CarlMarks @ CarlMarks @lemmygrad.ml

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5 yr. ago

"charismatic and full of potential" what the fuck.

Hi friends! I am generally supportive of the Zapatistas as an indigenous self-determination movement. I remember there being some criticisms of them regaerding external advice or lack of suppport to other groups in Mexico. Does anyone here have infomation or resources for where I could learn more about this? Thank you!

I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others' rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about "human nature" or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.

Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about "the enemy" is of little value. "The enemy" didn't become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won't argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and "apoliticals"?

I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.

You have framed the question correctly, which means you are already 80% of the way to knowing! How do we oppose capitalism? Well, together! Individuals can do very little against the dominant system, but in an organized group we can use tried and true means - of organized withholding of labor, of takinh direct action, of increasing the size of our ranks, of educating ourselves and each other, and, usually out of necessity, arming ourselves.

So the question then becomes: okay, duh, we need lots of people working together, but how do we do that, what are better ways of doing it than others, and how do I get involved? This is a very important question because historically there are examples of success, failure, and outright counter-productive movements that all had this same stated goal. This is every dedicated anticapitalist's biggest thing to fret about: which lessons from history apply to us and which do not? What is best in your locale may not be what is best in someone else's and there may be many pathways that are better or worse than the other. How do you choose which to avoid and which to embrace? Where do you, personally, fit into the equation?

The othet answers have the right gist: personal education and joining and contributing to an organization.

There is a substantial catalog of political theory, history, philosophy, media criticism, and practical organizing skills that are almosy entirely untaught in capitalist-dominated school systems. Reading a good chunk of that catalog is important for choosing the right actions personally as well as contributing to the decisions made by an organization. You don't have to read all of it before you begin work in an organization, but you should start reading ASAP. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds first, it is very short and digestible and provides a good framing by which to question the modern history of capitalists, socialists, and fascists. From there I would gravitate to Marx and media criticism, such as Heinrich's explainer (which I would eventually compare to works criticap of Heinrich) and FAIR.org or the podcast Citations Needed. Add some Engels as well. From there you can branch out in any direction you would like, but an understanding of the October Revolution, its precedents, the USSR, and a critical approach to its critics is helpful for understanding what the hell everyone is talking about in a given organization (and people are often saying incorrect things on these topics). There is a recent Liberation School series on the topic, effectively by PSL, that I recommend. Others to look into after this: Goldman, Gramsci, Mao, Che, Kalecki, Amin, Fanon, Freire, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Michael Hudson. This will provide some of the "Greatest Hits", albeit Western Centric. Dedicating time to the history of every socialist revolution is valuable. It will take yeara to read all of this and this is normal.

The other step is to join and organization. This gives you the opportunity to learn practical skills for getting people involved, educating people, being educated by others, and taking action. Not all anticapitalist organizations are created equal and there is a tendency for infighting between them. Some are actually highly counterproductive, so this isn't just pointless infighting though a lot of it is pointless. So long as you avoid abusive organizations that burn you out (or worse), being in any org is better than trying to pick the best one to join on your first try. I will suggest avoiding these kinds of organizations: Trotskyist, non-profits, Maoists that are up in each others' business, liberal identity politics groups (socialist/Marxist identity-focused groups can be good though!), and any group that spends most of its time on things like electoral politics and letter writing campaigns, i.e. what capitalists want their opposition to waste their time on. The first 3 groups are the most likely to be abusive and burn you out. The last is basically not actually anticapitalist at all even if they claim to be. To find options for local organization I recommend using a combination of attending events that sound cool and wors of mouth recommendations. "Anti-imperialist" is a decent indicator that a group is fairly cool, though it is not a guarantee. Go to a few events and feel them out. Protests, teach-ins, hosted political movie watching events, rallies, etc. You want to focus on the groups organizing these things, not just attending them, and only rule them out if they meet the above ezclusionary criteria. If they can't be ruled out, ask them how you can get involved. Any good organization will be very excited to loop you in and get you attending meetinfs and reading sessions within a few weeks.

The Russian Communist dictator?

I'm sorry people treat you that way. You don't deserve it.

Capitalism developed over hundreds of years and is inextricable from European colonialism. The shift to capitalist relations themselves being ubiquitous is just a couple hundred years old, but the conquest by the bourgeoisie goes back more like 500-700 years.

The idea of a "free market" is an invention of capitalism in the last few hundred years. Laissez-faire was coined by French businessmen in the late 1600s.

Most of the Roman low and medium skill artisans were slaves, actually.

But capitalism is best recognized by the proliferation of commodities, as it is made up of various wage labor capitalist enterprises producing large quantities of fungible goods for market. A chair is a chair is a chair and you can buy 50 varieties of basically the same thing at the furniture store. Under capitalism, all economic life is governed by this: you work a wage labor job and you buy everything else (commodities made by other wage laborers).

Rome did not have such a system. A vastly larger proportion of goods were made at home by oneself or by servants or by slaves. When goods were purchased they would have mostly been produced by slaves or petty bourgeois artisans or apprentices. Wage laborers still existed, but they were not typical.

An important part of Marxist analysis is to focus on the shift from quantitative to qualitative in social development. The high proportion of wage laborers is something that typefies capitalism, but wage laborers have existed for a long time. At some point there was a watershed moment - or watershed many decades - where the material forces that increased this proportion crossed various thresholds to create a new ruling class that became dominant and started throwing their weight around (capitalists). The capitalist class was in no way dominant in Rome.

Capitalism is not about individuals being greedy. Calling capitalists greedy is like calling fish greedy for needing water. The capitalist system requires constant profit maximization to prevent firms from crumbling, the capitalists are tasked with ensuring this, generally by (at first) maximizing exchange value of their product and minimizing costs (usually labor), then later using monopoly position to charge economic rent. In the heart of empire, financialization has meant trying to skip the first step via large financial investment up front, like with tech monopolies. The system itself forces exploitation, dispossession, colonialism, and ultimately crisis and war.

Historical empires conquered for reasons we often don't really know specifically, as the accounts we have are written by victors with limited access and understanding. But ancient peoples were just as sophisticated as us and subject to material forces as us, so it was certainly not just being greedy. The economic base can force hands, for example. The Roman slave and debt system was unsustainable and required debt jubilees and war and invasions to be maintained, for example. For the ruling class of Rome, was maintaining the empire only greed or was it what they were taught to do as the moral and right thing?

The mode of production is never human nature. Human nature is a factor, but the mode of production is something that is socially constructed and subject to material constraints, like tools and the environment in which people live.

But socializing and sharing empathy is virtually universal, and the impetus to share food or shelter or community is something that capitalist society teaches us to avoid. So one of the things we strive for through the abolition of capitalism is the restoration of human connections and care that are currently robbed from us. So I can totally see where you are coming from re: the extent to which the communism we want to build constitutes a return. But it is even more a step forward, a transformation into the future constructed from the bones of the present.

Re: what Marx called "primitive communism", which we might better call egalitarian societies based on hunting and gathering and sometimes agriculture, such societies have actually existed everywhere people have lived. You can find clear historical examples of such societies in the Americas and Australia, yes, but also in the Middle East, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ethiopia, Pakistan/India, China, etc. As you mention, any of these societies did not have written records or they were lost, but we can understand how they lived based on their homes, food, tools, dress, cohabitation, and spatial distribution of all these things.

Aside from their scammy games Temu just sells you the same things other major online retailers do but cutting out the warehousing middle man.

Iirc it would be more accurate to say the crowd apprehended Jackson. He nearly beat the guy to death with his cane and the crowd had to stop him.

Nope. Jackson was old and feeble and required someone to walk him to and from the funeral. The crowd, including Davey Crockett, restrained the assassin, who was found not guilty because he had incredible delusions. Jackson himself, old and confused, immediately claimed it was the political opposition come to get him and waved his walking stick around trying to hit the already-subdued man.

Jackson was a cruel racist settler colonist who only punched down. He was not personally particularly physically threatening and most of his "deeds" were done after age 45. The idea that Jackson was at all physically imposing is just Americans making things up because they have no respectable history. And those myths became rumors and common knowledge and then get repeated with veneration - e.g. I would suspect your knowledge of the cheese wheel comes, in some way or another, from a West Wing episode.

Hell yeah. Marg bar Amrika.

All of them

The guy whose two guns misfired and who was actually apprehended by a huge crowd?

lmao Jackson wasn't some kind of Uebermensch. He was abusive because his position protected him. A bullet isn't going to glance off his iron jaw or something.

And he won't get dumped on by the GOP because I will be gleefully shooting him in the head a few minutes into his reexistence.

Andrew Jackson would probably be happy that the US genocide of indigenous people was so extensive and the country was so large. And upset at how many people living there semi-equally weren't white.

He'd think those things for the few minutes before I shot him.

Yeah email sucks, I don't use it for anything requiring infosec.

GPG is an open source encryption package, you can use it to sign / encrypt your emails and allow others to verify/decode them so long as they have a certain kind of one of your keys.

Going into a forest to talk is legit. It leaves only one source of infosec risk: the people attending not being careful afterwards. As good as it gets! Of course this is not needed for fairly safe things unless your country is at risk of a harsh crackdown.

2FA = 2 factor authentication. Like when sites make you put in a number texted to you after you provided your password. There are key-bases options that are more secure and offer a way to not use a phone number. An authenticator app can also work, after verifying it you pit in numbers as if they were texted to you but they come from an app. A physical device like a yubikey acts basically the same way but you actually plug it into yout phone or computer and it cryptographically verifies that it is the one you registered with the website.

VOIP = voice over IP, a service for digitally calling people on the normal phone network.

For infosec you always want a threat model. IMO the first threat is fascists and other creeps, i.e. don't get doxxed. Using a totally separate account for something and not sharing personal info does this. The next is corporate-government spying which can amount to the same thing at first, as in, "oops we leaked all the names of pro-Palestinian organizers reom this Google Doc". If the state turns even more internally fascistic they might even target all socialists, in which case you want a minimized digital footprint to decrease th3 chances of getting caught in their net - which is sure to be an incompetent process on the state's part.

Following the strats I've laid out would protect you from all 3 but are a bit of work.

And of course, once targeted by the state, they will have little trouble tracking people down digitally. The third case is just for minimizing the chance if being targeted. We should all have real escape plans if things start moving fast.

Glad you've got Mullvad! It's the best VPN imo.

I haven't tried buying a phone number anonymously in a long time and the last time I tried it no longer worked for fooling Google, so unfortunately I won't be super helpful there. But I do know it ia theoretically possible. It's basically a VOIP provider that is verified to work with Google. Payment anonymously (like with cash) is probably the hardest part. If you go that route I would recommend using something other than a phone number for 2FA, like a yubikey or open source authenticator app, so that if Google eventually says, "we don't accept this number anymore" you have a chance to log in. Sorry for being less helpful on this question!

Proton is theoretically better than Google for email. IMO email is inherently insecure as a technology and due to the domination from the big providers that will blacklist you for "spam" if you don't jump through their hoops, which lractically necessitates paying a company to send your emails. The "best" setup that uses that third party and does not use GPG is to buy a domain, self-host your own inbox so that received email goes only to you, and and pay the third party just to send outgoing messages - which should be assumed to be insecure. In theory the best option is to run everything yourself with a domain purchased under a fake name with an anonymous paymeny method (which I haven't personally tried yet) and being very on top of things so your sent mail doesn't get marked as spam. And to encryot all your messages via GPG. But at that point of security concer , for most purposes I would just not use email at all and instead use something more inherently secure, ideally in-person conversations. Element and Matrix are better buy their funding model raises red flags so it is jusy something to regularly audit and understand. Avoid the habit of being too candid because you trust the software to protect you!

Linux is great and will help with getting more comfortable with digial security, so that's a good thing to keep trying at! It has a learning curve so don't get discouraged when things break the first few times.