Not to be alarmist...well, maybe, but a #famine will be incoming for the United States. Famines under capitalism tend to take the form of "there's food, we promise, it just happens to be too expensive for you to afford", so...you've technically been under famine conditions for a little while, but it's about to get a whole lot worse. Your latest administration has completely slashed agricultural subsidies, deported thousands of migrant agricultural workers, drained a reservoir in California, and levied tariffs on the three countries it imports the most food from. This is a good time to remember that many revolutions are preceded by famines, and it's time for you to start preparing and start organizing with anyone you can, before you're starving — which, again, I'm sorry to say, it's going to happen.

Talk openly about it; this is the time you can do it safely, and that window is going to be short. Find anyone, literally anyone, who is willing to talk back about the possibility of organizing together. It can be as simple as a mutual aid group, to try to afford bulk food more cheaply together when this happens, but we here, the people of the imperialized world, your fellow workers, are hoping that you will do more, and fight to end both famine and fascism in your country once and for all, no matter what it takes.

Red Paw Collective was a failure as a space because of the apathy that gradually settled into the community. Apathy breeds apathy, and, as one friend and ex-member put it to me, it self-selects: People who care in an otherwise apathetic space end up leaving for the sake of their own sanity.

I'm hoping to form another community on Matrix, with these lessons kept in mind. If you're viewing this post, you're invited.

This will be a community of anticapitalist solidarity, open and inclusive to all revolutionary anticapitalists in solidarity with the entirety of the working class without discrimination. This has been the three-point membership requirement for years, and it has been extremely effective, allowing Leninists, Maoists, anarchists, classical Marxists, and plenty of others to engage progressively with one another.

We will also retain our democracy. RPC's democracy was very successful and effective in empowering its members and creating a community that felt safe and appealed to people.

RPC was, as the community-chosen name implies, a fairly furry-heavy community, as that was also a focus of its founding members. This new community will eschew that focus. I would like to be more inclusive and less intimidating to people outside this subculture. I believe this secondary focus is also partly the cause of the apathy that would eventually lead to the community's downfall.

Finally, in correcting for those past mistakes, this new community would have the additional requirement that active members are also active in some form of organization within the space. This may be as simple as starting out with a reading club or mock debate, building our theoretical foundations, but as time goes on and hopefully we grow, we will branch into more depending on the interests and talents of our membership. For this reason, we will be on Matrix and only on Matrix, on a privately hosted server outside of the United States. Although we encourage relationship-building between comrades and may have rooms pertaining to shared interests, they will not be a focus, and if a member is engaging in only these secondary rooms without engaging in foundation-building or organization, they will be invited to self-criticize.

If you are interested in being a founding member of this space, leave a reply or send me a DM. There are a few of us already, and once we have a good small group going, I'll pull the trigger, and Workers of the World will have a new live space, ready to be built from the ground up.

#anticapitalism #communism #anarchism

Considering a way to describe what's been called left nationalism, or progressive nationalism, since nationalism itself has come to be associated purely with reactionary movements since Mussolini and we, as a socialist movement, never sought to reclaim or replace it, instead internalizing its theft and allowing it to be taken wholesale from our ideology.

I meet so many self-proclaimed Leninists that think internationalism means no borders, no nations, and no discussion at all of nationalism, seeing it as wholly reactionary. In particular, I'm told simply that Canadian resistance against American imperialism isn't valid, simply because Canada, too, is part of the imperial core — entirely ignoring that so is Ireland, so was Poland for Luxemburg, so were the nations within Russia for Lenin. For none of these thinkers, nor other thinkers on progressive nationalism, such as Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-sung, was nationalism only valid in the case of undeveloped countries, and more a quality of how it views the nation within a global context.

So, the way I'm thinking of describing it is in relating it to the "shop local" movement. No one shops locally because they think their local area is the best in the world, and anything sold or manufactured outside of it is inferior because the people outside of their local area are inferior. That is reactionary nationalism, the kind of nationalism that Mussolini, Hitler, Trump, etc. exhibit. People who aren't insane don't think that way, though: We shop local because it's economical, it's good for our communities — and it's good for other communities, too! It curbs the influence of huge corporations, and also curbs the imperialist exploitation of others around the world, of workers just like us. "Shop local" is, perhaps ironically, incredibly world-conscious, just as left nationalism is, in reality, necessarily internationalist. And just as one can hardly call oneself globally conscious without an understanding of the value of shopping local, internationalism is also necessarily nationalist.

Anarchists, too, should consider the importance of the nation as a formal expression of the culture and history of a people, as well as the validity of national resistance against imperialism. While I don't know of any anarchist thinkers who have discussed it, perhaps that ought to change.

#communism #anarchism #shoplocal

This whole #Trump / #Musk thing is absolutely wild and admittedly is kind of flying in the face of staunch dialectical materialism, in my view.

We have a case in which the corporate oligarchs have completely won control over the government and have the ability and the drive to do everything they want to do without a mask. Fascism. And yet, unlike past forms of fascism, they're doing things that completely shoot themselves, via their class, in the foot. Dismantling #USAID, attacking their closest trade partners, and now considering withdrawing from #NATO?

It really goes to show how a lack of education goes both ways. The system of defunding education and propagandizing individualism, anti-intellectualism, and Randian bullshit has produced a left wing that can't even see straight most days...but not only that, it seems to have produced a capitalist class that doesn't even know what that means anymore.

US imperialism is on a fast track to completely destroying itself, without any intervention whatsoever from a toothless left, and...I'm kinda here for it. #communism #anticapitalism #anarchism

At times like these when organization hasn't kept up with the crisis the world is rapidly plunging into, it's important to build community. There's a #furry space on Matrix for revolutionary anticapitalists of all stripes! If that's you, and you're furry or friendly with those who are, jump in and post an introduction!

matrix.to/#/#redpawcollective:…

If you aren't on Matrix yet but want to dip your toes in, we also have a bridged room on Discord and Telegram:
discord.gg/rH7wGTGUSR
t.me/ k3yYs6S3-V9kZTYx

#anarchism #communism

Matrix - Decentralised and secure communication

You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation

^matrix.to

Always sad when otherwise well-meaning people create rifts in the progressive world based on historical hangups. My thinking Stalin is pretty cool because he fought capitalism and championed a progressive and anti-fascist world isn't that different from you hating Stalin because you think he was a secret capitalist/reactionary/fascist. We have the same ideals in both cases.

I can talk about how I know these things about controversial parts of history that have been heavily propagandized in the US-led west, but it seriously doesn't matter that much. The only thing it would change in how you compose yourself now is that you will have hope, belief in a socialist future because you'll discover that there's actually been a pretty alright socialist past.

It should be something you want, but it isn't going to fundamentally change your ideals, nor will it mean I will work with you when I wouldn't before. You can be an anarchist or a trot and I will still work with you. What matters is: Will you work with me?

#anarchism #communism #mutualaid