Hi I am a fresh party member and unfortunately I have found myself completely alone in my area. There used to be a communist party where I am situated but it was shut down by reactionaries. My leaders have recommended that I go to protests and start my own SDS chapter at my college. There is a problem, in order to start my own SDS chapter I need people. So far my recruiting has consisted of providing material support to a person, and then If they are sympathetic I direct them to Marxism. The next step should be to attend protests and find sympathetic people. While practice is the sole criterion of truth, which is in fact what my superior told me, I would like to arm myself with theory in the meantime. Are there any recommendations on any good books, any advice on how to win over people? For context my speaking style is substance over style, I am an educator. I am said to have the “voice of a professor” by people who know me.
The answer I arrived at after much thought and trial and error is kinda you don’t. The framing of recruiting as I see it is not that effective, the way to do it is to be close to the masses, and help people, preferably in an organized fashion, with no strings attached, and along with the help you talk to people even some people with quite different views from yours and listen to them and have conversations, like about hobbies about their work about family stuff, establish a relationship of respect with people, once you get that they’ll listen to you when you talk about why things are the way they are, and the idea is to give people the tools to judge their own reality, and if your organization is doing things well the natural consequence is that some people will join. But if you lead with the dump of information uprooting their worldview and often antagonizing the views of people who they respect or love, you will almost always be seen as a raving lunatic because for that person’s life and social relations it’s a lot easier to ignore you and keep their old views, so to change that you gotta be part of the person’s life, be the friend of the people, operative word, FRIEND
Edit 1: and when I said to help the people I mean things like what VaqueroRed said about social movements or even what you say about material help, those are very good mechanisms