I really should start an anti-Entrepreneur channel. Listen folks, even if you make every single piece of art yourself, your tee shirt company? You aint selling without significant capital upfront. Can you drop 30k on an IG ad? I sure as fuck can't that's what I make in a fuckin' year. That nets you a single ad with 100k likes on IG, keep in mind likes =/= sales. Can you write compelling blog posts? Can you establish a personal brand? Do you not realize how soulless it is to have a "personal brand", to commodify yourself?

You know how much I make from my site a month? Less than $200 a month, and that's with a blog, a website, branding, a discord, networking with other artists, leveraging influencer friends, etc. I once donated 100% of my profits to my friend's trans healthcare fund, a whopping $150 dollars!!

This is peak neoliberalism though, extreme atomization, individualism, the idea that anyone can "be a business owner". It's bootstraps to an extreme. I often tell people if we didn't live in a capitalist hellscape I wouldn't be selling my art on tee shirts, I'd be content with just making the art. My goal has always been to link up with other artists to create cool art, and artists are getting fucked raw right now. 1099? Nah, here's a an upfront check cut to you for a single commission at a time. How the fuck do you even organize that? For all the failures of the situationalists, we are long gone from the days of collective art movements, it's every motherfucker and his dog for himself.

The entire thing creates a contradiction internally for me. I want to make art, I want to make art people can enjoy, I spend hours and hours learning my craft, and for what? To peddle tee-shirts while the world burns? It's fucking wack dude. Maybe it's the booze tonight but man, this one hit home. I have had this internal debate so many times, does it make me less of a Marxist to sell tee-shirts? Am I going against my own principles as I attempt to make my name know as an artist? Even if I attempt to carry a revolutionary spirit within my art, do these actions not negate that? Can one truly detourn a super structure as deeply capitalist as a "brand". I do not know, but I know that rent is always due, always increasing and things are ever bleaker.

Trump's narcissism is more or less a wild card.

you can say anything you want if you have your own site, protip

I was gonna post this here but figured it would be better in r/maoism but that's a dead sub so check it out https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4247798

love to see it

That military victory against true guerrillas is possible seems doubtful on the basis of modern experience, barring the use of methods approaching genocide,

War of the Flea, pg 26

"Clear and hold" operations, patterned on the French oil-slick technique, failed to remedy the situation, for the obvious reasons. The "clear and hold" strategy is always doomed to failure because the government, while strong enough to clear any given area temporarily, cannot hold many such areas without dangerously scattering its forces. In the face of a determined "clear and hold" drive, the guerrillas simply withdraw and redouble their activities elsewhere.

War of the Flea, pg 86

All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.

Mao - "Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong" (August 1946), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 100.

Take the Ultra pill, reject reformism. You have been watching a force of teenagers in adidas track suits with RPGs handling the most well funded and well equip military in the world, in urban warfare. You should be taking notes, Gaza is the climate plan, Cop City = Gaza Strip.

Anarcho-Maoism

Your first part is kind of why they've become known as anarchist tactics though, because it seems to me, and this might come off some type of way, that anarchists are the ones who are willing to take that kind of risk. And sometimes you just gotta take that risk, I feel. I mean, it's putting benches up. You can make them with wood, and you could probably do a bunch in the afternoon. And maybe they get taken away, but you just build new ones. I mean, hell, in LA there was a group of people who were doing crosswalks, and the city started removing them, and it caused a bunch of problems in the media, because people were like, why are you removing these crosswalks? Why didn't you build them in the first place? And then it became a propaganda win, which is what we need.

I'm also really glad that you guys are doing that GED stuff. I think that that is a winning strategy, a winning move. You know, I think about my own father, who had to get his GED when he was like 23. And, you know, he's kind of like an apathetic Gen X conservative, and I wonder if that could have been, way back then, a kind of starting point to make him not that.

Lets not get hung up on semantics though!

Not a bad idea, I still need to finish Women Race and Class by Angela Davis.

Something I consider when I think about, you know, a potential PPW, Party Rockin' type scenario, whether it be in the US, France, or elsewhere, Germany, what have you, they're depleting the tools of war at a rapid pace. What are they going to do when they run out of these things? All reactionaries are paper tigers, baby.

Furthermore, we're currently watching a group of young men and women battling it out with the most well-equipped military force in the world, backed by the largest empire in the world, dudes in fucking tracksuits, with flip-flops and an RPG, handling business in a corridor that won't look too much different than Santa Fe, New Mexico. Really makes you think.

And I have a feeling, the IDF's operational tactics, the loose goose, shoot em if it moves, carpet bomb em to nothing strategy, it wouldn't work in Atlanta, it wouldn't work in New Orleans. Something to think about.

Fair, fair. I only went with that because the orgs I've worked with in the past, IRL, whether it's, FoodNotBombs, or putting out fridges and food and stuff, they've all been very explicitly, yeah, we're anarchists. Which, which is cool, but limiting, to say the least. Fractured and limited. (We need a Vanguard)

I fully agree, I just like to phrase it like that because I feel that type of mindset would click for a lot of Americans (non-commies), because Americans are all about "we're gonna get on the gridiron and we're gonna win! we're gonna get the touchdown, we're gonna be the Super Bowl champs", but ironically no one else plays in the Super Bowl but America, so we're always the Super Bowl champs. It's just a perfect analogy.

Any other Americans kind of tired of like How pathetic we've become? It's like We've given up on winning. So we're just gonna take the ball home "No, you can't play. We know we will lose and we're not gonna try to get better." We'll just stop playing the game. We won last season so we don't need to play in season two. It's pathetic, it's lame. It's Disheartening, you know at the very least during the Cold War we competed. You know? The capitalists put their all into it. Oh, we're gonna go to the moon! You want to go to Venus We'll go to the moon. We'll do something to compete with you. To show you that we have some gumption. We don't even have that anymore. And that's just sad. What de-industralizing does to a mf. Century of embrassment for the US.

I feel like dating apps have set this weird precedent where you meet someone and you immediately have to decide whether they're someone you want to date/ ave a relationship with or if they're someone that you want to be friends with but in my experience the people that I've dated have typically been people I was friends with and then it kind of naturally just becomes a little more romantic and a little less platonic.

I can't help but feel like that was how it was before online dating became the norm.. You know, you become friends with a woman/man, and then maybe it becomes a little more than that, and if it doesn't, I don't see why you still can't be friends. Just make it very clear that if one party isn't interested in the same way as the other party, it's up to that other party to come to terms with that, and as long as that other party can come to terms with that and move on and not be like, "well, you know, you're the only one for me", then I don't see what's wrong with this logic.

Why not?

I only post on r/trueanon but i think I'm shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is so insidious

Asked this in my group chat, figured I ask it here as well. Why don't any of these parties apply anarchist tactics within the party frame work to build dual power and do praxis? My experience with organizing IRL is mostly stuff like Food Not Bombs Things like tactical urbanism

I see this a lot in my neighborhood, most of the bus stops lack shade or a place to sit, so you'll have old and disabled ppl forced to stand. Saw a old lady with a walker having to wait like that. Tactical urbanism would be getting together and building benches for those bus stops no cross walks in my neighborhood, we could fix that

communists tend to be more educated than average, we could be helping people get their GEDs, holding classes funded and organized by the party, this appeals directly to the masses, you help someone get their GED? You'll have a loyal comrade.

I have a friend who is a school teacher, a science teacher. She has four classes of students, each with about 30 kids in it. She's given $300 at the start of the school year to buy all of her supplies. Not only would it be an incredible propaganda win to go, Hey, look, the Communist Party is supplying schoolteachers with the supplies to teach your kids. Because the current regime won't provide for your kids. You see what I'm saying? We have to build that dual power. We have to improve the material conditions of the working class.

I mean, this could range from anything from helping the homeless have food in their belly, setting up mobile libraries, setting up coat drives, cooling centers, building bus benches, running workshops, building impromptu third spaces, guerrilla gardening, lot cleanup, Alleyway restoration. Like, if a party has numbers and has people paying dues, those people should be being put to work, and those dues should be being spent building the dual power and improving the work that can be done.

To me, if I join a party, that's what I want to be doing. I want to be put to work. I want to be with a leadership that is trying to get work done. I'm trying to stack W's, and my concern is that I'll join one of these parties, and we'll just be selling newspapers, which is, I guess, important. I mean, I run a blog, but I want to do things that I couldn't do alone and have zero interest in reformist electoralism within this settler state. Maybe they do these things already and I'm just ignorant.

What's a good follow up to Settlers? Incredibly blackpilling book, surely, but surely there's a follow up discussing things that can be done.

Capitalism is a meritocracy! but also:

POV: You've joined the DSA