Adding to all other comments, a lot of the suspicious Bush administration’s immediate reaction (i.e. PATRIOT act) can be understood as them being always ready for whatever calamity in order to justify either invasion or neoliberal “reforms”.

Naomi Klein (liberal) goes into detail in her book (Shock Doctrine) about what she calls “Disaster Capitalism” and how a lot of effort is put into laying down the groundwork, both legally and ideologically, for whenever crises make them possible, besides constantly agitating for chaos which can lead to said crises.

She has a documentary which summarises her book, if you want a peek. You can easily draw parallels between the events she describes and what’s happening now in Argentina, Ukraine and Ecuador, among others.

Now, with regards to what motivates this conspiracy theory: it’s a patriotic distraction. As US citizen lives are treated by US society as inherently more important, portraying Bush as a traitor is an attractive pitfall to fall into, whitewashing the constant crimes of the US, internally and abroad, as the acts of “a bad president”. Even if Bush had personally pushed a button to launch missiles at the WTC, it would not be even remotely close to the social murder caused by his administration, or any other admin before or after.

Gotta remember to come back in 8 hours lol. This might be a fun experiment, since basically every corporate social media wants to be tiktok already.

You’ll probably have better luck regarding history and theory of communes on hexbear’s anarchism communities.

There have been many attempts at something like networks of self-organised communes, even before Marxism and Anarchism were coined.

In colonial Brazil, self-sustaining and self-governed communities called Quilombos were created as an alternative to the Atlantic trade slave-society imposed by the Europeans. As far as I’ve read they often organised themselves in federations with regards to war but were self-contained with regards to their own economy. Not sure what’s a good English source, but Clovis Moura is the best Portuguese one.

Over time, with the consolidation of colonial (and eventually Brazilian) authority, the settlements were either wiped out or relegated to the margins of society. The few that remain today are constantly under judicial and criminal attack.

Other two more recent examples of federated autonomous communities would be the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Mexico, which recently got dissolved and the Shining Path (and following splinter groups) occupation of Peruvian territories.

Do note that all of the provided examples had to deal with the constant threat of organised violence, be it from the state or from organised crime.

Going back to Brazil, two other examples of communes would be some of the communities defended by the Landless’s Workers Movements (which is less militant and more legalist) or the armed League of Poor Peasants (which, surprise surprise, was created as a reaction to brutal state suppression).

Given all that, I don’t believe communes can be seen as “safer” or “more peaceful” ways of building towards socialism or fighting imperialism. They have a role to play (even under capitalism) and are objectively good in many cases, but they’re still going to be in the crosshairs of imperialism.

Wherever alternatives to imperialism (and therefore capitalism) present themselves, they must be brutally destroyed and made an example of. This is probably paraphrasing a few dozen Marxists and also a couple Secretaries of State.

In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing champions of a new and better society, that nefarious civilization, based upon the enslavement of labor, drowns the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry of calumny, reverberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working men’s Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the bloodhounds of “order.”

And what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind of all countries? Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilization! The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequally in any battle known to history. What does that prove? Why, that the Commune was not the people’s own government but the usurpation of a handful of criminals! The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution. What does this prove? Why, that the demon of the Commune has changed them into Megaera and Hecates!

The Civil War in France

It’s very low effort and low reward praxis. Kinda like reposting stuff about rallies or from organisations to your friends, it is useful and probably not detrimental, but be careful not to fall into “consumer praxis” pitfall of liking, sharing and subscribing to Second Thought and being satisfied with only that.

If you have some green areas near you try climbing trees. It’s a pretty weird hobby and you can start with what feels like humiliating small steps (climbing a hip-height branch). But it’s a great way for getting a different and closer appreciation for nature and also of exercising balance and body control rather than just the muscle growth you’d get at the gym.

I also second martial arts, specially more cultural ones like Capoeira, Kung Fu or Karate rather than competition-focused ones like Boxing.

The OECD has some good sources for data and viz on trade, as well as many other topics related to global economics.

https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/trade.html

Just be aware that it’s a liberal institution.

Academic Marxism is the tendency to study Marxism solely as an economic theory without little to no organizative theory or practice, rendering it toothless.

This means that the beginning and end of the organisation’s work is confined to universities, particularly economics and social science departments, bringing with that all the petty bourgeois and elitist trends in academia. In short, it’s “people who only read Marx in German, but never went to a picket line”.

This is extremely common in bourgeois democracies as a way of institutionalising critique, and therefore making it harmless. Rather than making communism illegal, the ruling class makes effective party work illegal, but “tolerates” intellectual Marxists with high pay, healthcare and good benefits.

For further reading, here’s an (academic) article critiquing academic Marxists and warning of how actual militant workers movements are in danger of being co-opted by liberal ideology in 1977. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1978.

This is an age-old debate (see Luxembourg’s “reform or revolution”).

The Marxist-Leninist line holds that protecting or enhancing the material conditions of the proletariat before the revolution can both increase the number of prospective party-members or militants (i.e. you can’t organise rallies if you’re starving) and gain the confidence of the working class by representing their immediate interests (i.e. protecting workers rights) unlike bourgeois parties.

Smaller more tangible reform fights are also ripe ground for recruitment of militants, as inexperienced comrades can get a lot of first hand experience organising for, for example, solutions for food security (Black Panther Party’s free breakfasts).

However those reforms are means to an end, and that end is revolution. So reforms should not be a one-and-done thing (see the UK’s NHS) but rather a front in heightening class war and highlighting capital as the enemy and their resistance to reform as evidence. I once saw a comment in another Lemmy instance that said something like “we tried to implement public healthcare, but capital resisted too hard so there’s no hope”. That is due to social-democrat and reformist monopoly over the discourse about public healthcare, which needs to be challenged by communists.

The term “class war” is not hyperbole. In a war, you should settle only for defeating your opponent, hopefully forcing them to capitulate or maybe even eradicating them. You don’t take your single victory in a battlefield and pack your bags to go home, that’s the reformist line represented by Jeremy Corbyn and in a more aesthetic sense, Bernie Sanders. But you also don’t wait while your enemy marches into your territory hoping that their cruelty will materialise an uprising to defeat your opponent in a single blow, that is the spontaneists line held by every other Trotskyist splinter party or academicist communists.

Bolsonaro took Brazil out of the Chavez-founded UNASUR in order to join the US-aligned PROSUR (which excludes Venezuela and Bolivia) as soon as he went into office.

Huh, another one for my list of deeply unserious individuals. The text in the screenshot is so bad, at first I thought it was satire. But turns out it was probably written by a discord teenager from some YouTuber’s fanclub.

Their own page describe themselves pretty well, citing a thousand concepts and authors without elaboration or sources, or ever making clear any of their actual positions from either a theoretical or organizative perspective. Bonus points for calling “leftists” “mentally ill”.

But then you click on the page of the “main representative” and it’s an “autodidact” debatebro.

What purging and murdering proper communists over a century does to a country.

Side note: apparently editing their wiki is open, in case actual queer anarchists comrades from hexbear are feeling bored right now.

Edit: also it’s definitely a “me” thing, but I deeply hate how they overwrite the meaning of the already extant word “leftism” in Marxist theory (in short: unpragmactic idealism) with their own, which is just the “globalism” nonsense all over again.

The asteroid 2063 Bacchus because IIRC Bacchus (Dionysus)'s tales have some themes of gender non-conformity. But in a more serious tone, the Hellenistic mythologies used to have some gender non-binary figures such as the statues of Aphroditus, but the Latin-speaking Italian Romans generally took gender roles very seriously even before Christianisation, so you’ll probably have to find some non-Latin astronomical object.

It might just be my lack of knowledge of the smaller European countries, but this is such a niche thing on a community that is technically not supposed to be an explicit anticommunist thing, that I feel this might be fedposting.

It’s a neat trick, post something that confirms previously enforced biases, but not interesting or topical enough that many people will know about it and push back, or actually bother to research it.

My issue is not with gender neutral endings in romance languages (though I think they’re rather underadopted right now), but that for some reason Yankees decided to go with the unpronounceable “X” ending rather than very old and established Latina/o or Latine or even Latin@. In my experience those are way more common than X endings, though I admit I haven’t looked at hard data on that.

They could’ve just called them “Latins/Latin-Americans” but they chose to first a appropriate the grammar for “Latino” then think try to “fix” it in the classic Yankee fashion of not looking at already established norms.

Yeah, I have a particular beef with those labels because, although I usually like my Latin American cousins, my “Hispanic” country speaks Portuguese and not Spanish. In the census there wasn’t even an option for Latin American people who speak languages other than Spanish (Portuguese and French but also Guarani or Quechua or the various creoles).

It’s extra insult to injury that they appropriate the gendered “Latino” instead of just using their own “Latin,” but then feel the need to slap an X on it. I’ve never even seen non-Yankees using latinx instead of the age old latino/a/e/@ out there.

communism good; capitalism bad; is that iffy?

“China is a censorship dictatorship and we should ban all things that come from there to protect our free speech.” liberals probably

Just you wait until US newscorps start advocating to ban the entirety of lemmy and its source code from the USA.