Prison abolition is not viable in the forseeable future.

Calibre for the win!

I highly recommend a second-hand kindle + anna's archive. A week+ of battery life with reading wveryday for couple of hours.

I am just worried that it is a change of social relations that cannot be "rolled back" without another violent revolution.

Umm what? Do you thunk that decollectivizing agriculture and reintroducing markets and labour-as-commodity is a step TOWARDS socialism? The productive forces have been expanded enormously but when do we start seeing the class distinctions being abolished onstead of bolstered year-on-year?

Edgy "Stirnerite" (due to vibes) at 16, left-wing fascist sympathizer at 18-19 (due to environment), typical socdem till 23, Marxist-Leninist at 24 and going. To be honest my radicalization came from watching a theatre performance that said "mortgaged credit = 30 years of serfdom" and then joining a local communist org.

If you declare that Anti-Fascists are your enemy then that must necessarily mean...

I don't know about the event itself, but In Defense of Marxism is a well-known Trotskyist site (sometimes tinging on reformist side). plus the domain is marxist.com(mercial)

Stop romanticizing your despair. You are not a martyr, and you are not 'evil', that framing is a convenient escape hatch. Calling yourself scum lets you off the hook because it declares you irredeemable before you've even tried. That isn't humility, it's narcissistic fatalism. The global oppressed don't care about your American guilt complex, they care about whether you're useful.

'No organizing potential?' That's lazy defeatism dressed up as realism. The US has millions of exploited workers, tenants facing eviction, and queer kids losing rights. The potential is there, buried under the same rubble you're too tired to lift. Did you expect the masses to deliver themselves to your doorstep? The vanguard isn't handed out, it's forged in the exact exhaustion you're feeling right now. If you can't do grand strategy, do logistics. If you can't do logistics, do mutual aid. If you can't do that, then your only job today is to survive and show up tomorrow. That is a tactical order, not a request.

I am not going to coddle you. But I will tell you a hard truth: checking out is the ruling class's favorite outcome for radical Americans. They want you dead or paralyzed. Staying alive and doing one tedious, miserable task today is an act of war against them. So stop spiraling about your inherent evil, that is a bourgeois luxury problem, and start thinking about your next tactical move. Eat a meal. Make a help-line call. Send an email to them. Just don't confuse self-pity with political analysis. Get up. Not for the party not the cause, but because lying down is exactly what the Empire wants you to do.

This kind of thinking is still privileged. You do not recognize your responsibility to the people of the world and selfishly want to anihillate yourself to save yourself from the trouble of doing the hard work. This is ingrained american exceptionalism and you should reflect on that. I do not write this to "dunk" on you, but I live in an equally if not MORE anti-communist country, and what? Do I complain? Do I resign? No. Our organization is small, but it's the little Davids that stand up against Goliath every day, get beaten down and rise back again. Because if not us, then who? You will not be saved from the outside, and resignation is admitting defeat, and giving away the win to the ruling class without a fight. Do better.

The biggest problem they fall in is constant universalism. Anything that is not pure in content, anything that includes any particular solutions to concrete problems, especially if it deviates from the Idea of Full Communism is deemed as a betrayal of the revolution. (Check out the conceptions of universalism and particularism in Hegel). Just to give an idea, he criticized Stalin for introducting wage-differentiation for different occupations (as in a doctor is paid more than a line worker). This was made to combat flight from factory to factory, in search of better wages and general reluctance to engage in more demanding jobs (as there were little to no incentives in the early collectivization phase). Since SU was trying to industralize heavily and was in need of experts, there had to be incentives for such experts to come to be. Trotsky criticized this as uncommunist, and insisted on keeping the wages the same for EVERYONE, as to build communism here and now, ignoring the reality that existed at that particular historical moment (and aleo because he hated Stalin).

I've read Kristen R. Ghodsee's Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. DISCOURAGE people from reading this book! I would rate it as 2/5, it provides some limited data, most of which shows that USSR and the Eastern Bloc was one of the best places in the world to be a woman, yet the author does not refrain from saying "we definetely can have the same thing without ToTaLiTarIaN government". She also vulgarizes Rosa Luxemburg in the last chapter, by saying that she believed that reform and revolution were different ways of achieving the same goal. I would take any recommendations on the "woman question" though, maybe except from Ultras like Kollontai who wanted to focus on universals and disregard the particulars (which Trotsky, curse his name, pointed out - focusing on universalization in the area of family, transforming the idea of "mine" and "yours" in regards to children leads to justifications of neglect of children, a shame he couldn't see the same universalization he was committing in the national question, by focusing on an ideal of an "international" revolution and interpreting INTER-NATIONAL as cosmopolitan)