I was mostly attracted to this book because of the "socially awkward" part of the title. As someone for whom the idea of knocking on my neighbors' doors without sounding like the Communist version of a Jehovah's Witness, recruiting for an org, or leading protest chants is frankly terrifying, I was hoping for something more specifically aimed at tackling organizing for socially awkward people. It turned out to be more general reflections on, and motivation for, local organizing from the author's experience, which is fine but not really what I was looking for.

In general I think the author offers good advice on organizing, especially for people who are just becoming politically aware and want to jump into things but don't know where to start. I have some disagreements on some things. For example, he implies in an early chapter that if you or your org isn't creating immediately noticable change or disruption right now, or even if it's just been around for a long time, then it's ineffective or ideologically compromised, which I think is a bit of an idealistic take that doesn't consider that a lot of revolutionary work, especially in the imperial core and at the current time, consists of simply building class consciousness and organizational capacity, which may seem boring and uneventful compared to flashy direct action that has a big immediate impact. Not to say direct action doesn't have a tactical place within a diversity of tactics, but we don't get to revolution by just doing a bunch of direct actions.

I also disagree with his chapter on electoralism. He says that he doesn't want to discourage people from voting if that's what they want to do, but most of the chapter is spent telling us how voting is not only ineffective but actively harmful, so I think discouraging people is heavily implied. I definitely agree that we're not going to vote our way to liberation within a bourgeois democracy (or what passes for democracy), and that "vote blue no matter who" doesn't count as harm reduction, but there are still plenty of material reasons to engage in electoralism as a tactic: running communist and socialist candidates creates opportunities for education and agitation, and creating coalitions with non-socialists to support specific policies and reforms (rather than candidates or parties) can both provide some material relief to certain groups and create a more favorable terrain for future struggle. The author draws a strong moral equivalence between the two major parties that I don't disagree with, but I think it's a stretch to say that we're therefore justified in not engaging with either even in case where some short term gains can be made. The author does say that if nothing else, encouraging people to vote has some value in that it can expose them to the truth about how undemocratic this country is, which I agree with, but there's more to it than this that I think he's missing.

Overall, a good overview of what local organizing can look like based on the experiences of the author, especially useful for people new to organizing, but not quite specific enough to socially awkward people as I was looking for, and not quite as ideologically rigorous as I would like.