To be fair, anti-communism is the opposite of progressive, though I get what you mean, lol. Companies will always take advantage of social issues to get profit.

What you’re getting at is more accurately identified as class struggle. There, over time, becomes a sharpening conflict between the revolutionary classes and reactionary classes, and this pushes towards revolution. Marketing pretending to support broader social change is a pressure valve for the system, one of many.

Nah

Conscious habit building, I automate myself, lol. Helps keep discipline with self-study, language learning, and fitness!

You’re replying to a Hexbear user, it’s a joke.

Yep, that too!

Among other things, comrades in PSL reporting record growth, Mamdani winning ovet Cuomo, and a shift from a ~14 point favor to “Israel” among democrat voters in 2017 to ~57 point favor to Palestine in 2025. The rate of growth is high, even if the numbers aren’t yet.

I don’t actually agree with the theory of brainwashing, it’s closer that imperialism and settler-colonialism contributed to a largely reactionary working class. However, now that conditions are deteriorating, the working class is still becoming more radicalized.

Communist organizing is increasing more rapidly than ever before, with the exception of the CPUSA back when it wasn’t revisionist and had genuine backing from the USSR. I don’t see a civil war, unlike the US civil war there aren’t two competing forms of labor and production (agrarian slave owners vs industrialist bourgeoisie). I do see the US Empire collapsing, hopefully via internal revolution during crisis but it may be that the US realizes that trying to re-industrialize under capitalism while depending on the financial profits of imperialism isn’t going to work, and instead takes on a more state capitalist economy like South Korea to force re-industrialization while maintaining bourgeois control.

I don’t think the latter would work, either, mind you. The US is thoroughly subservient to imperialist financial capital, it has all of the control. Re-industrializing can’t work when Chinese commodities are so much easier and cheaper to produce thanks to its advanced industrialization, the US would need to go into hyper-tariff, state planning mode and that would go directly against its current hegemonic position as a debtor country flooding the world with US dollars.

Honestly, I don’t know. Decay is the only thing I can really see as nearly certain. I do think we are approaching the weeks where decades happen, as Lenin put it.

Gotcha, I’ll keep those in mind, thanks!

Yea, all my pictures look a bit fuzzy due to being on my phone, a dedicated camera sounds great. I’m tight on cash now, though, so that’ll take a while.

I’ve been dabbling a bit, but I never thought to go out and intentionally do it, it’s always been incidental on my walks around where I live. I should try and expand it!

I always recommend Blowback, and I’ve recently been getting into Rev Left Radio. The former is an excellent anti-imperialist podcast going over the crimes of the US Empire, the latter is a solid podcast discussing Marxist-Leninist history, theory, and practice.

These are all good points, but I do think it’s important for those with the capacity to join an org and get organized. Capitalism is the problem, and we cannot just wait for it to fall. It gets easier to topple over time, but if we never kill it, it will stay on life support.

China’s working conditions are steadily improving, so that’s not really a big problem, plus a huge amount of commodities are either produced in the global south by imperialist companies from the global north outsourcing labor, or from imperialist countries using resources carved out of the global south. You can boycott the worst companies, but you are forced to interact with most under capitalism. Better to be made in a socialist country like China than directly support imperialism.

The best you can do is to boycott what you can, and join an org, so you can hopefully be a part of the solution. PSL is a good option if you live in the US, but do research on what orgs have local chapters for you.

Deeply unserious managers of empire continue to self-cannibalize their own productivity in an effort to go even more all-in on financial capital, all while the global south is doing its best to pivot towards more favorable relations with countries like China. When the US Empire runs out of countries to exploit, and financial capital ceases to be profitable, it will have no developed industrial base nor a strong scientifically trained worker base to pull itself back up. The US is cooked, this is just speedrunning the demise of the empire in a faster and harder fashion.

The good news is that the worse this gets, the more favorable the conditions for organizing become, and the more vulnerable to revolution the state becomes. We can legitimately take advantage of this, and gain mastery over capital, rather than the inverse. We can re-industrialize, become socialist, and begin the long and difficult but necessary path towards legitimate progress. It won’t be easy, but it will be doable.

I personally love reading articles on Red Sails and ProleWiki. There’s always more to learn about Marxism-Leninism, and these sites are treasure troves.

I also like meditation to clear my head.

Those who can work, should. Those who cannot should be taken care of by those who can. Comprehensive training programs and free education helps both, as well as subsized or free necessities.

Sure? Balkanization seems like a good way to speed up the process of the Empire collapsing.

Depends on the application. It’s a tool that has necessary use cases, but just like you don’t need a sledgehammer for a nail, you can certainly make things worse by using it, or slip into excess. I support the right of the oppressed to use violence to liberate themselves, and the right of those to use violence to free the oppressed.