Never admit anything to your boss or the police. If you’re drinking at work you are an alcoholic and you should get help though.

In the US more people than any any other state in history (save for the worst period of Nazi Germany) are kept as basically slaves in jails and prisons on drug charges and they are loaned out to capitalists. A significant section of the underclass is held down by drug use where they are sedated both personally and politically, forced into the worst jobs, or the reserve army of labor.

This isn’t a conspiracy though. Like the prisons aren’t conspiring with the cartels. It’s all just capitalists trying to make money by screwing someone else over and seeing both extremely vulnerable drug producers and drug users and taking advantage of them. Capitalism rewards this so it’s reproduced until it isn’t possible to squeeze any more juice out of it.

Yeah it’s not required but the only self identified “Marxians” I’ve come across were raging liberals while I have met “Marxist” academics that were not liberal.

It’s an approach in economics that usually rejects Marx’s revolutionary politics but agrees with his critiques of capitalism. People like Richard Wolff identity as Marxian.

“We’re against the genocide candidate but if you vote for an anti-genocide candidate then you’re actually supporting the genocide” -smartest American liberal

At this point basically all most unions do is political work, mostly fighting right to work so that they can collect revenue without having to organize anyone.

When I heard that guy on Rev Left radio say that I nearly burst out laughing. The understanding most leftists have of the labor movement is pathetic.

Ahh yes I’m never going to retire if I don’t get my shit together and get a new job

I’m not a shoplifter but have worked in retail for a while. I would think the best thing to do would be assuming you will be noticed because between cameras, other customers, and employees you almost certainly will be seen. The question then boils down to if they can identify you and build a case against you. To avoid this, knowing company policies and applicable laws is key. How much do you have to lift before you’ll be hit with a felony charge? Can employees detain you or forcefully recover product? Are police on site? Are you a known entity to police or the stores you’re lifting from?

If you disperse your lifting over location, company, and time, don’t take anything too valuable, and make yourself hard to identify you’ll probably be fine. Also if you get caught immediately leave, don’t listen to store employees who have no legal authority over you and whatever you do never admit to knowingly stealing anything unless your lawyer instructs you to do so.

If someone has “official write in status” then they are counted. Otherwise they are tossed.

Everyone seems to forget that a significant economic downturn started in late 2019 and it was only the unprecedented stimulus in response to the pandemic that staved it off. Well now here we are almost five years later with most of that stimulus cut off and in a much worse international position. They’re just trying to pretend it isn’t falling apart through the election but next year we’re in for a bad time.

Last time I talked to CP people they insisted on voting Democrat to prevent fascism. When I asked why they thought voting would prevent it when the worst historical fascists all came to power through other means than elections they just kept insisting Hitler got elected legitimately. I was so gaslit that I went home and read the Wikipedia just to make sure I wasn’t crazy for thinking the Nazis never won a real election.

Idk all the anti-vaxxers where I live are insane wealthy white baptists that would have been in the klan a century ago (if they aren’t right now). The poorer people in town tend to get their shots.

Maybe we should differentiate colonized/imperialized peoples that are skeptical of Western medicine because they’ve been victims of it from those that are Nazis that hate everything modern or any expectations of them.

I work with a Ukrainian guy and he writes English in immaculate cursive. Idk how that translates to Cyrillic but I’d assume it does which probably means he’s well practiced with it.

It’s a pretty nebulous term the roots of which are in Lenin’s Imperialism in which he describes a class of workers that sides with imperialists because they receive a portion of the superprofits of imperial exploration.

Historically it was used to describe business union leadership or union workers more broadly, especially those in the war industries. Further left tendencies tend to broaden the scope of who is a labor aristocrat including professional workers or even the whole of the white working class.

Personally I think as Marxists we need to reckon with the fact that many workers in the imperial core have petite-bourgeois brain worms precisely because their minds have been thoroughly rotted by debt and consumerism subsidized by the blood and sweat of the global periphery. That doesn’t mean we should eschew work among these workers but we should understand it’s limitations.

For instance there’s a massive naval shipyard near me that employs many people (mostly cis white dudes). They have a militant union and excellent pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly they’re all ridiculously conservative and nationalist and I’ve had multiple employees there tell me war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation. Just because many of these workers are union proles does not mean that they will easily align with the interest of the global proletariat and if we are organizing or agitating them we need to understand that.

Imo it’s a marginally better system in the abstract but if it or any sort of electoral reform was dropped on the US tomorrow it wouldn’t help. Elections are superstructural elements and don’t alter the economic/legal relations between classes. We see plenty of parliamentary systems that permit unpopular governments, party duopolies, etc. The bourgeois state, and its elections, are not for working people and their other instruments like the media enforce that as well.

Check your local laws. In a lot of places infestations are the responsibility of the landlord and if you want it dealt with you might not be on the hook.

The enemy are cruel and unrepentant murderers and we must bring them down by any means because this is war but also it’s bad to kill them and if they are killed it signals a dark turn for the character.

My friend at work got a new job. I’m happy for her but she’s the last of a group of people I really vibed with and now I’m scared I’m going to be alone. This keeps happening with coworkers and I think I’m realizing that’s just how life works but I’ve had lot of those moments lately and it’s not fun.

Blowback is the best resource for the answer to this question but in short

1. Kuwait was purposely overproducing oil to undermine the Iraqi economy. The Kuwaiti contribution to the war effort ended up costing about $32 billion USD, Iraq had only requested renumeration of $10 billion prior to the invasion. The conflict was never about money or democracy it was about destroying Iraq.

2. The US government turned Iraq into the state it was in support of them during the Iran-Iraq conflict (including making it the fourth largest military in the world in 1990), and US diplomats expressed at minimum that they had no position on inter-Arab conflict (many have interpreted US statements as tacit endorsement of the Iraqi invasion).

3. The US invasion was in defense of an autocratic petro-state to prevent an emerging successful Arab Republic and to keep most of the Middle East crushed under the boot of imperialism. The bloodshed (including numerous war crimes) and subsequent sanctions that occurred due to US intervention were far worse than anything that might have happened had they not intervend. Furthermore the American public was extensively lied to about the invasion, such as the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter’s lie that she told under oath before Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators. While the lies alone don’t justify Iraq’s invasion, it should raise the question why Americans had to be lied to in order to gain their support. All the lies about democracy and freedom fall hilariously flat faced when you remember Kuwait is literally a brutal autocratic monarchy.