Interesting how the USA had to kidnap Maduro before going to war with Iran for this exact reason

Yeah but reading history and theory is too hard, nobody wants to do it

/s

Everything has been professional wrestling since 2015

Yes finally ive been asking for this for ten fucking years

I see no way anyone could ever make out the identity of the supposed "arsonist". Video clearly heavily edited by ai and crooked cops. Even if there is an individual implicated in, what is most likely an electrical fire due to negligence on the part of the company, that individual should receive ample compensation for their trauma from the company who mis manages these hellish working conditions.

Ruling out some electrical fire, or perhaps a frame up insurance scam that benefits the company (likely), I think the actual cause of the fire will go down as one of the great unsolvable mysteries.

The strategy is build the party. You mentioned Marxism-Leninism, so that is your big picture strategy. We can't assess or influence conditions without a worker's party, that is, organized expressions of working class power. If you arent convinced of the partyist line, then it is "build the mass movement." Those are the two coherent trends in USAmerican socialism.

I'm not saying that you can't know next steps, I'm saying you can't learn them from me. If you can't connect your local work with a national movement then what is the point of either? You can't learn this from YouTube, or even from a book. you have to join in somewhere and do work. That is the actual point of Marx and Lenin.

Big picture options to get started.

1. salt a union if you aren't in one already. Will need support from local orgs/party

2. Join DSA and get involved in a campaign. Don't believe DSA haters, the org is what we make of it. Great if you want to engage in electoral strategies, education, and politics.

3. PSL is another national org, smaller and expressly and ideologically ML, but very practical and organized. Mobilizes good presences at public protests nationwide, and runs some compelling larger national propaganda campaigns. PSL can be very inside baseball so as I'm not a member I never really know what is up with them, but ive had mostly good interactions.

4. Communist Party USA - CPUSA is not bad. Lots of educational resources that go back for a long history, good people.

5. Local campaigns and movements - some of the smartest most radical people you will meet are like running some local campaign in your city, they know everybody and they need help, just go help them, you'll learn a ton.

6. Another major trend in organizing labor is the Jane McKelvey-ist strategy, outlined in "No Shortcuts", and sometimes referred to as "deep organizing".

7. UAW reformer president Shawn Fain is encouraging unions to negotiate their contracts to expire on May 1, 2028. Since a general strike would be technically illegal, this allows large labor organizing efforts in the open capable of shutting down huge sectors of the economy, the anti war movement will only radicalize labor further.

You might want to research the national strike wave of the early 1930s. 1934 is the closest the USA has ever come to socialism, and in 1935 organized labor was made legal and the white working class got a new deal.

Flirting = 90% eye contact + 10% jokes

The fartoriums were actually built by aliens

Known Epstein associate Stephen Pinker

Communism didn't kill your ancestors, even if they should have

You maybe shouldn't jump straight to mapping Lenin's conditions directly onto ours. That isnt historical materialism. What Lenin did, was use HM to determine his own conditions. In Russia there was a weak bourgeoisie, mostly lawyers and doctors, some smaller factories; along side an 80 year old revolutionary movement that, at the time of its writing, had just overthrown the tzar through Soviet power. Lenin had just returned from exile and Bolsheviks were still debating Lenin's April thesis.

His definitions of things are not static, they are based in his own conditions. He isnt saying "this is how the proletariat is defined for all time" he's saying what it looks like in Russia, and to some extent other countries such as Germany. Were the Soviets significantly stronger than worker power in our time, in the west? Yes. Was Russian bourgeoisie weaker than the empire of Capital? Undoubtedly. In fact Lenin had only months earlier successfully theorized and identified capitalist empire, as it was in a stage of development that was objectively and materially realized, but not yet hegemonically, totally dominating. That wouldnt happen until after WW2.

You're asking a lot of good questions. Actually Marx spent the last ten years of his life studying how societies transitioned from one form to another. In his time he saw the word transitioning from feudalism to capital. In his time, all production was being directed by capital, that is the economic base; but in most of the world, the formal power was still in the hands of kings, queens, and noble classes. Revolutionary theory is the theory of changes in the real world.

Anyway, Marx produced two cubic meters of handwritten notes about, among other things, how Russian peasant communes, called the Mir, might have evolved into socialism. basically working to disprove the social democratic ideal associated with Marx, that socialism could only evolve from capitalism. Considering the Russian "Soviet" was a worker council-led union, organized like a German or English union by people basically raised in the Mir, Marx was eerily accurate in his area of focus.

This was exactly the point that Lenin was making in State and Rev. The Bolsheviks wanted a bourgeois revolution, let capitalists develop the MoP and then overthrow them, and Lenin is trying to convince (and by August/September he has largely accomplished this, in no small part due to the publishing of S&R) the Bolsheviks that the Proletariat is revolutionary now and must overthrow both the Bourg and the monarchy, and create a worker state. By this point it is clear that the bourg are going to give power back to king Nick in the form of a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. That is why the Bolsheviks were the only faction in Russia that could have seized power. The bourg was too weak and stupid, and they needed the old state bureaucracy, itself deeply monarchist in character, in order to seize state power; which meant concessions to Nick, which meant continued war, slaughter and martial law via Kornilov, and death sentences for fleeing soldiers.

At this point, the challenge the Bolsheviks were having was keeping the revolution from happening too early, or not in a coordinated way. In fact many prominent Bolsheviks wanted it delayed even further, and were even moderate on the question of a proletarian vs a bourgeois revolution. But the Bolsheviks were a very well disciplined party, capable of communicating clear and accurate information across all different strata of the toiling classes. For example, if the rural semi-peasantry wants to pop off a revolt and the urban conditions aren't yet present, revolution fails.

The Bolsheviks worked for decades organizing in factories, in the cities and countryside, through conditions of brutal repression, exile, and illegalism; educating and developing the workers, individually, materially and organizationally as a class. This was how they managed to build trust and deep roots in every layer of the working classes, as well as much of the peasantry, against intense slander and resistance, not to mention repression, from the crown and bourgeoisie.

Compare this to Germany, the most industrially developed country with the most developed social democratic bourgeoisie in the world. The Spartacist faction of Luxemburg and Liebknecht did not develop a strongly disciplined, broad, and deeply connected party like the Bolsheviks. The revolutionary Marxists in Germany was not prepared in 1914 when the SPD voted to support WW1, even though Luxemburg had already written extensively about the Social Democratic elite; and they were not ready in 1917 when the communists and militants began to break away and condemn the SPD. Because they lacked deep roots and strong discipline in the working class, the German revolutionary movement was plagued by putsches and infiltrators, like the Vorwarts siege that led to the capture and murder of Rosa and Karl by fascist cops. These uncoordinated revolutionary upsurges persisted for years, and by 1924 the proletariat and the bourgeoisie had effectively defeated each other, creating another condition for the rise of fascism in Germany.

The revolutionary conditions are always present, as the central contradiction is between the bourgeois and the working class. This means that when the bourgeoisie divides the class in some ways, it unites it in others. Capitalism is not capable of producing a stable middle class, which it needs in order to mitigate this very class antagonism. Which means the conditions of the workers, the ways we are divided and united, are dynamic and dependent on historic conditions. We use Marxism to develop the existing revolutionary potential of the workers over capitalism, not to apply old models of history to our current conditions. What we need is the party capable of building deep roots, communicating effectively across various strata correct information about real conditions affecting peoples lives, empowering people to see our power and seize it for not just our class benefit, but for the liberation of humanity.

In terms of what to organize? For now, the answer is yourself. From there, the answer will be different for everyone. But on a larger scale we need the party. For now you are at the very beginning of a journey, and our task is to take it as revolutionaries and scientists. Be very careful with abstraction itself, like "what routes can be taken to revolution outside of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism" might be a moot point, because for us, nothing but the total domination of capital exists.

Your example about racism as a revolutionary impetus is a good question which needs much discussion. Class antagonisms are experienced along lines of race, as well as gender, ethnicity, etc., but are not the central contradiction itself. Racism is a condition in which we organize but is not the fundamental contradiction. Where that leaves us is understanding and educating, as a basis for campaigning and fighting for change, and the best mechanism to accomplish this is still the revolutionary worker party.

Our challenges and conditions are different than Lenin's in many ways, but not all. The tasks are largely the same, but the conditions are of a much different character, not just from time to time but from place to place as well. So it can be very confusing comparing different times and conditions for similarities. In order to understand concrete similarity we need to also understand concrete difference. Not just what is the same but also what is different. You will likely read State and Rev again and again, you will take and teach classes about it, you will quote it in your political statements. Each time you do, you will be changed, a little further along on your journey and yet somehow back where you started. As you change, you will continually create change in your environment until you can no longer return to that place at the start, one way or the other. This is true for the individual and for the class.

The only thing capable of administering this individual and class development is a mass revolutionary party made up of individuals of all working classes, which make up the international revolutionary working class, fighting for the interests of the whole class on the basis of a revolutionary shift away from capitalism towards socialism. We are in a phase of sectarianism where this may not be immediately obvious, but diversions from any part of this formula this are bound to be ultraleft, opportunist, reformist, or worse. It becomes more clear the more you understand the structures that actually create these conditions we struggle with.

Hillary is such a monster.