The Neighborhood Information Center (NIC)

The Local Hub for Class Consciousness and Counter-Propaganda

 

To break the isolation imposed by the ruling class and combat the disinformation of state and corporate media, every sovereign working-class neighborhood must establish and maintain a Neighborhood Information Center (NIC). This center will not be a passive library but an active organ for global and regional news updates (that is not filtered through special interests or state deception), political education, truth-telling, and global solidarity. Its purpose is to reframe daily realities within the true context of the ongoing class war, connecting local struggles to a global narrative.

 

1. Core Function: Daily Contextualization & Urgent Updates

The primary daily task of the NIC is to aggregate and disseminate clear, concise analyses of events affecting working people nationally and globally. This goes beyond headlines. For every incident—a police killing, an imperialist invasion, an environmental disaster—the NIC will provide the "why" that mainstream propaganda omits: the profit motives, the political strategies, and the historical patterns of the ruling class. This will be disseminated via trusted, accessible channels: community bulletin boards, encrypted messaging groups and meetings.

 

2. Historical Context 

A cornerstone of the NIC is its Historical Truth Program. This program will systematically teach the covered-up and distorted history of the ruling class’ oppression and subversion against the working class,  colonialism, psychological warfare, slavery, indigenous genocide, labor struggles, fascism, and imperialist coups. This curriculum will reveal how present-day structures of oppression (police, prisons, debt, borders, high rent, high cost of living) are direct descendants of these historical projects. This understanding is the foundation for seeing through the myths of liberalism and neoconservatism programmed into via mainstream media.

 

3. Networked Leadership: Integration with the Global Struggle

The community members who maintain the NIC cannot operate in isolation. They must be connected to a regional and global network of revolutionary study groups, online classes, and other Information Center leaders. This network serves to:

 

· Share Analysis: Rapidly circulate vetted information and strategic lessons.

· Prevent Burnout: Provide political and moral support from comrades worldwide.

· Coordinate Narratives: Ensure a united, coherent understanding of events across neighborhoods and borders, creating a true intercommunal perspective.

 

4. Rigorous Source Curation & Media Defense

The NIC will act as a wise guide through mainstream lies. It must actively aggregate and share only from sources that meet a critical standard: those demonstrably free from corporate funding, state influence, and the ideologies of liberalism (which seeks to reform oppressive systems), neoconservatism, racism, and fascism (which are the sharpest tools of ruling-class division). This means prioritizing:

 

· Independent journalist collectives.

· Revolutionary theory from marginalized communities.

· On-the-ground reports from autonomous movements.

· Scholarly work that exposes power structures.

 

5. Active Community Engagement: From Consumption to Action

 

Information must lead to dialogue and organization. To this end, the NIC is mandated to facilitate:

 

· Weekly In-Person Classes & Book Clubs: Structured study of foundational texts and current events, translating theory into local practice. This builds shared vocabulary and deepens collective analysis.

· Direct Testimony & Solidarity Links: The NIC will establish a secure mechanism (via its networked connections) for neighbors to hear directly from individuals on the front lines of struggle anywhere in the world. This could be a Palestinian farmer in occupied West Bank, a black family in Ohio being harassed by law enforcement, a tenant facing eviction in Florida, or a town in Appalachia recovering from a hurricane. This practice shatters the abstraction of "news" and builds tangible, human solidarity, making global struggle intimately local.

 

Historical Precedents for the Neighborhood Information Center

 

The vision for a Community Information Center is not abstract; it is deeply rooted in the practical survival and revolutionary programs of oppressed communities throughout history. Two critical precedents are the Black Panther Party's Community Programs & Political Education and the communication networks of the Miners during the Blair Mountain Revolt.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) systematically executed the very model of a neighborhood information and action center, primarily through their Survival Programs Pending Revolution and their newspaper.

 

· Political Education Classes (Mandatory): All BPP members were required to attend regular political education sessions and revolutionary strategies. The Panthers understood that without a true understanding of history and power, spontaneous anger could be misdirected.

 

· Intercommunalist Network: The BPP actively connected their struggle with liberation movements globally—in Algeria, Vietnam, China, and Mozambique. They saw themselves as part of a global working-class and anti-colonial struggle, a direct parallel to the NIC’s requirement to be networked with "global revolutionary online classes."

 

The Blair Mountain Miners: 

 

The Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) in West Virginia—the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history—was made possible by a sophisticated, grassroots communication network that functioned as a de facto regional information center for the working class.

 

· Countering Company & State Propaganda: Miners lived in "coal camps"—company-owned towns where the employer controlled all information (newspapers, preachers, teachers). To organize, they developed alternative information channels. They used secret meetings, encoded messages, and word-of-mouth networks to share news about unionizing efforts, warn of company spies ("knock-down the list"), and spread the true context of their exploitation, cutting through the coal operators' narrative that unions were "outside agitators."

 

· The "Red Neck" Army's Communication Lines: As thousands of miners mobilized to march on Blair Mountain, they relied on a community-maintained relay system. Sympathetic locals, often women and miners' families, passed messages, provided intelligence on the whereabouts of sheriff's deputies and private Baldwin-Felts detectives, and supplied the marching columns. This was a literal, life-or-death mechanism for community members to get direct, unfiltered information from the "front lines," precisely as envisioned in the CIC's "Direct Testimony" function.

 

· Building Regional Solidarity: The miners' struggle connected across hollows and counties. News of evictions, murders by company guards (like the assassination of Sid Hatfield), and tactical successes were rapidly disseminated, transforming localized grievances into a shared class consciousness and a coordinated regional rebellion. This exemplifies the NIC’s goal of transforming isolated individuals into a conscious, connected class.

The Black Panthers demonstrate the intentional, ideological structure of a permanent information center: systematic education, counter-media, and tying survival to political analysis. The Blair Mountain Miners demonstrate the organic, tactical necessity of such a network in the heat of struggle: creating trusted channels to bypass ruling-class propaganda and coordinate direct action.

 

Together, they prove that the Neighborhood Information Center is a historically validated necessity. It is the permanent institutionalization of the communication and education networks that have always emerged whenever the working class moves to defend itself and understand its power.

 

Easy Methods to get a NIC up and running in your neighborhood

 

During neighborhood meetings, ask for volunteers who track news regularly from uncompromised revolutionary information sources to set up a basic information hub, a news bulletin for the neighborhood, have weekly calls with other regional and global NIC’s, and have weekly news briefs prepared for any neighbor who wants a simplified or detailed update on the current moves by the ruling class against the working class or critical developments of disasters or actions. Start book clubs and study groups that any neighbor can attend. And plug into a global network which can establish direct contact with a neighbor and another person in any given region of the world who is close to an event of interest. Social media or encrypted messaging groups are perfect tools for this mechanism.