“charismatic and full of potential” what the fuck.

This is a pretty good heuristic for all things geopolitical.

I wonder what percentage of Libertarians know who Gadsden was.

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.

Sometimes a topic is complex or unfamiliar and shouldn’t be explained simply. It really depends on the audience and one’s goal.

But just to validate the main sentiment, speaking in terms of dense theory to an audience that doesn’t know any of it is a mistake and avoiding engagement with such audiences is just cloistering oneself away from the masses. It’s impossible to be an effective socialist when making those mistakes.

An important element of deprogramming liberals is to explain how a political party should actually function (e.g. in the neighborhood of demcent and cadres) and then contrast it with how liberal parties are just top-down corporate efforts that only use facade of democracy to get you to do free labor and unquestioning votes / lack of opposition.

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.

Kerala is a limited experiment and hardly an example of socialists winning. CPI(M) is constantly losing Kerala. The wins in Kerala are comparable to social democrats in the global south, which is not nothing, but this also does not mean they are following a communist program - which you can see in their chauvinist takes.

Nicaragua had a socialist revolution. It is a challenging one highly disrupted by the Unites States. They are doing surprisingly well given their geological position. Sandanismo has not fully subverted itself to electoralism, it still has an armed wing and internal struggle.

Venezuela is run by SocDems. The current Venezuelan government is actually cracking down on MLs.

Yeah CPI(M) ia a good ezample of what happens when a socialist organization subverts itself to bourgeois electoralism. There are many parallels with the SPD and trying to defend their officials and cater to mainstream liberal discourse and inatitutions. But they have little excuse, as this approach haa been tried and always fails, and is literally the antithesis of what MLs have learned from history. CPI(M) saddles itself with so many albatrosses, is so lackadaisical, and fails to have basic coherent theory and solidarity. Unsurprisingly Vijay Prashad has these same chauvinist hangups and is himself a member of CPI(M).

Nothing major politically happens because an individual does something. We have to get together with other people that think like us and build that organization until it can take substantiative action, possibly in coalition with other organizations.

As an individual, that looks like joining an org and improving it. Improving it is you gaining skills, teaching those skills, doing logistics and planning, facilitating actions, interfacing with other orgs, and recruiting. I’m lumping in knowledge with skills - reading and knowing theory and history is also a skill.

Doing this is work, particularly emotional labor. Most socialist organizations retain heavy doses of liberalism both officially and among members. Many people and meetings will be exhausting. But this is how you learn the most valuable skill: navigating conversations to organize other people, including those who just said the must absurd thing you’ve ever heard. Building our movement means socially building a big series of conveyor belts to loop people into action and development so that we have a growing core of dedicated revolutionaries as well as a larger mass of sympathizers who can take action when called upon.

There is no other mode by which we can be said to have done anything substantial politically. The rest of what we can do as individuals is basically charity and making those around us a little less reactionary. Those are good things, but highly limited, and not up to the task of taking on the number 1 sponsored genocidal apartheid settler colony of capitalist empire.

Ah, thank you. I’ll still probably avoid but it’s good to know what’s changed.

A web server is just any software that can be accessed with web network protocols. This can look like a lot of things. If you have Python installed you can start a web server right now by running python -m http.server. localhost:8000 in a browset would then let you browse files via the (local) web.

What kind of server do you want to run?

Does anyone know what happened w/ Adidas? I’ve been avoiding them for years but they’re not a priority target anymore?

You could read the works of Hu Sheng

The Russian Communist dictator?

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

We are all bathed in propaganda and distraction and false consciousness, so many things that should be obvious in a better world would actually be shocking and rejected out of hand by most people if you just told them the conclusive facts. Liberals invested in the voting system already conflate it with democracy and repeat propaganda against “enemy” states when they deviate from this model, calling them undemocratic. Those same liberals are unhappy with their governments and do not feel represented (correct!) but simultaneously justify and entrench their own systems as great and buy the propaganda that the real problems are things like those who vote wrong or immigrants, etc.

Underneath this propaganda is the greater mover of white supremacy and the colonizer mindset. A false sense of superiority salves the wound.

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.