Currently I don’t have any disposable income, but if I manage to get my shit together this year I probably would contribute a little bit. I find your posts really useful, and I hope they keep coming and are properly archived for future reference.

An embodiment of Latin centre-left Catholicism. Not a real comrade, but progressive in issues that aren’t key to the Church. Preaches love and peace which, although with its contradictions, is consistent enough to denounce the greatest atrocities out our time. A “live and let live” Pope, for better or for worse.

Given the Church’s role as a reactionary cudgel over the past 200 years, and specifically during the Cold War, he was a breath of fresh air. Can’t wait for some out of touch European to start telling third worlders how to pray the proper German way again.

Happy Lenin day!

This is probably not you’re asking for, but (MLM) People’s History of Ideas is a pretty good deep dive into the Chinese revolution.

Besides that, there’s the RevLeft Radio episode on him and Red Pen on the revolution (it’s pretty harsh on the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution).

Brazil is distancing itself from China at such a fast pace that some analysts are predicting it’ll leave BRICS after a right wing victory in the next election.

Do you have any idea how many more people China has compared to Vietnam?

Yes, 14 times. I’m not saying it is going to be easy or that it’ll be concentrated on a single country like it was with China. In fact, I believe that some fragmentation will be optimal to prevent China 2 from just doing what China did.

The USA is looking for lebensraum.

The US doesn’t need Lebensraum because they already have colonies and barely any national industry. Incorporating Canada and subduing Mexico for geopolitical reasons aren’t incompatible with trying to replace China in the international division of labour.

Surplus value must be extracted from somewhere, and although Mexico and Canada have their industries it’ll not be enough and too close to home to be too heavy handed.

That’s not even considering how ideologically communist Vietnam is.

China, Vietnam and the USSR were all nominally communists when Kissinger was playing the three of them against each other. The superstructure follows the base, and unless both countries integrate their economies or at least make SolidNet into a proper successor to the Third International, I won’t hold my breath. Right now the CPV is already negotiating zero tariffs with the US.

The only countries I would seriously bet on staying with China are Venezuela, Iran, Russia, the DPRK and Cuba, and possibly the AES. And that’s just because they are so economically desintegrated from the world economy that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain, for both their proletariat and (if it exists) their bourgeoisie.

No idea, but if he is, the fact that it never comes up is exactly what I’m complaining about.

Don’t worry about losing your social circle by changing parties, you’ll probably still meet a lot whenever your new and old parties converge on specific actions. Some might even follow you or try to organise joint actions.

For changing, if you get into touch with some comrade from your current party, ask them about how it’s going and advice on making the jump. Other than that, if they publicise any of their events (specially reading groups, those are the usual recruiting gateways) try to go and meet some people, and see if you feel comfortable with the people there. Eventually you might get close enough to someone for specific advice.

Good luck comrade!

Tinha que ser estudo de “sindicato patronal”. Devia ser proibido isso existir. Esse troço tem nome, chama cartel.

I don’t expect much from broader leftist YouTubers like hbomberguy, Shaun, philosophytube, so it doesn’t disappoint me when they do a liberalism, and their content is otherwise fine.

But I actually really dislike the couple “actually socialist” ones like Second Thought because they do the exact same thing as the previous ones (pointing at the problem with no perspective for solution) but are lauded as some heroes of Marxism-Leninism. The only video of his that I find minimally ML is the one telling people to get organised. He barely advertises US parties (keeping in mind that’s his main audience) or points to what can be done, and wastes too much effort on “production values” over agitation. If he refuses to join any party, the very least he could do is make a video explaining all of them to help out his followers. Effectively, he’s an anti-capitalist/pro-China agitator at best, and I’m tired of USAmericans hopefully waiting for China to fix everything. The other deprogram lads fit the bill too, but I don’t even bother watching them.

English-language YouTube is generally really bad at agitation (clarifying the contradictions of singular notable events), specially due to “monthly video” model. There’s a huge space for short daily news analysis being ignored. But there are some really good propagandists. So I’d like to recommend RevLeft Radio for current events and Red Pen for understanding theory. Besides that there’s also Socialism for All for commentated reading of theory, though he is MLM.

Oh, I didn’t know breakthrough news was theirs. I thought they only owned Liberation News, which usually lags behind the news cycle by a lot.

On the other hand, Chinese state-supported media model sidesteps these barriers by decoupling news accessibility from commercial pressures.

The same could be said of the BBC, DW, France24 and many others. They’re still trash. Being state supported is nice, but the interests of that state are key.

I’d like to add that western communist parties are doing a very lacklustre job in fighting for hegemony in the digital media/news space. It is depressing that single-person channels like First Thought somehow are better at constant free news coverage than the PSL or other English-language ML parties.

It might not take off in the west where there’s too much propaganda against China for people to turn to Chinese sources, but that’s not the case for the global majority.

Most Chinese news platforms are still mostly only in English, which isn’t accessible for non-westerners. And national bourgeois media is happy to only translate what supports their interests. I’d rather they support the building of national left-wing press structures abroad.

O iFood tá ficando uma porcaria cara pra caramba, então é bom voltar a ter alguma competição. Essas empresas só são boas na época de operar no prejuízo pra monopolizar, depois fica tudo pior do que era antes.

It gets worse now that it’s being made available to people with disabilities and now with mental illness too. In Belgium there’s precedent for people being euthanised for being for autism. Only difference from the Nazis is that at least the Hans Asperger didn’t try to convince his patients they had to die.

Are these tariffs even being implemented or are they just “announced”? I can only imagine the chaos that customs workers must be going through.

Definitely not my most rightwing view, but my most rightwing conscious position is that comrades should join and build up whatever organisations they can, even if they are right-deviationists or contain reactionary elements, and fight over those inside the organisations. This includes parties with settler, LGBT-phobic, misogynous among other deviations.

I also have another view that may be seen as rightwing here (and is definitely controversial) that settler-colonialism is not the principal contradiction in current day USA, North America, or most of the rest of the Americas. It’s first between the international bourgeoisie (with home base in the US) and the international proletariat, then between peripheral nations and the imperial core finance, military and cultural sectors, and only after that it’s between oppressed minorities (be they native or “imported”) and the national state repression force. Some day I’ll take the time for this struggle session.

If you look on the FBI “most wanted” page he is one of the top “fugitives” lol

Material context matters, but anything that would help maintaining “soviet” organisation after the revolution. Truck drivers, bikers, hardware-capable technicians, but also nurses and medics, farmers, depending on the society maybe even programmers, and also military-capable workers.

It all depends on what sort of proletarian power structure you’re building and what are the key skills required to maintain and grow it both during repression and after victory. If there’s lots of rails, train engineers. If urban areas are sparse, maybe radio operators.

If there’s an anti-war movement, it’ll be very diverse in its tactics.

Well, in that case those other things can’t be said outright as answers either.

What can be said is a list of sources, perhaps.

TM 31 210

Other more up to date TMs and FMs

Chemistry Youtuber

Some theory

Also check out some circuitry courses online and try to learn how to solder and short-circuit batteries. And join the SRA, maybe budget for a 3D printer.

And finally I recommend reading through David Shub’s biography of Simon Ter-Petrosian, for some lessons on what to do, what not to do, and what can go wrong.

However I still advise those other things to be done with some sort of organisation.

If we get nuclear Armageddon, everybody in the planet will die. There’s no escaping it, we have more than enough nukes to make earth uninhabitable.