u/3corneredtreehopp3r - originally from r/GenZhou
A bit of an odd question, but something that keeps popping in my head that I can’t shake. Hoping to get some other opinions.
Before COVID, I had started a marxist reading group to try to work through Capital together. I didn’t know any marxists/communists at the time, so everyone that came was a total stranger responding to posters I had put up in a few places.
In general it was a great experience with a surprisingly good turnout, although after a few months attendance dropped off quite a bit. I think the text was a little dense for a beginner group, probably should have started with something easier. Honestly I made a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t repeat if I were to do it again.
In any event, eventually it was just me and one other guy, who set off alarms for me after a while.
He was white and in his mid-thirties. Pretty easy conversationalist. He had an older copy of Capital V1 that he brought with him that looked like it had been read a lot. Like maybe 10-20 times. But he had a somewhat odd understanding of certain passages and would ask the group for their opinion on what x,y, or z thing meant. He would readily agree with whatever the consensus was, never really argued his points.
He claimed to be a member of PSL, and he might have actually been one, I’m not sure. But the nearest PSL organization is about a 2 hour drive or train ride away. He claimed he would make the trip every weekend, and spend time down there doing whatever just hanging out in the big city. Maybe that’s normal for some people, but I’ve never personally met anyone who does that unless they’re in a long-distance relationship. It didn’t sound like he went there to meet anyone, he claimed he just wandered around on his own.
But there’s another odd thing. He had a bunch of 12-gauge shotgun ammunition with him one day, and offered it to me saying he couldn’t use it. It was a whole grocery bag full of boxes of shells.. several hundred rounds. It felt like a very weird thing to offer someone out of the blue.
When it was just the two of us and nobody else was coming anymore, I was still trying to have a discussion to work through the book one or two chapters at a time. But then after a couple meetings of that he said he would rather just hang out, drink beer, and talk casually—and that it was going to take too long to get through the book. And then he said that he thought the key to Revolution was to try to get people to stop working at their jobs. Like start taking 3-day weekends, then 4-day weekends, etc. I told him that sounded like a utopian anarchist plan and that it didn’t really make sense to me.
That was the last time I talked to him because he just gave me the heebie jeebies and he obviously wasn’t going to be much help getting through the book.
But what do you think? On a scale of 90-100%, how likely is it that there’s a file on me in the Hoover building? And secondly, how are you supposed to organize and not be infiltrated?