Okay but what if I discover a new country?

Amazing, proud of you.

Why would bourgeoise institutions encourage the development of a class conscious world view? The “smartest” STEM students are ironically probably the ones who didn’t manage to land a job, despite their excellent grades, which might have been a radicalizing moment for them, especially when they end up meeting people just as smart as them with no diplomas.

That’s nice, they should stop growing food and just import it. Nothing bad can happen there.

If you don’t make profit from making t-shirts and screen prints you are not a capitalist, the moment you extract surplus value from making t-shirts and invest it towards making more that is capitalism.

“Yeah my comrade is is out of work due to illness and needs accommodations, but if we invest this money we have into making more t-shirts we can house more people later.”

This is the struggle with corruption, is it always the wrong choice? Maybe not, but continue down this path and you will fail to do good for the sake of something great.

I don’t really know how to simplify it more. If being anti-capitalist generates capital then capitalists will become anti-capitalist.

Judge by actions, not by appearance.

It means whatever the last person told you it means. That’s how simple it is. One may call themselves a Maoist third wordlist and crochet the flags of oppressed nations on their coats all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critique into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead…

You should consider matryoshka dolls. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find online.

You can find some positive things FDR said about Stalin. Can’t think of anything easier than that.

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They are willing to raise the retirement age, but are unwilling to guarantee employment.

Why does work have to be this thing you’re forced to participate in before you can finally “enjoy your actual life” in your 50 60 80’s

Unless you are lucky enough to avoid it.

And you can always be unlucky enough to be forced to work forever.

If someone goes through education make it so their diploma actually guarantees them a home and some food with some time to live their own life too, at least, through employment. Our lives do not start after we retire.

Apart from all these other classes, there is the fairly large lumpenproletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all . . . .One of China’s difficult problems is how to handle these people, Brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance. (“Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”).

Maybe if Westerners could get over their disgust of poor people stuck in desperate times we wouldn’t be losing so badly, on so many fronts.

Further:

There is nothing automatic or certain about the relation between the present insurgencies and the working class. On the contrary, there is an extreme danger that the contradiction between the lumpenproletariat and the working class may become antagonistic (particularly if many workers were to listen to the bourgeois press or PL), The lumpenproletariat is, after all, a parasitic class that lives off the labor of the working class. Workers may perceive anarchic rebellion as a threat to the marginal security they have been able to win from the ruling class. On its side, that part of the lumpenproletariat consisting of students who have dropped out of petit bourgeois, professional, and bourgeois families has been filled with the most virulent anti-working-class ideas. And particular situations may sharpen the contradiction. (Students and street people occupy a housing development from which working-class people have been evicted, and then demand that this be a free People’s Pad, while workers in the surrounding neighborhood cannot afford their rent. Or the same situation may be turned into unified struggle. Out of the People’s Pad project has come intensive organizing for a rent strike in the surrounding community. So the task of first linking and then uniting the struggles of the lumpenproletariat and the working class is not only essential, but needs the work of conscious revolutionaries.

Among Third World people, there is a less clear demarcation between lumpenproletariat and working class than there is between street people and the white working class. Black and brown workers are the last hired and the first fired, so that a large percentage knows what it is to be among the unemployed. Many Black and brown women are on welfare or employed in part-time “domestic” (i.e., servile) positions. The Black Panther Party has shown the way to unite lumpenproletariat with working class – by constantly developing practical programs to Serve the People in areas where the oppression of the lumpen proletariat is an extreme form of oppression suffered by Black working people. Beginning with a base almost entirely within the lumpenproletariat and committed to defending the people against police brutality, the Panthers now have wide support among Black workers, and thanks to the Breakfast for Children program, throughout the Black community. What has been central to this success has been the Panthers’ refusal to take the opportunistic course of organizing around lumpenproletarian demands per se, but rather organizing through the lumpenproletariat as the most victimized members of the Black nation and therefore as ones capable of raising demands for the people as a whole. Although now and again contradictions have intensified between lumpenproletariat and working class within Third World communities, it now seems certain that revolutionary leadership, national oppression, and the intensifying crisis of imperialism will combine to forge revolutionary unity. (This is from Bay Area Revolutionary Union - Red Papers 2 you should read all of it)

I love him and I’m incredibly proud of him. He’s super smart and he’s doing a lot of great work in his org.

There’s a lot of admiration there for your brother and I promise I don’t mean to be insulting to anyone, but are you sure he actually develops his own conclusions or is he just parroting a lot of big words from people he finds important? If you learn more yourself you’ll be able to judge better. You’re plenty capable.

You don’t need to argue with your brother about politics if it makes you feel bad or damages your relationship that you cherish. Let him quote Trotsky all he wants, it isn’t really gonna do much harm honestly (won’t do much good either but we all can have our fixations eh?) . Just focus on learning stuff you care about for yourself.

Also the kind of neat or depressing things, depending on how you look at is, is that everything is political! So you can just study and learn how to apply Marxist principles in practice, without explicitly announcing it.

They have fully bought into the idea that they are going to win and that USA is their reliable friend. That’s why they humiliate themselves like this, but honestly I can’t wrap my mind around their actions sometimes, surely USA has to be pulling the strings or something no way anyone would actually choose to be like that by their own free will.

They will blame it on Winter.

A lot of Europeans have been quietly waiting for the war to stop so we can go back to trading and doing capitalism with Russia.

You’re obviously never going to hear this take much because it can get you fired from your job and it’s a social taboo.

Copyright and Private property kind of go hand in hand where they basically exist so someone can’t “steal” your property and profit off of it themselves.

But it’s been talked over a bunch and I don’t wanna repeat the points that provide compelling and reasonable arguments for why it could/should be abolished. Or how should we abolish it.

I’m more interested in the identity aspect of it. Copyright law doesn’t actually do anything to make sure your attribution to something you’ve put your work into stays. Capitalists love turning things into hobbies so you work for free in a precarious environment and they can keep stealing from you and copyright anything you made, that they see they can extract value from. They will copyright anything and everything their wallet allows them to and hold it all hostage.

I’ve improved my relationship with my family through silly little soviet pins I’ve been collecting, my mother used to collect them. The atmosphere in the house doesn’t feel that tense as of late, which is nice.

I also get encouragement to go out there and participate which is a nice bonus too. Things are looking up

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if you don’t live and say the kind of shit he did then you will be fine. Don’t worry