all of the infrastructural manifestations of fascism are here: sweeping police state (bodily autonomy, crackdowns on anti-zionism), paramilitary infiltration (3 percenters, proud boys), dehumanization of the other (queer, immigrant, muslim, arab, jews especially anti-zionist ones), etc. is already here.
the last things left are explicit bans on proletarian organizations (unions, socialist parties) and sweeping restrictions on information (internet monitoring & censorship, especially of sexuality and anti-imperialism). oh wait, they’re already getting started on those (new york & antizionist social media, kosa/restrict, porn bans). fuck
Wear a face/eyes covering (e.g. mask and goggles), long black clothes that cover any body identifiers (e.g. tattoos), and perhaps some Kevlar gloves if you are paranoid. Ideally cycle to the location to & from a discreet clothes-changing station. The main threat here is doxxing and not legal-related.
I would approach this with the same caution that the Black Bloc approaches protests, especially since the "safety in numbers" is less of a factor here. Although if you are willing to accept some social risk, feel free to drop some of the more prohibitive precautions.
It's cool how by their own criteria "women's rights" includes 7/8 purely financial indicators and nothing like "culture" or "safety in public" or "freedom from harassment". Like damn, I didn't realize the "Visual Capitalist" is a class-reductionist tankie Broshevik /s
when fascists say "so and so revolutionary movement will have you removed imprisoned and killed" they're not doing so out of concern. it's a mutually-suicidal curse directed outwards by those who will never be happy, and don't want anybody else to realize their true potential either.
The proletariat of the Arab nations would riot. In the imperial core, the media will pretend it is just another day in Israel’s “peaceful” ethnic cleansing. Except in Germany, where so-called leftists will attack Palestinians and call it “direct action”.
Basically it’s self-professed centrists who support “the gays”, NATO, & Ukraine (PS) plus their right-wing Christian conservative allies (OLa’NO) vs nationalist welfare chauvinists who hate Roma people and “George Soros” (Smer-SD) but are NATO-skeptic and want out of Ukraine, plus their right-wing nationalist allies who like Josef Tiso (SNS). Our good Nazis versus their bad Nazis, am I right?
Slovakia is a socially-conservative country in which since the fall of the socialist bloc, the nominal center-left and center-right have both expressed reactionary cultural attitudes. PS is a relatively new party that has been an exception; given that they would govern in coalition with right-wing Christian conservatives and with a socially-conservative center-left in opposition, I doubt their professed stance would do much other than pinkwash NATO. I’m not going to hold my nose and cheer for Smer, although if they actually pull Slovakia out of NATO it would be extremely funny (albeit unlikely — Smer is a party of the establishment and has governed for most of post-2000 without doing this, not some radical populist party as the media paints it).
Objectively, I think that the conditions for socialism exist in the USA. The population is increasingly disenchanted with its constitutional and economic institutions; criticism of capitalism itself has moved from unthinkable to accepted (if not mainstream); and the imperialist state apparatus is a bloated paper tiger that can barely win a war without hiring a suite of incompetent contractors and bribing the enemy's generals with millions of dollars (and is incapable of reform due to being waist-deep in its own neoliberal dogma). The wannabe-fascists of the Republican Party (and cop-funded mayors like Eric Adams) are a threat to any emergent socialism (and human rights generally), but they have no power base outside of the same haute-and petty- bourgeoisie that would constrain their ability to deal with the crises of capitalism; this is in contrast to 30s-style fascism, in which the national bourgeoisie were content with letting fascist corporatism manage the crises of capitalism their own class leadership couldn't. If there were a political vanguard that was capable of exploiting these conditions and winning the peoples' hearts and minds, I would be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for socialism (although via horrific struggles with the previously-mentioned wannabes committing heinous crimes).
insane that hungary and poland (rigged elections with fascist parties that even the EU distance themselves from) get higher scores than bolivia and mexico (plenty of opposition parties in power at least in state/department level). reads more like a settler colonialism map than a democracy map to me.
A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, "objective" width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity's past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.
tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.
(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).
Lenin was not a member of a purely vanguard Marxist party either; the RSDLP contained genuinely vanguardist elements, but also thoroughly reformist ones that agitated for better labor conditions but downplayed and even abandoned their struggle against the repressive Tsarist state (i.e. "Legal Marxism"). Organizations such as DSA in the States and Die Linke in Germany are similarly "Legal Socialist" or "Legal Social-Democratic" parties; unlike pure reformist parties (SPD, British Labour) they openly criticize capitalism, but are afraid to openly challenge the liberal constitutional order for (admittedly valid) fears of being criminalized. But there are elements that are worth engaging with, just as Lenin did. There is no shame in splitting to protect the revolutionary faction from revisionists/liberals, but it's also not ideal.
I would suggest to engage in the party's associated organizations (youth orgs, student orgs). Look for what interests you, whether it is community/labor organizing, direct action, education, mutual aid, electoral campaigns, or even just showing up at a variety of the above and volunteering/baking cookies or something. If the party's organizations have an open political culture, there are bound to be activists you have affinity for. Develop your politics with those comrades, participate in readings/campaigns with your circle, and maybe evolve into a revolutionary faction. Only by demonstrating that the revolutionaries of the party are more capable of leading the proletariat than reformists can Marxist-Leninists in a left party gain hegemony over the broader social-democratic movement.
you could look at this intersectionally. perhaps their hindu nationalist chauvinism outweighs their queer identity, and they emphasize their more socially accepted identities as a way to gather support (i.e. assimilation). here in the states, white cis women (including queers) love using white women tears to defend their positions when feeling threatened by transfemmes and/or people of color (look at tumblr).
there is also something to be said about petty bourgeois queers in cities having more visibility and social/economic capital than their closeted counterparts in poorer regions, so a nation’s queerness ends up represented by its most bourgeois elements (just as national cultures tend to overrepresent their bourgeois elements in general). regrettably, left chauvinists used to take this as pretext to repress LGBTQ culture on the spurious grounds that it is bourgeois, which makes as much sense as banning the English language because Britain is imperialist.
liberasts: “lol communist breadlines” also liberasts: “eek tankies using knifes at dinner”