Discovered this guy’s music a couple of weeks ago and have been listening nonstop ever since. This song is called “Bosat el Reeh” on streaming services. He wrote three hundred songs, sings beautifully, and is also a beast on the oud.

New hexbears be like: where’s the cool zone I miss it so much

Old hexbears be like: I bring the cool zone wherever I go

Haha take that commies.

I was masked in a hardware store. A guy who looked like Tom Skerritt from thirty years ago but taller and thinner looked at me and started ranting about communism with his employee. Did you know that communists want to get everyone dependent on the government? That’s their plan!!

He also said that he had read Marxists and recommended that his employee do so.

This guy also wears some kind of uniform with an American flag on the shoulder every day. I always got bad vibes from him but never really heard him speak. Until now.

I didn’t say anything because I go to this place all the time for work and I see him there constantly and suspect that he may be the owner.

So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I've spent more than a few hours chatting with "the guys," and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I'm extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the "good" ones that provide their treats. (They're also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we "really needed" a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has "made some money" through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA's future (and climate change) and has said that he'll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It's wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that's a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.

What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from "collectivist" to "individualist." Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers' political views much easier to understand. They're individualists. They don't like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they're happy to be rich (at everyone else's expense) and to have the same police protect them.

As an aside, I've been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you'll see that I'm a communist, which means that it's impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I'm writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there's so much money in this field and I'd like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There's tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it's more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I'm interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.

The world has "fallen" to communism. The last liberals and fascists on Earth flee to Puerto Rico (sorry) and basically turn it into another Taiwan for a few months or years. The ruling class there maintains that it has suffered only temporary setbacks at worst and that victory is at hand. And besides, if you like communism so much, why don't you move to [the rest of the world]? And they aren't even real communists there anyway because they have not instantaneously transformed the planet into paradise. They're just befogging the masses, who are too stupid to understand that the best days of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy lie ahead!

I'm just thinking about this because of the Yankee cope I'm seeing all over the place. Ukraine just needs more weapons and European soldiers, then it's bound to prevail against Russia, which is collapsing anyway. China is a heartbeat from balkanizing. Haiti is just run by a bunch of cannibal criminal gangs. Palestine can't possibly win. Etc.

So I felt like I was following the genocide in Gaza pretty closely but apparently these images are at least a few days if not more than a week old. I found them on tiktok as well as a telegram channel called Gaza Now in English. I honestly couldn’t believe what I was looking at, but once I found this poor kid’s name I saw that his death had already been covered by establishment media. You can find these images and articles by googling his name (Yazan al-Kafarnev) and honor him by doing whatever you can to stop the genocide. I’m a parent and have trouble writing this but we failed this kid, our protests failed to save him.

I used to think that people focusing so much ire on boomers was anti-Marxist because the main contradiction in American society is class (settler / indigenous, bourgeois / proletarian) but I’ve started to wonder if this profound and really ubiquitous age-consciousness (ageism) is actually just a step toward class consciousness? Like I’m guessing most people who hate boomers don’t really have a problem with homeless boomers?

I’m thinking also of how women in South Korea are refusing to get married or have kids and how this will basically destroy South Korea (albeit slowly) if trends continue. Women in South Korea are objectively correct in identifying men as their oppressors, but is this awareness of the patriarchy a step toward class consciousness and revolutionary thought or is it a dead end? I guess it depends on the person as well as circumstances.

It still seems like, regardless of how hard the bourgeoisie pushes the idea that only individuals exist and anyone can rise to the top if they just work hard and smart enough, large numbers of people are possibly developing nascent class consciousness, which can lead toward an understanding of historical materialism and scientific socialism. This is basically an extended “is it gonna be barbarism or socialism?” meme but I just thought I’d post it here to see what people thought.

Power users and mods just keep repeating: "History is not a science because culture (i.e., god) is all-powerful. We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories."

I have not actually watched this film (because it’s probably not good). And yes I’m aware that Dracula is actually an anti-semitic caricature of the feudal aristocracy. Doctor Frankenstein is the actual bourgeois, while the monster is his proletarian creation. Neither can actually exist without the other. The monster is the real hero of the story and the proletariat is the hero of history.

🤡

Seriously wtf, amerikkka now has three different flavors of fascist to choose from for president.

https://nypost.com/2023/10/20/jon-stewarts-apple-show-abruptly-ends-due-to-disagreements-over-china/amp/

Sorry to link the NY post but it was actually the only source I saw that mentioned both Apple’s manufacturing interests in China as well as its interest in hawking goods there.

I feel hopeful that the CPC’s policy of hanging the capitalists with the rope they sell them is working. Is it possible, as unbelievable as it may seem, that American journos will one day soon lose their jobs for criticizing China?

Sorry if this was already covered elsewhere. I searched but couldn’t find anything.