constructive in the long run when combined with a "project cover" which stresses proactive action over passive study.