askchapo

What things do you all do within your organizations or parties to maintain discipline and militancy with rank and file members?

I'm sure we've all dealt with the same problem: the group votes to do some large project or campaign, a lot of people express enthusiasm and maybe even sign up for the "fun" or flashy parts, but the majority of the work for the project/campaign (all the prep work that leads up to the main event/flashy part) gets largely ignored by Rank and File members.

Example: your org votes to put on a day class - people are excited, some volunteer to help out "day of" to be greeters, presenters, or setup and teardown, but few people volunteer to assist with event prep (finding and inviting presenters, writing & editing presentations, finding a venue, advertising the event, etc). The prep work then falls on a few comrades that don't want the event to fail, who end up picking up too many tasks to drag the event across the finish line. Despite all their efforts to involve new members or existing rank and file members, during the debrief some of the rank and file members express concern and wonder about how the event had major problems (some may not be literally major, but the comrade offering the critique doesn't have enough context to see the larger issues because they weren't around for the work, so they are bike shedding dramatically). The folks that got the work done are exhausted and then end up doing it again for the next event. Some (or all) of the comrades who showed up for the flashy parts repeat their actions and critiques.

How do you all combat these issues? The orgs I've worked with have tried various methods and none have had lasting success. I have worked with a tenant union that was OK at getting people involved, but the nature of that structure did not involve keeping those people involved long term.