calcifiedNeurotic

all of the infrastructural manifestations of fascism are here: sweeping police state (bodily autonomy, crackdowns on anti-zionism), paramilitary infiltration (3 percenters, proud boys), dehumanization of the other (queer, immigrant, muslim, arab, jews especially anti-zionist ones), etc. is already here.

the last things left are explicit bans on proletarian organizations (unions, socialist parties) and sweeping restrictions on information (internet monitoring & censorship, especially of sexuality and anti-imperialism). oh wait, they’re already getting started on those (new york & antizionist social media, kosa/restrict, porn bans). fuck

Wear a face/eyes covering (e.g. mask and goggles), long black clothes that cover any body identifiers (e.g. tattoos), and perhaps some Kevlar gloves if you are paranoid. Ideally cycle to the location to & from a discreet clothes-changing station. The main threat here is doxxing and not legal-related.

I would approach this with the same caution that the Black Bloc approaches protests, especially since the "safety in numbers" is less of a factor here. Although if you are willing to accept some social risk, feel free to drop some of the more prohibitive precautions.

i'm sure that the IDF will totally respect even the 4 hours per day, and that the American media will totally hold them accountable.

when fascists say "so and so revolutionary movement will have you degenerates imprisoned and killed" they're not doing so out of concern. it's a mutually-suicidal curse directed outwards by those who will never be happy, and don't want anybody else to realize their true potential either.

The proletariat of the Arab nations would riot. In the imperial core, the media will pretend it is just another day in Israel’s “peaceful” ethnic cleansing. Except in Germany, where so-called leftists will attack Palestinians and call it “direct action”.

ahh the us senate, that sham institution cosplaying as a democratic legislature.

the only thing "green" about the German party is their love of US greenbacks.

Basically it’s self-professed centrists who support “the gays”, NATO, & Ukraine (PS) plus their right-wing Christian conservative allies (OLa’NO) vs nationalist welfare chauvinists who hate Roma people and “George Soros” (Smer-SD) but are NATO-skeptic and want out of Ukraine, plus their right-wing nationalist allies who like Josef Tiso (SNS). Our good Nazis versus their bad Nazis, am I right?

Slovakia is a socially-conservative country in which since the fall of the socialist bloc, the nominal center-left and center-right have both expressed reactionary cultural attitudes. PS is a relatively new party that has been an exception; given that they would govern in coalition with right-wing Christian conservatives and with a socially-conservative center-left in opposition, I doubt their professed stance would do much other than pinkwash NATO. I’m not going to hold my nose and cheer for Smer, although if they actually pull Slovakia out of NATO it would be extremely funny (albeit unlikely — Smer is a party of the establishment and has governed for most of post-2000 without doing this, not some radical populist party as the media paints it).

he did nat zee this coming.

what organizational constraints do you see the us left needing to overcome for it to be able to meaningfully challenge state power?

Objectively, I think that the conditions for socialism exist in the USA. The population is increasingly disenchanted with its constitutional and economic institutions; criticism of capitalism itself has moved from unthinkable to accepted (if not mainstream); and the imperialist state apparatus is a bloated paper tiger that can barely win a war without hiring a suite of incompetent contractors and bribing the enemy's generals with millions of dollars (and is incapable of reform due to being waist-deep in its own neoliberal dogma). The wannabe-fascists of the Republican Party (and cop-funded mayors like Eric Adams) are a threat to any emergent socialism (and human rights generally), but they have no power base outside of the same haute-and petty- bourgeoisie that would constrain their ability to deal with the crises of capitalism; this is in contrast to 30s-style fascism, in which the national bourgeoisie were content with letting fascist corporatism manage the crises of capitalism their own class leadership couldn't. If there were a political vanguard that was capable of exploiting these conditions and winning the peoples' hearts and minds, I would be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for socialism (although via horrific struggles with the previously-mentioned wannabes committing heinous crimes).

Oh yeah, about that last part...

A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, "objective" width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity's past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.

tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.

(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).