Yes, this is a good idea. You could also focus on the community-building aspect: these are our neighbors, capitalism has done huge violence to them, and we need to take care of each other because nobody else will. Whatever aid you focus on will likely be useful for more people than just the unhoused, which is ahain good community building.

Choose the right community to start in, too. Suburbsn rich crackerville will probably dehumanize the people you’re helping and see it as harmful. I wouldn’t do my first action there.

Tie your work to a larger project as well. Build a list of supporters with contact info so you can push a local electoral campaign, hold rallies to pressure politicians, etc. This will help justify and offset costs, as aid $$$ quickly adds up and you will need donations and all opportunities to build power.

Hilarious

Red alert! We have an advanced history understander here.

Please notice me

The key is to make fun of them. They are not serious people deserving of respect and they don’t respond to argument or fact.

There’s nothing to debunk because the claim itself is based on an absurd level of ignorance, they don’t even know what they mean by the word communism, and it makes no sense for it to be “tried”. The only consistent references that could almost make sense are these

• Communism as a theoretical state of being (classless etc society) posed by me Marx (and some others) as the eventual project and outcome of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As such, it has never been “tried”, it can’t be “tried”, it is more of a goal or state of being rather than a strategy you can adopt. Plus, that project requires that the capitalist class be deposed by the working class such that efforts in that direction could be enacted, which unfortunately has been limited by the extreme and violent reactions of imperialists. It’s difficult to do that project when you’re just trying to survive the sanctions and wars.

• Communism as in a country run by a communist party. This has been tried, and to great success, with fantastic improvements in quality of life for those living there. What failures we do identify largely fall into two buckets: (1) targeted for destruction by imperialists and they were forced to succumb or (2) fell apart through the former and internal failures to build a robust political system, e.g. someone like Gorbachev should never have even been near the reins of power. Both can be criticized, but neither can be chalked up to, “oh dang commies can’t run countries”. Alsi, the largest real economy on the planet is run by a communist party and overcame over a century of colonialism and then industrialization to do it.

But really, someone saying this isn’t even speaking the same language as us. It’s really a conversation between two clueless liberals: one that simplistically craps on “communism” and it “failing” (without pointing to anything concrete) and the other liberal trying to say things like, “well real communism has never been tried”.

In both cases, they’re in need of a basic education, starting with, “what is a communist?”

I’ve never met one and I think I’ve probably met way more commies than you.

Words that can only be spoken by someone who’s never tried to get together with others to change things for the better. You don’t get to take an entire society and immediately make it equitable and free it of centuries of hangups. You do the revolution with the people in your country, warts and all, and struggle to make them better at the same time. You do not have the luxury of only organizing people that already 100% agree with you, nor will you be “in charge”. And, let’s be honest: any of us in charge would bring our own hangups, because all of us look back on ourselves 5-10 years ago and say, “wow that person believed some problematic things”.

For example, the October Revolution and Russuan Civil War were fought by, believe it or not, Russians born (mostly) in the 1800s in a semi-feudal country without universal education and a large peasantry. The communists were incredibly progressive in comparison to the rest of thr country. But because they retained some of the harmful biases of their culture at the time, you write off the whole project and carry around little lists in your head about how actually they were also just “bad”.

It took West Germany 2 decades to catch up with East Germany re: LGBTQ rights. Tge USSR was the primary opponent of the Nazis, do you know what they did to anyone falling outside of the sexual or gender norms? Germany was a bastion for queer people before the Nazis took over - Nazis quietly supported by Western powers under the hope that they would kill the Soviets (spoiler alert: they tried to kill every Slav). During the cold war in capitalist countries, homosexuality was generally illegal, often criminal, and was used to blackmail people, and notably used against high profile civil rights activists.

Does that make the oppression that did exist in some socialist countries okay? Of course not. But they did much better than the capitalists, so it’s ridiculous to choose that as your primary criticism. Socialism isn’t a utopia and no socialists ever claim it is. It is a struggle, and the earlier it starts the better we can progress.

Cubs is currently running circles sround capitalist countries with its new family code. Were you aware of this?

It’s good to endlessly excuse the USSR and PRC, as most criticisms of them are bullsit that is only believable by people with poor knowledge of history and zero capacity to critically engage with the media. Unfortunately, this is basically everyone under capitalism.

Thanks for not saying, “another kkkracka down unlimited genocide on the first world” during your announcement that hexbear would be joining these TANKIES. That took a lot of restraint.

Reddit tends to ban commies. It’s like a mini red scare: with the left removed, the right thrives.