We need a serious labor movement. If workers are not willing and able to hinder production then the left will never accomplish anything. Union density is much lower now than it was when the left was effective and union density in the largest employers is even lower than it was back then (and the unions are even worse too).

If the left ever wants to be effective it needs workers to leverage their economic power. Nothing else (maybe with the exception of armed struggle) will work.

There are two sides to this:

1. Accept that you will be targeted.
2. Make it as hard as reasonably possible to be targeted, especially for spicier operations.

These weight against each other directly and try to be biased towards the second. Anyone that rejects infosec/opsec should not be trusted as a safe comrade who prioritizes longer-term efforts instead they will put people at risk. You're asking just the right questions!

1. Join an organization. Do things via the organization not as an individual blasting out opinions on social media. Opsec/infosec then become a question of how to carry out actions in the context of an organization. That's where you can do impactful work and where the question of how to balance it against risk becomes relevant. Promote good opsec/infosec in your organization. Most people don't know these things and will have to be convinced to care about them. Educate your comrades about how there are no depths to which capital will not sink to destroy everything you love. The Jakarta Method is a liberal-friendly recounting of this (maybe innoculate against the anti-Stalinism in it).
2. A classic shield is the front group. A front does not present itself as communist or socialist (usually) and therefore has a smaller target (at first). It can also attract people who are not your ideological companions. Cynically, this means that if there is a crackdown, it is not necessarily your cadre that is thrown in jail or worse. This is something to think about very carefully, because you also do not want to be someone quick to sacrifice people (for a whole host of reasons). A front group only means something in the context of being in an organization that controls the front.
3. Use cash for operations. Distribute it among cadre members so that no one person can take it all with them (not necessarily maliciously). Stay away of limits on how much cash you can have before it becomes evidence for RICO etc. You can gain cash through dues and you can gain it through soliciting donations for general activities / fundraisers. Cash is harder for those targeting you to track and means that if X, Y, Z items are found at an action they have a smaller chance of being traced back to a receipt in your name.
4. Do not do anything spicy via electronic communications. Not at all. You discuss that in-person and plan well enough in advance, and build a cadre that functions well enough in advance, so that you do not feel the need to do anything last-minute (inherently riskier) if it is spicy. If you are doing something spicy you do not bring your phones. They are on and in your house. If you can get a burner without a credit card / your personal info, you can use that and then actually burn it.
5. Limit electronic communications chats to logistics. That is not where political questions are raised or answered. Aside from being a great way to waste a ton of time and make everyone angry for no good reason, you do not want an electronic paper trail on political lines that is so easy to share and has your names / aliases on it. ideally invest in more secure ways to have these kinds of logistical conversations.
6. Protect your information onlin ein general. The best way to do this is to limit your use of social media in general. Email is not secure. at all. Don't use email for anything you wouldn't want read out loud at court.
7. If you think violence is actually coming you should probably be prepared to run. You asked what the bolsheviks did. Well they got capturd, went to jail, escaped from jail, and ran / went into exile, only coming back when conditions were ripe (but still organizing overseas). There is a romanticism to this, don't copy it just because they did it. But leaving is a real thing that organizres do if they understand that their opponents will just jail/kill thema nd nothing good will come out of staying. Assata Shakur survived and kept agitating in Cuba. Of course she cut it as close as imaginable, she was convicted and imprisoned and escaped. BLA in general has many interesting underground tactics to learn from (and critically examine for modern conditions and how they performed decades ago).
8. Agitate where it seems "safer". We can't always play it safe but we do also have to do self-crit on romanticizing adventurism and recognizing when our own urge to get things done amounts to adventurism. Maybe the best thing you can do via your org is to organize a workplace of oppressed people. That's still something and you can grow and solidify your org thorugh those kinds of actions, and do base building. This is in no way a guarantee, they come after seemingly "safe" actions whenever they are perceived to threaten their power, but it is certainly true that some focuses are more immediately dangerous than others - and it may not be strategic to pursue them even though they satisfy a revolutionary urge.
9. Focus on building over tearing down. Make organizations bigger while holding on to your lines. Try to angle at merging orgs rather than splitting, precisely by building agreement via political education. Don't compromise key points, spread understanding thorugh careful work across orgs. The org can be built but so can a base from which to draw or mobilize outside of it. These are not just offensive forces, they are defenses. They are how you have money, bodies in the street, a couch to sleep on.
10. Spread the expectation that capital will not allow peaceful necessary change. Be ready for defense, don't let people rely solely on peaceful protection by masses.
11. Understand that the entirety of your work may be a ton of socializing and reading and explaining and nothing particularly spicy. I'm speaking about ways to protect yourself from violence but it may not come at the time or in the form you would expect. Being prepared to run is probably the best universal advice.

Understand that none of this will be done perfectly but you can adopt it over time and gain practice in it, eventually becoming very good at it. Maybe you previously had an online presence and now it gets a lot quieter so you'r eharder to track, for example.

Also you will learn and see the value in this and more as you do more organizing with an organization. You will see where yo uare exposed and can imagine how to limit that exposure or what you'd need to do to eliminate it.

I'm gong to sound like a broken record, but you got to connect and start local. The stronger your community ties, the harder it will be to break them. If we all are doing it across the country the harder it will be to destroy us. Something as simple as a group that goes around feeding people and asking people what their needs are can really start going places. And as much as it sucks, City Council Meetings. Pay attention and whistle-blow shit you see there. People will appreciate it and and join you. This means, however, you will have your work cut out for you. No matter what you are doing, if you are in the west, half of your job is to educate and to fight against reactionary tendencies in a CALM manner.

I like to shit talk and stuff online as much as the next person, but, and i'm sorry but this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for some people, you do have to engage people in a certain way if you want them to actually listen to you. I say this as someone who struggles with it myself for a variety of reasons. For instance, the group I created is dealing with an influx of people suddenly because of an issue that happened in our community. I'm spending a lot of time playing referee and talking to people about reactionary tendencies, without using the big scary words. In the end, you have to remember that these are our fellow comrades. You must meet them where they are at. You will be surprised too, by how much people will rally around you if you put your words into action. People are starved for authenticity. Like, idk I'm decently liked and looked up to in the community, and I'm constantly shocked by this. I'm not exactly bursting with charisma and people skills. It shows how much an understanding ear, calm, and patience can do.

and how important it is that I have angry rantyremovedfests at home so I don't explode in public while my wife nods sagely at her computer while she is playing FF14.

How did the Bosheviks survive?

They did their revolution before the fascists won, when the decaying old order was still in place. McCarthy is a completely different comparison than the Bolsheviks, and the much more fitting one.

how did left organizers survive the McCarthy era?

did they? my education probably wasn't great all things considered but they make it seem like the anti-war movement was built from the ground up in the 60s and there was decommunized civil rights activism that stayed going before the big push we're all familiar with.

I don't think anyone's had to organize under a digital panopticon before. Someone would probably be wise to use bots to flood the internet with nonsense and poison the AI databases.

It will also depend on who they target first. Podcasters like Hasan? Internet shitposters? Any protester and their friends who piss off the local cops? Demsoc politicians? I assume the end game of all this is to destroy any left-leaning democrats, but they might just go after and harass normal AIPAC democrats to game the elections, too. I guess we'll see.

If I recall, CPUSA's core party leadership that were anonymous (the known ones went to trial and prison) went underground during the Mccarthy period. They would couch surf house to house among party members or fellow travelers, issue orders via snail mail or courier, etc. To prevent the party from being completely decapitated.

This underground period coincided with the rise of the ultra-left in the United states to fill the void left by the Party alongside the schisming that occured during the sino-soviet split.

Nominally in the contemporary age, a requisite would be going completely offline and disconnected from any sort of internet. Analog or mechanical technology can make up for the transition from high tech when applicable. Learning a bit of basic spycraft knowledge can assist as well. In the silliest terms, try doing what Dana carvey does in the movie 'The Master of Disguise but a bit less bombastic. Learn to walk different, talk different, look different. Learn how to go camping and sustain yourself for at least 1 week in a rural-ish location that you never go to. Also learn how to disguise your tent so it looks natural from above and on eye level, same with your vehicle.

I found a good refresher on the McCarthy era: https://tempestmag.org/2025/10/rehabilitating-mccarthyism/

"Freedom" is just a buzzword to be tossed aside when it's convenient. This is great for my mental health

Stand guard amidst the places where you have strength in numbers; dissimulate in the places where you don't.

The failure of Operation Metro Surge suggests that they won't have successful campaigns in cities where leftists are strong. If the federal executive literally sieges its own cities, it maims its own economy and cuts the hinterlands off from resupply.

The places that are more dangerous are the places where there isn't a strong anti-Trump consensus. If you're going to be on one of those frontlines, then at least don't be alone.

You don't need to broadcast that you're a communist to the world to be able to recruit people. Onboarding/pipelining people usually means feeling them out and building them up before putting two and two together. Sure, it's not as fast as having people make contact in a public or online setting, but it's the one-to-one connections you make that are the strongest and most trustworthy.

If you look like just a regular homesteader or something, the government is not going to crack down on you not buying things in the stores. If you operate a business, they have a disincentive to crush you.

The truth is that if there's another civil war in America, its status as a global power is finished. Liberals intuitively understand this and that is why they aren't interested in fighting the right; reactionaries know this somewhere deep down and that is the main reason why they've been all bark and very little bite.

if we kill everyone who doesn't mask first we can have communism with the 2,000 people left in what used to be the united states