Fortunately, except as a way to waste a summer afternoon, no one actually interested in organizing politically ever has taken or ever will take this question seriously. Were many active radicals to ever do so, political activity would come to a more or less dead stop for ever. The question, "how do you propose to get people to commit to themselves to something abstract, distant, big?" is simply silly, for the obvious and only answer is, "You don't, ever, anywhere, past, present or future." And the second answer is, "Why in the world would you want to?" That isn't how Marx started, or Lenin, or Mao, or any other revolutionary or militant reformist that I have ever met or heard of. The Panthers, as I have remarked before, started by putting up a stop sign at a dangerous corner and placing an armed guard at it. Quite a few people got interested. But of course they did that in the context that had included people walking to work in Birmingham, Alabama, and some of the people involved in that had (if I remember correctly) attended a CP training in school in Memphis a decade or so before. Things pile up. Grass dries -- sometimes it's a long time drying. Sparks sparkle and nothing happens -- and no one really knows, has ever known, ever really will know, why sometimes it's different, and a little spark begins a prairie fire.
About 20 years ago I had an interesting conversation with a man who among other things had been a major CPUSA organizer in the meatpackers union and had fled to China in 1956 to avoid HUAC. He started as an 18 year old CP organizer in Minneapolis, selling the Daily Worker on a street corner. He sold it there (and sold hardly a one) every day all one cold winter. No one was going to stop in zero weather to buy a paper. But when spring came, it turned out that a lot of people had been seeing him there all winter and thinking -- gee if he can stand out there in this weather, he must have something to say. And in the spring they started buying -- and joining. He fortunately had never read Adorno or been on a maillist with nothing better to do than ask foolish questions.
There are probably about 2 million people in the United States with radical (not just liberal, and not just implicitly but self-consciously radical) politics. No one is talking to most of them, and most of them have pretty good reasons not to get involved right now. It would be worthwhile spending a little time thinking about how those of us who are still more or less active could communicate with those radicals. You see, one of the advantages of talking to the choir is that (a) they are anxious to listen and (b) even though they're in the choir they still aren't very active and need to be kept informed pending the day when there might be something to do -- when the prairie finally dries out.
Are there any corners near you that need a stop sign?
Carrol