Unfortunately we can't choose history. It's just continuity and rupture. The empire's contradictions will mount until something breaks, and when it does we need to be the most informed people with the most intersectional critique and the numbers to act on it. Those numbers aren't growing PSL itself- vanguardists are professionals- but expanding the number of community things PSL is involved in. In my DSA chapter I'm a communist by organising around the stewardship of urban greenspace and the labour organising of city employees. The result is more neighbours seeing leftists as something other than scary radicals coming for their toothbrush. We're the group that steps up to do community work which builds real democratic community beyond what the state offers, like Black Panthers putting up stop signs where the city wouldn't. Being a communist is just reading as much as you can about everything and then applying it in your praxis wherever you see weak points in the current system. More than anything else, class consciousness comes from people seeing the new stop sign and seeing that fellow workers put it up themselves to protect their neighbours.