ProdigalFrog

People keep recommending Parenti’s Inventing Reality

Just so you know if you read that at some point, Parenti does engage in historical revisionism, and is very much an apologist for authoritarian socialism (USSR, Castro, China, etc), as he feels that the gains for the working class like increased literacy, healthcare and housing are worth living under extremely authoritarian hierarchies and the negatives they bring (while also downplaying those negatives, such as minimizing the murders of political opponents in Soviet gulags).

Damn. Our current trajectory already would've made life very difficult in 100 years, this news moves up the potential extinction part to be far closer than I'd anticipated, which means if we can't cast off capitalism soon, it will destroy our species and most other life on earth very rapidly.

We desperately need to build up decentralized grassroots working class movements globally as quickly as possible, enabling the use of our most powerful weapon: the General Strike.

The governments propping up fossil fuels would be brought to their knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to demand real changes, such as an end of fossil fuels, the abolishment of centralized state governments, and the end of capitalism.

The general strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands.

There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting a general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

Enacting a general strike will result in violence being used against us even as we attempt to avert global destruction. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.

Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

But you'll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

If you haven't already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

These are groups using direct action to solve each other's problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We've been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

This isn't only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don't want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike! 💪

If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!). Unions are essential to effectively enacting a general strike, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).

🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally, and they are in bed with fossil fuels. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they'll help you set up a new local branch.

🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
🇮🇹 Italy: USI
🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland
🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️

Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.

Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.

Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.

Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.

We'll start it off with some General Advice:

Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
Be careful about who you meet online
Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don't have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.

For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you'll need to scroll down. I'd add it here, but it won't fit in this comment).

I'd also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).

Putting up meshtastic nodes is very much a worthy endeavour that will become extremely useful in the near future as our nationwide communication networks are targeted. Alongside that, we desperately need to work toward enabling the use of our most powerful weapon: a proper, long-term, nation wide General Strike.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (Ending the war in Iran and Gaza, and Abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).

The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike! 💪

If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then may be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.

🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they'll help you set up a new local branch.

🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
🇮🇹 Italy: USI
🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland
🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️

We'll start it off with some General Advice:

Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
Be careful about who you meet online
Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don't have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.

I'd also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).

It uses a subset of the email protocol (which makes it very difficult for governments to block) but it no longer uses an an actual email address to function by default.

Even if someone did use a gmail exclusively for this (you can't use it with an email account you use for normal emails too), everything would be entirely encrypted, and only the app itself would be able to decrypt it (google would not be able to decrypt the messages). But again, no normal user is going to use an actual email address.

You can read more about how it works in their FAQ. But the short version is once you pick a username, it just gives you a QR code or link to send to people, which connects you immediately in an encrypted chat room with no faffing around with emails.

Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

I think the defense of Stalin comes at the end of a particular path that can be very appealing to people for various reasons.

One potential driver of it is that ML/Stalinist groups are not too dissimilar from a secular religion; it has a group of people ready to welcome you as a friend and ally as long as you agree to a certain worldview and a very specific reading of history from approved texts that always pose historical Maxrist-Leninists as righteous figures who didn't really do anything that bad, and if they did, it was for the greater good, and justified.

Those texts can even make a certain amount of sense if you're disillusioned with the status quo, and distrust western media. It's also likely extremely comforting to believe that while the western world is fucked up and exploitative, there are at the same time powerful allies elsewhere in the form of the AES states, which in their view are making steady progress towards the promised socialist utopia.

So ML groups can offer a feeling of belonging, friendship, a comforting worldview, and the belief that if we just follow the directions of long dead prophet-like historical figures (like Lenin or Stalin), then we will someday have heaven on earth. These are extremely appealing aspects to someone who may be very lonely, or who may have suffered a severe trauma and may not have their basic needs met (which may also be what leads to some people being attracted to the MAGA cult)

To someone well versed in history and a desire to find multiple viewpoints for a historical event to avoid propaganda bubbles, the true nature of ML/Stalinism and its authoritarianism becomes self-evident. But for those who never went down that path and are in a vulnerable state, a 'scientific' cult offering you hope, meaning, and companionship is very easy to fall into, and thus willingly self-delude themselves to attain in-group status.

Just like with normal religions/cults, once they are deep inside it, they are heavily encouraged by the in-group to suspect any outside information that challenges their narratives or isn't approved by the group, and thus the cognitive dissonance they could create if looked at more objectively can mostly be avoided.

Also similar to religions; a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history. If doubts are voiced, the group will attempt to re-affirm the validity of the texts (keep the faith). But if that fails and the member continues to voice doubts, they are likely to be ejected from the group, which is very traumatic for most people, but especially so if there is no other support groups to lean on. This likely results in many keeping doubts to themselves, or convincing themselves those doubts are just CIA lies, similar to how Christians try to reject their own doubts with the concept of Satan spreading lies to tempt a Christian from their faith through logic or archeology.

whereas anarchist idiology hasn’t really been implemented in any kind of large scale

It was successfully implemented at a fairly large scale in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, and even implemented an effective bottom-up elected military.

For a US version, this older guide can help you choose an Index fund that is at least divested from fossil fuels (though it doesn't avoid big tech, I'm afraid).

We as a community should, in my opinion, pick a “good enough” solution for the majority of the people we interact with.

I'd probably suggest Deltachat. It's decentralized and has always on encryption, but is so incredibly simple and easy to onboard and use, and doesn't require a phone number or even an email. It also works on all platforms with a single app.

I spread out my donations, so less to more projects. I also try to prioritize projects that need financial help the most.

So as an example, the Linux Mint project is very well funded (especially this year, where they are receiving 30k+ per month) so I personally stopped donating to them so I could shift that money to a project that would benefit far more from the relatively small amounts I can share, such as the Movim project, which is attempting to completely replace Discord with a FLOSS solution, but was only receiving like $40 a month before they started a funding campaign a few days ago.

Figure it'll do far more good there to help the dude cover his expenses for providing such a valuable service to us all for free.

Well done, comrade! I agree, Catalonia is where the USSR shined the most!

Glad to hear you're all set up ^^

If you're interested in Solarpunk, my instance's sysadmin hosts solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net on XMPP, and there's a cool little DIY project community at craftmanship@muc.loqi.im :)

нет, comrade. I am not ignoring your points, I am just finally seeing the light thanks to your efforts!

No, I'm totally on board. Like after really looking at whacky stuff like this, it totally makes sense to just... Ya know, get rid of 'em. Like holy heck, how the hay could they not see all those things would immediately cause the socialist struggle to fail? They were absolute dumbos for not seeing the enlightened wisdom of the Marxist-Leninist party.

Like this one especially:

To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labor and peasant movements;

Totally, like 100% against the aims of a socialist revolution. Good thing 'ol Trotsky dealt with them until they stopped (by killing them instead of just talking with them). And then good thing 'ol Stalin dealt with that traitorous Trotksy later on (by killing him with an ice pick, very scientific I must say).

Good thing you're here to set everyone straight on how awesome the USSR was, especially toward Anarchists, which is super duper cool of them.

but at the same time he praised “red anarchists” that fought alongside the red army and even joined it.

He liked the people who were subservient to his goals and chill with state authoritarianism? who knew. Wonder what happened to all those non-red Anarchists he didn't like?

It’s not like Lenin hated Anarchists especially, Kropotkin was given a large State funeral and the largest rail station, Kropotkinskaya, was named after him.

Yeah, for sure, totally.

Super weird that the Krondstadt sailors weren't able to make it to those meetings. You'd think they'd want to have their voices heard in something so important? 🤔

Huh. Kinda wild to see the Collabora dude posting his own comics to try to defend their actions of ensuring Collabora keeps getting corporate contracts. Odd situation.

I never used em dashes before, but I use the shit out of bullet points, it's too good at distinguishing stuff from the rest of a comment. I'd hate to have to give those up...