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Sometimes people are frustrated and would like to join or work with MIM, because they desire to use abilities they don't have. Most MIM members turn out to have experience from some non-MIM- affiliated mass organization. Except in a handful of places, (by total luck), MIM is not able to guide you face-to-face. If you're having trouble getting started as an activist, and want face-to- face help, then try some other organization, not a phony communist party, but a committee with a cause somewhere. (The reason those phony communist organizations want to guide you face-to-face is that they are not building a party of leaders and they put public opinion work as secondary to party-building. It's also why fewer people read the materials of parties that started several times larger than MIM.)
If you are on a college campus or in a town with a good variety of churches, you will want to check the meetings in those places. Cooperative grocery stores, public libraries and the YWCA are other places that sometimes have political meetings inside on a regular basis. Instead of criticizing from on-high, comrades should go to these meetings, investigate what they are like and learn some skills and organizing. If one goes to enough meetings of such organizations, one will realize why a vanguard party is necessary and learn to argue with people who do not agree. In the meantime, one will also learn many useful things.
Even many campaigns for the bourgeois parties have relevant skills to MIM. Such campaigns often have their own posters and literature. Some may go door-to-door. If you cannot find enough Third World and anti-war organizations to go to meetings, there are many other causes that may teach you something.
Some of the organizations with many branches worth learning from: 1) American Friends Services Committee (AFSC) 2) Friends of the Earth 3) Green Party, Libertarian Party etc. etc.
MIM agrees with parts of all the above. So work issue-by-issue to get some experience.
Are they discussing politics at meetings, handing out flyers, gathering petitions--if so then that organization is for you. So for a totally arbitrary example, it turns out that in Nebraska, there is an AFSC that was meeting monthly to oppose the war in 2004. Our point is, if Nebraska has it, so does your neighborhood. Either you are not looking hard enough or you are in a very, very remote place--more remote than central Nebraska.
If you cannot find anything of interest in your town, it could be that you are just depressed, as you should be when it comes to imperialism, but you could also consider moving somewhere that you believe does have activities that interest you. Depression should turn to anger and anger should drive the activist. 99 times out of 100, a loss of angry energy is from getting comfortable in imperialism.
If you are having trouble getting active, another possibility is that you are in a location with some activity and you are not depressed but you have ultra-left impatience and consider everything "a waste of time." Eldridge Cleaver in the late 1960s tended to think work that was not shoot-outs was a "waste of time." Others have their idea of what a "waste of time" is. Opposing this sort of opportunism recognizes that hard, detailed work pays off. There are infinite free gains to be won in the struggle just from applying the effort. You need to ask yourself if you are opposing small incremental gains of public opinion and independent institution work. There is no substitute for having energy to do work.
Most newspapers have a "community events calendar." Find one. Another possibility is a Google search on your town: 1) +"my town name here" +"anti-war" 2) +"my town name here" +"Third World" 3) +"my town name here" +peace. That's three examples of what to type into www.google.com to see what is going on. Replace the word "peace" with "environment" or "invasion" or "prisoners" and you may find things going on in your locale already, usually just not as radical as you would like.
If you find yourself in a committee--on the Patriot Act, the Iraq War etc.--expanding its activities and going on the offensive, then you know you have learned something. When you find yourself running the organization and complaining others do not do work and it's better to do it yourself, then you know you have reached the point where you should leave the organization. By doing everything or having a clear idea where the group should go, you have disrupted the natural rhythm of that mass organization you joined. Now see if you can apply what you learned to helping the party. If you know how to run a mass organization, one thing you can do is form another mass organization affiliated with MIM.
If you are very experienced with mass organizations and going to meetings and doing volunteer work or even paid work for some groups, it is still worth your while to attend these organizations for your own informational purposes. (MIM opposes participation by an experienced you in that meeting unless you as an individual are specifically invited to do so. People with a lot to say about proletarian politics disrupt the rhythm of mostly petty-bourgeois organizations that tilt somewhat in a proletarian direction. Your interventions and struggles should occur outside the meeting, in the hallway or at the door leading into the building.) It is only by observing the patterns of political thought and contradictions in the public that we know how to do effective public opinion work ourselves. We hope to see patterns in people's thoughts when we speak to thousands of people orally in such meetings. This is not a waste of time: if you are going to join MIM, it's part of your "profession."