chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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founded 4 years ago
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My local supermarket has a "play" page. Stupid me - I thought it was an just app to play games.
(hexbear.net)
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That's where all those Pentagon trillions went. I'm sure of it.
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Opuntia, commonly called the prickly pear cactus, is a genus of flowering plants in the cactus family Cactaceae, many known for their flavorful fruit and showy flowers. Cacti are native to the Americas, and are well adapted to arid climates; however, they are still vulnerable to alterations in precipitation and temperature driven by climate change. The plant has been introduced to parts of Australia, southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa.
Prickly pear alone is more commonly used to refer exclusively to the fruit, but may also be used for the plant itself; in addition, other names given to the plant and its specific parts include tuna (fruit), sabra, sabbar, nopal (pads, plural nopales) from the Nahuatl word nōpalli, nostle (fruit) from the Nahuatl word nōchtli, and paddle cactus. The genus is named for the Ancient Greek city of Opus. The fruit and leaves are edible. The most common culinary species is the "Barbary fig"
Opuntia is regarded as an aggressive invasive species.
Distribution
Like most true cactus species, prickly pears are native only to the Americas. Through human action, they have since been introduced to many other areas of the world. Prickly pear species are found in abundance in Mexico, especially in the central and western regions, and in the Caribbean islands (West Indies). In the United States, prickly pears are native to many areas of the arid, semi-arid, and drought-prone Western and South Central United States, including the lower elevations of the Rocky Mountains and southern Great Plains
Opuntia species are the most cold-tolerant of the lowland cacti, extending into western and southern Canada.
Prickly pears produce a fruit known as tuna, commonly eaten in Mexico and in the Mediterranean region, which is also used to make aguas frescas.
Prickly pear fruit for sale at a market, Zacatecas, Mexico
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From Al Jazeera: Iraqi army guarding a KFC amid rising anger at the US in the population
(hexbear.net)
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As some feel too hopeless to get out and organized, I was reminded of this quote:
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. [...] I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism. [...] The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.
- Huey P. Newton
I like this sense of letting go. Letting go of the necessity to personally catch a glimpse of the new world with my own eyes. Maybe I will. I almost surely won't. And yet, I want to help us get there. Even if things have to get worse before they get better, I want to help keep that spark alive.
Activism burnout is real and valid. If you're effected, take all the time you need to heal. But recognize it's similar to depression in that it lies to you. It lets you see reality through a distorted, non-materialist lense where everything is hopeless. (Might even lead to actual depression.) Don't confuse it for wisdom. Material contradictions will move history forward.
To avoid that burnout in the first place, if we organize around a moment that arises outside of our control, we should anticipate the ebb and flow of social forces, of action and reaction. Use any arising moment to agitate, grow our forces, raise class conciseness, strengthen our orgs. And don't be surprised or disappointed when inevitably the moment passes and forces of reaction take the stage. The moment will only not pass once. Until then we have to endure. And only personally commit what we can sustain long term.
Also we should be understanding towards people who feel burned out from activism. Don't call them weak or pressure them, but invite them to come back in their own time (but don't let people spread nihilism either).
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You are all pathetic ultra leftists regarding the ongoing protest movement (No Kings, etc)
(hexbear.net)
Hi, I'm here to announce that everyone pushing the standard Hexbear party line on the protest movement is a loser and wrong. I already know the weak-ass arguments you're gonna make and every single one of them reveals your disconnection from any actual organizing. Let's go through them one by one. If you have another that you think Marx Failed to Consider, please bring it up and I will explain how you are wrong in that way as well.
This was funded by the Waltons
No, one Walton bought an ad in the NYT. Who fucking cares? It has no material bearing on the movement whatsoever. There's no organization money is being funneled to other than the Democratic Party and Indivisble, which is not different in any way. The on-the-ground organizers in most cities and towns are not receiving a penny from the left's George Soros conspiracy. They're just normal people (and, to the next point, lots of leftists).
The Democrats are using this to steal the leftist energy of the masses
The Democrats certainly want to do that, but on the ground reports indicate they are losing all over the country. That's because leftists (especially 
) are not leaving this space uncontested. I have spent an enormous amount of time putting in the work to earn the trust and legitimacy necessary to place a bunch of literal revolutionary communists in the leadership of the local movement. Not in some sneaky, behind the scenes way, but out in the open, succeeding specifically because we are literal revolutionary communists who never shut up about it. The Democrats, by my accounting, are losing the struggle in more places than not. If you refuse to engage because you're afraid the Dems will suck your leftist soul, you're just conceding the struggle and granting them victory. They don't co-opt by pressing a button, they co-opt because they have the resources to take leadership and then defuse. So far they have failed to do so specifically because the space is not empty and the communists are fighting harder to reach the masses (since we actually have an appealing program).
The attendees are all Kamala-loving liberals who just want to go back to brunch
If you had ever bothered to go to one of these events and talk politics to people, you'll discover a very broad array of political perspectives, including a strong trend towards explicit support for socialism. Yes, of course, the PMC bug-eating libs are there - who cares? They are by no means the only attendees. Maybe you're just Too Cool to be around someone who reminds you of your mom, but the rest of us are finding deep political discontent and activating it. When one of my comrades gets on the mic and says "we need to break from the democrats and do a literal socialist revolution", the crowd response, by and large, is incredibly positive. The retired dentists and accountants in the crowd grumble and whine, but they are a minority - and they don't leave. They stay and listen to the arguments we make. They say things like "you're right, I just don't think it's possible". They very, very rarely say "you're going too far".
This is a disorganized mess that's going to fizzle out
50501 and other decentralized spontaneous protest movements never last, but they do give an opportunity for dedicated political organizers to intervene on a stage where thousands of disaffected liberals and Democrat voters are asking "what is to be done?". If you decide not to show up and answer that question, the Democrat machine will coordinate the demobilization of this movement. If you do show up and you deliver the political argument you believe in. If you show up with the AV equipment, safety marshalls, march route, signs, and speaker list - the bare minimum for a halfway serious organizer - then you don't just hand out flyers and talk at a table but set the entire political line of the event. And in doing so, you demonstrate the leadership of the socialist movement and win a lot of those attendees to your side. If you can plug them into actual organizing work, you can bring them into permanent political motion. Does it matter if 95% of these people just go home and never bother to do anything besides another protest? If those 5% join the movement in a meaningful way, that's half a million new comrades.
Mao says: "All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."
Stop thinking about what you want to do and achieve and start thinking about the fact that we needs tens of millions of people to support revolutionary socialism in the US in order to get anything done. They are out in the streets begging for you to explain this to them.
These are just peaceful protests that won't achieve anything because they aren't revolutionary.
Lenin says: "What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, and he was right. We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot."
You're doing the ultra-leftism of conflating tactics with strategy. Our tactic in this moment is to intervene in these protests to convince people of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist political organization as the only solution to our sick society. Right now, mass revolutionary socialist consciousness and organization does not exist in the USA. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out open revolutionary militancy. If the current crop of people who are in some way directly involved in revolutionary socialist organizing (certainly a lower bar than revolutionary guerrilla warfare or sabotage) turned today to armed struggle, all ~100,000 of them would lose. The broader periphery of people who semi-passively support that objective through attendance at events and monetary contribution is probably a few million. The masses who would passively support probably number in the tens of millions, but that passive support is not particularly useful. And the number of people who would simply sit by and watch it happen is probably over 100 million. Every one of those groups needs to be elevated to the next stage - observer to passive supporter, passive supporter to semi-passive periphery, semi-passive periphery to revolutionary organizer, revolutionary organizer to doing the literal revolution. Each of these layers of the movement have a symbiotic relationship with the others that strengthen the entire struggle.
Here's the key lesson: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.
Amerikkkans will never do a revolution because they are labor aristokkkrauts
Ok, thank you for you contribution, you can resume sitting in a hole since your prescription is inactivity.
Please tell me your other weak-ass reasons why you're correct to sit on your ass.
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