All revolutionary Marxist (and specifically Marxist-Leninist) parties should prepare themselves to operate in conditions of illegality eventually, which follows from seeking to seize power.

So, with that in mind, all parties should have at the very least an internal group focused on security, as in physical security in protests and such. Depending on the legal conditions this can include firearm security. There should also be militants in charge of understanding warfare, not only because of its analogues to militant politics but also because of the possibility of needing to put that understanding into practice.

But other than that, martial arts training and self defense courses are a great idea, but they shouldn't only be for militants. One of the many social failures of capitalism is the seclusion and lack of hobbies or leisure for youth, particularly poor youth. If it's possible with the party resources, having public gyms for training some sort of martial art would both materially and mentally help that audience while also enabling some combat experience for militants. And it can be relatively cheap too.

We should never be "above" any tactic, including combat training. Though training mobs of hooligans is not the wisest idea, rather it'd be more along the line of "defense personnel" for protecting civilians in protests and such. And always keep in mind that no amount of training will make anybody bulletproof.

So much about "expensive weaponry", so little about "effective weaponry". If your tool (in this case, of war) is described in terms only of its cost and not of its effectiveness, you may have a commodity fetishization issue going on there.

There's a reason the AK rifle is the most popular in the world, and it's definitely not its massive price tag.

Sources said Ukrainian troops had repeatedly abandoned Javelin missile command launch units (CLU), which can be re-used and reportedly cost more than $100,000 (£80,000), on the battlefield as Kyiv’s military allegedly retains a Soviet-style, semi-disposable outlook towards its equipment and weapons.

This reminds me of gun nuts being in more danger than normal folks in countries where guns are illegal because they're so valuable.

Russian doctrine

Emphasis on massive firepower over manoeuvrability and precision attacks. Although units do support each other, they do not prioritise coordinating assaults with rapid, spontaneous cooperation. Troops are often of lower quality, who will push forward frontally in order to probe weak spots or get masses of cheap artillery into a better position to grind the enemy down gradually.

Nato combined arms

Troops are trained to a high-level to be able to understand the entire battlefield and operate in coordination with air, armour and artillery on the fly Commanders get troops in flanking positions by using fast communications and high-tech weapons to rapidly and accurately strike threats as they appear. Emphasis is on speed, aggression and outmanoeuvring the enemy.

I may be completely ignorant on battle tactics and doctrinal differences between modern armies, but on a very shallow read I don't see the advantage of needing to train troops to a "high-level to be able to understand the entire battlefield" "on the fly" compared to a doctrine that supposedly relies on less training for troops and mass produced heavy weaponry. Not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but this framing is not helping NATO.

If one were to be snarky about this, they could say that basing your strategy and tactics on the unfounded belief that your people are inherently superior is not a healthy idea.

I didn't link to a Portuguese source because this thread was for the gringo friends, but this movement has been growing for too long for one to confuse their ignorance for it "coming out of the blue". Now let me attempt to correct the record in English for the sake of the internationals.

Here's a short article from PCBR talking about the historical construction of this movement.

Summing the history up "shortly" in English, one of the strongest demands from both the PCB (pre-split Brazilian Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist) and the PSTU (United Socialist Worker's Party, Trotskyist) since at least the June Protests in 2013. Due to the first having some serious organisational problems with their leadership (which led to the split) and the second being fairly small (and Trotskyist, I guess), neither managed to fully oppose the government from the left and materialise this demand.

After the pandemic, with work/life balance dynamics being brought into question, given both the absurd rise of informal work (more than half the "employed" population is informal) and the indignation from workers in the "service" economy from bearing the brunt of the pandemic without any perspective of increase in quality of life from the new "leftist" government, wildcat labour movements started forming from the workers themselves. This includes the fight for better legislation regarding delivery and "rideshare" app workers' pay and benefits, and for the reduction of the maximum legal workweek.

For some context for the foreigners, the maximum legally allowed weekly workload is 44 hours in Brazil, which can be divided in 6 days of work with 1 mandatory rest day (hence, 6x1, usually split into five days of 8 work hours and one day of 4). We are paid monthly, not hourly, so an employer is legally allowed to demand all 44 hours paying only the minimum wage, though not allowed to pay less than the minimum wage for less hours.

This Rick Azevedo guy accidentally went viral on TikTok for criticising this horribly outdated work scheme and decided to create a single-issue movement ("Life Beyond Work", VAT) for an increase in mandatory rest days, which grew a lot organically with some support after the fact from leftist parties. The party linked above, PCBR (Revolutionary PCB), is what came out of the PCB split, in strong support for this demand among others but it is still in its restructuring phase.

Last election Rick ran with PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, "multiple tendencies" leftist party) for a municipal legislature as a single-issue candidate and got elected with significant voteshare despite almost no party support. Considering the horrible defeat by the electoralist left (including Lula's party, the PT) this last election which abandoned labour issues in defense of an "united front against fascism" again, this was a major win for the movement.

Now, a federal deputy (as in congresswoman) who is also from the PSOL, Erika Hilton, wrote a constitutional amendment that would reduce the work week to 4 days with 3 mandatory rest days, and maximum of 36 weekly hours. (Yes, this doesn't make sense numerically and is probably so that parliamentary negotions they can back down to 5 work days and 2 rest days.)

After this was announced, both the VAT movement and the radical left parties coalesced around this amendment, calling for national protests, broad agitprop activities and naming and shaming deputies and parties who go against the proposal. Every radical left party with the bare minimum of material analysis is taking this as the pressure point to attack against the right in the government and for building broad support, but obviously each in their own framework for praxis.

And to finally respond to your comment, this is sadly a conquest by the working class despite the leftist organisations, who are mostly hopping in at the last second. There are right wingers being forced to support this because 1) there are lots of working class right wingers who are aware of their exploitation at some level, and 2) in order to mobilise the bases, rightwing politicians often co-op class struggles aesthetically (fascists in general, Bolsonaro as an example), and some leftist orgd are intentionally abusing this to force their hand into supporting the cause or risk being shown as a farce. The same applies for corporate media conglomerates. And of course, 3) it's an opportunity to weaken the Lula government if they don't also support the amendment, which is an okay sacrifice from the left as they intend to position themselves as left opposition.

So I wouldn't say this is strange, in fact it's been fairly predictable so far.

Edit to add: I forgot to mention the PCR/UP, a different Marxist-Leninist party with a strong base in the urban periphery, was also involved in getting the VAT movement viral and is going into this struggle with full force.

Movie AI apocalypse: Skynet takes over every computer on the internet and nukes all urban centres

Real "AI" apocalypse: clueless general asks a probabilistic chatbot what to do every day, accidentally starts war

I've only seen this accusation used in the extremely liberal sections of Reddit or our friendly lib instances.

It doesn't really feel like an efficient way to derail a conversation in text: you say something, the person responds asking for a source; either 1) you reply with the source or 2) you don't and the conversation dies.

Compare that with "Just Asking Questions", which can quickly frame complex issues in unstated but obvious ways that usually pander to preconceptions or even conspiracy theories. Those need to be directly confronted (or banned) every time and can easily pass as curious cluenessless.

But irl it can be very annoying. Imagine having a conversation where the person asks you to cite the source of every remark like you're a walking academic article. Dealt with a Trotskyist fake leftist fucko who once even wanted me to cite the Kinsey-scale paper after I offhandedly mentioned it while talking about my bisexual living experiences.

Edit: but libs hate both this and JAQing because they have no actual sources and can't properly answer those questions without sounding reactionary themselves.

The best thing the Financial Times ever did for capitalism and liberals in general was to put an expensive paywall on their website. Imagine if regular people had quick and easy access to one of the most renowned economics newspapers in their regime complaining about housing prices going down.

Dumb question, but the word is "losing" right?

At this point I think their escape strategy is a full Russian annexation so that Russia has to deal with the Nazis themselves for eastern NATO countries for free.

By also for getting to claim "we warned you!!!" about Russia absolutely definitely wanting to annex the entirety of Ukraine from the start, historical development be damned.

It's been a while since I haven't checked the lib instances and Reddit, how are they dealing with the war now?

the question of whether Joe Biden is pragmatic is complex and multifaceted.

I know he's horribly full of himself, but he must be aware that his death clock is ticking already. I have a hard time believing that he actually intends to win the next election rather than just taking a very late retirement, since a Trump presidency is always very useful for the blue no matter who crowd.

Childfree here, and I think it might be a side effect of having to do a lot of thinking about society against the current.

Having children is a lot of work that often gets romanticised and oversimplified, so once you look at it really hard it's no longer that obvious of a good decision. Sexist men also have no concept of how hard it is to both give birth to and raise a child, so if you're a man and generally think women deserve rights, I bet you'll be more conscious about that.

It's the Sargon of Akkad tactic of screaming "I don't care!" while inserting themselves into every single conversation. Somehow they seem to think their dumb uninformed opinions are always equally worthy of merit despite doing zero homework. If you look into the thread, you'll notice most people didn't even read the article.