Getting good at fighting with any weapon, even just a heavy blunt object, will be easier to learn and more effective than unarmed self defense. Knowing how to use a firearm is even more practical if you’re in a situation where they’re an option.

Avoiding fights is always the best form of self defense though and being prepared for them if they happen is the second best.

Yeah it’s not required but the only self identified “Marxians” I’ve come across were raging liberals while I have met “Marxist” academics that were not liberal.

It’s an approach in economics that usually rejects Marx’s revolutionary politics but agrees with his critiques of capitalism. People like Richard Wolff identity as Marxian.

I got out of the DSA over the Palestine stuff early this year. I can’t say I don’t miss the party life but it’s nice not being in a Zionist and all around opportunist org.

I also had some revelations about the big unions at the end of last year and yeah we’re all around fucked unless the US left starts figuring some shit out real quick.

Sorry you’re going through this. It isn’t fun. There’s at least a few others with you though.

“We’re against the genocide candidate but if you vote for an anti-genocide candidate then you’re actually supporting the genocide” -smartest American liberal

At this point basically all most unions do is political work, mostly fighting right to work so that they can collect revenue without having to organize anyone.

When I heard that guy on Rev Left radio say that I nearly burst out laughing. The understanding most leftists have of the labor movement is pathetic.

I’m not a shoplifter but have worked in retail for a while. I would think the best thing to do would be assuming you will be noticed because between cameras, other customers, and employees you almost certainly will be seen. The question then boils down to if they can identify you and build a case against you. To avoid this, knowing company policies and applicable laws is key. How much do you have to lift before you’ll be hit with a felony charge? Can employees detain you or forcefully recover product? Are police on site? Are you a known entity to police or the stores you’re lifting from?

If you disperse your lifting over location, company, and time, don’t take anything too valuable, and make yourself hard to identify you’ll probably be fine. Also if you get caught immediately leave, don’t listen to store employees who have no legal authority over you and whatever you do never admit to knowingly stealing anything unless your lawyer instructs you to do so.

Everyone seems to forget that a significant economic downturn started in late 2019 and it was only the unprecedented stimulus in response to the pandemic that staved it off. Well now here we are almost five years later with most of that stimulus cut off and in a much worse international position. They’re just trying to pretend it isn’t falling apart through the election but next year we’re in for a bad time.

Idk all the anti-vaxxers where I live are insane wealthy white baptists that would have been in the klan a century ago (if they aren’t right now). The poorer people in town tend to get their shots.

Maybe we should differentiate colonized/imperialized peoples that are skeptical of Western medicine because they’ve been victims of it from those that are Nazis that hate everything modern or any expectations of them.

I work with a Ukrainian guy and he writes English in immaculate cursive. Idk how that translates to Cyrillic but I’d assume it does which probably means he’s well practiced with it.

It’s a pretty nebulous term the roots of which are in Lenin’s Imperialism in which he describes a class of workers that sides with imperialists because they receive a portion of the superprofits of imperial exploration.

Historically it was used to describe business union leadership or union workers more broadly, especially those in the war industries. Further left tendencies tend to broaden the scope of who is a labor aristocrat including professional workers or even the whole of the white working class.

Personally I think as Marxists we need to reckon with the fact that many workers in the imperial core have petite-bourgeois brain worms precisely because their minds have been thoroughly rotted by debt and consumerism subsidized by the blood and sweat of the global periphery. That doesn’t mean we should eschew work among these workers but we should understand it’s limitations.

For instance there’s a massive naval shipyard near me that employs many people (mostly cis white dudes). They have a militant union and excellent pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly they’re all ridiculously conservative and nationalist and I’ve had multiple employees there tell me war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation. Just because many of these workers are union proles does not mean that they will easily align with the interest of the global proletariat and if we are organizing or agitating them we need to understand that.

Check your local laws. In a lot of places infestations are the responsibility of the landlord and if you want it dealt with you might not be on the hook.

The enemy are cruel and unrepentant murderers and we must bring them down by any means because this is war but also it’s bad to kill them and if they are killed it signals a dark turn for the character.

Blowback is the best resource for the answer to this question but in short

1. Kuwait was purposely overproducing oil to undermine the Iraqi economy. The Kuwaiti contribution to the war effort ended up costing about $32 billion USD, Iraq had only requested renumeration of $10 billion prior to the invasion. The conflict was never about money or democracy it was about destroying Iraq.

2. The US government turned Iraq into the state it was in support of them during the Iran-Iraq conflict (including making it the fourth largest military in the world in 1990), and US diplomats expressed at minimum that they had no position on inter-Arab conflict (many have interpreted US statements as tacit endorsement of the Iraqi invasion).

3. The US invasion was in defense of an autocratic petro-state to prevent an emerging successful Arab Republic and to keep most of the Middle East crushed under the boot of imperialism. The bloodshed (including numerous war crimes) and subsequent sanctions that occurred due to US intervention were far worse than anything that might have happened had they not intervend. Furthermore the American public was extensively lied to about the invasion, such as the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter’s lie that she told under oath before Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators. While the lies alone don’t justify Iraq’s invasion, it should raise the question why Americans had to be lied to in order to gain their support. All the lies about democracy and freedom fall hilariously flat faced when you remember Kuwait is literally a brutal autocratic monarchy.

In all reality it probably isn’t even true either. When Trump took office membership and activity of left wing organizations exploded. It was so much easier to organize people into a state of rebellion when they couldn’t pretend things were fine under Trump than it has been under Biden.

Funny, my Democratic governor has been the primary roadblock to indigenous sovereignty in my state and continues to fuck them over at every turn she gets. I’m sure they’re glad she’s there thinking of them though.

Actually it’s kind of an apt comparison. They just don’t realize that Lincoln was never really anti-slavery and was only really forced into that position because the Republicans in the Northern states demanded it.

While I think the members of Red Star mean well and their faction generally has good positions, I’ve gotta push back on the idea that they’ve significantly pushed DSA’s international work broadly or their anti-zionist work specifically in a better direction. The recent gutting of the anti-zionist resolution by the NPC and the retraction of the statements on the Venezuelan election and the Israeli assassination in Iran show that at the highest level DSA is firmly in control of chauvinist social democrats on these issues (I had to scoff when I heard of the “left” NPC getting elected last year, as if Bread and Roses are left lol)

Furthermore, DSA’s position on the presidential election has always been firmly invested in working within the Democratic party as seen by their focus on the “uncommitted” movement and their recent statement about Harris picking Walz as her VP. They still hide in their dirty break/party surrogate position which functionally ends up the same as the CP’s line.

There are a lot of good people in DSA and I learned a lot when I was a member but the organization is fundamentally repelled by any sort of discipline and the social fascists on it’s right wing maintain their power through that disorder and have demonstated that they do not care if their opportunism harms the organization or anyone else for that matter. Changing it into something viable would take an immense amount of work that would be sabotaged by SMC/Groundwork/B&R every step of the way, or you could just join an actual Leninist org.

Sounds like the UFCW won’t step in to help on that front unless the union is voted on? Should we just find a labor lawyer instead? Or is this just a risk we have to take once we start advocating in the open?

UFCW would most likely help you file ULP charges and navigate that process before an election (especially if you had already signed a card) but American labor law is basically pointless and you’d still be out of a job until you could prove to the board that you were fired for protected activity which can take months or even years if you can prove it at all whether or not you have a large union helping you. Also usually labor lawyers offer services cheaply or freely to working people. Sometimes UFCW will hire workers that get fired but from what I’ve heard working for UFCW is horrific so not sure I would recommend.

If you have a worker center or maybe a labor education center near you they might be able to help guide you and put you in touch with a lawyer.

As for organizing independently you’re going to be doing the same thing for the most part that you would with a large union (assuming you work through the NLRB). Build a committee, map the store, get people to sign cards, petition the NLRB, win an election, and negotiate a contract. I think you’d need to have some sort of charter and officers at some point and if you’re handling more than a few hundred dollars as the union you’ll need to incorporate as a 501c(5) but those things aren’t as complex as they might seem.