I'm going to keep agitating this at the general cohort of Unalloyed Posters, especially now. There is no excuse at this point. You will not imagine socialism into reality. You will not imagine us out of capitalism. You need to do what you can as soon as you can and the time is and always has been Now to start locking in.
Go outside and organize. By organize, I specifically mean join a local chapter of an existing socialist organization that exists and is real and is comprised of socialists and go to their meetings and events and demonstrations as much as life allows you to.
(EDIT: And if there are no local chapters--even if there ARE local chapters--get to know your neighbors and get to know your coworkers. An antisocial socialist is a contradiction upon themself. Talk to the people around you. Push yourself to put yourself out there. Combating alienation is praxis. The more communal a community is, the more will to resist it can summon. You hear it in Minneapolis right now--the people on the ground right now are fighting for their neighbors! Take the community out of communism and you get sadomasochism.)^1
I genuinely don't care if there's no organization that is aligned 1:1 with your sensibilities/preferences. If you actually care, you need to do the work to move the one that is closest to your sensibilities in that direction. Stop whinging over which specific one you join for fear of missing out on the vanguard party or whatever. My local DSA and PSL chapters coordinate with each other when prudent. Stop treating this like it's team sports. It's an unserious approach. You are not locked in forever to a specific org when you join it. You can change orgs. Membership is not a blood pact. You need to join an org first to do that, though. You need to join an org and you need to be an active part of your org.
Otherwise, please spare the world from irresponsible, ungrounded 'critique.' Without grounding in reality, without real organization and the insight it provides, it is utter drivel. Stop pre-emptively guarding yourself against disappointment. It's cowardly and pathetic. It's even more embarrassing than terminal vote-brain. At least voters walk their talk (voting and doing nothing for the next four years).
— Marx (source)
Applies to life in general I’d say. Communists have to understand the power and necessity of the example. Sometimes people just need an example to follow and they’ll follow it if the conditions are otherwise there. Heck, Christianity has shown us how effective this is with the WWJD thing.
Being a communist is about setting the example, demonstrating the path forward in practice.
Communism is not merely critique, it is not merely negation of capitalism. That is the starting point only. Communism is essentially a positive movement, ie a new thing posited, put forward. In Hegelian terms it is negation of negation. It’s too easy to forget this and get stuck in critique mode. But to build is to be creative, and creativity is an entirely separate mode of thought; this is, for example, why writers separate the tasks of drafting and revision.
???
WWJD is a construct of new protestant evangelical American churches, who almost all uniformly act in unchristlike manners. They are greedy, violent, selfish, cruel, hateful. If anything, this is an example of the exact opposite of an example being followed. It's an example being used as a mask to do the opposite things, to balance it all out.
not the thrust of his post
You are right about that specific movement. I only used it as shorthand for the broader logic of Christianity, in which Christians nominally follow the teachings of Christ.