Those of us in the US have been taught to fear Communism, Communists, and Socialism (a transition period from Capitalism to Communism).

We have been told so many lies. The propaganda that is used to make us fear these is very familiar in feeling to me as the way the Jehovah’s Witness cult (I’m a survivor of being raised in it, escaped 1996) portrays ex-JWs, especially those of us whom they regard as “apostates.”

In both scenarios, a minority of rulers are terrified of losing their power to control the majority, so much that they tell & repeat extravant lies about anyone or anything that they see as a threat, in order to get the masses to fear, hate, and become conditioned to react hostiley to anything that fits the description they’ve been given.

In the JW cult, the Governing Body is the minority. In the US, the Capitalist Ruling Class is that minority. In both cases, they are invested in maintaining a narrative of Us (entire JW membership or entire US population) Vs Them (“Worldly People & Apostates or Others in or outside the US) that distracts from what’s really being fought, and has been for generations – Class War.

The US has to make a villain of Stalin, because once you learn the truth about him (and many other Communist leaders) and start talking to others about it, saying how angry you are that we were all lied to by our own government, that information spreads. People start looking into it for themselves, and start thinking about how many other incorrect things with which we’ve all been indoctrinated.

Then people start reading Stalin and realizing that he’s very easy to understand and also has a sharp wit. More questions arise, and more investigating the matter brings one further understanding of just how deep all of the lies go. Now the Bourgeoisie Ruling Class has to open the Propaganda valves even more in an attempt to contain the truths & lies becoming general understanding.

The US is an Anti-Communist, counter-revolutionary nation, and the heart of the Capitalist world empire. So of course the Ruling Class is going to villainize Revolutionaries, particularly those who are well-known. You can tell the ones who they fear the most -even in death- by how hard they work to get us to fear and hate them.

Any of this sounding familiar?

If you want to read more on this matter, here are some book recommendations:

Stalin Waiting…For The Truth by Grover Furr

Khrushchev Lied by Grover Furr

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo

Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard by Douglas Tottle

Here is a Historicly podcast interview with Grover Furr. If you listen, please consider a small donation to them if you’re able.

An educational thread from Communist Economics Professor Asatar Bair

The true story of the Berlin Wall is explained in this Historicly article.

The post The US Villainized Stalin appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It doesn’t matter whether you wanted it or recognize it. It doesn’t matter if you grew up in a “Conservative” or “Liberal” Household or how you vote.

Even having friendship, romantic, or familial ties to Black, Indigenous, Asian or other marginalized people doesn’t magically undo the systemically indoctrinated, sometimes insidious prejudices and behaviors that are part of US culture.

In order to dismantle and abolish racism and white supremacy from our culture, we must first begin the process of identifying and dealing with the corrupt ideas and beliefs that we have ourselves. In order to be successful in our efforts, we must simultaneously recognize and fix the fragile ego that we’re encouraged to have in this individualist culture. That means not allowing being embarrassed or angry about being called out for reinforcing systemic racism and white supremacy with our words and actions to put us on the defense. Rather, we must be willing to accept that our hurt feelings are not the same as being oppressed, and recognize that this is an opportunity to improve ourselves as a human being.

American Exceptionalism is a deeply racist myth. It has affected us all, whether we know how it’s manifested in ourselves. We are surrounded by its propaganda everywhere – in fact, that’s why most of us think it’s “normal.” We are raised to believe that white culture is the height of humanity, and that everyone around the world wants to live like us.

“The Greatest Country In The World” is one of the more common US Capitalist propaganda slogans.

But most of the rest of the world – outside of US/NATO countries – is actually fed up with US foreign policy and are beginning to form alliances with one another that are mutually beneficial, rooted in peace, and that bypass US Hegemony. The US has military bases all over the world that exist to protect the interests of Western Capitalists & their corporations. No other nation has that much military presence outside its own borders.

So if you aren’t already working to become anti-racist, it’s time. Keep reminding yourself that your impact means more than all the best intentions in the world. Also focus on how you are helping to fix a systemic corruption instead of continuing (even unintentionally) to propogate it. Develop friendships with others doing their anti-racism work and try to help one another. If a marginalized person tells you or confronts you about your racist belief or behavior, LISTEN TO THEM. Don’t attack them. Take some time to ruminate.

White supremacy and racism are core elements of Capitalism, which needs those to function; one way we can all help dismantle it is by working to identify and correct how those have manifested in ourselves. Keeping the masses divided is another requirement for Capitalism to exist, because we outnumber the Capitalist ruling class, and they know it. That’s why our culture encourages divisions, selfishness, and even dehumanizing.

With a United Front – the masses can overturn the Capitalists. But how can people trust one another to unite against a common foe, then defend and maintain a successful revolution afterward, if some among that “United” Front believe themselves superior to others?

If humanity is to survive the multiple crises we face, we must look at things the way they actually exist in material reality, not what we wish was ideally true.

I can recommend from my own work to learn unsanitized, declassified history. The history we’re taught is biased to favor the ruling class and reinforce their values. Check the Reading Recommendations history section for suggested books. If you’re on Twitter, you can find my bookshare threads of things I’ve read/am reading.

The post Systemic Racism In The US appeared first on Comrade Birb .

How can you look at things and believe this government was ever meant to serve the masses? Read Federalist Papers 10 if you think it ever was, so you can understand that the founding fathers ALWAYS intended to establish a class-based US, with themselves (and their descendants) at the top and in charge. How can you NOT see this, EVEN IF your personal existence in this world is comfortable?

I really am trying to help y’all. I’m being direct because I see where things are headed and I’m trying to help you recognize that Capitalism is the largest cult humanity has ever seen.

If I didn’t care about you, I’d just sit on the sidelines laughing and mocking you behind your backs. But I DO care about y’all, so here I am, trying to share the information and resources that have been and are useful to me. So I’m going to start recommending specific things you can read, watch, or listen to a couple of times a week here on the blog.

Today’s suggestion is to get acquainted with political scientist Michael Parenti. Please read his article here: Left anti-communism: The Unkindest Cut, and then follow it up with reading more from him, and watching some of his lectures on YouTube.

He is one of many authors I will recommend, and all of them are human, ergo, imperfect. So there will be no hero worship from me, nor do I encourage it. May this also inform you that this is not a cult and no one author or theorist is regarded as infallible. Contrast this with the subcult of celebrity – along with herofication and villainization of public figures – under capitalism, depending upon how the upper ruling class needs the masses to view those figures at any point in time.

Please let me know if you look into my recommendations, and what you think.

The post Examine Your McCarthyist Impulses appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If you didn’t already know, I have complex PTSD. It’s a daily struggle to keep the nihilistic, often cruel, brain weasels that chatter some of the most hateful self-talk you will likely experience. So I have to actively work to keep them at bay. One important way I’m able to do that is by countering those weasels with Revolutionary Optimism.

Revolutionary Optimism can be generated by learning to understand and identify why our world operates the way it does, and then working in solidarity with others to build dual power systems that meet community needs outside of the Capitalist/Colonialist Establishment.

For me, this looks like:

1. Learning and sharing history that’s been deliberately obfuscated or outright hidden by the Capitalist ruling class
2. Learning sustainable growing/harvesting/preserving practices, putting those into practice, seed saving and sharing with others, and sharing resources and knowledge
3. Working with our local cadre to support our mutual aid organization and other orgs when I’m able
4. Engaging with other comrades to discuss history, theory, current events and our personal experiences

My Revolutionary Optimism grows stronger as I see why things are the way they are, and how I can – especially in solidarity with others – make helpful material impacts on behalf of the working class.

Revolutionary Optimism is not like what most Westerners think of when they talk about optimism. The socioeconomic system we live under in the US, Capitalism, is rooted in the philosophy of Idealism, which argues that reality is just a mental construct instead of a tangible, material existence.

Most USians associate optimism with “changing your perception,” rather than changing any of the conditions that have diminished or destroyed a person’s capacity to experience it. “Perception is reality! Happiness is a choice!” they like to squawk at anyone who isn’t utilizing their “manifesting positivity” brand of magical thinking. Most of the people who’ve adopted this mindset don’t realize it has its roots in the post-WW2 McCarthyist Evangelical Revival movement, which was coordinated by Capitalists attempting to prevent USians from seeing the benefits of Socialist socioeconomics. The Positivity Movement also requires its adherents to make heavy use of cognitive dissonance, because they must ignore and deny horrific things happening around the globe (most of which are rooted in US hegemony) while they enjoy the privilege that allows them to demand “Good vibes only.”

Once you see behind the curtain, it’s impossible to experience that type of bogus optimism. But the good news is, it opens us up to being able to experience the genuine joy of Revolutionary Optimism, because now we can see what is to be done find our role in the revolution. Contributing to measurable helpful impacts in our communities improves my mood and outlook, not empty platitudes.

I also treat my cPTSD with therapy, medication, getting support from family and friends, and self-care. Combined with the optimism I build through revolutionary work, I’m able to manage my symptoms fairly well. I occasionally suffer from triggers, hypervigilance, meltdowns, but I’m able to recover and not get stuck in the despair those can cause, thanks to my supports and Revolutionary Optimism.

I share my perspective in hopes of being helpful to others. Please share this with anyone who you think may benefit. Thank you!

The post Revolutionary Optimism And cPTSD appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It is essential we all embrace cooperative, communal, internationalist thinking and values in order to avoid extinction.

Review who you’re consuming news and information from, and ask, “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”) from the bias & manner in which it is presented. Approach this using a class-based lens. It will help you improve your ability to identify whose propaganda you’re taking in and allowing to shape your ideas about your experiences and perception of others and the world.

Think about the stories you hear or read, non-fiction and fiction alike. Which class do the antagonists and protagonists belong to, putting aside the usual divisions of politics, race, religion, gender identity, nationality, sexuality, that shape your opinions. Look only at whether people are members of the Capitalist/Owner/Bourgeoisie, or Worker/”Lower & Middle Class”/Proletariat class? Obviously there are nuances, and either side can experience traitors, but again, ask yourself who benefits from the way a person thinks and lives?

US politics are Capitalist-Class-Serving – the entire system. If you’re new here, trust that I have done the work to know the evidence beyond memes. I’m an avid reader, and I’ve been investigating the way Capitalists have indoctrinated generations of us here in the US, by giving us sanitized history textbooks, along with those same Capitalists owning the news and entertainment media, controlling the narrative to always have a Pro-Capitalist viewpoint presented. The Pentagon reviews, approves and rejects movie scripts, the US intelligence machine has people in place, often right in the open now, guiding the narrative.

These are repeating patterns over the course of the last century or so, as Capitalists have resisted change in order to satisfy their avarice, by taking more and more from Workers. They literally plan to move most people into space while select few get to remain on planet. Jeff Bezos has said this openly in a recent interview.

The Capitalist Class sees Workers as cattle for them to consume, by exploiting labor, allowing a deadly pandemic and other global human rights violations like hunger, lack of clean water, lack of housing, and other avoidable suffering & cruelties to go on even though these could all be resolved via wealth reparations, and abandoning the Death Cult of Capitalism.

I haven’t even gotten into how ugly the history of the US is. Trust me, you will be appalled when you learn the truth and more importantly, you recognize the lies you’ve been told, why you were told those, who benefits from you believing those lies, and who in your life will cling to those comfortable lies once you show them.

As always, if you need sourcing on any claim or statement I’ve made, get in touch via the site or on Twitter, where I’m most active. You could also try my linktr.ee/comradebirb

That said, I’m not inviting you to a debate. I’m autistic (late diagnosis), ADHD, have cPTSD and am chronically ill and in pain. Frankly almost anything you think is a GOTCHA about Communism has already been addressed and is likely new information to you. I’ll help point you to it, but it’s up to you to do the labor of reading, listening, or watching and do so using your critical thinking skills, avoiding logical fallacies or other mistakes in thinking. It’s harder than you imagine if you aren’t already questioning the supposed merits of continuing to allow the exploitative socioeconomics that are necessary for Capitalism to function.

But if you’re ready to approach things using real, unsanitized history, declassified government documents, a recognition that you are still vulnerable to Imperialist propaganda, because that’s been the Default “Normal” for generations, and a commitment to examining material conditions, not simply accepting idealist platitudes as proof of progress, then you should dive into the Reading Recommendations section, which is in dire need of updating, but trust me, there is almost certainly several books you’ve never even heard of, much less read.

I personally recommend getting up to speed with a broad overview of unsanitized US history. The extensively sourced graphic history novel ADDICTED TO WAR is a great place to start.

I’ll be updating the reading recommendations soon, but I have other commitments to family and comrades in our mutual aid group to meet in the next couple of weeks first. I’ve read many books the last several months and I’m excited to add those to the lists.

Thanks for reading, and please follow our pages on social media!

The post We Must Become Anti-Imperialist Internationalists appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Why, when I have questioned why people collectively just accept preventable evils – which I began doing in early childhood – have the majority of people in my parent’s generation – them included – responded with some variation of the “Life isn’t fair, get used to it, there are no free rides!” rhetoric seen at the start of the second paragraph?

Likely because it was drilled into them growing up, too, and at some point, they just accepted it, unquestioningly embraced the competition required to participate, and upheld the status quo.

I have never succeeded in accepting it, reluctantly participated, because my other choice was to starve, and trying to contort myself into being acceptable to the Capitalist status quo literally made me ill.

Needless to say, I am not raising our son with that abusive propaganda. Because I know better, and now it is my duty to DO better. Thankfully my spouse agrees.

Those resisting admitting that the second paragraph represents abuse need to recognize that while they’re likely guilty of it, they were also subjected to it as children. But that doesn’t absolve you any more than it does me. It is our duty to one another as humans to DO BETTER and in order to know what that materially looks like, we must first learn and be open to accepting we have operated with incorrect ideas in the past, so we avoid perpetuating more abuse!

If you’re selfishly unworried about human extinction, because you think you’ll be dead, in heaven, or in a survival bunker with your 12,000 cans of beans, you have the same thinking of EcoFascists. Is that your intent? It is your impact.

My investigation into #RealUSHistory has turned up a lot of verifiable, credible stuff that is SHOCKING and completely changes our understanding of global and domestic history & politics.

Your current comfort is temporary. Your failure to start the journey of unlearning your Capitalist indoctrination will cost you, because there’s a lot to catch up on, especially if you haven’t yet read history books – not school textbooks – that are Anti-Imperialist (hey, yeah, exactly like the baddies in Star Wars!) you need to know it’s going to be deeply disturbing.

I’ve been at this a few years and I’m trying to keep records & resources to help you as you start this important work. You can find my resources on my Linktree, and may I recommend that you read the Twitter threads regarding history there. But please be in a headspace where you are ready to have many of your core beliefs challenged by new information. We humans have weaknesses as a species in that regard, and Capitalists have exploited that in the way they’ve indoctrinated us and how they design their propaganda to manipulate us on a daily basis.

I am not the only person who has come to this realization. I understand your impulse is to reject what I am saying. That is why I am providing resources so that you can see for yourself. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I am truly trying to help.

The post Reflections On Abusive Indoctrination appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Claire was allegedly an anti-imperialist before Elon. I suspect they magical thinking-ed their way into a relationship with him – thinking they’d infiltrate his world and make revolutionary converts, maybe even him. But that obviously failed, now he’s doing the same “get in the news cycle first to control the narrative before your ex does” move he’s used in past relationships. I think they know they’re screwed as far as access to the kid goes – it’s always gonna be on his terms.

Claire understands the threat civilization faces and looks like they’re trying to get in the news cycle by astroturfing their way into it with this performance. Sound insensitive? Sorry, I’m just saying how the pictures hit me in raw emotions. Probably it’s me injecting myself into the circumstances and problem solving a web of possible plot-advancing choices I can imagine. Point is, it comes from a place of empathy, imagining myself as a parent in her shoes, who was themselves traumatized and desperate and having terrifying realizations of likely future life for their kid.

[I might be using my overactive writer’s imagination a bit too much.]

I am convinced Baby X is going to only hear a pro-Elon worldview, but eventually they’ll reach a stage in development where they can observe material conditions growing more desperate for most ppl (except the upper class they’re in.)

And at some point they’re going to want to know why mom didn’t try harder to stop dad, or, even got together with him in the first place. Bet Claire plans to point to these photos as “evidence” of attempts to counter his narrative.

I understand they are also a victim in all this and if they come forward with sexual assault and domestic violence allegations, no, I won’t be surprised. And yes, I’d support them, as a fellow survivor.

But using this as a prop for their own celebrity rebranding isn’t excused by whatever abuse they’ve suffered in that relationship. It’s just super performative and cringe.

I say all this as a massive fan of Grime’s music.

I’d be far less harsh if this didn’t just seem like empty celebrity opportunism. Maybe I’ve read it wrong. I have my own biases to consider. I’m open to discussion on this.

One bias, straight up, is having felt betrayed by Grimes when they began dating Elon. But that’s as rooted in my own failure to completely reject celebrity culture.

Revolutionaries must be prepared to receive correction from other trusted revolutionaries. I’m willing to listen if I’ve been too harsh here.

We live in the most propagandized nation on Earth, and Hollywood along with celebrity class and culture play a MASSIVE role in helping the CIA &State dept achieve their groupthink goals, whether the individual members in the industry realize it or not.

The Pentagon & CIA have editing power for our TV shows & movies. Go search news.google.com for it to see recent headlines on the matter.

Just remember – celebrities may or may not be aware of the role they might play in creating or spreading propaganda. But WE must be aware and watchful for it.

Work to develop the ability to recognize emotional attachment to someone does not change with someone when we acknowledge their errors or they ours, and we help each other be accountable and improve ourselves moving forward.

Drop your airs if you’re carrying any, and connect with others without a competitive spirit. Build up your ability to be vulnerable with your trusted loved ones, and ask each other for help with this. Reject the rugged individualism Hollywood sells us.

We all have one another, and we outnumber them.

The post Grime’s ManifeStroll appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If you’re USian and white (like I am) please trust me, the religious cult survivor, when I tell you we’ve been subjected to cult practices our entire lives. Why? In order to indoctrinate us into upholding white supremacy, imperialism, along with all of the social classes and divisions that benefit the upper class of capitalists and screw the rest of us over, (to varying degrees.)

So even if you think you’re the most communist person you know, remember that you live in the most Anticommunist nation on the planet, and give that ego a perspective check. I say this cuz I’ve had to do it myself. We ain’t always right cuz we’re white, just the most privileged in this social order, which has built biases in our brains that are reinforcements to Rugged Individualism, American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, all key components of white supremacy and its economic system, Capitalism.

If you don’t want to serve the interests of this corrupt, disgusting order, you must be willing to do a lot of self-crit and not get stuck in a survival reaction when you receive criticism from trustworthy sources. Being willing to admit our own errors, be accountable for any harm we cause, and be accountable to ourselves & our community by correcting our thinking and actions: these are requirements for any revolutionary.

So when we’re repeatedly told our understanding of experiences outside our own is wrong, we need to run ourselves through that self-crit and accountability process. Ask for help from trusted people to keep track of your progress. Be that person for others.

If we want massive systemic change, we must change who we are so we don’t just keep repeating the same errors over and over. We’ve been conditioned our entire lives by a US/Nazi social order (see Twitter threads at my Linktree) to protect the order at all costs. We must be sure we’ve broken enough of that conditioning to avoid repeating historical mistakes. Let’s keep working at it, helping one another in a comradely manner, being willing to admit and accept we’re wrong when errors in our understanding or behaviors are being shown to us by trustworthy people. We all need to retrain our brains away from the survival reaction. Fight, flight, freeze, appease are all part of this evolutionary reaction dating back to when our evolutionary mammalian ancestors long ago were often prey to other species. It originates in the oldest part of our brains, the amygdala, which is phylogenetically very primitive. Some call it our “lizard brain.”

Many studies about how the more primitive areas of our brains work have been performed, published, and peer-reviewed. Capitalist white supremacists in Nazi Germany took this research and weaponized it against their victims and their own citizenry. Then many of them were recruited after WW2 into not only the sciences and industry in the US, many were recruited and protected from war crime tribunals by the US State Department, Army Counterintelligence Corps, CIA and NSC. Nazi policies and practices have been a part of our collective existence here in the US and abroad ever since. That includes indoctrination, propaganda, groupthink, conspiracy theories, “fake news” and more.

Fake News has been an especially successful capitalist psyop. No wonder, given the fact that it’s designed to exploit the most primitive parts of our brain where that information is most likely to plant ideas and even false memories, using fear to fertilize the propaganda seeds.

So remember all of this when your primitive brain bits start lighting up and you begin processing new information, particularly if you feel an immediate defensive response because it contradicts what you think you know to be certain. Once that fight or flight or freeze or appease instinct is put into motion, it starts triggering everyone’s same instinctive reactions around you. We’ve all endured what comes next, whether in person or online. Petty insults, logical fallacies, threats of violence, actual violence, and long standing grudges are common outcomes of those reactionary conflicts. These experiences reinforce nihilist and ecofascist mentalities and cause anxiety, anger, fear, and depression, trigger trauma disorders, only serving to further divide people. This is not revolutionary.

Move into mindfulness, into the higher brainmeats, and use what you’ve learned from historical and materialist dialectic to evaluate whatever it is that has your adrenaline pumping or other survival reactions firing inside your limbic system. Think about who benefits from the outcomes of whatever it was you were about to say or do. Being hyper-conscious of this for a few days will often give us all perspective on where we’ve progressed, where we’re still working toward desired progress on other stuff, and new shit we gotta work on.

Let’s be radically honest with trusted and consenting comrades about what we’re working on in ourselves, our triggers, if you have those (I do; cPTSD) and ask if they can help support us in specific ways. We all have things to offer one another!

Ditching my fragile ego was one of the best life decisions I’ve ever made. With a lot of reading, listening, shrooms (yes, seriously), and asking to be held accountable and then being willing to non-defensively listen with a genuine openness to criticism and accountability, I see the world in a far different way – it’s clearer, because I’m not fighting my ego’s cries for attention. The Alienation Of Capitalism exploits our need for community and belonging, tries to convince us work is life (golly that sounds vaguely familiar, don’t it?) and encourages us to center our identities and socializing around our jobs.

So let’s help one another in a revolutionary manner, comrades, with genuine concern for one another, and willingness to be vulnerable enough to accept and admit our errors when we make those. Holding ourselves accountable to one another – rather than relying solely upon our own perspectives and experiences to evaluate our experiences and actions – means being open to receiving and giving radical (in truth but also in kindness) honesty. Is this not a revolutionary contrast from the Rugged Individualism, “I got mine, fuck everybody else!” ethos we’ve been indoctrinated with for generations in the US?

Building communities seeking the collective good through cooperative actions that can be sustained and defended over time requires that we work to revolutionize and decolonize ourselves so that cooperation can become the “new” normal. This means many things we’ve felt certain were true or represent historical and material reality accurately are going to be challenged. When this happens, we must be aware of our reactionary hindbrain survival instinct being triggered and consciously navigate those emotions to see whether it’s a conditioned Pavlovian reaction, or an ego wound. Become comfortable saying, hearing and respecting the need to ask for time to process a new idea or event, investigate it if needed, and revisit the discussion later once you feel better prepared to have an informed and productive conversation.

I write all of this while applying it to myself, too. I’m not better than anyone for having an understanding of something we’ve all been manipulated away from understanding. That’s a classist snobbery mindset. I’m sharing what I learn because I want to be helpful to those who haven’t yet explored the same knowledge – or who have and felt alone upon reaching similar understandings. Shedding our capitalist indoctrination is a process and we’re all in our own process, but we also have a lot in common with many other people who are going through the same decultification. Being vulnerable with each other helps build and strengthen relationship bonds, which in turn, builds community.

Please join me and other revolutionaries in this vital work. Check out the reading recommendations on the top menu. Want a more personalized recommendation? Leave a comment and let me know what you’re looking to learn. Have a communist author you’d like to recommend? Comment below. Thanks!

The post Revolutionary Self-Crit & Accountability appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If you see yourself in any of these words take time to reflect before you respond. Especially be mindful that what matters is not our intent but the impact we have and whether we are accountable for that if things don’t go the way we’d hoped they would and we end up causing somebody harm.

People who are worth investing into relationships with understand that they need to be willing to admit when they are wrong, especially if they feel defensive, because someone they care about is trying to show them the error in their thinking. We all make mistakes and it doesn’t make us weak to admit that.

It is egocentric and reactionary to stand firm on ideas that you have been shown are erroneous but because you don’t like admitting you were wrong, since it makes you feel vulnerable and you don’t have the emotional capacity to cope with that. Hey friend, I’m sincerely here to tell you that it did not come natural to any of us trying to recondition our brains and behavior to become more cooperative and compassionate either! And none of us are perfect at it. We’ve all been traumatized by capitalism and it’s corrupt values. But those of us who’ve been working on it for a while now often share information like this to try and get you to reflect on it in light of your own ideas and behaviors.

It is a humbling process, but I promise you it’s worth the emotional labor to improve yourself so that we are better equipped to work together in our communities to try and survive together through the ecological and economic upheaval we collectively face.

It is difficult to imagine mutual aid groups enjoying long-term success in their work if the individuals within have not yet begun working to identify imperialist indoctrination in themselves with the help of those closest to them doing the same kind of work. Mutual aid and other community led efforts often do not last in the long run due to individualistic, imperialist values creating friction or being exploited by agent provocateurs. This is why it is vital for us all to be working on ourselves and instead of living in our primitive hindbrains, always in fight or flight, freeze or appease mode, which only benefits imperialists, we need to shift up into the more advanced forebrain and stop being so easily manipulated by the ruling class.

We are all in different places as we work on decolonizing and decapitalizing our minds, so we can think outside of the bullshit hegemony constraints they’ve conditioned into every aspect of our lives. So if a comrade who is being harmed tells us it is harming them, we need to not allow our biases and fragile ego do ventriloquism with our skull. That’s letting the hind brain react instead of letting the forebrain respond with more stimuli to evaluate and ability to assess the risks the hind brain is squealing about. The capitalist ruling class has conditioned us with their own values to always try to have the upper hand in all of our social relations. It’s one of the things that keeps the working classes divided. So if you’re not ready to let that go, you’re not actually that revolutionary.

If you’d like some revolutionary reading recommendations personalized to you, please ask in comments. Let me know if you have a preference on length of the reading in terms of an online article, a book either in print or available to read electronically online, with some of the latter being free, an audiobook available for free on YouTube, and if you have any preferences on fiction or nonfiction. I’ll try to go from things I’ve read already or things I have that are on my own reading list.

The post Collectives Require Cooperation, Not Individualism Or Imperialism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Ever notice how all these “positive mindset” and “self-help systems” out there claiming they can improve your life ultimately hold you individually responsible for all your problems, and not getting your needs met under capitalism, despite us all having pretty much the same problems?

If we’re all looking inward and drowning in self-loathing – which gets reinforced by this capitalist social order and its toxic culture – it helps obfuscate the systemic faults of capitalism. Especially because we’ve all been conditioned to look down on the poor so much, and to keep up appearances of being anything but poor, even when we’re struggling, in order to “maintain the illusion” that we’re successful.

Look around us at all of the “only positivity,” “manifesting your dreams,” and “self-improvement” hustles that surround us, both in physical space and in the virtual. Do the majority of them actually help the people practicing those, without being at the cost of someone else’s life quality?

Keeping people distracted and divided is vital in order to, as the Wizard of Oz said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” except in this case, to keep a massive population from recognizing that their suffering is all a result of the system, rather than individual failings on their part.

Maintaining the illusion, by keeping everyone overwhelmed by work, family life, education, rising costs and stagnant wages, has prevented the majority of the US population from questioning why the system requires so much suffering in order to operate, for decades.

Getting USians to rally around a Cold War enemy about whom the government controlled the narrative, while simultaneously getting hundreds of millions of individuals to be self-absorbed, encouraging egocentricity, all in the guise of self-improvement, has helped the capitalist ruling class to maintain and expand the US empire since WW2. Having an enemy about whom the government can lie, with little to no repercussions, has served the US empire well, and conditioned USians to accept enormous military budgets that have resulted in cuts to domestic social programs, for which the people have suffered.

Even after the fall of the USSR, the US has rarely not been involved in war or military actions of some kind. The US military budget expands year after year, while spending on social safety nets and other community programs have been forced into austerity.

By keeping the US populace distracted, it has allowed the capitalist class to continue exploiting workers, and to pursue an atrocious imperialist agenda, without being noticed by enough of the population to experience significant pushback from the people. In fact, many workers have been convinced that they share the same class interests as the capitalist class, and will defend that class over their own working class.

Those who question the system are often treated as traitors by both the system and by fellow workers, when in fact, the workers who defend this system over their fellow workers are the true class traitors.

So just how does the capitalist ruling class in the US maintain this exploitative system? To answer this, we must look at the history of the agency that brought us the myths and propaganda of the Cold War.

Did you know one of the first hires at the CIA was a magician?

According to documents obtained from the C.I.A. today and amplifying interviews, the magician, John Mulholland, who lived on the Upper West Side until his death in 1970, was paid $3,000 in 1953 to write a “manual” on sleight of hand or, as the agency referred to it, “prestidigitation.” The manual was meant to be an aid to agents in surreptitiously administering drugs.

 

New York Times, August 3, 1977

The magician, John Mulholland, was consulted by the CIA on several occasions, but evidently provided the most assistance in sleight of hand techniques.

The CIA spent decades trying to develop mind-control techniques, even testing mystical methods, but ultimately moved to using drugs, psychological exploitation, and even torture.

Under the terms of his agreement with the agency, Mr. Mulholland was supposed to provide information on techniques by which “solid, liquid or gaseous” substances could be secretly delivered to individuals.

NYT, August 3, 1977

Frank Olson was a bacteriologist and biological warfare scientist employed at Fort Detrick in the US Army’s bioweapons laboratory. He was murdered by CIA agents in November of 1953 as part of a coverup in which they had secretly dosed him with LSD. This was part of the covert program MKULTRA, part of the CIA’s ongoing efforts to develop mind control techniques. They attempted to present it as a suicide. But even at the time there were many questions about that likelihood. Finally in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission exposed the CIA’s nonconsensual testing on unknowing subjects during MKULTRA.

In the mid-1990s, Olson’s family had his body exhumed and an autopsy performed. It was determined that he had died from severe blunt force trauma to the head and chest. This, combined with the suspicious behavior of the agents staying at the same hotel, as well as the agent staying in the same room as Olson having a business card for John Mulholland, points to this having been a covered up murder.

Mr. Mulholland’s initials, address and phone number were among the contents of the wallet of Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a C.I.A. employee who was escorting Dr. Frank Olson on the night Dr. Olson plunged to his death from a Manhattan hotel room a few days after the agency gave him a dose of LSD without his knowledge.

NYT, August 3, 1977

When it became apparent that the covert methods of attempting mind control were not practical, and were likely to be noticed and scrutinized by the general public, the CIA had to look for other methods to achieve their goals.

Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power Of Positive Thinking had been published the year prior to Olson’s death. The book drew on concepts that predated it, such as positive mental attitude, autosuggestion (a form of self-hypnosis) New Thought, and The Emmanuel Movement.

Peale synthesized these concepts and wrapped them around a Biblical faith-based theme. He became very successful and influential. In fact, the infamous 45th president of the United States, Donald J Trump, was raised going to hear Peale’s sermons at his Manhattan Church with his family. His parents echoed the same teachings in their home. Trump not only cited Peale as a major influence on his own personal philosophy, he considered him his pastor. Norman Vincent Peale officiated the wedding ceremony for Donald and Ivana Trump.

Peale’s book and methods that tied positive thinking to Christian beliefs helped (along with others) spawned a whole industry of magical thinking that has evolved numerous times over the decades, but that remains influential in our culture. A common thread is that these have all served empire by getting the population to look inward, instead of externally at our shared reality, as being the cause of all our collective suffering. Do you believe that this mindset best serves interests of the capitalist class, or the working class?

The “power” of positive thinking, manifestation, auto suggestion, self-hypnosis, etc are all symptoms of relying upon an idealist mindset. Capitalism is rooted in idealism. The exploitation of magical thinking by the capitalist class and of the working class relies upon idealism. How else can a minority of a massive population convince a majority of that population that they should accept exploitation by the minority, in order to make that minority more wealthy?

Using distract and divide tactics – along with idealistic magical thinking – has been very effective for the minority capitalist class to retain control over the majority working class.

If we truly want to help ourselves, we must turn our attention to our communities and take care of one another as a collective, helping to meet one another’s needs outside of the capitalist system. Additionally, we must educate ourselves and organize together to better understand how to dismantle the system that is the source of all of our collective woes.

Envisioning it will not make it happen. We must deal in material reality with collective group actions, and take history into consideration in order to understand the conditions we live in, so that we may better coordinate our efforts to bring an end to the destructive, cruel system of capitalism. Learning our real history also helps us to avoid wasting time investing in methods that have been proven incorrect already.

Magical thinking in the form of positive mental attitude and its like only work if you are already predisposed to be wealthy and successful. This results in the already wealthy relying upon cognitive biases to form beliefs that they bootstrapped their way into success by wishing and thinking it into existence.

It also results in disappointment for many in the working classes as they invest money, time, physical and emotional labor into self-help systems and multi-level marketing schemes that they have been rubed into thinking will significantly and permanently change their lives for the better.

It is vital for the working class to understand that we are in a class war and have been under attack by the capitalist class our entire lives. These positive thinking psyops only benefit those at the very top of the capitalist pyramid. Working class people will benefit more from getting involved in helping to build dual socialist power in their communities then they ever will from the latest distractive offering from the capitalist class.

The post SERIES (Part 1): “Self-Help” As An Anticommunist Psyop appeared first on Comrade Birb .

By fighting the greedy oppressors
Loving and working for The People
As we struggle to seize power
So we may prevent our extinction

And build a world worth living in for all
Nobody will be forced to earn being alive
Our Pale Blue Dot can provide for everyone
If we listen to her Indigenous caretakers

Colonial values only serve the powerful
Costing everyone else varying life fractions
Oh Nyx and your blanket of stars, you already know
But I make my vows, and will honor them

The post Poetry Break On An August Night appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Congress already crushes US workers with cuts to unemployment, an expiring eviction moratorium, stagnant wages and shorted stimulus payments. They can ill-afford to shoulder another burden from their rulers’ failed policies. Oregon implemented a version of this tax in 2018, called a VMT, and charges drivers 1.8 cents per mile. That’s in addition to 18.4 cents per gallon charged at the pump.

As wildfires rage across the West Coast, heralding a change in climate produced by US pollution, the VMT removes incentives to curb emissions from driving electric and dodging the tax at the pump. Its attempt to encourage more public transportation is a farce. Most US cities lack the infrastructure outside wealthier neighborhoods.

Due to a lack of reliable public transit, this hurts people with long commutes to work and gig economy drivers the most. This 2019 AAA study indicates US workers drive time has increased by 20 minutes per week in the past five years, likely due to those gigs.

The VMT’s financial burden is felt by the driver, not the company making them drive so they can pay rent.

Another insidious feature of the proposal pairs well with Biden’s decision to end USDA produce distribution during the pre-Delta Covid spike. It is an attack on mutual aid organizations, some of whom made national news saving frozen Texans last winter. Comrade Birb correspondents spoke with members of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC) to learn how this harms direct aid efforts.

The Work at Ground Level

MIMAC’s system involves partnering with other 501c3 organizations like Food Rescue US to obtain fresh groceries corporations were planning to trash. Then, volunteers assemble the rescued food and other donated items into weekly care packages delivered to homebound and immunocompromised residents. They also distribute cleaning supplies and PPE aided by Mutual Aid Disaster Relief to combat Covid and basement mold. The latter is due to Detroit Water and Sewage Department failing its residents by having sewage spewed into their homes during heavy rain.

The USDA produce box cancellation made the job even more difficult.

“Requiring the poor to pay these taxes and pay the price for [Biden admin]’s big ideas is just another way to prove they don’t care what’s going on with workers. Like when they cancelled the USDA food program boxes. Many groups have to drive extra miles to obtain the food that serves their populations,” – Siren, MIMAC founder.

Volunteers used to gather in one central location to source food. Now the move forces them to drive all across Metro Detroit to find participating grocers. Thanks to donations to MIMAC’s Venmo (@MI-MAC), they can currently reimburse supply and delivery drivers. Will that be sustainable if Oregon’s current VMT is directly implemented?

The Math Behind the VMT

A supply driver sourcing food can drive from Clinton Twp. to MIMAC’s cold storage in Detroit three times a week. The 50 mile round trip distance is typical for most supply drivers, and $1 per trip (50 miles round trip x $0.02/mile) is a reasonable benchmark. Accounting for all general supply runs it’s an additional $9 per week. Delivery distances are about the same, tack on another $10 for a week. The food share crew has to drive from the suburbs to downtown, too, adding another $4. All told, MIMAC would pay an additional $23 per week and roughly $100 per month with the VMT. All to serve communities that the government imposing the tax chose to ignore.

MIMAC’s monthly budget rarely exceeds three figures, and public transportation isn’t an option in Metro Detroit. The VMT would saddle them with an extra 10% to their monthly budget just to do their job.

“This solution is punishment to anyone caught by the undertow of the government’s decades long public urination on the electric car industry. It rewards the wealthy…while punishing the poor with a tax intended to make up for decades of [expletive] governing, ignored science, and a pedestalled oil industry.” – Andre, MIMAC member.

As the United States continues to turn its back on the people, the people must make due for themselves. To help MIMAC with personal donations, please send to their Venmo (@MI-MAC). If you are a business and wish to contribute larger monetary donations for a tax write-off, please inquire at michiganmutualaid@gmail.com.

The post Senate’s Per-Mile Tax Pilot an Attack on Working Class appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It’s even more despicable to me that anyone has the inhumane gall to continue DEFENDING this system when they can plainly see just as the rest of us do – the harm and death the US Empire causes, and in fact, RELIES upon. It’s undeniable, and anyone saying otherwise has sequestered themselves into the regime’s echo chambers that tell them what they want to hear. But even that is a choice, to remain in ignorance.

I find myself emotionally detaching from those who defend this cruel social order, because I know we are going to be lost to one another sometime in the probably not distant future. The wheels of history continue spinning and we have to decide which side we want to be on: socialism or barbarism. Those choices are more than performative philosophical differences, and the divide it causes will only continue to widen and intensify further in the near future – in our lifetimes. So if someone is willing to keep defending this burning dumpster of a social order:

I have to accept that they may well betray me – possibly not even intentionally, but their ignorance blinds them to seeing how they could do just that.

I have to accept that they cherish capitalism even more than they do their relationship with loved ones, or at least with me. 

I have to accept that they could be killed by reactionaries because they won’t take seriously the antifascist work I’ve done for over a decade now.

I have to accept that they may die from a lack of preparedness for climate emergencies, because they chose to believe sensationalized pseudoscience and the charlatans propagating it.

I have to accept that they may die from Covid-19 because they think public health actions are “Communist plots” and that vaccines will give them the Number Of The Beast (Christian mythology) instead of helping protect them from a deadly pathogen.

I have to accept that they are likely racist, perhaps due to their ignorance that comes from only having been educated about the history of their nation with a highly propagandized narrative structured to condition them to think “white is right” and to aspire to Bourgeoisie values.

I have to accept that they are at the very least tolerant of (and possibly may even embrace) injustices, particularly toward already-oppressed peoples, that could be avoided by changes in policies, spending, behaviors, and community enforcement, because they simply want to keep living their lives in a familiar way, even if it harms other people (directly or indirectly).

I have to accept that when we finally arrive at the giant fork in the road ahead here in the US regime, there’s a good chance that these people I care about are going to head in the direction opposite of me.

I have to accept that they may help get me arrested, tortured, raped and even killed, because they think the police & all of the alphabet agencies can be trusted.

I have to accept that the above could happen because they don’t take antifascism seriously and unwittingly give my personal information to chuds.

That This Is All Avoidable Hurts The Most

It hurts me to acknowledge all of these truths, but it’s necessary work. It is heart-wrenching to think about. But I do think about it, by necessity, because I’m trying to observe my own material & historical conditions in my relationships to help guide me in those.

What hurts the most? It’s all avoidable. But these people I care about refuse to take their blinders off and look at the real world around them. They’re comfortable in their lives and fear how they might be negatively impacted by any massive changes in our social order, and that to them is sufficient justification for letting other humans (and many other species) continue needlessly suffering and dying. They are so unwilling to confront and control their fears through deprogramming from imperialist, white supremacist indoctrination, they are willing to offer up others as human sacrifices on the altar of their comfort.

As a member of the vanguard, I recognize that I need to exercise patience with the masses, but I find my patience with those in my own life who have continued to reject their opportunities to begin addressing their political/social brainwashing by, for instance, learning something about US history they were deliberately not taught, or being shown unsustainable contradictions in this capitalist system. I have to accept that many of those who I love will never change their minds or their habits, because they are comfortable.

Excusing Injustice To Remain Comfortable Is Fascism

I myself cannot be comfortable in this capitalist, white supremacist hellhole. I’ve asked my entire life why injustices are tolerated, because it is clear that humanity is capable of addressing those effectively, and many of us want to, and are willing to put our money and our labor to work in our communities to try to do that.

I’ve received answers in the context of the Jehovah’s Witness cult that I was raised in – “Because Earth is the proving grounds for God’s Universal Sovereignty, where Satan challenged his authority in the Garden of Eden, and we are all being tested until God’s Great War Of Armageddon. Our job is to help separate the “sheep and goats” here on Earth through our door-to-door preaching work. When the Last Days Of This System Of Things arrives, there will be signs like increased earthquakes, flooding, natural disasters, plagues, wars, and God, Jesus and their army of Angels will do battle with Satan and his Demons until they lock them up for a 1000 years. Loyal servants who died over the course of human history will be resurrected into new bodies and can rejoin their loved ones (if they made it too). Then mankind will restore the whole planet to Edenic conditions, as our bodies return to a physical state of around 25 years old (if you were older than this) and we will become perfect during those 1000 years, at which point everyone will be tested by releasing Satan et al temporarily and they will attempt to tempt humans into betraying God again. Anyone who does dies forever along with Satan and his Demons, the rest of the loyal people live forever in a paradise. So, you see, no injustice experienced by any human (loyal to God, some conditions may apply) will ever be outweighed by the joy, contentment and love they will feel in that paradise. So don’t worry at all about what’s going on right now to countless people in suffering. The best thing you can do is go get them to join our religion.”

Obviously, I found that explanation unsatisfactory, and it was one of the reasons I left the JW cult. They forbade voting in candidate/party elections. The left local issues like school tax millage elections as a “matter of conscience,” with the admonition that registered voters were called to jury duty, and Jehovah’s Witnesses could not serve on juries because they said no human is fit to judge another. They also said we couldn’t get involved with or give money to environmental causes, because to do so would show a “lack of faith” that Jehovah had the power to undo the damage puny humans did to the planet! Also if you have extra money to be throwing around, you should be putting it in the contribution box or sending it to the Society HQ, not spending it on “worldly” causes which were corrupt and pointless. But enough of them.

I’ve also been told “humans have been trying how to make a better world since there were humans, just accept your place in the system and do your best, because nobody has the answers.” One former co-worker (a sales manager) used to rant about how “that old haves and have-nots argument has been going on forever, it’s tiring, and people just need to know their place and if they want a better one, they gotta bootstrap their way to it, it’s not easy, BELIEVE ME I KNOW, MY LIFE HASN’T BEEN EASY STREET, but the hard work is all worth it!” He was a native of one of the Grosse Pointes, if I recall correctly.

Another argument has been to tell me that voting is what will make a difference, and what I really needed to do was get involved in organizing with the Democratic Party, because we can fight for changes from within! Bernie Sanders and The Squad are exemplary of what happens when reforms are attempted. The only changes are that the “progressive” “changemakers” are either corrupted or contained by the DNC on behalf of the ruling class. In other words, once they get into office, they no longer work on behalf of the people who elected them into it. I can see the electoral patterns repeating over and over in my own lifetime, and my pursuit of learning real history has given me perspective that helps me to see these repetitive electoral and political patterns preceded my birth by generations. Knowing this, I can only see attempts at reform the same way George Jackson did, as he wrote in Blood In My Eye,

If one were forced for the sake of clarity to define fascism in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be “reform.”

If you’re a Socialist and you haven’t yet read George Jackson, especially if you are in the US, please do. His insights are so important to the historical and material conditions we live in, and particularly for those of us who are white, who grew up in the middle class, it is perspective we desperately need in order to have a clearer understanding of the experiences of Black Americans. George had a gift for synthesizing his own experiences, history, and political theory that was successfully used by revolutionaries elsewhere and instructing us all on how those same principles could be adapted and applied here in the US Empire.

The Fascists Have Been In Power All Along And They Won’t Be Voted Out

The US Regime has used so many underhanded tactics to manipulate voting laws, gerrymandering, voter protections, voting access, voter suppression – all to insure the election outcomes that most favor the ruling class. And any would-be reformers who manage to get into office are quickly brought to heel by the Establishment. We need only look at “The Squad” – which has become another mechanism the ruling class uses to exploit people anxious for good leadership. When people are tricked into thinking that political change takes a long time and have lived in a social order rooted in Idealism, they are willing to accept performative platitudes as the full service their politicians can provide. This is why we need to talk instead in terms of material and historical conditions – tangible, real things that have happened and are happening. The actual way things are, and what can be done. And we can do much more beyond just voting and waiting on politicians in the service of the upper class – that sees the rest of us as disposable lives on their profit altar.

I have to accept that not everyone will see things this way. This is reminiscent of my exodus from the Jehovah’s Witness cult in so many ways. I realized we’d all been duped back then, too, but the power of the cult’s indoctrination and propaganda meant that most of the people I’d grown up with in that cult stayed in it and remain until this day. I couldn’t change their minds, and just the same, I won’t change the minds of everyone in my life today as I endeavor to show them all the ways we’ve been subjected to the same cult brainwashing methods the JW’s use – except these have been used by the upper class that rules this country and owns the government.

And just as it was back then, trying to remain in close touch with those who see you as “apostate” to their belief system means they will feel obligated to reign you back in “to the fold” or to refuse to discuss your new understanding of the governing element in your lives. Back then it was just the Watchtower Society (now called JW dot org, due to multi-million dollar court settlements from victims of JW pedophile cases) that governed my life – and it was so central to my existence, I didn’t even see the “human government” I happened to live under as being of any import. But I’ve come to realize just how much the JW leadership and Capitalists have in common in terms of how they control large masses of people and convince us into doing their will, often with little to no benefit to ourselves, and more often, harm is incurred in the process. But those at the top always thrive. Such is the case with pyramid schemes, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Capitalism are both that type of structure.

Despite All Of This, I Continue To Have Hope

I suppose I am still holding out hope that more of the people I know personally, care about, and who haven’t yet opened their eyes to the harsh truths we collectively face will do so sooner rather than later. I don’t invest in those hopes too much, though, because they’ve all witnessed the same horrors I have and continue to believe that capitalism is the best way of life available to humans. Something would need to change significantly for them to see a reason to look outside of the blinders. Probably most of them won’t ever do it. But even if one does, that’s one more comrade helping us work toward not only a livable, but a better future. So my hope is not rooted in any particular individuals, but rather, in the chance that someone, or hopefully several someones, will finally take the step to get off of the capitalism hamster wheel and help us build solidarity and dual power in our communities through collective actions. Meantime, I keep working on mutual aid, political education (my own and then sharing what I learn), food sovereignty, and self-development to be a better comrade with my comrades doing the same kinds of work themselves. This is how the world changes and humanity evolves: cooperation. And that is why I have hope, because of my comrades and the revolution we are building.

The post Ethical Incompatibilities And Their Impacts appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It wasn’t until I started reading history written by authors who aren’t trying to uphold the values of Western Empire, or defend its legitimacy, that I began to see that it isn’t having power and authority alone that is the corrupting factor in the equation. Rather, it has to do with WHO is wielding the power and acting with authority and WHY. Ironically, one of the things that helped me understand this was a scene from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the film Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). In it, Dr. Abraham Erksine explains to a pre-serum Steve Rogers why he was chosen to receive it:

“The serum was not ready. But more important, the man. The serum amplifies everything that is inside. So, good becomes great. Bad becomes worse. This is why you were chosen. Because a strong man, who has known power all his life, will lose respect for that power. But a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion.”

So it matters who is wielding power – someone informed by their experiences of having no power in the system, and what it is like to live that way, is going to wield authority differently than someone who has always held power. When one acts with authority in order to use that strength with the understanding of what it is like being on the other side of it, when someone willing to abuse that power is using it against you, and rejecting that in favor of an empathetic approach that considers the needs of all, but particularly the weakest, results in very different (and better!) outcomes than corrupt top-down authority.

Pay Attention To How Your Ideas Develop

If you’re anti-authoritarian, consider you’ve likely only ever lived under the authority of oppressors. So your understanding of “authority” is itself tainted, and this informs your understanding of the world. But if you’re familiar with revolutionaries and history, you know that’s not the only way authority can be used; revolutionary authority has been used successfully to overthrow corrupt governments and run nations in way far more just than what we’ve experienced in the US. Authority can be used to oppress the people or it can be used to achieve goals to benefit the people. But those of us living in the US Empire have been deliberately conditioned our entire lives – for generations – to view Capitalism as the only acceptable authority in our lives…by the Capitalists who control our social order, including our schools, entertainment, communities, and who have attempted to prevent us from learning anything that shows us that’s untrue. They’ve used indoctrination and propaganda that has habituated most USians to distrust, fear, and loathe any anti-Capitalist rhetoric and to reject anything that sounds like it resembles Socialism or Communism on the basis that it will be used to oppress people. The irony of course, is that this is a complete projection of the qualities and outcomes of Capitalism onto states struggling to become Post-Capitalist collaborative body politic run by workers instead of the owner class. This is another example of the US Empire’s usage of the propaganda technique “Accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty.” Inevitably, that indoctrination has USians (and others) describing the conditions we live in under Capitalism when they are asked to elaborate on why they hate Socialism. It’s happened so many times in front of my eyes, both in face to face conversations and electronically, I stopped counting years ago.

Revolutionaries require the authority to make revolution. We are authorized by the needs of the oppressed to do so. We must protect revolutionary gains with authority, and be authorized by the will of the people to pursue additional gains on behalf of them (and because we’re part of the collective, ourselves).

“But Birb!” You might say, “Look at Cuba/China/USSR/etc, their lives are terrible there, that’s what Socialism does!” But most of these objectors have not investigated any further than a biased source, whether it’s someone they know or a news story, to determine the veracity of the information they’ve been given by those sources. They rely upon the same regime that has allowed the pandemic and economic depression to kill its own citizens, put them out on the streets due to lost jobs and illness, and has made homelessness literally illegal in cities like Los Angeles. LAPD pointed assault rifles at homeless people living in tents on Venice Beach. The cruelty is deliberate, because the Capitalists who rule this regime see themselves as above the rest of us, and believe our lives are disposable, according to their needs and whims. Why would we believe what they are telling us about other governments? Why would we, to paraphrase Assata Shakur, be foolish enough to let someone else tell us who our enemies are, particularly when that entity is responsible for causing so much suffering around the world?

It is important that USians learn history beyond what this capitalist regime has inculcated us within school and popular culture, because that which they’ve withheld, twisted, and flat out lied to us about is life-altering in content, impact, and understanding for anyone with their humanity intact. Without accurate historical context, extra layers of opacity are still in place for anyone trying to analyze the behavior patterns of the US regime, because they are operating with fraudulent narrative that doesn’t represent the actions and impacts that materially occurred in the past. This makes evaluating the present and future difficult to impossible, depending upon how much CORRECT historical context a person has availed themselves of since realizing how much they’ve been lied to in order to protect the authority of the upper class of the US regime.

The US regime has discouraged open acknowledgment that we live in a class and caste based social order (of their making) because that contradicts the public image of the US: the land of freedom and liberty FOR ALL. Obviously material reality informs us that is untrue, and that an elite minority of the population “strikes it rich” or is born into wealth. But when a person realizes all of this and is deprived of historical and class contexts, they are led on a wild goose chase that will lead them down a confused tangle of arguments about Why Things Are Like This And Even If You Personally Are Suffering This Is Still The Best Way For Humans To Live that have all been sorted out by past thinkers, organizers, and authors whose work is work is dismissed because they are anti-Capitalist, anti-Imperialist, and anti-Class. Those qualities cultivated in enough people mean the end of the US regime, so it’s very much in the interests of the parasites it serves at the top to keep the masses busy with work, family, and church, and when they are seeking entertainment, it’s important that it reflects the values that the dominant power benefits from, and fraudulently vilifies things that threaten it. What imperils the authority of the US Empire?

The collaboration of the masses together around a central framework built on correct ideas, that removes power from the minority of wealthy elites. The masses together then turn that power against their oppressors to dismantle the class-based empire they built, until Capitalism and the US regime no longer exist on Turtle Island.

Pay Attention To How Your Emotions Are Being Manipulated

Take some time to ruminate on the fact that our social order pushes rivalry and elitism as not only desirable in every one of our interactions, but necessary. Think about how how adversarial we are encouraged to be in all of our relationships, to divide into competing teams that built antagonisms based on what are ultimately meaningless constructs – whether we’re talking about sport teams or their fans rivalries, student science fairs, Team Cap vs Team Iron Man, #[type of girl], we don’t [do things like other type of girls], corporate ladders, reality TV personalities, or the dreaded gym day when we played dodgeball, start being mindful of where you see rivalry, elitism, and divisions beyond those based on our identities. Our social order is unhealthy for us, we know that, but it also has the potential to be lethal – not just for us as individuals – but to our entire species. Read the paragraph above and factor in all of the divisions we are expected to live under and take a side on on a daily basis. Pitting the masses against one another makes what I wrote about above very unlikely, don’t you think?

In order to help the masses recognize, acknowledge, and begin to deprogram their imperialist indoctrination, we are going to need to provide political and historical education (really the same thing but I want to be clear on what I mean.) To suggest that one has found correct ideas that are worth sharing is an authoritative act. We need authority, community solidarity, and organized discipline to help the masses, otherwise, why will they believe we have the correct understanding and organization to back up what we’re telling them? “On whose authority can you do this?” “On the authority of the people.” The people are not served by the authority of the US regime or any capitalist government. But we can be served by our own authority that we grant ourselves when we begin to build a path away from these parasitic governments and their ruling classes, in solidarity with our neighbors.

Many reject post-revolutionary authority, even saying the first act of a revolution should be to dissolve the state and declare decentralized rule. Consider that it is adventurism to accept so much risk on behalf of the people, to expect them to live in a constant war of attrition between revolutionary and reactionary elements since neither acknowledges their rival has authority. Doing this will result in more dead than Capitalism already kills with each passing year via social murder, wars, coups, hunger, extrajudicial killings by cops, pollution, curable diseases, lack of healthcare, lack of clean water, etc. Why not instead, accept a worker-led policy making and enforcing body that rules from the bottom up using centralized planning, until its policies have ensured everyone materially gets what they need, humanity has rejected and abolished class/castes so thoroughly, so no antagonisms exist, then as its policies no longer need to be enforced, it gradually withers away.

Seek Out Historical Examples Of Your Ideas Being Tested

Immediately declaring the abolition of the state has been tried in the past, in France, which many USians point to as exemplary in their revolutionary tactics, so it’s worth noting how that turned out.

It has not gone well, as detailed in the excerpt from THE DEATH OF THE STATE IN MARX AND LENIN by Hal Draper above. Decreeing abolition of the state as the first and primary act of the revolution fails to take history and the existing material conditions of the particular time and place into account. Until the US is no longer a threat to the rest of the planet, any nation or group is going to require a policy-making and policy-enforcing organized political structure to protect their revolutionary gains from this evil empire, and that is particularly true for those of us living in the belly of the beast itself. 

To deny the people to rule themselves from the bottom up, INCLUDING in the workplace is deeply selfish, even if the US Empire’s culture tries to inform us such actions would be brave. The US has been selling the fulfillment of greed (especially on the part of the bourgeoisie) as bravery, freedom, and liberty for its entire existence. They lie to us about history and current events to cover up their atrocities and to make the people easier to manipulate. This is one of the reasons learning actual history is so vital.

A dictatorship of the Proletariat is rule from the bottom up, instead of the top to bottom “trickle-down” we live under now. It is using the state as an instrument to defend the people against capitalist parasites, until the classes/castes it has required in order to function are eliminated – and if humanity manages to reach that point, then the state can be eliminated. But skipping from revolution to a stateless society is not possible. So long as class exists, so does the state. It’s all a matter of who you want in authority.

Be Mindful of How Your Ideas Impact Others Who Are Unlike Yourself

I asked about this on the Comrade Birb Facebook page recently, and one of the responses can be seen below, along with my reply. The author of the comment suggests that a “constant war of attrition” can be used to bypass the need for a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat.

It is unethical to ask marginalized and targeted people to support a revolution that will require them to live under a constant hand-to-mouth existence in which they must also maintain constant vigilance for fear of being victims of oppressors – that’s the lived of experience of so many people under Capitalism already! How can anyone argue in favor of doing that while also claiming truthfully that revolution has improved the lives of those most oppressed by the current regime? 

Consider that it is adventurism to accept so much risk on behalf of the people, to expect them to live in a constant war of attrition, when instead we could have a worker-led policy making and enforcing body that rules from the bottom up. It only remains a constant until its policies have ensured everyone materially gets what they need, and humanity has rejected and abolished class/castes so thoroughly, no antagonisms exist. Then as its policies no longer need to be enforced, it gradually withers away.

Until the US is no longer a threat to the rest of the planet, any nation or group is going to require a policy-making and policy-enforcing organized political structure to protect their revolutionary gains from this evil empire. To deny the people to rule themselves from the bottom up, Including in the workplace, is deeply selfish, even if the US Empire’s culture tries to inform us such actions would be brave. The US has been selling the fulfillment of greed (especially on the part of the bourgeoisie) as bravery, freedom, and liberty for its entire existence. They lie to us about history and current events to cover up their atrocities, and to make the people easier to manipulate. This is one of the reasons learning actual history is so vital.

Without knowing what’s been tried, failed, and why, people tend to believe their ideas are unique, original and untested, therefore, it upsets them when they’re challenged with historical evidence to demonstrate incorrect conclusions on their part. Factor in the fragile ego US culture encourages and conditions in us (which we must actively fight, particularly if you, like me, are white) makes a good recipe for reacting irrationally, instead of calmly re-evaluating the errors in your understanding, and taking the opportunity to expand it as you seek correct, tested knowledge.

US Culture Deliberately Breeds Fragile Egos In Us Because It Makes Us Easier To Manipulate

It’s okay to be wrong. I’m not always correct, either. But I put great effort in placing my personal evolution and gaining more knowledge as a priority over my ego, which I continue to strangle to death daily. It’s more important to me that my thinking and understanding are correct than being concerned that being wrong is embarrassing, especially in an imperialist culture. We can all keep learning until we die.

We’re all treading in uncharted waters and there’s no boat coming for us all. We only have each other, and we need to build solidarity, not antagonisms, if we’re going to help each other survive. Correct, tested and proven thinking is more important than our individual opinions, which remain largely rooted in imperial indoctrination, especially when we haven’t addressed the internalized imperialism in ourselves. If one doesn’t want to read history, then they must recognize they have a weakness when it comes to analyzing conditions and must defer to trusted comrades whose expertise in people’s history allows them a wider view of the problem/issue under consideration. Failing to accept that one’s unwillingness to learn history disqualifies them from developing an informed, considered opinion that the collective should take into account in planning and implementation of revolutionary goals is individualism, and that is what led our species into the hellworld in which we’re all now residents.

The US regime is the most violent, militant, genocidal, reckless, mass-extinction causing empire that Earth has ever known. If you don’t recognize that, it is likely that you need to read some more history (see the recommended history books on our site). That is our reality – the material and historical conditions under which we live – and we must approach it realistically. It is irresponsible to believe that we can build a social order better than the one we currently suffer under without seizing the means of production – and therefore authority over those means, along with a centrally coordinated set of policies and enforcement mechanisms that are used to insure that everyone’s needs are being met. The Proletariat – The People – must be put in charge in order to reshape things from the bottom up in order to shake the foundations of the Capitalist pyramid so that it is flattened and can never rise to power and oppress anyone again. 

Vital Questions For Revolutionaries To Consider

A successful revolution has historically relied upon a united front among the revolutionaries, who are seeking clear, common, coordinated goals and who have a plan on not only how to achieve those, but to protect them once they are achieved. If your ideas for revolution do not take this into account, you are putting yourself and others in danger, including those who you claim you want to help.  Has your idea been tried in the past? How do you know for sure? If it’s been tried, has it worked? If it hasn’t, what factors have led you to believe that these ideas will work now? Give serious thought to these questions. If you are still convinced that we do not need a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat, please review the questions in the infographics in the album below and take some time to think about the implications.

Slide1

« ‹ of 8 › »

The post Anti-Authoritarianism Is Counter-Revolutionary appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The article also features members of The Squad calling out Pelosi’s attempt to lie about the notice of expiration, along with demonstrations doing everything they can except getting the required votes for the bill’s passage. They did, however, force a means-tested concession that protects some from eviction.

When internal communications are alluded to, like in this article from The Hill, it shows much more personal concerns from the party: “Moderate Democrats, eager to leave Washington, were fuming at leadership for keeping the caucus in town until late in the day.”

So their concern is preserving their vacation time, while refusing to prevent an eviction crisis that Press Secretary Psaki warns “Given the recent spread of the delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to further extend this eviction moratorium to protect renters at this moment of heightened vulnerability,” and went on to say the Supreme Court prevents an executive order solution.

Between those two sources, there’s at least twelve Democratic House Representatives that made the choice to favor their feelings for wanting a vacation over the lives of people forced out of their residence and made to live on the street during a burgeoning Covid-19 outbreak. When they do this, they employ a subjugation tactic that the United States’ ruling class has been using to blunt righteous outrage since before its founding.

Infernal Origins

With Thanksgiving three months away, Grace Donnely recaps the origin point of this lethal tradition:

Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children.

Not “proven by evidence”, but believed. Given that the descendants of these same settlers staged a false flag operation by destroying British tea while dressed as Indigenous people, they are not a group whose word can be taken as gospel. Governor William Bradford would later declare this act of mass murder a “great victory”, all based on the belief and feeling, not the evidence, that Wampanoag people had murdered one settler. In that same speech, Bradford would re-iterate the false equivalence of feelings over lives:

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.

To Bradford, the only downside to this detestable campaign of violence was that the murderers’ nostrils were assaulted by the corpses they burned. No regard for their innocence, the sanctity of their life as humans, just a complaint that they should have burned to death in a less odorous fashion.

The white supremacist culture that birthed the United States now uses this false equivalence in every dispute. Giving material harm of the oppressed and exploited a lesser value than the feelings of the exploiters.

This has played out more rapidly in recent years, as the cracks in the US Empire begin to show more prominently. Hundreds of news outlets owned by billionaires parroted after the 2016 election that Trump voters weren’t racist, but driven by feelings of “economic anxiety”. Demographically, those interviewed are the wealthiest and best protected class in the US.

This scholarly article provides a data-driven debunking of those claims. A further conjecture is, just like Bradford, these statements are an invention to protect their ill-gotten plunder and silence dissent against their violence.

After a summer protesting hundreds of police murders, predominately against Black and Brown people, most police departments saw a budget increase despite the object of the protests being defunding. Bloomberg delves further into the rejection of the popular and data-driven demand that higher police spending does not reduce crime. It reveals violent crime spikes in multiple large US cities that directly coincided with police budget increases, eliminating that argument from any logical discourse.

Everyday Solutions

Wealth may not trickle down in society, but values always do, and combatting this at both the personal and political level demands that the following thought process be adopted:

The most basic change starts with oneself, by adopting the principles of historical materialism and explicitly rejecting historical pieces deriving from the “Great Man Theory” of history, wealthy academic “objectivity”, or ones provided directly by a societies’ ruling class (whitewashed depictions of the first Thanksgiving, for example). Specifically, this is what’s demanded:

When Marxists look at society they do not pretend to be neutral, but openly espouse the cause of the exploited and oppressed classes. However, that does not at all preclude scientific objectivity. A surgeon involved in a delicate operation is also committed to saving the life of his patient. He is far from neutral about the outcome. But for that very reason, he will distinguish with extreme care between the different layers of the organism. In the same way, Marxists will strive to obtain the most scientifically exact analysis of social processes, in order to be able to successfully influence the outcome.

If a person seeks an improvement to liberal republics and empires, then there can be no accommodation between oppressed and oppressor classes. That balancing act, which ultimately only serves the ruling class, is the exact foundation of liberalism. It derives directly from the false dichotomy that a ruling class’ feelings are of equal or greater value than the lives and material consequences of those they subjugate.

To improve from this system, one must be an explicitly partisan entity for all oppressed classes in that society, but that approach is only effective if one’s rhetoric and action are rooted in verifiable fact. The oppressor uses lies to enforce their stranglehold, how can that be broken if the people fighting back do not reject their rule by adhering to the truth? In the case of the United States, it does so many horrible things domestically and internationally that there is never a need to lie in the first place.

There is one genre of lie that anyone walking this path will need to embrace: the lie of omission and/or obfuscation to protect oppressed people and fellow revolutionaries. The left is, at its heart, a movement for collectivist policy, so preventing individuals from being targeted by reactionary forces is not just a practical demand, but a moral and ideological one as well.

A word of caution: this principle is only to be applied to situations where a person could encounter material harm should the full extent of their actions against reactionary forces be known. An individual lying about failing personal commitments, overstating positive connections or understating negative connections to individuals and groups, or denying an assertion that is rooted in independently verifiable evidence without countering with their own (conversely, making such unsubstantiated claims) is identifying themselves as an embedded reactionary and they should not remain in an organizing group if they are not willing re-educate.

To that end, the benefit of the historical materialist framing is that it allows everyone to remain in the shared reality when discussing an issue, unfettered by individual whims that only seek to obfuscate.

While renters are justifiably outraged about the eviction moratorium expiring, it would be no less an injustice even if responses were generally favorable. The shared reality shows that up to fifteen million people will lose their residence amid a burgeoning round 2 of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is why corporate news stations place such a great emphasis on opinion polls over in-depth statistical analyses.

Every struggle oppressed people are engaged in today is not one of feelings, but one of material subjugation. Palestinians are bombed, murdered, maimed and taken from their homes so a Trump supporting chud from Long Island can get a vacation spot. Earning the trust of the masses means never disrespecting the struggle by reducing it to an ephemeral emotion, and instead maintaining a laser focus on the material reality. Never let a ruler convince people that a powerful person’s desire for a vacation is equivalent to the need for fifteen million people to have housing.

The post Feelings vs. Lives: The Ruling Class’ Greatest False Equivalence appeared first on Comrade Birb .

RAGE! FIGHT BACK! IT WORKS!

Support those fighting back even if it scares you! Seek more understanding in order to inform yourself – it helps address our fears.

Do NOT do things to defend this white supremacist, imperialist USian empire. If you can’t or won’t fight, play a supportive role, or STFU and stay out of the way of those of us doing those things!

Humanity deserves a habitable planet where basic needs are protected human rights, not this capitalist hellworld that relies increasingly on social murder in order to function.

FIGHT BACK.

The post Fight Back appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Anti-Communism is an Imperialist value and tool. The US Empire has used it to sabotage and destroy Socialist governments that were working and popular with the people living under them.

The CIA and State department function as Anti-Communist world police. They have committed atrocities and then used propaganda to blame communists.

This is not to say that all socialist governments have been perfect. But learning the truth about what blame lies at their feet versus what the US Empire is guilty of will open your eyes.

It is important for you to understand this history in order to see through this empire’s lies and propaganda now. We are all being lied to every day by the government and much of the US media.

Have you noticed how many “former” CIA types are now on your news commentary shows?

Check out one of the founders of the CIA:
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwisner.htm

If you can, you should also read the books seen below:

The Jakarta Method
Addicted To War
Lies My Teacher Told Me
Blackshirts & Reds

If you can’t read these books, here’s an essay from Michael Parenti:
https://cym.ie/2020/04/01/left-anti-communism-the-unkindest-cut-by-michael-parenti/

And if reading isn’t possible but listening is, here is someone reading the essay above:
https://youtu.be/51KSe96VCuI

Continuing to believe that the same system and people who have driven us to the brink of extinction in their pursuit of profit and expansion on this planet will agree to and implement the massive changes required to avoid the “untold suffering” that 11,000 scientists warned us about in 2019 is foolish and dangerous.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/05/climate-crisis-11000-scientists-warn-of-untold-suffering

Please endeavor to learn more about this if you haven’t already.

The post Anti-Communism is an Imperialist Value & Tool appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Do you understand that the US has started a new Cold War against China, with very real threats for a hot war?

It’s for the same basic reasons why the US began the Cold War against the USSR: governments that are actually serving ordinary people and care about poor people, are a threat to Capitalism, and the US does not want that spreading. The US ruling class of the very wealthy particularly does not want the US population to expect or demand our government to do the same.

This is literally what it looks like to put profits above people.

If you know actual history, instead of the indoctrination we’ve all been subjected to in history class in US schools and throughout our culture, then you understand that this is what the US has always been about from its start.

If you are still trusting and invested in US politicians, please try to look beyond the words they say that are designed to lull you into thinking meaningful change is coming, and instead look at the actual material outcomes.

I was once fooled by them too. So many of us have been and have recognized it, rejected their scam and have been educating ourselves through history and political theory and we’re ready to help you do the same.

Don’t think that there are only two choices, Democrat or Republican. That’s a false dilemma that they set up to make you feel trapped. There’s REAL hope and change within our collective reach, but we must first reject the lie that this dictatorship of the rich we live under is the only option we have.

When you are ready to do that and start learning how dual power is being built in communities across the nation, through collective volunteer efforts by ordinary people, you will discover many of us ready to help you find resources. Just ask.

The post The US Ruling Class Wants You To Fear & Loathe China appeared first on Comrade Birb .

To put it in pro wrestling terms, The GOP is the heel and the DNC is the babyface.

Much of what they do is scripted ahead of time and all that they do serves their owners, not the rest of us in the audience.

It is vital that USians recognize this, along with how this duopoly uses propaganda, preys on cognitive biases, and emotionally manipulates the public in order to influence and maneuver us.

We must all break free from their Bourgeoisie electoral games and work with one another to build systems serving all of us, not an elite few.

The post Imperialist Bipartisanship Games appeared first on Comrade Birb .

On Sunday I went to some garage sales. At one, I got chatting with the wife at one house because they had chickens. I bought a couple of books.

I don’t remember how but we got on the subject of little free libraries and mutual aid and she said if her stuff didn’t sell by the end of the day that she would probably donate most of it for those efforts.

She gave me her number and asked me to text her. I did but then she decided that she didn’t want to donate the stuff, which was fine. I mentioned that I was enjoying one of the books I bought from her and it led to her outing herself as a white supremacist.

I blocked her after the last text you see in the screenshots.

I will not argue with not one damn person, especially white ppl, about whether this is an example of white supremacy or not, because it is.

If you aren’t horrified by what she said, you need to take a good deep, long look inside yourself.

Be aware this is NOT an uncommon mindset, and may even be held by ppl you know and care about. It’s actively dangerous and if you are friends/family/co-workers with someone like this – they pose a threat to other ppl in your community. The question is whether you care more about your principles or keeping the peace with white supremacists.

The post People Reveal Themselves When You Talk About Anti-Racism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

But you have to choose. Will you:

1) Support the world Socialists are working to build

2) Remain on mental cruise control, surrendering to the will of the Davos attendees who want to reform Capitalism while maintaining Imperialism

Your choice helps influence the way all our lives will look in the very near future, either:

A) a cooperative social order in which the people are ruled by the bottom up, putting the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few thousand wealthiest humans (Davos)

B) an increasingly competitive social order in which the minority of wealthiest humans continue to rule from the top, still running the climate toward collapse, whereupon they have survival bunkers and yachts where they’re stocked for 5+ years.

You must choose. Failing to choose means you support this status quo of injustice and cruelty.

So what’s it going to be?

The good news is, if you’re ready to work in your community to improve conditions and help flip the power structure so the working class is in charge, there’s lots of ways you can do that.

Mutual aid

Organizing a tenant’s union

Organize your coworkers into a union

Participate in phone zaps to place pressure on officials on behalf of oppressed and threatened people

Learn actual history and share what you’ve learned

Build food sovereignty by gardening and participating in community seed library programs

Volunteer or Organize at revolutionary, regular-ass people serving events like Free Stores or defending & serving homeless encampments.

Help train and arm BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other vulnerable community members with firearms and other forms of self defense

Become a HAM radio operator

Be a safe house

Build plastic shields for frontline fighters

Fundraise for bail funds, mutual aid, and community serving events

Write incarcerated people and support their integration back into the community as you help work toward abolition

Support striking workers

Organize or attend direct actions and vocally support them to your peers

Start a community fridge

There’s so many roles to fill. You are needed. You have something to contribute to building a better world that serves people, not profits

Even if you don’t see it now, comrades can help you identify the talents you possess

Please don’t let the bad guys take down our beautiful planet. Help us fight them.

The post You Face Existential Choices appeared first on Comrade Birb .

During my last couple of years in the Jehovah’s Witness cult, I was PIMO: Physically In, Mentally Out.

I suffered, knowing it was all horseshit, but due to a lot of variables, I couldn’t yet escape. I had to pretend I was still PIMI.

Listening to my friends spout what I knew was JW propaganda that had been designed to emotionally manipulate us was PAINFUL. That propaganda was working in conjunction with our previous indoctrination to make us reflexively reject ANY information that contradicted or even slightly undermined the cult’s authority and teachings. Seeing my loved ones parrot back what they’d been conditioned to think and say by the JW organization made me want to vomit, because I’d seen through it, but couldn’t say a damn thing to them.

Guess what?

We’ve all been indoctrinated by the US government on behalf of the tiny minority of humans who call the shots – the wealthiest people at the top of this Capitalist Pyramid Scheme. We’re drowning in their propaganda every second of our lives.

I’ve written, recorded and sourced copious information regarding what the ruling class – the wealthiest minority of humans who are responsible for all that indoctrination and propaganda – have planned for the future. Check my archives.

It’s painful and maddening to see so many Liberal family and friends refuse to see beyond all of those cult manipulations. I’m not suffering as badly when I was PIMO in the JW cult, because I don’t have to keep quiet about what I’ve learned and seen. I can warn the people I care for about what’s happening and the fact that we’re literally facing global extinction because of a few thousand humans greed. And I do just that.

But it doesn’t do a damn bit of good when the people I care about listen to me, but don’t do shit, or simply dismiss what I’m trying to share with them.

It hurts even more than those who refuse to listen in the first place, because it informs me that either they’ve dismissed me as an unreliable source of information, or they just figure someone else will do something about it.

Hi. I’m a someone else. There’s quite a few of us, but not nearly enough people organizing and training for what’s coming. WE NEED YOU.

So, how about diving in and lending a hand? Lots of opportunities, many as simple as making a phone call or chipping in $5 a month toward mutual aid to keep people safe, fed, clothed as our homeless encampments in the US grow and more people need help.

If the past year of Covid-19 has taught you nothing else, it should be that the US government sees you as disposable. I don’t, and neither do my comrades. It’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to the Proletarian Revolution.

I really hope more people come to terms with being in a Capitalist Cult and join us as we build solidarity to free the people from this hellish system, and then crush it out of existence.

All of our lives depend upon it.

The post Capitalist Cult Conditioning appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The Democratic Party and Liberalism are rooted in the philosophy of Idealism. Idealism says that our thoughts create reality. This is why you often hear people suggest that “perception is reality,” when they are referring to either manipulating or outright deceiving others. It is also why Democratic politicians will symbolically or performatively support a cause, a group, or an idea but they never take material action and so nothing ever really changes.

Dialectical Materialism is the practice of using scientific inquiry and critique of social problems while factoring in history and its outcomes. That’s not a complete definition, it’s just how I’m describing it right now. Materialism looks at the way things actually exist, not the way we wish they would exist. It then uses scientific principles to determine and carry out solutions to our problems.

Capitalism requires pseudoscience in order to function because it needs a scientifically illiterate population at large, to be able to easily manipulate with propaganda. All you need to look at is the climate change denial hoax to see what I mean.

I hope that those of you who are still emotionally and intellectually invested in electoral processes as a means to reform justice out of this corrupt system will begin to scrutinize whether or not your support is due to your own conclusions or someone else’s that you adopted because you are fearful and busy.

We cannot continue to do the same things we’ve been doing in the pursuit of justice over and over again and expect different results than what we’ve been getting, which are sometimes even steps backwards.

So what changes are you willing to make in supporting effective and organized efforts driven by ordinary people like us?

The post Democrats, Liberals & Idealism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The US Democratic Party, even it’s progressive wing, has repeatedly demonstrated their allegiance to capitalism and the capitalist donors who control policy decisions.

They have the majority and have since late January. Yet they keep finding excuses as to why they cannot pass policy on behalf of ordinary people. But this is in line with their entire mode of operation. They exist as a counter-revolutionary rabbit hole for people who would otherwise recognize that this corrupt system cannot be reformed, and avoid getting entangled in the trap that is the DNC.

It does not matter who has the most political power at any time in the US, the powerful are rarely held accountable for their crimes. When they are, it is typically a metaphorical slap on the wrist, often in the form of a fine that would be the equivalent of 10 bucks to most ordinary people.

So you got to ask yourself, where is this headed if the Bourgeoisie ruling class, the very worst of humanity, are allowed to continue their rule over the rest of us? Factoring in Capitalism’s need for endless war, our climate crisis and the refugees it is creating, a still uncontrolled pandemic in the US and some other nations, and the potential we each face – of being an ecocide victim – what do you think you should be doing?

The very wealthy have been setting up their survival bunkers for years. All while telling the rest of us that climate change is either a hoax, or that the US either can’t or won’t fund and carry out the necessary systemic changes required in order to avoid mass ecocide.

We still have an opportunity to prevent that, but it will require that quite a number of the majority of us organize to seize power from the tiny minority of people who actually rule this planet.

So will you support that revolutionary action, or just resign yourself to the fate that the ruling class wants for you?

If you don’t care about what happens to you, what about the generations that come after your own? Do you care about them, or at least what they will think of you?

Continuing to do things the way we have always done them will not save us. Nobody is coming to save us. So what are you doing about it?

The post Democrats And Idealism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Liberalism is based in the philosophical school of thought called Idealism, which is rooted in the idea that our thoughts and perceptions are what make up reality.

Socialism is based in the philosophical school of thought called Materialism, which is rooted in the idea that material things make up nature, and that our thoughts and perceptions, along with everything else in reality, are results of a material interactions.

To simplify: If you want to grow a garden, you must use materials like soil, seeds, water, nutrients. You must also take material action with your body. You cannot grow plants with idealistic thoughts.

In the same way, material action and items are required in order to successfully fight fascism and to grow socialism.

We have been indoctrinated our entire lives with idealism, particularly if we grew up in Liberal households or communities. This is why our politicians and government tend to speak performative platitudes instead of taking action in order to ensure people’s needs are met.

Fighting fascism requires us to unlearn things because we have been living with normalized fascist ideas our entire lives. We have also been propagandized to fear and hate socialism, because it is rule from the bottom up with the goal of eliminating the hierarchy of classes. That is a threat to capitalists, which is why they have put so much effort into conditioning us to oppose revolution.

An essential part of revolution is to unlearn what the upper class has conditioned us to believe about reality. How have you been working on that in yourself?

The post Idealist Intention Vs Material Action appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If your Anti-Fascist work doesn’t extend beyond the revolution in order to protect Proletarian victories, you are not actually Anti-Fascist, because you are willing to allow them to continue terrorizing people and potentially return to power. If you think that they are just going to accept the outcome of revolution, you are dangerously naive.

A class-based social order is Fascism. This is why class must be eliminated before the mechanism of the state, wielded by a DOTP, can become irrelevant.

Becoming historically literate by reading actual history in order to correct the Imperialist narrative we have been taught in the US will help you to better understand the need for a DOTP. So will reading theory. Your ability to spot patterns in history is handicapped by the lies you were told in school and through US culture.

We live under a dictatorship of the rich here in the US and it is their interests that are protected by the way they taught us history. It is imperative that you recognize this in order to avoid betraying your own class interests.

The post Proletarian Revolution and Authority appeared first on Comrade Birb .

These are my thoughts after dealing with some so-called Leftists who laugh reacted at a post, tried to chide me in comments, but when I pointed out the failings of their arguments, they simply laugh reacted everything I had to say. I asked questions in earnest that went unanswered. How is that different than MAGA Chuds doing the same? What is the material difference in impact/outcome from either?

I blocked them, as decades of experience in moderating internet message boards have taught me to set boundaries with trolls. With this context in place, here’s what’s on my mind:

When I ask you what, if NOT a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat, you intend to use to suppress the Bourgeoisie and their pigs after the Proletarian Revolution is underway, and you laugh react to everything I’ve written, it tells me a few things:

1) You’re deeply unserious as a Revolutionary

2) You either haven’t read Lenin, or believe yourself wiser than him and the many nations in the Global South who’ve used Marxism-Leninism to build Socialism – in SPITE OF US opposition, indicative of Western chauvinism

3) Your ego gets erect by behaving in an infantile fashion when you don’t have answers to dialectical questions

4) You have no strategy to deal with Capitalist Bourgeoisie, or their reactionary protective forces, who will not simply acquiesce to the demands of the People and will kill many of us if we leave the revolution to y’all. This would particularly affect BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Immigrants, Disabled, and other already targeted groups detrimentally. So who is your revolution even for?

5) You may well be a tool of the pigs. Whether or not you’re aware and consenting to it is irrelevant, because the material impact is the same whether you’re a knowing participant or not. Your actions serve the pigs, the preservation of the status quo. Even if you sincerely want to overthrow the state, your unwillingness to consider how to maintain the material conditions you’re envisioning POST-revolution shows you’re not serious as a Revolutionary.

6) You sound like an opportunistic reactionary who will betray the Proletariat, as has happened over the course of history. Which you’d be familiar with, if you’d made even a half-assed attempt to learn actual history.

Now, if you’re looking to correct your understanding, I can recommend some reading.

Blood In My Eye by George Jackson

Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin

On Authority by Frederick Engels

Check the Recommended Readings page for history books.

The post Reactionaries Playing Revolutionaries appeared first on Comrade Birb .

So why do most people just comply? This is because the Capitalist Cult indoctrinates us to think war is normal and necessary, as for the few thousand ultra wealthy people who rely on war to keep their profits flowing, it IS necessary. They start exposing us to upper-class, aka Bourgeoisie, propaganda from our very start in life, through news media, advertising, schoolwork, patriotism rituals at school and sporting events, and even in our entertainment.

War Is A Racket – a book by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC

A People’s History Of American Empire – another graphic novel regarding US Imperialism. The Zinn Education Project website is an excellent resource for learning the real history of the people, not Bourgeoisie Propaganda.

The post The United States & Capitalism Rely Upon War appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If yesterday’s events in the US Congress were the final straw for you with bourgeoisie politicians (both the GOP & DNC serve the Capitalist ruling class) and you’re feeling ready to start investigating why things are the way they are, we stand ready to help you.

The best thing you can do is learn ACTUAL history, because we’ve been told so many lies by our govt – for generations.

The graphic history novel ADDICTED TO WAR is a great primer for understanding how the military industrial complex and the billionaires control our lives. It’s one of several history books I’ve read and recommend, a list I maintain on my website here.

We all need to recognize that US politics are hierarchical – aka class-based. All of the Liberals vs Conservatives, DNC vs GOP, it’s all theater like pro wrestling. Both parties serve billionaires, and if yesterday’s events didn’t show you that, after everything else we’ve seen, I don’t know what will.

We also have the added layer of systemic, structural white supremacy and racism that is uniquely USian. That is part of the class structure – whiteness was made up in order to justify the enslavement of African people. It’s one of the most obfuscated and propagandized parts of US History.

One you learn how much you’ve been lied to and manipulated in order for the billionaire parasites to keep getting richer while the rest of us suffer to varying degrees, you’re gonna be pissed. Don’t let the ruling class manipulate you further by falling prey to Fascist groups who only seek to protect class-based white supremacy. Learn history so you learn its lessons & avoid repeating those.

If you have genuine questions regarding US History, Capitalism, Marxism-Leninism, Socialism or Communism, please ask in comments. I’ll do my best to answer, and if I don’t know the answer, I know sources to find it.

Don’t lose hope.

The post Let This Radicalize You appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The post Please Help Out Our Dallas Comrades If You Can appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Through our writing here, I hope we can help readers understand our shared world better and by helping build people’s ability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism, the genocide it requires, and the ecocide it’s already causing. We can do better, and I hope my comrades and I can convince you of that, help you understand what is needed on each of our parts to achieve it, and build solidarity.

Watch this space soon!

-Birb

The post Building A Larger Nest – New Columnists! appeared first on Comrade Birb .

We’re surrounded by propaganda in the US. Most people have no idea.

This includes the propaganda regarding China and the Xinjiang region. Did you know the majority of the “Uyghur Prison Camps” propaganda originates with a Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalist named Adrian Zenz, who runs a Fascist thinktank called “The Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation?” That organization was created after Senator Steve Symms and Representative Dana Rohrabacher both introduced as concurrent resolutions, and Senator Jesse Helms amended, and was passed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Take a look at the Senators and Representative who drove this Act Of Congress, as well as Bill Clinton and Adrian Zenz. Do their values align with yours? Can you not just look at the name and taste the propaganda?

Yes, it was passed unanimously, but every politician is aware of what happens to anyone expressing positive thoughts regarding Communism, much less -defending- it against likes. McCarthyism STILL looms large today, what makes you think it wasn’t a factor in 1993?

If you’ve taken the time to learn history beyond your school textbook and imperialist propaganda, you are aware of the lies we’ve been told and how USians have been indoctrinated and gaslit for generations by our government. Here’s a few quick zingers for you. Did you know that:

• The US brought thousands of Nazis to the US in order to integrate them into our society and have them work on behalf of US interests simply on the basis that they would insure anti-communist interests? Do you under stand that this is because fascism is the opposite adversary of communism? Nazi war criminals helped get the US to the moon.
• Christopher Columbus and his men wiped out an entire Indigenous West Caribbean population, and they were bloodthirsty tormentors and rapists. We are not told the truth about what they did but are instead taught a hero-fied, infantilized mythology that is part of the white supremacist capitalist civic religion that we’ve all been raised to be compliant with in order to keep mostly white wealthy people at the top of the plantation culture we still live in – and it’s killing us all. 
• The CIA experimented on human test subjects who were unaware of what they’d signed up for in Project MKULTRA, the paranoid capitalist attempt to gain mind control over other human beings? That’s supervillain level shit, but we’ve all been propagandized and desensitized so much that when we find this kind of information out, because they declassified it, everyone either just tut-tuts or laughs and says, “Yeah, but that’s in the PAST! They’ve changed and now they only seek our best interests.” WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY WERE TRYING TO ACHIEVE? Oh, hey you know who one of their victims was? Ted Kaczynski. If you don’t know anything about Ted other than the fact that he’s been sensationalized as The Unibomber, you really should challenge yourself to learn more. Have you ever wonder what drove him to what he did? It’s important. If you read only one link on this matter, read this from his brother.

So. There’s just a taste of things to come once you delve into ACTUAL US history. It’s upsetting. It’s horrifying. It’s shameful. It’s gut-wrenching levels of outrage.

You know how we’re always told that the US military needs to be abroad to “protect our freedoms?” No. It is and has always been to protect the interests of the very rich fraction of 1%ers who actually decide through their actions what happens in our nation and elsewhere. Marx called them the Bourgeoisie.

Now that we’ve established that your government has been lying to you about history, do you think that’s stopped? If so, that’s dangerously naïve, because there’s ample evidence to demonstrate they continue lying to us every day of our lives. Yes, even today. And tomorrow. And the next day. Until they manage to kill us or we manage to stop them.

This is class war. We in the US are living through a class genocide as our government has done hardly a thing for most people during a global pandemic, economic depression (caused by the billionaires again), and now another “once in a lifetime” weather events with the resulting humanitarian crisis – how many “once in a lifetimes” are we at with these now? But they’ve insured that we remain beholden to billionaires for generations by giving them the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history as part of the CARES Act last year while giving most everyone else $1200, but many got nothing. NOTHING. Oh? Did you miss that part back then? I understand if you did, because those were the start of desperate times for plenty of people. But I’ve been trying to pay attention for us all and thankfully I have other comrades doing the same. Do you even have any comprehension of just how much money these billionaires have? And it’s all Fiat Currency! It’s all fiction! The only thing holding it all up is that we’re all beholden to it, cuz it hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971. It’s backed by terror. The terror of what the US military machine or sanctions will do to your country if you refuse to accept the US dollar. That’s what’s kept it the global standard all these decades. But the billionaires feel they need most of it and are perfectly fine with letting the poor suffer every day despite their ability to stop that suffering. The very wealthy are sadistic parasites who enjoy watching what amounts to suffering porn for them – they don’t want us to survive their cooking the planet. They have survival bunkers to flee to and it’d just be way easier on them if we could just wait to die and keep paying them in the meantime. They’ve been planning this for years.

Bourgeoisie values are the source of all evil. That’s what Paul of Tarsus was aiming at when he said that love of money is the root of all evil.

The problems we face collectively on our planet cannot be solved by the same governing system that has forced and then reinforced these problems itself. If you’re not already convinced of this, I guess you’re too comfortable in your own life and unwilling to empathize, TRULY empathize, with those who are suffering. In order to do that you must first start addressing the classist and racist indoctrination in yourself, and learning ACTUAL history is a great starting place, because you need to understand what attempted solutions have already been tried, often repeatedly, and failed. You need to understand our past to interpret the data you receive from the present accurately and to avoid repeating errors in the future. History is a weapon and the Bourgeoisie have been using it very successfully against us. It’s our time to turn it against them.

We have so little time left to start implementing the massive systemic and structural changes required if we are going to have a survivable ecosystem ten years from now. Climate change denial is another propaganda psyop to keep us from uniting together against the billionaires and corporations responsible for climate change and catastrophe we’re now in. The ruling class has used indoctrination and propaganda with great success on so many occasions throughout our history. If you ever expect to be able to recognize these attempts while it still matters, you need to learn history. ACTUAL history, not US propaganda.

Once you’re ready to accept the fact that the US government has no interest in your survival, and in fact is demonstrably willing to let half a million Americans and growing die from a pandemic that is also demonstrably controllable with lockdowns in which people are paid to stay home – realize that you are not alone. We’re already doing the work, and we’re ready for more help. Join a Revolutionary Party. Help fund and distribute Mutual Aid in your area. Keep up your own personal work by reading history and theory, listening to audiobooks, or watching videos. Learn to problem solve while rejecting the conditioning we’ve all been subjected to that places Capitalists at the top of humanity.

Give me a follow on social media if you’re not already. There’s links all over the page.

I really am trying to help us all avoid genocide or ecocide, and we very realistically all face both right now. US Political Parties will not save us, not even the Democrats. They are beholden to billionaires just like the Republicans. Liberals are polite Conservatives, but they do not stand for material action to alleviate other people’s suffering – just the appearance of good intentions and performative puffery. It’s more important to look good than to BE good according to the Bourgeoisie values they embody.

If this all hurts you to read, trust me, I understand. I’ve been living with this knowledge for years now, trying to get other people to realize it, and have mostly gone dismissed by people who I care about deeply. It sure would be nice to have some more people to organize with, because I know many of my family and friends possess skills that would be so beneficial to help the people who are suffering right now. And those who aren’t able, some could do things like pitch in $5+ a month to the MIMAC Detroit Diaper Fund – that’s the mutual aid group I organize with myself. I can tell you that the Black single moms and their babies in Detroit with whom we’re in solidarity surely need and appreciate your giving. MIMAC is also going to need a commercial van or box truck soon and we’ll be fundraising for that. Want to support locally? Find one in your area and see how you can pitch in. If you see changes in your neighborhood, like maybe a community free fridge, see how you can help, or start one yourself. There are so many people doing mutual aid work right now and it’s a great way to see how much better the world can be.

Take some time to process all of this information. Be good to yourself while you do it, but remember that your comfort, especially under the conditions we find ourselves, comes at a cost to others, who suffer to maintain the imbalances that Capitalists create. You can’t just ignore this and it’s going to become increasingly a part of our day to day lives, so wouldn’t you rather join those of us who are already working to insure that regular people are getting their needs met? Who will you turn to when your privilege bubble pops and you’re desperate? Nobody is coming to save us but ourselves.

The post Sinophobia and Imperialist War Propaganda appeared first on Comrade Birb .

US Liberalism often encourages a smug attitude about oneself being a morally superior character who others should aspire to being like. This helps to justify the atrocities committed in the name of US empire, so that “we can raise others to our standard of living.”

Why would our “standard of living” be an improvement for anyone, particularly when someone from the allegedly more compassionate wing of the US Capitalist party talks like this against some of the most oppressed people living under this sadistic social order?

I’ve been reading Mao’s short but impactful and important essay, COMBATING LIBERALISM, every night before bedtime. I use it as a metric to review my thinking and actions that day as I attempt to abolish oppressive thinking and behaviors in myself. I highly recommend the practice.

Reject Conservatism.

Reject Liberalism.

Build Socialist Dual Power And Solidarity!

The post You Can Be Almost Anything, So Don’t Be So Shitty appeared first on Comrade Birb .

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP by Mao.

If you think this idea of “No investigation, no right to speak,” is to be mocked or that it doesn’t apply to you, think again.

On the Comrade Birb Facebook page, I’m blocking those who refuse to investigate but want to smear their opinion feces in the comments.

If we want a new better world then we need to start being new better people.

Our high schooler who’s co-enrolled in community college just told me that when they write research papers, their sources must be less than 10 years old since so much changes over time, and particularly within the 21st century, progress accelerates at an even faster rate than it has in the past.

So if you’re relying on your own experiences, it is important to remember that those are only your experiences, those are not universal, and in all likelihood if they’re more than a couple of years old, those memories are dated and have at least some inaccuracies in terms of useful information to understand the current problem. While there may be some common elements between your past experiences and those currently under similar conditions, you cannot assume that you already have the solutions to these problems.

An example is a commenter who tried to defend the $2.13 hourly wage made by wait staff in the US by saying when they waited tables, they made over $100 a night in tips on average. While I am happy that that was their experience, further probing revealed that their experiences were had 13 to 14 years ago. It is unreasonable for them to believe that the conditions they experienced are exactly what others doing that work today are experiencing.

So before you allow your own biases, the biases we have been conditioned into by capitalist indoctrination, your emotions, or your ego to decide that you already have the answers to other people’s problems, consider whether you have made a thorough investigation first. If you haven’t, and you still care about the issue, then you should look into it using historical and material dialectics, a specific set of critical thinking tools that will allow you to find the truth on matters.

The post No Investigation, No Right To Speak appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Are you familiar with the Philadelphia MOVE Bombing of 1985?

I remember reading the multipage feature about this in the Detroit Free Press and being outraged. It was 1985 and I turned 15 that year.

I asked how this could happen and saying I thought the objectives of MOVE made sense. Even the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses cult my family was members of just said this was an inevitable “sign of the end times,” but there was nothing for us to do about it because we were waiting on Jehovah to decide when we could stop knocking on doors and trying to make converts and he could bring Armageddon in full swing. And only after that and a restoration of planet Earth to Edenic conditions, then, maybe, if the people had converted to being Jehovah’s Witnesses they could be a part of a new just society. And if they died in the meantime they might get a resurrection back onto the planet with a new body.

For some reason, this answer was not good enough for me. I had lots of questions and nobody had the answers. I was growing increasingly agitated with the idea that we should just wait for justice when I had read that it was possible to organize directly in a community to bring it about for one another. And that obviously threatened the unjust order, because the state decided to come in and bomb the place.

I remember my Dad sitting with me to talk me down, cast doubt that the victims may have been criminals, and even if they weren’t, we couldn’t put our hope in imperfect human institutions when our hope as Jehovah’s Witnesses was in God’s kingdom. He also talked about how he grew up in the civil rights era and that not everyone and everything is as it seems and not everyone who is Black is actually oppressed.

I’m sure he was just repeating what he’d been told himself as a kid. It’s a family tradition here in the US, but it’s also a systemic tradition. We have all experienced it from our different perspectives, but we all have in common who it protects. It should be obvious to anyone paying even slight attention to the news cycle and daily events that this system is designed to exploit most of us in order to create profits for a very small minority of humans who are using up more than their fair share of resources simply because the system allows them to.

I wrote recently about the parallels between the control methods that the Jehovah’s Witness cult uses and that capitalists use to control workers. I think that my Dad, being a small business owner trying to succeed in this system, has had to adopt certain cognitive dissonances, just as we all have. I think that is reflected in his behavior at that time. I’m certainly glad that we all escaped the cult decades ago in the ’90s but I also have PTSD from traumas I have endured. In coping with the life-altering symptoms caused by those, I’ve found that I must take the same approach I did with my escape from the cult back then, and that is to face down my fears and reframe some of the trauma.

My heart aches knowing that back then the best thing we could’ve done as a family is abandon that cult and get class conscious, as well as addressing active and latent white supremacist and racist conditioning in ourselves.

It really hurts knowing years later that Dad bought a copy of a book by a former member of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses – something we were forbidden to read – that same year, 1985. He and Mom had a fight about it and it just so happened to occur simultaneously with the first time I skipped school and immediately got caught. Mom was sick in bed, there was fighting behind closed doors, and Dad was openly hostile toward me. At the time I had no idea about the verboten book, which Mom had discovered in his office desk and pitched into the dumpster because it was full of DEEMINZ. Or so we’d been advised at weekly meetings and through Watchtower Society publications ad nauseum.

So ten years later I found out about their conflict. I’d spent the previous decade thinking I’d fucked up and disappointed them so badly that I damn near broke up our family. I remember talking to my high school teacher Mr Cates some about it, but only because he drew me out. I felt guilty. He assured me it wasn’t a big deal, and that he said it as a teacher and a parent. He told me if I felt scared at home to let him or my counselor know. I didn’t feel scared. I felt like a disappointment.

I was able to reframe that through a lot of work in therapy over the decades and now realize that even if their anger was only about me skipping school, my parents reaction was overblown. They hid their own fight within their being upset about my behavior because they never had open conflict in front of my middle brother and I growing up. They’d go to their room & fight quietly in private.

But my current struggle is reconciling with the fact that I saw the way out decades ago, was dismissed and chided, and now we’ve all been hurtling along toward extinction in the meantime when we could’ve been doing the work everyone needs to be doing for avoiding that extinction. All my recent efforts since becoming a Marxist-Leninist to convey the need for massive personal and systemic change continue to get dismissed and eyerolled despite the fact that the science, math, history, and our own senses are showing us that it’s needed.

We don’t have another 35 years of Liberal complacency and Conservatism that’s taking off its mask and showing us the Fascism underneath.

So I sincerely hope that my Dad and others his age either do the work they need to in order to get past their Anti-Communist conditioning and get to work helping to build the new world or if they’re unwilling to make any effort, then they should adopt the motto “No examination, no right to speak,” and adhere to it while the rest of us put the work in.

We do not have time to waste arguing with people who continue to accept propaganda as reality.

I’ve taken to reading this essay every night to use it as a metric for analyzing my day’s thoughts, interactions and behavior and determining where I could’ve done better. It’s helped me identify even more layers of Capitalist conditioning. I hope more will consider incorporating this practice with me and perhaps we can even discuss it together.

I think my brainmeats my finally be ready to settle in for slumber – my body has been ready for hours.

I may come back and make corrections/edits tomorrow, this is very stream of consciousness.

The post Trauma Triggers Can Be Revealing And Reframed appeared first on Comrade Birb .

They lied to us about history and created the evil mythology of white supremacy in order to justify genocide and slavery while giving the lower classes a reassurance of their own white skin privilege relative to BIPOC people, even though plenty of white-skinned people are in the working class and suffer many of the same oppressions of BIPOC. The lower class whites may have the elite Bourgeoisie parasites in the owning/ruling class above us, but the system assures us we’re still “above” plenty of others. This is the mythology written by sadistic slaveowners who needed justification for their selfish exploitation, rape, genocide of other humans while remaining in God’s good graces. Christendom is complicit and collaborative in the Amerikkkan Regime.

Plantations evolved into prisons and corporations, and that’s where things stand today. I don’t need to remind anyone we’ve been in a pandemic for a year, an economic depression, and oh let’s not forget the recent news that the ecosystem is collapsing even faster than expected so maybe it’s time we all take a break from sacrificing thousands of lives a day to Wall Street and reconsider the viability of continuing to do the same things that always result in the same old shit!

With that in mind I urge you to first read this essay by Michael Parenti. Then you should read BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS.

We don’t have time for people to go through all of the usual counter-revolutionary distractions for years. The system has all those things in place as obstacles to keep you from learning what you will in that book. You’ll need to read more after it but you need to get past the reactionary, reflexive feelings you have about Communism. There’s not a lot of time to spare and your community needs you.

Here’s the book

And here’s a link to the essay online.

The post You’re Going To Get Angry When You Finally See Their Lies<br> appeared first on Comrade Birb .

These tweets got me thinking about more parallels between my experiences having been raised in the Jehovah’s Witness cult, which I eventually escaped in my mid-twenties.

During my time as a member, many of the publications and presentations would talk about things from the perspective of people who had converted as adults as far as them having a point of reference about what it was like “to be worldly” (one of their code phrases to indicate someone who is not a Jehovah’s Witness).

I had very little reference material available because my parents started converting when I was a toddler and fully committed by the time I was five.

So when I would get told that the Jehovah’s Witnesses offered the best way of life, what argument could I make? It’s the only life I had ever known. It was familiar, it’s where all of my friends were, and my whole life was structured around it.

They portrayed “worldly” people as undesirable & dangerous outsiders who would convince me to abandon the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In the mid-90s, I had saved up and purchased a home computer. I had been online on work computers for several years at that point. It took me a year to sneak a modem into the thing because my 1st wasband tried to stick to the JW advice and there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for the internet then. I started on AOL like a lot of people did back then. There was a Star Wars simming forum which was basically playing the tabletop RPG using threaded message boards. I got to know people on there and I realized they weren’t the total demonic shitstains I had been indoctrinated to believe.

I also started to question the foundation of my beliefs If the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves recognized the ease with which members could be swayed against those by outsiders.

I had been raised to believe that the JW’s were the only true religion and only hope for a livable future. But if that was true, why was it so easy to debunk what they were teaching me?

The last few years of my existence in the Jehovah’s Witness cult were miserable because I was what is now called PIMO: Physically In, Mentally Out. It was physically painful at times to attend meetings because I knew I didn’t believe it anymore, but I had to pretend to because I felt stuck. I had gotten married very young to a newly converted JW, my own parents were going through a separation, and my entire social structure had been constructed around the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had to pretend that I was still a believer so that I wasn’t constantly nagged, policed, and disciplined by my then-husband and other members, including the “clergy” level (although they do not call it that, that is their function.)

I finally decided that there were more cons than there were pros to sticking around. I realized that my marriage would not endure my departure from the cult and that was probably for the best. As it turns out, it was, but I was scared at the time as to whether leaving the familiar was the right choice, even though I knew it was hurting me. I even had a little bit of concern that maybe the JW’s were correct about Armageddon being imminent, and that might mean that I got killed at the final battle and become “bird food” for the avian cleanup crews JW’s like to “joke” about when referencing unbelievers on what they believe to be the day of judgment. It took a couple of years for me to shake all of that indoctrination but I kept facing down my fears because every time I did, I realized that they were mostly an oppressive construct that had been inculcated in my mind by a small group who wanted control of my thinking and behavior.

All of this in light of the tweets above is to demonstrate that within capitalism, many of these same cult tactics are used to control us. It can be scary to confront them, particularly if you are surrounded by people who are true believers in the system. They will use the same group policing tactics to try to get you to conform. They will also react when you say or do things outside of conformity. The reason for this is that we have all been trained to protect the interests of the ruling class, the small group that holds most of the wealth and power in our world. They are a parallel to the JW Governing Body, and they have created a social order much like the JW’s that actively combats dissent.

We are living in a time when Capitalism’s contradictions have been laid bare. If you cannot already recognize the injustice that must exist in order for capitalism to function, you must not be very affected by it. You are probably white, middle class, and mostly comfortable in your life. This means you are especially targeted by the system to help reinforce it with your social power and privilege. Familiarity and comfort do not on their own justify your unchanged existence especially when you only have those due to someone else’s suffering.

Just as the Jehovah’s Witnesses forbid members from reading or listening to anything critical of their beliefs, for fear of it causing them to recognize lies and faults in those, the ruling class of capitalists have demonized socialism and especially communism, because they know it means the end of obedience to them. This has resulted in our living in the most propagandaized nation on the planet here in the US, complete with a generations long anti-communist disinformation campaign. I have pointed out in previous blog posts and podcast episodes how they’ve distorted history, and they even use our advertising and media to condition us.

So as we live in these unprecedented and dangerous times, be very mindful of whether your actions serve the system, or the people trying to survive it. Think about how most of the news media in the US is controlled by billionaire owners, including the ones you think are “on your side.” The majority of them are selling you a narrative that serves the ruling class. We do not have a chance at a survivable human future unless we abolish capitalism and the classes that it requires.

The post Leaving The Familiar For Liberation appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Finally watched THE LAST FULL MEASURE – a 2019 film based on the real life story of the effort to get a posthumous Medal Of Honor for an USAF Airman, William H Pitsenbarger Jr, for his acts of service during a rescue mission in Vietnam. He died after saving many other soldiers lives, but being Enlisted, was not given the same priority for the MOH that Officers were. Only 3 of the thousands of MOH awarded in the Air Force have gone to Enlisted, the rest to Officers. Class divisions and inequality, unsurprisingly, are built into the US military.

In this scene with Diane Ladd, who plays Pitsenbarger’s mother, she says they didn’t stop their son from going to serve in Vietnam because they had raised him with American Values and couldn’t tell him to defy those just because they were scared of what they could lose. “If not our son, whose?”

I’m thinking about how the indoctrination and propaganda in the US informs us that this is the high moral ground to stand on.

In reality, the wars and invasions that the US is involved in are resource wars on behalf of the Bourgeoisie ruling class, and they condition us to believe that the human sacrifices that must be made in order to support those wars are normal and good.

The ruling class requires this violence in order to increase their wealth and maintain their power over the rest of us. Whether oil, lithium, cobalt, gold, or any number of natural resources, the US has started wars and conducted coup d’etats against other sovereign nations on behalf of Capitalists.

These resource wars in the name of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny serve the banks and billionaires. You know, the same people and organizations that have been shown not to pay much, if anything at all, in taxes, but who rely upon the infrastructure built and maintained by the working class, who have to make up for the fair share of ruling class unpaid taxes with increased payments of our own, and decreased community supports.

But it’s really important to the Bourgeoisie ruling class that they have at least 10 superyachts each, and more money than they could ever spend in their lifetimes, and often more than several generations of their descendants could. Meantime, other human beings suffer from not getting their basic needs met. These are not representative of billions of individual failings. This is an unjust system designed to work exactly in this manner.

Oh, and we taxpayers had to bail the same tax dodgers out after they’ve bankrupted themselves pursuing their greed – all on the back of the working class. They just received the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history this past spring as part of the CARES Act. Five TRILLION dollars.

On top of all of that, they expect us to be willing to sacrifice our children for their cause, which they manipulate the population into believing is “our” cause. That is false class solidarity, and it’s important for people to recognize this truth, and the implications that come with it.

American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and the heroification of US historical figures are all part of a white supremacist mythology that is killing all of us, including the white supremacists. It keeps us all in thrall to the capitalists, who are committing ecocide. They have underground survival bunkers, where they expect to ride out years of an unsurvivable climate, while the rest of us suffer.

I’ve gone into detail on all of this in blog posts and past podcasts on all of these matters here on the site, please check out the archives. If this is all new information to you, I highly recommend that you check out the recommended reading section and start your journey of learning actual history. Addicted To War is a graphic novel that is heavily indexed with the reliable historical sources on which it is based, and is a great introduction.

“Okay, so what do we do about it?!” You may be asking. In addition to seeking out educational materials like those I just mentioned, we also need to organize in our communities in order to build dual power, and make ourselves ungovernable by the Bourgeoisie. The specifics of how to do that involve more than just a tweet thread or a blog post, but to get a good overview, you should read this thread from Black Socialists in America.

You should also read this article from Indigenous Action.

The Bourgeoisie social order under which we all live will never give us the tools we need to save ourselves, because the ultra wealthy regard the rest of us as various degrees of disposable. Those famliar with Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for” prose need to understand that it is not just about the Nazi regime in Germany. It informs us that the working class must not allow the divisions that the Bourgeoisie ruling class has sown amongst us to keep us divided. We need one another if we are to avoid Fascist genocide and ecocide. We must agitate, educate, and organize with one another to build strong communities where we can support one another through the crises we are currently experiencing as well as those to come.

If you are looking for a way to connect with other like-minded people in your community, getting involved with a mutual aid group is a great place to get started. You can search for a group in your area in the US at the Mutual Aid Hub website.

The post Capitalism Requires Human Sacrifices appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It’s where I want my tax dollars spent – helping other workers. I loathe seeing my taxes bailing out billionaires and their corporate facades, paying for their resource wars all over the planet, sending our kids to fight those wars and if they’re lucky enough to survive they have life-altering injuries, PTSD, etc. I hate watching them rob the rest of us while they buy their 5th superyacht and tell the rest of us we’re just too lazy to have it as good as them. Meantime, they’ve got overseas tax shelters, pay no taxes here, their employees rely on state aid because they’re compensated poorly, and oh by the way, the cops will protect them and their shit, but if they steal from you via wage theft, you’re gonna have to pay an attorney and go to court! All this while not even paying the taxes that pay for those cops. Nope, the rest of us working people pay for the cops, and they’re trained not to trust us and as evidenced by a recent expose of the Kentucky State Police, even trained with Nazi materials on attacking civilians.

So you can miss me with your racist arguments about welfare queen myths. If you insist on continuing to behave like ignorant, petulant toddlers, do it somewhere else. Grown people who recognize our collective peril are talking and you have less than nothing to contribute to the conversation.

The post Just Give Poor People Money! appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I’ve been telling people this since 2009 when I learned it. We’ve been homesteading since 2008 and seeing hands on the injustice of our food system led me to realize we can’t reform our way out of this mess. We’re long past the point where we should’ve pulled the plug on Capitalism, and we still risk extinction from Fascist Ecocide if massive changes don’t start ASAFP.

It’s good to see this part of my life becoming more important to the revolution. I knew it would eventually, but had hoped it would’ve been sooner. But the material conditions weren’t in that position yet, so I’ve been patiently waiting. If I’d run ahead of those conditions in a fit of accelerationist opportunism, I would’ve created unnecessary risks to myself and others, potentially costing lives or freedom. Instead, expending my energy on what was needed by examining material conditions has given me an opportunity to build my own knowledge base and then use it to help agitate & educate people – in hopes they’ll join we comrades in organizing our communities.

Socialism is a science. Employ its methods to help avoid egoism and centering the revolution on yourself. It really works – helps you remember we’re all made of starstuff and naturally want to cooperate. It is the Bourgeoisie elitists who are the exception to that rule, but they’re far from exceptional themselves. They have a stranglehold as long as civilization on generational wealth thanks to classist social orders, including the one we live under. Wars, famine, pandemics, racism, white supremacy, misogyny, ableism, homomisia, transmisia, income inequality, infrastructure failure, climate collapse – all thanks to them & their greed.

The post Grow Food Not Lawns appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Bet most of y’all never learned this part in school.

It’s imperative that we as whites LEARN ACTUAL HISTORY because it is deliberately withheld and mythologized when they teach us in school. This results in our being in false class solidarity with the white supremacist Bourgeoisie and believing that their values serve us all. Their values are killing us all. They see the rest of us as varying orders of disposable, and that should be evident to anyone looking at the way they’ve insisted on continuing to run the economy as if there is no global pandemic taking the lives of workers and their families. Black USians have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19 due to the fact that our socioeconomics are designed to put them at highest risk for all dangers.

The US was founded by tax dodging Bourgeoisie slave owners looking for ways to seize and then distribute the power of the monarchy that ruled them amongst themselves. A USian Bourgeoisie aristocracy that exists to this day. Plantations have become prisons and corporations and many of the same families still possess the wealth produced by chattel slavery. Wealth today is produced by enslaved prisoners whose crimes are mostly rooted in Capitalist injustice, and wage slaves – 80% of USians live paycheck to paycheck, rely upon their employer for health care – if they are lucky enough to work somewhere it is provided – and cannot bear an unexpected $400 expense. Capitalism requires some form of slavery to function.

And besides the injustice capitalism generates and relies upon within the human species, the extraction and exploitation of our entire ecosystem has not come without consequence. But the same capitalists who caused this ruin now refuse to pay for the emergency needs that the climate crisis creates or the rehabilitation of the communities affected. They refuse to change their practices to avoid further damaging the ecosystem.

Their plan is to let the same working class they’ve exploited and extracted profit from deal with the outcomes of their ecosystem abuse. I’ve written here before about their survival bunkers.

All of these issues intertwine. It’s a Hydra with what often feels like countless heads. But the body, the heart that keeps them alive, it’s Capitalism. This is why when we try to reform the system issue by issue, we just end up with more problems than we started with. The entire system must be replaced, because it has always been unjust, and cannot fulfill its stated purpose without employing injustice.

We need a social order that is designed to meet everyone’s needs, in harmony with our ecosystem, while actively defending against those avarice-fueled predatory parasites to prevent them from taking power, and do this for as long as it takes to eliminate class from the human species. Only then can the state “wither away” – because it exists as an apparatus to oppress one class by another. Most of us are part of the oppressed, and so it can be easy in our furious search to understand our oppression to skip the critical step of class analysis and jump to the conclusion that the state must be immediately smashed.

But when we do this, we fail to recognize that in order to succeed in destroying the state – the weapon used to oppress us – we must first wrest that weapon from those wielding it against us and turn it against them, while simultaneously building dual power with People Designed & Powered structures to replace the Bourgeoisie infrastructure within which we currently exist. Black Socialists Of America have an informative and important Twitter thread on this that I urge you to read and act upon.

This is especially vital here in the US, because our entire social order exists due to white supremacy and codified racism. As those of us doing anti-racism work can attest, it is so ingrained into every aspect of our lives, you may find yourself shocked by the values, ideas, policies, outcomes, and structures that you’ve accepted as the status quo your entire life that are deeply racist and problematic. We cannot expect our Black comrades to support a Revolution that does not take into account the need to defend them – now and ongoing – from the violent white nationalist chuds who’ve shown us over the last several months they really are willing to go to the lengths they’ve claimed and threatened. They want the race war they’ve been wanking to for decades from The Turner Diaries – already responsible for several domestic terrorist attacks and deaths here in the US – including the Oklahoma City Bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

We will need to be organized and have People’s Consensus designed and recognized authoritative standards for insuring the safety of Black USians and what defense vs opportunism looks like – and in order to do that, we need to start holding People’s Assemblies to begin discussion, making use of Scientific Socialist Dialectics. I urge you to consider using open source Jitsi instead of Zoom for these virtual meetings.

I’m getting a Mastodon server ready to begin accepting members this week. I’d like to begin forming state People’s Assembly organizing groups on there as a place for people to put announcements pertaining to their areas, network with others, and for us all to discuss ideas and offer one another support.

Because it is an open source platform on a privately owned server, we will control who and what is allowed. This will not be a general social media type platform but is instead intended to provide Leftist Anti-Racist Revolutionaries a space free from other politics to focus on our work.

I will be prioritizing BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People Of Color) members on this server and elevating their voices above whites, even my own. I believe that should be a guiding principal of ANY revolutionary, Leftist organization, party, coalition, etc who is truly interested in justice, revolution, and a fighting chance against climate collapse.

Watch for an announcement later this week.

Solidarity and Peace!

The post The US & Capitalism’s Reliance On Slavery appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Remember when you said if they replaced RBG before the election you’d burn it all down?

Kavanaugh’s opinion he issued today, taking the most radical position any SCOTUS member has ever taken on Bush v. Gore, along with states deploying cops and national guard troops to polls -and Oathkeepers & other militant white nationalist groups are also patrolling polls, as well as towns already – should inform everyone on the plan for the election. Ballot boxes are being burned, bombed and otherwise compromised.

Things about to get very ugly.

So, did you mean it? You’ve been moving the goalposts with each new horrible thing that happens, as far as what your threshold for being willing to take radical action is, leaving those of us Left of you wondering if you are truly the spineless, debauched navelgazers the Reichwingers claim you are, or if you’re finally ready to extract your mind from the Capitalist Death Cult.

So, what’s it gonna be? You gonna rise to the occasion of history and humanity and start organizing with and listening to we Revolutionaries, or are you going to uphold the system that has caused ALL OF THIS?

If you’re ready to learn, then I’ve got something to teach.

Check the recommended reads, past blog posts, and my podcasts.

The post Did You Mean It, Liberals? appeared first on Comrade Birb .

My co-host Cat and I review chapter two of Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History Of The United States.”

I’m always urging people to learn ACTUAL history, not the white supremacist, anti-labor propaganda we were indoctrinated with in school. We know you’re busy, some people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet, so we’re creating 20-30 minute episodes with highlights from each chapter to provide a way to get acquainted with the material.

Please have a listen, and share with your own circles. Learning this hidden history is one key to liberation from this Capitalist Death Cult that is driving us to ecocide with their extractive, exploitative practices.

The post PODCAST: Chapter 2 Review of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Back in August I had the pleasure of interviewing independent pro wrestler Duncan Solaire over Zoom. I had delusions of grandeur about teaching myself Adobe AfterEffects so that I could upload the video to my YouTube channel, but alas, my skill level just isn’t where it needs to be in order to produce quality video. Hence, I bring you the interview in our usual podcast format. Please check out the links below to learn more about the FANTAZZALOUS DUNCAN SOLAIRE!

Duncan’s YouTube Channel

Pro Wrestling Society YouTube Channel

Pro Wrestling Society Facebook Page

The Korea Times article on Pro Wrestling Society

The post PODCAST: Interview WSG: Independent Pro Wrestler Duncan Solaire appeared first on Comrade Birb .

This is a great episode I recorded in August with Robert Jay, of Metro Detroit Political Action Network (MDPAN), in which he talks about two of my favorite subjects: Star Wars and Revolution. It’s long, but so worth it.

The post PODCAST: Star Wars & Revolution w/Robert Jay of MDPAN appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Hello! I’ve been MIA, and I apologize for it. The past couple of months have presented some health challenges, including gastrointestinal issues, extra depression, PTSD episodes, and my usual collection of chronic ails giving me grief. I’ve been struggling. But I’m back!

I’ve been trying to teach myself Adobe After Effects so that I can add more video interviews, but between the learning curve, the limitations listed above, and only having 3Mbps Internet connection out here in the sticks, it just doesn’t seem to be the time. So I’m working on getting the content I already have posted up as regular podcast audio files, and maybe one day our stretch of road will get access to the fiber that is on the lines just a half mile South of us. Looking at you, Charter Spectrum! Full disclosure: they did tell us we could get their fiber last year, but our cost to get it to our house would be $26,000 USD and every neighbor in between us and the current run would be charged $9,000 USD. That’s JUST for installation. Needless to say, we declined their offer.

So, I’m busy at work in Audacity – I have an episode uploading right now about Star Wars and Revolution that should be available shortly – watch for the post shortly. I have some interviews I’d hoped to present in video but that 3Mbps just ain’t havin’ it – taking 12+ hours to upload those and even then, it’s glitchtastic. So for now, they’ll just be audio, and should something change, I’ll work on getting those fancypantsed up and uploaded to YouTube.

I recently discovered a very helpful thread from Black Socialists Of America regarding the people-built and powered infrastructure we must build for a successful revolution, and I’m dropping it here for everyone to consider what they can do, what role you’re best suited for in the revolution, because not everyone is fighting on the front lines – lots of people BEHIND those battle lines that are essential to success.

The post BLOG: October Comeback appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Check out these pieces of Soviet Anti-American propaganda from 1953, 1964, 1981.

It’s almost as though those wacky Marxist-Leninists (I am one) had identified all of the things that were wrong here decades ago. Centuries, practically.

The arrogance of US anti-Communist propaganda is that it is mostly comprised bold-faced lies – often projecting Capitalsm’s own flaws – that are easily debunked.

That smug arrogance is only matched by the intellectual laziness of most descendents of European settlers that means they buy it hook, line, and sinker, AND our culture rewards those who allow themselves to be lulled and/or bribed into complacency. This is despite the fact that the comfortable bubble of privilege many of us enjoy is only possible due to being carried on the backs of BIPOC.

Capitalism and the US run on white supremacy, codified racism, violence, imperialism, and various castes of oppression based upon Othering certain parts of the population to set us up for special exploitations from those with greater social power than we possess.

Both must be dismantled and become a part of our beautiful planet’s most shameful history, never to be permitted to return.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

The post White Supremacy Is The Lifeblood Of The United States appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Check out our Chapter One review video here – podcast audio coming soon!

The post People’s History Series appeared first on Comrade Birb .

They are not wrong that we have been lied to about a lot, but instead of discovering the actual lies, they just latch on to new ones. This works against their own interests, and against the working class to which they belong.

Way back about 10 years ago we were in a co-op where we would order bulk foods together and then meet once a month for the delivery. Members would need to help unload the truck and break down bulk foods, which we did in a church kitchen in town that provided a space. The time that they had people come in to warn us about the new utility boxes getting installed on your home to automatically transmit your usage back to the utility, we kind of stopped going after that. We had other reasons, but that was kind of the final straw.

People understand that we are being lied to by those at the top, but the lack of historical and scientific literacy in this country means that people latch on to the first thing that feeds their biases and fears without doing any kind of critical analysis to determine the credibility. This is a systemic issue, not an individual one, or else these conspiracy theories would not gain so many adherents.

Scientific and historic illiteracy in the US makes these people vulnerable to charlatans and shysters who have various motivations, but ultimately all of this works to the benefit of the ruling class, because it keeps the people from realizing the truth about them and banding together against them.

The post Conspiracy Theories Benefit The Ruling Class appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Sowing doubts about the veracity of science itself among the Proletariat is another strategy that they employ. It has been very effective in getting a lot of people to blind themselves to the climate crisis we face. This, in turn, benefits Capitalists, who want to continue their practices, which the global scientific community has repeatedly identified as the primary causes of damage and destruction to our ecosystem.

So while memes like this are good for a chuckle, we need to think about the danger and efficacy of the systemic anti-science propaganda out there, ready to hook those who are most gullible, instead of immediately calling people dumbasses. Capitalism is a death cult, and the rich and powerful have invested deeply in creating effective indoctrination and propaganda.

We must continue to push back and attempt to educate. Whether people listen is up to them. Don’t waste time on those who are willfully ignorant and uninterested in changing that, but also don’t assume that that is where everyone is at in their headspace. I am writing this for myself as much as I am anyone else, because I am just as tired of the ignorance.

Humanity needs one another if we are going to make it through. I’m not suggesting that every denier can be persuaded to learn the scientific method and develop critical thinking. Many of them will continue to be expert dipshits, as I suspect the fellas in the MLive Facebook page comment section from which I took this screenshot. But there are also people who are caught up in it because that’s all they know. We need to be ready to help them learn, should they become receptive. The Proletariat is not elitist.

The post Capitalists Benefit From Pseudoscience appeared first on Comrade Birb .

At that time we were at the location on Woodbridge, near the Renaissance Center, and I worked in technology services in the basement. Also in the basement was the break room, which had anywhere between 2-3 working microwaves at any time. The payroll office was next door to the break room.

The payroll team used to complain that during the days leading up to our twice a month payday, they would “gag” because “everyone was out of money and eating cheap microwave food,” and all of the smells would combine and concentrate into their office.

Now, I’m not begrudging them that it did stink. But let’s look at the disconnect here:

The company wasn’t paying people enough to be able to eat better lunches. And it wasn’t just a particular department of low-paid employees – it basically was everyone except the executive team.

So we’d all have our little $1 microwave “meals” and laugh about how we’re waiting for payday. This was regarded as dozens of personal failures on our part – not an indicator of a failed system, despite the evidence right in front of everyone. That’s part of capitalist cult conditioning.

This is the same company that bragged about its “famous 40 cent pop machine” in job listings, as a sign of how well they treated their employees.

This is the same company that allowed my technology services/publishing software specialist co-worker RP, of Royal Oak, Michigan, to continually harass me nearly every day, despite my reporting him to HR. His harassment included unwanted touching, hostility, backstabbing, and attempting to get me in trouble with our manager because I wasn’t sharing what I learned at community college courses I took at night ON MY OWN TIME AND DIME with him.  If he and I were alone in the department, particularly if we were doing after hours production support on the days things went to press, he would SCREAM at me and behave in a threatening manner. He complained about my chronic illnesses to our boss and told her I should be fired, something my boss shared with me.

This is the same company that downsized me and a bunch of my co-workers – all of whom just so “happened” to have chronic illnesses that meant we used our health insurance coverage and most of us had at some point been on disability – in 2008-2009. They “culled the herd” of those of us, who, to their minds, were too much of a drag on the system, regardless of what contributions we made to the company. They tried to cover this by saying that they’d lost so much money that they couldn’t afford to keep staffing at those levels. A few years later, they said WHOOPSIE! We actually -made- millions, we didn’t lose it back then! Liars.

My health was severely impacted by my experiences of being employed there under those hostile conditions. I suffer to this day from it. Others do too.

Capitalism is a death cult.

The post Cheap Lunches and Cheap Bosses appeared first on Comrade Birb .

We encourage you to join us and read along! You can find the book new and used, ebook format, and you can read the book for free online here. 

If you have questions, please submit those via the contact form and we’ll work to get those answered on the next episode.

Really looking forward to bringing you this content!

The post VIDEO: People’s History With Ruben appeared first on Comrade Birb .

As I’ve made abundantly clear in my previous blog posts and podcast episodes, I am anti-capitalism. As a socioeconomic system, it exists as a class-divided system in which a minority of human beings extract and exploit not only the majority of their fellow humans, but from our shared ecosystem, in order that the ruling minority may amass the most resources and control every major decision within civilization, whether the majority agrees with that social contract or not. The ruling minority uses their private military, aka police, in order to enforce the social construct. That’s why so many cities have half or even more of their annual budgets allocated to police departments. The police protect the ruling class and their property. One only need look at the Class War battles being waged on American streets to see that the police do not serve and protect the public at large. They have been this way their entire history to those that the ruling class has regarded as undesirable. And as they collapse the climate on everyone’s heads, some of them already fled to their survival bunkers at the start of the pandemic, where they are supplied to live for years. They’ve known that continuing to abuse the ecosystem would bring some kind of disaster, and they’ve been preparing for years. I’ve covered this in so many past blog posts and podcast eps. I’m not doing the labor again to link all of these claims that I’ve already repeatedly backed up in past work. It’s all here on the same website, so go back and read those to get source links if you need them.

So, the bottom line, my comrades and I have recognized that this entire nation was built on white supremacy, land left, life theft, resource theft, genocide, enslavement of other humans, and while the structures that currently serve those purposes have changed in appearance and nature somewhat, the plantations became prisons and corporations. Everything is corrupted. We are discovering that just as in religious cults, the ruling class has been indoctrinating us with suppressed and whitewashed history and other propaganda in order to condition us into beliefs and behaviors about life that serve THEIR purposes instead of ours.

Knowing as I do that in order to reach these conclusions, one must first commit to using a critical lens to one’s own government and way of life, I use the same critical lens when considering other nations governments. I also know that much of the suppressed history is about how our country has been actively working to sabotage and overthrow any nation that begins the struggle toward Socialism, using the CIA and military resources. Google The Army School Of The Americas – oh EXCUSE ME, that’s right – Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, as it’s been known since 2001. They train dictators. That’s part of the US military budget and has been for decades before the name change.

Capitalism relies upon pseudoscience, corruption, and injustice to operate. So, as long as it exists, and especially with the US Military enforcing Capitalism around the globe, it’s going to be difficult for any nation, even a country as large as China, to fully implement Socialism, particularly with the adversarial presence of the McCarthyist US using its resources to cause it to fail. We’ve seen this documented throughout history. And if you haven’t yet, visit my Reading Recommendations page.

I say all of this leading up to the question of my view of China through that critical lens. Thankfully, I have learned to start using the Marxist-Leninist political lens in addition to that, because I recognize that as a US citizen – I have been indoctrinated and propagandized my entire life by a government that went so far as to set up a special anti-Socialist propaganda wing right in front of our eyes – The Ad Council. So I’ve had ideas inculcated in me my entire life, like all Americans, that are going to make me inherently suspicious of anything that seems to contradict what I’ve been told is “normal” or “the best way” my entire life. This is very similar to when I was deprogramming from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sometimes I had things I didn’t have the answers for, but I knew that I couldn’t just take the Watchtower Society’s answers – the only ones I’d ever known – as the correct ones simply because they said so. It benefited them to have me unquestioningly obedient to their status quo. At the time, it was certainly the easiest route – to just bury my doubts and keep going to the Kingdom Hall – but once I had a taste of the world outside of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of the lies they told me began to collapse. Eventually I was able to develop INFORMED opinions on issues that I’d previously just accepted what the authority in my life at the time had told me was true.

I’ve been doing the same with my understanding of injustice in the world. And obviously, as I’ve stated before, I believe that Socialism is the right direction to get to justice. But it’s just part of that journey. And Socialism itself is a struggle – it’s not something you just get overnight. So when people question me about China and why their Socialism isn’t “perfect” – which, frankly, those doing the questioning rarely even understand what Socialism actually is in the first place – thanks to propaganda – but I digress.

China is still struggling toward Socialism. They have Capitalist elements to their economy, so there exists Dual Power – just as was the case after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Eventually, the Bolsheviks seized control, but even the Soviet Union never achieved full Communism, even though they are frequently pointed to as “failed Communism.” The Soviets took a pre-industrial nation and became a space-faring nation within a few short decades, all while under constant adversarial pressure from the US and all of the lucky Nazi war criminals that the US rewarded with life in the US with Operation: Paperclip.

China also has experienced dual-power circumstances in the past. Again, as a US citizen, I must always temper the understanding I have regarding history and politics with the knowledge that I live in the nation with the largest military on the Earth, and a track record of using it to protect corporate interests. Why would that be any different today? Look at all of the trade war news we’ve read in the last several years. You think that’s the only intimidation tactics that have been used? Those are just what we know about.

The Chinese government has been working to eradicate poverty, and doing a damned good job of it. Despite their population being quadruple that of the United States, their poverty rate is far lower than ours and they are on track to end poverty by the end of this year. Once again, as in the USSR, the party has transformed a pre-industrial nation in a few short decades. Are things going perfectly? By no means! But I don’t expect things to go smoothly for any Socialist nation so long as the US and Capitalism exist. Additionally, I find it interesting that bootlickers for Capitalism always demand that Socialism work perfectly, immediately, or that is a basis for rejecting it as a credible socioeconomic system, but they NEVER apply that same standard to Capitalism. Ever. They’re willing to suffer for a system that will never serve them, but if they think that someone is going to make them share a toothbrush (that’s more Capitalist propaganda) then they don’t want to hear another word!

People will often point to the Hong Kong protests as evidence that true freedom-loving people do not want to be ruled by China. For many of them, this appears to be the first time they’ve paid attention to Hong Kong, because they are unaware that it was a British Colony for 156 years before being returned to China by the UK in 1997. And while it is treated as a “Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,” under the PRC rule, the British have still meddled in the 23 years since they left. And it’s not just the British – it’s also the US, because the CIA’s NED (National Endowment for Democracy) has been working in Hong Kong and have been funding the protesters there. Last year, I was reading interviews of the actual working class – restaurant workers, who were not striking, and who wanted mainland China to gain more control over Hong Kong, because it will mean that the underclass and destitute people will be lifted out of their poverty as is being done throughout mainland China. Everything I’ve learned has led me to believe that the majority of those who are striking – particularly the most well-coordinated, are actually pushing an Imperialist agenda. Marching to the US Embassy last September, holding up signs asking President Trump and the US GOP to help, and Pepe The Frog – a mascot appropriated from the original artist by Fascists – frequently showing up on their signs. Does that sound like freedom fighters to you? Or does it sound like maybe this is something the US is trying to encourage or even help coordinate in order to make US troops eventual arrival in Hong Kong to give the appearance of “liberators” away from China – who just happens to be not only the largest trading partner with the US – it also holds over $1 trillion in US debt. Oh, and our trade deficit runs about $500 billion a year with them.

OPE! And let’s not forget, about 11% of US real estate is owned by China too!

So, do you think, perhaps, given the competitive, adversarial nature of the US-Chinese government relationship in economics, combined with the knowledge that the US government has been used by Capitalists for more than a century to raid, plunder, and exploit other sovereign nations because that country has something that is desired by US interests, that just maybe, we as US citizens might be getting propagandized about Hong Kong? That’s my belief. And with that knowledge, along with realizing that my labor is best spent on worrying about fixing the abundance of troubles we have here in the US, I do not focus my attention on Hong Kong. Neither do I ignore it, but I do not allow myself to get misdirected away from my own community and its imminent needs, and what I can do to help meet those. I know that I live in an Imperialist Capitalist, White Supremacist, Patriarchal, Heteronormative, Ableist, Misogynist, Homomisic, Transmisic society. That’s what’s on my plate. It’d be hypocritical and ignorant to throw stones at China and the Chinese people when I live in a house of candy glass. I think that the Chinese people are further ahead in their solutions than we are, and in the areas where they’ve discovered problems or failures of methods, we should not look at that and say “Your way doesn’t work” when they have plenty of other successes that say otherwise. We can learn from their successes and failures.

So I refuse to participate in any anti-Chinese sentiment. I am certain that I have comrades I haven’t met yet in China. We are all struggling, the world around, and our common enemy is Capitalism and the Capitalists who hoard from it. I’m not going to let those bastards turn me against the Chinese people. They’ve done enough damage, and I aim to see that they pay for it. Everywhere. One day, I envision a freed world of peace, love and solidarity. It IS possible. And until then, I’m going to cultivate those qualities in myself and my communities.

The post On The Question Of China and Socialism In 2020 appeared first on Comrade Birb .

It’s fighting season again and there will be a need for Tear Gas First Aid! More experience with the pigs usage of chemical weapons banned by the Geneva Convention over the past year has led to the following updates from a comrade who is an experienced street medic and was kind enough to do the following writeup:

Eye flushes with clean water are the best response to tear gas and mace. Everything else you’ve heard: Baking soda, milk, Maalox/LAW, apple cider vinegar; all of it ranges from equally effective to ineffective and dangerous. Mace and tear gas employ oil based neurochemical irritants, generally Capsaicin, but not always. While they are slightly acidic, it is not the acidity which causes the irritation.

These chemicals interact with your nerve endings to give you a burning sensation, the same way menthol gives a cooling sensation. There is no burning or tissue damage occurring (as it would if it were really an acid burn), it is simply bamboozling your nerve endings into thinking there is an emergency and depending on what type of tissue, your body has different well intended reactions, but as many of us know all too well, really do not help. Skin gets a burning sensation, mucous membranes secrete fluid to try to wash out the irritant, airways constrict to keep the irritant from further contaminating. In short, any attempt to “neutralize” the “acid” of mace or tear gas will not and can not help.

For this reason, most street medics and medical experts agree that the best solution (ba-dum-tss) is simple, reliable, clean water for the eyes and, if a hose or plentiful water are available, soap and water for the skin. The reason eye flushes work is not the water neutralizing the irritant, but, at a microscopic level, the water washing away the bulk of the irritant, massively reducing the amount the body has to metabolize and thus reducing the recovery time.

There are many youtube videos demonstrating good technique for this. The key elements are:

1. clean water, generally from a sport cap water bottle you just opened (and haven’t been drinking from)

2. 2-3 aggressive flushes for each eye, from the bridge of the nose and out.

3. positioning the head and body such that the now contaminated water doesn’t run down the body, spreading the irritant.

Generally this is accomplished by the patient leaning forward and tilting their head toward the side being flushed so the water runs right off their face to the ground. It is important to remember to tell patients that this will not make them feel better, it will make them feel better sooner. It reduces the amount of irritant your body has to metabolize. A good water flush will get the majority of the irritant out. Soap and water on the skin would get a supermajority of it out, but even then there is still some left and people will still be hurting for a while.

Degree of contamination, different tolerance levels, and efficacy of flushes make it hard to put a number on the recovery time, but the difference is significant. Again, water is best because it is simple, accessible, and will not risk further harm.

Next we will talk about the shortcomings of the other proposed solutions starting with the most popular.

1. Liquid Antacid and Water (LAW/Maalox): The minority of street medics that are not on team water are almost always on team LAW. The theory is that a 50/50 mix of Maalox and water will neutralize the irritant. As we discussed this is not how it works. Additionally, LAW can cause harm. First, most will not purchase the “correct” Maalox which is free of irritants such as flavoring and alcohol and is very rare. Second, even the correct Maalox has particulates which can scratch the cornea. Third, this mixture will pain the patient’s face white and make them a target for law enforcement, as we saw most prominently in Ferguson.

2. Baking soda: Nothing to neutralize, has particulates.

3. Milk: There is a kernel of truth to milk. We drink milk to cool our mouths with spicy foods, i.e. non-weaponized concentrations of capsaicin and it is effective because the lipids (fats) in milk bind with the oil-based capsaicin and help wash it away. This is ineffective for weaponized concentrations because it is only slightly more effective than water at binding to the oil, but can be quite harmful compared to water. Best case scenario you have milk that is not spoiled from being in the sun all day, but still contains pus, bacteria, and other microorganisms you do not want in your eye (personally this doesn’t stop me from drinking it, but I dont want it in my eyes).

4. Apple cider soaked bandanas: The apple cider does not chemically interact in any meaningful way with the irritant and is basically the same as a water soaked bandana. While any barrier for keeping the bulk of the irritant away is good, people need to be cognizant of how ineffective it still is: you will still be incapacitated if exposed without a respirator and eye protection.

5. Onions: the idea is that you get your tears flowing early to help flush out the irritant. Ineffective. Remember: Being on the wrong end of a chemical weapon is traumatic and more and more common. As such, we want to believe there is an “antidote” we want to help our friends not to suffer. There is no such antidote to date and the best we can do is help people recover faster without risking further harm. The best way to do that is with clean water. Tell your friends. Science is on your side.

Please keep these updates in mind as you read the original post below:

__________________________________________________

I have a great community over in Facebook Birbland, and one of the comrades messaged me a couple of days ago with this vital information – I’m sorry it took me this long to get to it. It’s been a rough couple of days – I had to make the difficult decision to quit my political party, and I tendered my resignation on Monday. I wish my comrades there well and remain in solidarity with them, but I could not continue to remain a member of the party without a marred conscience, over things that I both witnessed and learned of regarding leadership and what I will only call performative proletarianism, and leave it at that.

Back to the rad community we’ve built over on the Comrade Birb page on Facebook! One of the members, a project manager at a decontamination company, messaged me with the following BADASS MUTHAFUCKA praxis!

I’m a project manager at a decontamination company. Over the weekend I became livid at the police brutality at the protests about police brutality

So I realized I have something to offer

I put these together today, then went out and bought supplies for six of them

This one is meant to be printed on both sides and affixed to one of the bags of supplies with safety pins, so that the team member can wear a sign indicating the service they’re providing

TGRT-Signage

This one is treatment instructions for pepper spray and tear gas

TGRT Instructions

The phone numbers at the bottom are specific to Miami

Here’s the Word document so people can replace them with local numbers

TGRT Instructions

The baking soda solution should be in a spray bottle with 1 tablespoon baking soda for 8 oz of water

I used body wash bottles from the Dollar Tree because they press down, instead of squeeze

Also, use baby shampoo to make the soapy water so victims can keep their eyes open

It was a little under $60 for six kits, masks and paintballs not included

As the trained specialist, I also have welding gloves, a Honeywell respirator, with two HEPA P100/organic vapor combo cartridges

($18 for the mask, $24 for cartridges, two day shipping. It’s important they be pink/magenta and gray/black, they’re color coded. Extremely reusable, but you must store in an AIRTIGHT container while not in use – things can shake loose from the filter)

a small traffic cone for handling tear gas canisters directly – NO PVC, it will melt!  You put the cone over the canister and dump water rapidly in through the top – the maneuver pioneered in the Hong Kong Uprisings 

If exposed while wearing the mask: 1) wear gloves while handling (put gloves on before you put the mask on, and wear them until after it’s in a sealed container), and 2) wipe the mask down, especially the rubber, with an alcohol wipe or isopropyl alcohol. Acne wipes should work too in a pinch

This was my primary source – Popular Science

Not pictured: bottled water, instructions/signage, mask, paintballs (because apparently that’s not a thing in south Florida)

The goggles are $5 each, everything else can be bought at a Dollar Tree except for maybe the baby shampoo

It’s rudimentary, but it’s something anyone can do, and it’s the best we’re capable of even in a professional setting, really, short of Sudecon wipes, which are hard to find

Tear gas is an acid, and baking soda makes the water in that bottle basic, so it neutralizes it somewhat

Pepper spray is an oil, same as Covid, so the only thing that can get it off is soapy water (surfactant)

It took me about an hour and a half, not including shopping, to make five

For the record, I’m offering no guarantees, and this is merely a strategy to minimize risk

Tear gas is a weapon of war developed for use against the Viet Cong

Brave novices should not take it upon themselves to approach tear gas canisters. The best strategy is to make your presence known at an event so that you can meet and treat victims immediately after exposure

I hope this helps someone

Thanks for the work you do

Thank YOU, comrade! This is a community service, especially during The George Floyd Uprising, for all of those warriors on the front lines of this Class War that is culminating with the Fall Of Capitalism. The Ruling Class has deployed its thug pigs against the Working Class, and we continue the long Struggle for Socialism. Please share this in your circles and see that this information gets to the front lines. Those who are unable to be present at events can show solidarity by purchasing supplies and assembling these kits to be given to those on the front lines.

If you read my earlier statement about leaving my party on Monday, and thought it meant I am no longer a Marxist-Leninist – to the contrary. I remain your comrade! I have new plans in the works: my comrade Cat, one of my scrumtrulescent moderators on the Facebook page  and I are forming the Michigan Chapter of The New White Panther Party. More news on that in the coming days! In the meantime, you can read more about The NWPP here:

The New White Panther Party

The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter

WDET-FM Detroit Article regarding the history of the original White Panther Party

The post UPDATED: DIY Tear Gas Help Kits – Mutual Aid – Praxis! appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I was just thinking about how there are some specialized Open Source packages where the basic is free to use, but there are often upgraded levels of functionality or support offered by specialists. For instance, all the different flavors of Linux.

So I was thinking how Marxist-Leninism is a framework that can be applied to examine the specific material conditions of a given time and place, and the conclusions one arrives at after applying the scientific lens of socialist analysis will differ, depending upon a variety of variables. So whosever contemporary interpretation and application of M-L may be successful under one set of conditions, may fail under another.

In the same way, the different varieties of Linux have often found niche use cases in which they’ve become recognized as industry standards for particular use conditions and settings. Another way of saying “time and place.”

In my experiences as a woman in the IT field, I found the corporate toxic culture the men subjected one another to (and the rest of us, by extension) so senseless. This ever-present need to dominate and establish confidence by tearing others down. Everyone was stressed out by the demands of the jobs we were doing, but instead of directing that angry energy at its cause, the corporate overlords, everyone found reason to have divisions of varying degrees with one another, not unlike my school experience.

Knowing as I do that things have only grown worse in terms of toxic culture, since my becoming disabled and unable to work outside the home in 2009, I am hoping that perhaps there are least some people who, like me, want to get to the real cause of everyone’s distress: White Supremacist Capitalism. And we’ve long established that we aren’t outnumbered, we’re unorganized. But in order to organize a united front, we must have common philosophy, agenda, specific goals, and willpower.

So this gets me back to the subject of Open Source Software and Linux. So, there is a super toxic geek culture in which comparing one’s level of expertise spawns reactionary impassioned arguments, insults, manifestos, macho bullshit behaviors. I’m so glad it’s been (deliberately) years since I had to deal with all that Alpha Geek energy in my physical dealings. But as my own self-education in M-L readings continues, and I witness the interactions between varying factions of Leftists online, I get the same flavor of bile hurking up in the back of my throat as I did with the Alpha Geek Thirsty Force. It’s the same energy.

Anyhoo, here’s a little wackadoodle thought, what if the super divisive Leftists, or at least some of them, are chaos sowing infiltrators designed to keep us all quarreling so that we aren’t instead building solidarity, and a united front?

Anyway, back to what I was saying, regardless if my little now evidently pet theory is right or not, my point is that Alpha Geek energy – insecure, but instead of being vulnerable, tries to establish dominance so they never feel humiliated, but in the process is haughty AF – yeah, it’s still a massive problem on the Left.

So’s White Supremacy. Yup, if you’re white like me – even if you’re “woke” or even further along in your studies and practice than me – we still have white supremacist indoctrination to address, along with what that means in terms of changes we may need to make personally to be a more loving, just, empathetic part of our communities. Frankly, we may never be entirely rid of its effects in our lifetimes. I certainly expect us to do far better than things are going now, though, and as Maya Angelou said, “Once you know better, you can do better.” She didn’t mean it as a suggestion, and neither do I. Once we know better, it is our obligation to do better.

This process of deprogramming from indoctrination is often painful, and I know from personal history. I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses cult. I escaped in 1996. Thankfully none of my family remains members, so none of my family shuns me. But I lost my entire social structure when I left the JW’s. It was frightening. But it is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Probably THE best, because without having gone through that pain, I wouldn’t have even been free to MAKE the other decisions I’m happiest about in my life.

So we’re all in CAPITALISM HELLWORLD now, and if we want to have a future worth living in, we must build working class solidarity – but we Alabaster Americans have an extra homework assignment, and that is to learn the ACTUAL history of the United States of America, because we were indoctrinated in our history classes. History textbooks are White Supremacist Capitalist propaganda tomes. Check out my Reading Recommendations page for your first assignment: Addicted To War, by Joel Andreas. It’s a 74 page history book in comic form, and it’s heavily sourced in the index. Understanding our actual real history is key to destroying the white supremacist myths we were taught, like American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, Herofication, and oh so many more. But you’re going to need to read it to find out!

The post Open Source Software and Marxist-Leninism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

• I participated in a Zoom Webinar on labor organizing on May Day (May 1st) – it was my first time doing it!
• I’ve been working together with my comrades in our party club to get our social media accounts more active and engaging.
• The Mutual Aid Network Hub Facebook page – continuing to post resources as I find those, and I welcome submissions!
• Updates to the website included an expanded Reading Recommendations page and the NEW Covid-19 Working Class Resources page, for which I also welcome submissions.
• I’m working with comrades on a People’s History weekly webinar – hoping to have more to announce on this in the next few days!
• I’ve been getting garden seeds started indoors to plant our garden, which I hope to expand and grow enough surplus for sharing.
• Finally, I’m trying to get funding to purchase a heated greenhouse that will allow me to grow food year-round, to be distributed to those in need through Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition – MIMAC. I’m not beneath asking celebrities and philanthropists for this, and I am doing just that.  If you click on the Twitter screenshot, it’ll take you to my tweet thread, and I’d be very appreciative of likes and retweets!

  

Other than that, I’m doing a lot of reading, tea drinking, and procrastinating some bloodwork I need to go get done at the lab. As a person who is at very high risk for Covid-19, I am frankly terrified of going out in public. It is evident that there are those who are either just selfish, or so frustrated with the collapse of capitalism and how that’s impacting them, they are denying the severity and sometimes the very existence of this deadly virus. Some of those types are terrorizing anyone who they perceive as trying to protect ourselves with physical violence, or even intentional infection. My partner is still working remotely from home and I hope he is able to continue doing so – so does he. His employer is a Trumpist and regurgitates all of that ignorant rhetoric about “herd immunity” (what they actually mean is “EUGENICS”), insists it’s less deadly than influenza, and calls it “The Chinese Virus.” The company already has some workers back in the office, but nobody is wearing any PPE and there are no real precautions being taken. My partner was given an additional month before he must return due to concerns about my vulnerability, for which I am grateful. But if he is forced to return in a few weeks, my risk will not decrease. I could literally die as a result of his employer’s mandates. This terrifies me.

But! I am still hoping that we see action in the next month here in the US to continue or reinstate lockdowns. Nobody should have to die for anyone else’s selfishness or convenience. Cases in Germany have tripled since they loosened their restrictions, and they are considering a return to harsher lockdown conditions in order to save lives, and the same is also happening elsewhere. The ruling class has demonstrated to us that they do not value working class lives and consider us disposable. We must collectively seize the means for our own survival! But we need working class solidarity and organizing – and that means that you, yes you, need to get involved somehow. If you’re unsure how to do that, you can start by donating (even $5 matters!) to mutual aid groups, like MIMAC or one of the many other groups out there doing this work. Everyone has a role they can play – if you need help figuring yours out, find your local Leftists and we’ll be happy to show you a variety of ways you can get involved.

Finally, I want to leave you with this mindfulness exercise. I encourage you to start, today, changing your understanding of what is meant by “The Economy.” Share this idea with others. Let’s change this norm.

The post What’s In the Works appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I also want to encourage everyone to read during quarantine. If you are just starting to explore outside of the two-party system and are trying to gain an understanding of imperialism, colonizing, and why the US has only been at peace for 16 years of the 242 years it has existed, please pick up a copy of Joel Andreas’ Addicted To War: Why The US Can’t Kick Militarism and read it. If you want to talk about it with others, I’ve set up discussion space here on the website. But you should absolutely read it ASAP, because it will help you to make sense of our present conditions, and inform you on your future political choices.

I’m currently reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth. While thinking about it, I wrote this recently on my Facebook page:

I have been working for many years to confront feelings of shame that I have been reluctant to process, regarding many social injustices, and my own privilege in contrast.

That is part of being a revolutionary. So when you feel shame over the existence of social injustice and recognition of your own privilege despite that injustice, don’t ignore it. Use it. You need that to help inform the decolonization and revolution inside of your own mind, which enables you to then put those decolonizing and revolutionary actions out into the world.

Reading Wretched is forcing me to confront ideas in myself that, if I were not already keenly aware of what it is like to deprogram from a cult, it would be easy to feel slighted over, because those ideas often seem “natural” or like they are actually representative of your own self-informed beliefs. But I know that what I am confronting is the indoctrination and propaganda of the Establishment ruling class, so while I am willing to be accountable for my own thoughts and actions, I also do not allow myself to become reactionary to the information I’m learning. It is important as we decolonize, dismantle and abolish oppressive elements from our society that we do not let our ego take control. It is important to reflect on both the systemic implications and the role we personally play in those, so we can do better moving forward. Please consider this as you learn new information that forces you to re-examine your own beliefs and understanding of the world around us. Consider how we all need one another, that that our collective empathy and care for one another is so vital in these times.

Now, onto some more valuable resources!

Jane McAlevey, a seasoned worker organizer, was interviewed on The Jimmy Dore Show recently, and I highly recommend checking out the videos regarding strikes and actions during a pandemic. Rolling targeted strikes will be key, and we need worker solidarity – even if it is inconvenient or risky – because there is power in numbers, and the working class needs to show ours to the ruling class. We outnumber them, and as a united front, we can change the world to make it more livable for not just current generations, but for future descendants. Please check these videos and her books out. I’m reading one of her books after I finish with Wretched.

You can check out Jane’s site for a bevy of resources, too.

There is so much we can do to help one another in the short-term, as well as building long-term goals and efforts to force a world that serves the working class and our ecosystem, instead of the avarice of billionaires. We have lots of reason for hope – provided we band together, in a united front of working class solidarity. I’ll be updating the new Covid-19 Organizing Page in the coming days, and if you have resources that you believe belong on it, please reach out!

The post How To Organize, Strike, And Revolt During A Pandemic appeared first on Comrade Birb .

This is a screenshot from the Fox News homepage tonight. It is deadly propaganda.

Fox brainwashes those who rely on it for their news and worldview with jingoism and rugged individualism, and a distrust and hatred for The Other.

All of the major news outlets are mouthpieces for the Establishment, but Fox News has been the favored brand of white supremacists, white nationalist, fascists, and Nazis.

Every one of those groups platforms center on genocide. So it should come as no surprise that they are manipulating the pandemic narrative to suit their ideology.

Capitalism is a Death Cult, much like the Nazis, and Fox is its Heinrich Himmler.

I have family who have been brainwashed by Fox, and they are advocating for a return to “normal,” vilifying Gov Gretchen Whitmer for our state’s quarantine. I’m appalled by their attitudes and behavior.

They are playing useful rubes to Death Cultists. They could very well become the blood sacrifice to The Economy themselves. Some might even try to tell me that I must think of my child – that those sacrifices are necessary somehow to save his generation’s future.

But that’s objectively untrue. That’s certainly what Capitalists WANT us to believe, but that’s because it serves their whims. We’ve seen how arbitrary financial matters are; how many trillions has The Fed – an unelected body appointed by POTUS – pumped in over the last month to save Wall Street – primarily benefitting billionaires? We already went through this on a smaller scale in 2008, and here we are again. So, that future they say we gotta save for our kids – come 2032, give or take, will they need to repeat this sacrificial rite?

What if our tax dollars had bailed out mortgage payers instead of mortgage lenders in 2008? What would our world look like today? Since the bailouts of Wall Street were obviously ineffective, because here they are, hat in hand YET AGAIN, why are we Groundshog Daying ourselves through that shitshow again?

The same ruling class members who hid, lied, and delayed warning the public and taking action to protect us all so that they could rearrange their investments to profit from our illness, suffering, and deaths are now on the POTUS committee to reopen the economy. Do you feel they have the best interests of the working class (which includes those of us unable to work) as their priority, or their own? By the way, the White House has a committee strategizing tech and AI in order to compete with China for domination of those markets, and it involves not only fundamentally restructuring our economy, but our very way of life. You should probably read the FOIA document that has been severely underreported in this pandemic, because you might, like me, have serious objections to the world they expect us to live in. For more details, check out Whitney Webb’s excellent reporting.

There are numerous working class organizations working to procure relief for us, but we must accept and normalize their policy platforms. It may feel too radical, but you need to understand that you are facing a choice between what the billionaires deciding our collective futures without our consultation or consent want, and us fighting back to stand up for working class rights.

Billionaires regard workers as disposable biolabor units. They refer to people as “susceptible biologicals” in their vision for our future economy. Feel dehumanized yet?

So, what can you do?

• Educate: start learning about our material conditions, gain an understanding of class consciousness, read history and theory in order to understand why we are in this position, and what steps we can take as a united front to improve our lives and our communities. Help others by sharing your knowledge.
• Agitate: challenge the Establishment propaganda. Help normalize working class values as more beneficial to people and our planet by not being afraid to stand up for those values and promoting those. Support strikers. Participate in direct actions, if you are able. Build worker solidarity and reject and challenge Establishment Propaganda.
• Organize: do not act alone. Connect with others who are also doing the above and those who have an interest in doing so. If you can’t volunteer for Mutual Aid tasks, find MA requests, and if you can, give money, or if you can’t, boost signal by sharing and validating those requests in your own networks. Help normalize it.

Those are not complete – just things off the top of my head while in bed, unable to sleep.

Check out the new virtual reading club – totally free! Visit my Facebook and Twitter pages. There are many like-minded folks on both.

Check out the following organizations:

General Strike 2020

The People’s Bailout

Homes Guarantee

Both major political parties serve Wall Street and billionaires. Any policies they craft and adopt that benefits the working class is strategic to ultimately benefit the Establishment ruling class, or is simply incidental, although members of both parties are happy to take credit for it all as a part of holding onto their power, and the wealth that often accompanies it.

The status quo isn’t coming back. We do get a choice on how the future is shaped, though. But you must participate if you want to affect it in a way that benefits us instead of being a bleak totalitarian dystopia that places us on a path to extinction as a species.

Ignoring all of this means you choose dystopia for us all.

The post Fox News Is Heinrich Himmler appeared first on Comrade Birb .

So, I have a lot of bookmarks! I’d love to send you some. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Register for an account here on my site, which will give you posting ability on our reading club forum.
2. Email me with your mailing address from the same email acct you use to register. LMK how many you’d like (up to 5) I’ll mail them to you via USPS.
3. Get a copy of the book we’re currently reading.
4. Start reading! Share your thoughts/questions on the forum.
5. OPTIONAL: Share the club on your social media (THANK YOU!)

I look forward to exploring these reads with y’all!

Global Peace, Love, and Solidarity!

The post Radical Revolutionary Virtual Reading Club Signing Bonus! appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Today I’m excited to announce a new opportunity to agitate, educate, and organize while we are all in quarantine (and hopefully beyond!)

Comrade Birb’s Revolutionary Reading Club! The discussion forum is set up here. I’ll also be doing weekly podcasts reviewing what we’ve read and featuring comments from participants on the forum.

We’ll be exploring books by revolutionary and radical authors on subjects like:

• History
• Imperialism & Colonization
• Anti-War
• Anti-Racism
• Class Consciousness
• Dismantling Capitalism
• Civil Rights
• Community Organizing

The first book we’ll be reading together is Prof. Joel Andreas’ ADDICTED TO WAR – 2015 edition. It’s a graphic novel, and 74 pages long – with extensive sourcing in the index. You can find where to buy it in the forum post.

I’d like to open books to discussion for a month at a time. I know we are already into April, but given that this is a shorter read, and we’re all in quarantine, I think we can do this! My tentative plan is to announce our next book by April 15th, to give everyone time to get that as well. 

The post Revolutionary Reading Club appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I’ve been thinking that any justice should be administered by Indigenous Americans and American Descendents Of Slaves (ADOS). I don’t think whites can be trusted to be just. (I am descended from European colonizers.) We have our entire history of the nation in the way of evidence.

Regardless of how well-intentioned we might be as individuals, we have been systemically conditioned and indoctrinated by white supremacist imperialist propaganda. It’s very similar to the cult tactics I experienced growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I obviously defer to Indigenous People and ADOS as to what their stance on the matter is. I really think in order to achieve a just world, we descendents of European colonizers must unlearn a lot of what, turns out, was Nazi Propaganda all along.

We all need deprogramming. I’ve already started, which has given me a jump on most folks. But I’m here sharing what I’m learning to try to help you navigate this uncharted territory. I’m working on new content here in quarantine, which isn’t terribly different than my everyday life, with the exception of my partner and our kiddo being home all day, but I’m enjoying their company and our togetherness.

I hope you are faring well in this turdnado of history.

Planetary peace, love and solidarity!

????????

The post Pandemic Tribunal appeared first on Comrade Birb .

QUARANTINE NEWS

25 MARCH 2020

We are being confronted with the stark truth that our reality must change if we are going to survive as a species. Some of us have known this for some time, having listened to the scientific community that has been pleading with us to make massive structural changes to our socioeconomic system. But it’s evidently easy for most people to brush that off as not affecting them personally, or not coming in their own lifetime, until faced with systemic collapse and horrifying deaths from a pandemic.

So here we are, and people are panicking. But the last thing the working class should be concerning itself with is how the ruling class elites are going to continue enriching themselves on our backs, and instead seek our own survival through this crisis. Some workers have already been refusing to accept the risks their employers are taking with their lives. I’m seeing more people calling for a General Strike on social media.

The ruling class elites are pushing to restart the economy back to to the status quo. Refuse. The status quo is what led us to this pandemic, and they delayed telling us in order to PROFIT from it. I suspect that covid-19 may be one of the viruses that scientists have been warning us about waking up in the permafrost for years. If we do not stop the exploitative, extractive socioeconomic system of capitalism, we will continue waking up more plagues, and those will become the status quo. Workers will be expected to work until their untimely deaths from a horrifying disease, and that will be normalized. Is that the future you want?

Social distancing has proven to break the infection chain. Our hospitals in the US and elsewhere are beyond capacity, and we are losing vital healthcare workers to the pandemic. They are dying in order to care for other humans, and the capitalists want to burden them even further. This pandemic is causing so many hospitalizations and deaths, our existing healthcare and deathcare facilities are overwhelmed and alternative facilities are being built in parking lots, or existing ones that can be converted commandeered. If we do not keep these measures going and attempt to restart capitalism, it will result in greater deaths and suffering, along with breakdown of healthcare provision, vital supply chains (like food, fuel, and deliveries) and the ability of the working class to fight back will be severely diminished. It will be catastrophic for humanity and our ecosystem if we allow them to restart their death machine. It’s already been demonstrated in history for us. We must listen.

Consider beyond yourself and your own family – realize that prisoners and detainees are in crowded, filthy spaces, and infections are spreading swiftly. Our carceral state is helping to rapidly spread this deadly virus.

Do not look away. It will eventually affect you, even if it does not now.

Do not fall victim to the propaganda all around us conflating capitalism with existence. Capitalism has only existed for 500 years. Human commerce has been around for at least 150,000. We can exist without capitalism, or we can perish within it. Check out yet another article demonstrating how when capitalism is shut down, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

Find a mutual aid group in your community. You can search on Google and Social Media. I have a Facebook page where I am listing the ones that I find and any requests or offers for/of aid here. If you have a group you’d like listed, please email me at thebirb AT comradebirb.com.

Be ready to take a stand with the rest of the working class against this system that regards us all as expendable, disposable, meaningless sacrifices for the ruling class and ALWAYS HAS. They’ve just stop obfuscating their contempt for us during this deadly crisis. Learn from this, and never be their hostage or useful rube again.

WORKING CLASS SOLIDARITY FOR PEOPLE AND PLANET!

The post BLOG: COVID-19 AND THE WORKING CLASS appeared first on Comrade Birb .

QUARANTINE NEWS

24 MARCH 2020

If the past two days have not opened the eyes of the working class to just how disposable the ruling class regards our lives, what will it take for those still in denial about it to recognize that? Even the corporate news media and some politicians are acknowledging that US President Donald Trump’s impatient insistence to get the market restarted in order to keep wealth flowing to the top is dangerous. Health officials – the same who Trump dismisses as having less informed perspective on pandemics than himself – are pleading for continued quarantine.

Capitalists, whether they are politicians, billionaires, corporate executives (sometimes all 3 in one!), or their boot-licking peons, have been all too willing to sacrifice the lives of others in the name of capitalism – and without the consent of those victims! Check out the tweets from this alleged attorney, Scott McMillan, as seen on Twitter.

Scott’s ready to sacrifice seniors and disabled people like myself, but one of the insightful fans from the Comrade Birb Facebook page pointed out, 2.5% probably covers a lot of capitalists! Give that an ole Midwest OPE!

I understand that things are moving quickly, but please take notice of how much we are getting to see from “behind the curtain” of power and recognize that class war has been going on since long before any of us were born. This is a long-time struggle of humanity, and it only makes sense that it is reaching its peak at the same time that our planet manifests an inability to sustain that struggle on our behalf. This imbalance of life quality, due to the hoarding of resources by a a minority, while relying upon the exploitation of the majority and the extraction and exploitation of our shared ecosystem to enrich a few cannot continue. The economy is a human construct. Humans must preserve ourselves. The ruling class has the means to make this planetary pause possible. They have demonstrated they lack the will. The working class must demonstrate to them that labor creates all wealth!

There are stores, factories, offices, all standing still during quarantine. But are those empty? NO! They contain all of the objects and machines that we are told would create wealth without us, but what is actually happening? It is obvious that they need workers to perform activities with those tools in order for the enterprise to be functional. Workers are the only way that Capitalism works. And all workers must be underpaid in comparison to the value they create in order for profit to exist. Profits are the stolen wages of workers.

The ruling class has been receiving billions and trillions in bailouts to prop up their hoards of wealth during this pandemic, and they have received taxpayer funded bailouts in the past when they have crashed the economy with their greed and carelessness. Every time this happens, the working class suffers more losses in income and freedom.

We are all facing the imminent collapse of our healthcare systems as they are overwhelmed by patients, and this is forcing crushing choices upon medical staff when they have limited resources like respirators, masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. Already we’ve read the stories of those doctors and nurses who have had to make unthinkable choices about who will receive life-saving care, and who will be left to die.

We know concentrations of people together help spread the disease, and yet very little to nothing is being done to help imprisoned people and the refugees being held in concentration camps. We know we all need to shelter in place, but what of the unhoused – expecting them to crowd into shelters that already didn’t have enough space before this crisis is sentencing them to horrible deaths.

Have you heard or read what death is like for victims? I won’t get into all of the terrifying details, but it is not a gentle good night, and if you’re feeling cocky about it, saying it’s no different than seasonal flu, you are deadly wrong, and need to correct it.

We are going to have traumatized survivors – both of the virus itself, and beloved survivors of victims of the virus, in our communities, and already do. But those numbers are going to grow, and we’re going to need to develop community strategies and resources for helping them. The federal government has demonstrated its reluctance to provide us with our basic survival needs, even as those same leaders manipulated the news cycle in order enrich themselves from our suffering instead of warning us. Do not trust them to have your best interests at heart. They regard workers as expendable biolabor units, to be used, abused, and disposed of when they’ve used us up.

Capitalists use indoctrination and propaganda to manipulate us. But the working class actually has the upper hand being in our homes. Don’t go back to work to make capitalists even more rich. Demand that the billionaires who made their fortunes on the backs of workers, and who misled us about this global pandemic through the media and politicians – who they own – in order to secure their own gains, pay for all of us. We’ve learned that billionaires and corporations pay little to no income taxes. So the working class has been holding up the economy all this time. Let that sink in. They cannot “restart the economy” without workers!

I echo Comrade Lenin’s query: What Is To Be Done?

And I urge you to get familiar with Mutual Aid, Rent Strike, and General Strike.

You must choose sides. You are unlikely a capitalist if you are reading this. And if you are, HEY you know you can stop being a hoarder and share your resources in humanity’s time of need, right?

The Age of Capitalism is over. The Working Class must choose to fight for socialism, or lay down our lives for the barbarism of these wealth hoarders, who could very literally bring on extinction with their continued insistence that they be served and enriched during a global plague, and by restarting the same capitalist practices that have driven the ecosystem damage that this pandemic will likely be traced back to one day. My personal suspicion is that it is something that was frozen safely away in the permafrost and that it’s one of the things that scientists have been warning us would happen for the last several years now.

Restarting the economy and returning to “status quo” is a death sentence for humanity. The billionaires can easily eliminate debt and enable us to all live safely and comfortably in homes while our species recovers from this pandemic and we can work on sustainable, just policies for all to be implemented. They’ve always had the means – they just haven’t had the will. You’re seeing it everywhere with rapid policy and structural changes happening in response to covid-19. Let’s give them the will.

I aim to misbehave. Do you?

The post BLOG: Capitalism’s Covid-19 Crisis appeared first on Comrade Birb .

QUARANTINE NEWS

23 MARCH 2020

It’s safe to say that there’s almost nobody on our planet who hasn’t been affected by our current covid-19 virus pandemic, save for the few remaining uncontacted tribes on our planet, who should be left alone. If you’re reading this, you’ve undoubtedly been impacted in some way by it.

I am chronically ill and have multiple autoimmune disorders, including severe asthma, that make me high risk for contracting this virus. It would almost certainly hospitalize me, and quite possibly kill me. I’ve been in self-quarantine at home for over a week now and expect to be here for the foreseeable future.

My partner is thankfully able to do his IT Network Engineering/Virtualization work remotely; now instead of being expected to do that only on his personal time, during evenings and weekends, he was able to get approval last Thursday to perform his assigned work hours from home. He was potentially exposed at work last week, and so keeping him home has reduced the risk of our spreading it if we did get exposed, reduced my continued exposure, and reduced the triggering of my cPTSD. I am privileged and I am grateful for it, while recognizing that there are still vulnerable others who need their rights fought for, and I’ve been pressuring our state officials through social media, Resistbot, email and phone calls to take measures to protect the unhoused, victims of domestic violence, and prisoners, as our Governor has escalated up to an Executive Order for our state, mandating remaining at home for all but essential workers and travel.

Of course, as I write this, Fox News is attempting to manipulate POTUS into forcing everyone back to work during a pandemic, and based on his immediate responses on Twitter, they are experiencing some success. This is concerning, but not shocking, because as I’ve pointed out here many times in the past, the capitalist upper/ruling/owner class has always regarded workers and their families as disposable. It’s always been reflected in their policies, but they’ve constructed complex bureaucracies in which they were able to couch and obfuscate their cruelty, justifying those policies as somehow “fair to everyone,” when in reality, those have always placed already wealthy and powerful people in an advantaged position to maintain, and often gain more wealth and power.

They’ve indoctrinated us with white supremacist capitalist propaganda to elevate a minority of rich and powerful people as somehow more worthy than the rest of us of enjoying not simply the luxuries of life, but the necessities, like healthcare, safe housing, safe reliable food and water, personal needs, transportation, and happiness. They hold workers hostage to their paychecks and healthcare, even during a GLOBAL PANDEMIC that is spreading like wildfire because those at the top refuse to tolerate a pause to their resource hoarding. They even delayed, deceived, and denied the news of how serious the covid-19 disease is, in order to first position themselves to profit from people’s suffering.

Now that we are all facing literal life and death, it’s not as easy for them to use indoctrination, propaganda, and coercion to convince us to serve their avarice and whims. While many working class folks are still in denial and playing useful rubes to capitalists by believing the continued attempts to diminish its severity, despite world health officials pleading with us to take this seriously. Many doubters cite the annual deaths from influenza as reason to dismiss covid-19 as posing even less of a threat, however, those seasonal flu deaths are ALSO preventable, AND – influenza is infectious when people are symptomatic. That means they can either recognize their own illness, or at least other people can avoid those who are observably symptomatic. This is not true with the coronavirus. People can be asymptomatic – that means no observable symptoms, not even to themselves, for weeks! They can be unwittingly spreading the virus to others.

Some links I’ve shared on social media this week that are directly related to this crisis and should factor into your understanding:

A map for the US population and leaders to consult on expert projections regarding spread of the virus in each state, and how long before their healthcare system is overwhelmed if they do not implement and enforce social distancing.

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now and its follow-up, Coronavirus: The Hammer And The Dance, are both packed with information and resources you may not be familiar with yet.

Cloth masks are no replacement for N95 surgical masks and may help spread the virus.

What you need to know about online tools during social distancing, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I hope that this information is helpful to you. I’m fighting horrible seasonal allergies right now, so my speaking voice is quite limited. Rather than attempting to record podcasts, I’ll be writing blog posts in the meantime, to keep in touch during quarantine.

Planetary Peace, Love, and Solidarity!

????

The post BLOG – Capitalism’s Covid-19 Crisis appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Today’s episode is shorter – let me know how you like the format. Here are links relevant to the discussion:

The Fed injects $1.5 trillion into economy to benefit billionaires

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now – Politicians, Community Leaders and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When?

Concentration and Extermination Camps

Deaths under Communism debunked

US Govt & Media Whitewash Nazi Holocaust Using Debunked “Black Book Of Communism)

Why They Still Need Their Big Lies About Socialism

RevLeftRadio on debunking the lies about Communism

The post PODCAST: Episode 9 – Covid-19 & Capitalism appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Just like Mary Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of Typhoid Fever. It’s believed she caused up to 50 deaths in the major outbreaks of disease she caused.

So even if you dismiss the threat to yourself, consider whether you can live with knowing your negligence and apathy caused others to become gravely ill and possibly die. That will be part of your legacy.

Yes, nearly everyone has bills to pay and is one paycheck from disaster. Can’t you see that’s by design? These aren’t a collection of individual failures – it is a collecTIVE issue due to the fact that our socioeconomic system is designed to exploit most of us, in order for a small minority of humans to hoard most resources, while the rest of us struggle to get by. There is plenty for everyone. The 1% needs to be taken out of power.

Mary Mallon was just a worker in service to the upper class trying to make ends meet. Just as so many are today. Your Typhoid Mary might be a cook at Taco Bell. Or Burger King. Or Olive Garden. Or a cashier at the supermarket. Maybe the receptionist at your hair salon. Start thinking about every contact you make in your day to day life with workers who are paid low wages, with no paid sick time, and high deductible or no health insurance at all.

The establishment regards those people as disposable. Do you? Are those of you who identify as centrist maybe reconsidering your fear of the “radical” notion of socialized medicine?

That same establishment has spent $32 million PER HOUR since 2001 on WAR. Why don’t Centrists ever question that spending, only ever social welfare and collective benefit programs? If Centrism is supposed to represent a balanced, independent middle, why do so many of their policy stances lean toward the conservatism, regressiveness, and “rugged individualism” of the far-right? ???????? How is it that Centrists never have positive positions regarding Leftist policies?

Anyway, start giving thought to the changes you start seeing in response to the covid-19 pandemic. Notice things like San Fransisco rolling out washing stations in response to this, and yet despite being one of the most affected cities by the housing crisis and having been asked by the unhoused community to provide these, didn’t.

The resources are available to end human suffering. The will to do it isn’t –  until capital is threatened. They don’t care when it’s “only” human suffering, because they’d have to then ALSO admit that this system is built on injustice and requires human suffering to be maintained.

We are at a watershed moment in history. Whose side are you on: capital, or life?

The post Covid-19 in the USA appeared first on Comrade Birb .

A link to a sociologist’s website in which they explain Othering.

Here is the workshop report from TNI that I mentioned in this episode, regarding authoritarianism and how to challenge it.

Read more about General Smedley Butler here. 

This article details the timeline of CIA atrocities committed around the world. Capitalism requires their enforcement of our policies and demands globally, even without citizen knowledge and consent.  And here’s an article detailing the 35 countries where the CIA supported Fascists, drug lords, and terrorists. It’s from 2014 and requires updating, but this should inform you on the fact that the corruption issues in the US didn’t just start with the 2016 election.

Those at the top KNOW that they are collapsing our ecosystem on us. If you are a climate change denialist, you are their useful rube. If you accept climate change science, but fail to accept the scientists findings that the practices of capitalism are the cause, how are you materially different than those who deny the science? Welcome to the Capitalocene.

The capitalism pyramid is basically the same as it was when it was first drawn in 1911.

I’ve previously wrote about the book ADDICTED TO WAR on the blog. I am trying to fundraise to buy multiple copies to place in Little Free Libraries around Michigan as well as in a counter-military recruitment campaign for Michigan Students. I believe that the graphic novel format and relatively short length of the book makes it easier to ramp up to speed in one’s understanding of US Imperialism than trying to dive into an all-text history book first, but you should do that, too.

Funds raised thus far have allowed us to purchase 18 good condition used copies of the book at about $4 a copy shipped, versus the $15 new price. We’re hoping to acquire more to be able to distribute with students and perhaps teachers in the campaign Movement For People’s Democracy Michigan will be working on in the coming months.

Can you help with a donation? Even a couple of bucks from several people will help us in this goal. I don’t want anyone to hurt their own ability to live. But if you have an extra two or three dollars it would be deeply appreciated! Thank you comrades.

Solidarity and Peace!

PayPal: thebirb@comradebirb.com

Cashapp: $gremlinfarts – my referral code link is below

Hey! I’ve been using Cash App to send money and spend using the Cash Card. Try it using my code and we’ll each get $5. KMSWQSD
https://cash.app/app/KMSWQSD

The post PODCAST: Episode 8 – Communism and Socialism As Scare Words appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Here’s a link to the interview with Ian Dunlop, the senior member of the advisory board for the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, and FORMER fossil fuel executive.  And here’s a link to the Daily Beast (not my favorite source, but the author appears to be an actual trained journalist) article about the role of Gina Rinehart, the billionaire coal executive who has spent $4.5 billion on climate crisis denial efforts, in Australia’s bushfires.

The Constitution was written to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. They were unsatisfied with their inability to centralize power and collect taxes, and the common people were acting under the Articles of Confederation to try to improve their lot somewhat, so the Founding Fathers met again to write the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. I’m not suggesting that the Articles of  Confederation should be reinstated, however, it is important to note the historic pattern of the ruling class using their power to squash any attempt by the working class to achieve justice.

Learn more about how the media uses propaganda to manipulate us so that you can recognize their tactics. Social Media has also been a very effective engine for the ruling class to indoctrinate the public.

The post PODCAST: Episode 7 – Identifying Some Ruling Class Propaganda appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I’ve talked about it on social media, but I realized I’ve never made a post here on the website on the project I’m working on in meatspace. I’m trying to encourage radical changes in thinking by placing books in the Little Free Libraries in my area. I think that reaching out to people who already enjoy reading is a way to help educate the working class. I plan to purchase books like those on my recommended reading list.

For my Yule gift from my family, I asked for custom bookmarks being printed, that I will place inside these books to encourage readers to explore the ideas from the books I placed in further depth by listening to my podcast and reading my blog.

I’ve put in a request with an online used bookseller to see if I might be able to qualify for their donation program, but I’m still waiting to hear back, and even if I get approved, I’m not sure how many I will get approved for per month, or what titles will be made available to me. So I’d like to see if I can do some crowdfunding toward the effort. I will purchase the books used from Better World Books or directly from the author if they offer bulk discounts, like the author of the Addicted To War graphic novel does.

If you’d like to help, I have two ways you can help fund this project:

1) My Patreon: this is a monthly sustainer program in which you can pledge (starting at $1 a month!) to help fund my project on a monthly basis.

2) Ca$happ: $gremlinfarts PayPal: thebirb@comradebirb.com

3) Purchase copies of ADDICTED TO WAR and have them drop shipped to me.

4) Purchase a gift card from Better World Books where I can find used copies of books, often retired from Libraries.

I really appreciate any assistance you can offer to this goal! Thanks comrades!

The post BLOG POST: Little Free Library Project Request appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Today’s episode centers on some thoughts I’ve had regarding socialized housing, with housing as a guaranteed human right instead of a commodity that enriches a few on the backs of us all. Here are some relevant and related links.

Many people think they are 1%ers, but unless they’re clearing at least a minimum of $700k (and typically far more) in yearly wages, they are not. Check it out at Investopedia. 

It’s also worth knowing that Utah found the solution to houselessness, but thanks to the greed and cruelty of the landlord/owner/ruling classes, the product was defunded, and as a result, chronic houselessness is back on the rise after having dropped by an incredible 91% under their Housing First model.

I mention in the podcast the fact that many full-time workers are now houseless. This has been covered by the media, but somehow most people I meet seem blissfully unaware of it. We in the working class are all closer to becoming unhoused than we are to be in a position to buy a mansion for millions, so should concern you personally to see this. There’s at least one YouTube Channel devoted specifically to stories of unhoused workers. That is a poor reflection on us as a society. If this is the height of capitalism, what do we have to look forward to as it crashes?

While it sickens me that I have to provide justification for the idea that no human being should be deprived of housing, I wanted to provide you a partial list of some organizations you may have heard of who also have taken a stance on this issue:

American Bar Association

The United Nations

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

National Economic & Social Rights Initiative

The post PODCAST Ep #6: Housing As A Human Right appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Moving forward I am going to respond to anyone who claims that Communism or Socialism have caused more deaths than Capitalism by asking if they are willing to read this book.

Frankly, anyone who refuses is up to their eyeballs in horseshit about their alleged moral concerns pertaining to the way the ruling class has treated the working class in a particular nation or state. Anyone with a gram of integrity will be seeking truth, even if it causes them to question deeply held beliefs.

If it’s any consolation, most people’s “beliefs” are actually indoctrination and propaganda that took root in their brainmeats and fit together with their pre-existing biases so well, it seemed like their own original thought. Start paying attention to how you construct conversation. Be mindful of phrases you use, not because you consciously chose those, but because it’s a common aphorism or slang. Or a product slogan. How do most people form opinions?

We have so much ruling class programming in our brains. Some of it, we’ll be unable to even recognize as propaganda and not actually ever having been representative of our own thoughts until we are years into a post-capitalism world. I’m confident of this, because my own escape from the JW cult and -continued- therapy TO THIS DAY due to the trauma that their propaganda caused informs me on the process of deprogramming from cults. I escaped in 1996. I am still finding shit in my brain that THEY planted, and was never my own thought!

Capitalism is a cult. It is a genocidal cult. Climate collapse is eugenics for the rich to get rid of the rest of us as the climate becomes unlivable and automation can perform more of the jobs. They expect to survive in the bunkers I’ve linked numerous times in past posts and terraform once the climate allows. The Nazis at the top have used the US military to enforce their will on the rest of us.

Go ahead and mock away. Maybe I’m wrong. But my gut WILL NOT SHUT UP and it says Fascism is going to be full blown sooner than any of us expect. The more informed you are about history, the less likely you are to become complicit in Fascist cruelty. This 74 page graphic novel will give you the basics in an easily digestible form, and it is all referenced with an index of sources in the back.

If you use the link in my sidebar to search Better World Books inventory (they nearly always have copies), I will receive credit from them that will go toward my project outlined on my Patreon (also linked in sidebar) to place copies of books like this in Little Free Libraries in my rural area with bookmarks letting readers know they can find more working class book recommendations on my website.

Thanks for reading! Could you please share this post to your social media? Scroll to the bottom of the page to click and share. ????????

The post BOOK: Addicted To War by Joel Andreas appeared first on Comrade Birb .

As always, I cannot recommend enough that every American read sociologist and historian James W. Loewen’s important book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

This is an excellent piece from a historian regarding the documented relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. It’s not your school Thanksgiving pageant, which was, by the way, propaganda.

Here’s another piece examining the historicity and whitewashing of Thanksgiving.

This is an example of a hawk’s bell. Keep in mind that the Arawaks had to find enough gold dust to fill these if they wanted to keep their hands. Not gold nuggets. DUST.

Thanksgiving wasn’t a national holiday until a 19th Century Social Influencer started a campaign to make it happen and President Abraham Lincoln saw a way to try and unify North and South around one national identity.

If I’ve forgotten any links, please send a message from the WANNA SQUAWK form or you can tweet me @comradebirb.

The post Podcast #5: Columbus, Pilgrims, and You appeared first on Comrade Birb .

FACT: America Actually ‘Invaded’ Russia after World War I

So, let’s talk about this. Did you know about it? Howard Zinn goes into depth on it, so does James W Loewen, but I bet your high school history textbook didn’t pay it much, if any, space. And this is from a site that admires HENRY GODDAMN KISSINGER (fucking warmonger) so there should be no accusation of getting this from “fringe Leftist sources” ????

This is a small sliver of our working class history that the ruling class has worked to suppress. As the URL above states correctly: “History is a weapon.”  So, we have to choose whether to wield it or have it used on us. We have the knowledge to deprogram ourselves from the propaganda they served us up as history in high school, preparing us to become part of The Machine that makes them rich. This is our opportunity to expose the man behind the curtain and get what we need. Ask yourself whether you you want to use objective truth to protect yourself and your loved ones from the ruling/owner/1% class, or be beaten by them with lies, gaslighting, and abandoning us to the climate collapse they have started and will continue until they retreat to their survival bunkers, which they have been preparing for some time now, all while luring some members of the working class into a false sense of invincibility regarding the climate, in order to keep them complacent and continuing to perform labor to produce valuable goods and services, so that the owners can steal wages in the form of profits.

These literal battles against workers used to be commonplace, and as labor rights continue to roll back, do not doubt that the ruling class will use these same tactics. They’ve become more sophisticated, so have their techniques. Just like attempted de facto genocide is happening in the refugee concentration camps by denying the people medical care, INCLUDING FLU SHOTS THAT HAVE BEEN OFFERED FOR FREE, we will see their schemes become more nefarious, manipulative, and highly propagandized in order to pit the working class at one another the way the have used the Trumpist movement to polarize and pit the working class against one another. This is all despite the fact that increasingly, most of us, including the racist, homomisic, transmisic, ablelist, white supremacist “just folks” who show up for The Fanta Menace’s rallies, all have more in common with unhoused people than we do or ever will with billionaires. And yet, with even scientists telling us that we must disrupt the economic system that has enabled these billionaire predators and parasites to get rich and powerful on our backs, these fools gladly defend the very system that could kill them and all their loved ones, all of humanity moving forward. And it isn’t simply Republicans or Conservatives – Liberals and Democrats and just as complicit in upholding these systems, and more people seem to be waking up to that fact.

Capital has only been an element in human lives for a few hundred years. Commerce, trade, even international trade, can be traced back at least 150,000 years. Capitalism, which enslaves the working class to varying degrees and severity of exploitation, depending upon privilege and other factors determined by the ruling class, in order that what those workers produce may be extracted by the owners and redistributed amongst the ruling class. The ruling class fears and loathes the term “wealth redistribution” because they have been doing it to us for millennia and don’t want to be found out. Remember, these are the same people who employ the Nazi propaganda tactic of “accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty” (paraphrased).

Capitalism is a system that requires exploitation of workers and ecosystem, and extractions from both that benefit a small minority of people (ruling/owner/1% class) while imposing suffering and struggle upon the majority (working class).  It cannot be reformed to benefit workers because it cannot function without exploiting them and extracting from what they produce. That is literally what profits represent.

Billionaires, owners, “job creators,” ruling class – whatever you label them, they are a small minority of humans who regard other people as prey. That’s the bottom line, and it’s reflected in the fact that Bezos just stripped health insurance from employees because he was “losing” money, as if that’s even palpable to the richest person on the planet.

We are surrounded by ruling class propaganda, including in our history. And that’s just one of the weapons they use against us. Don’t fall for it! I’ve been identifying their tactics for the past couple of decades and can help. Keep reading, and more podcasts are soon to come.

The post Forgotten Working Class History appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I really didn’t think that I would need to say this, but the chudwanker invasion over the weekend that I had to clean up last night brought to my attention that some are under the mistaken belief that this page is run by a Liberal member of the Democratic Party, or that either of those things represent Leftist politics.

No.

Liberal politics and the Democratic Party are just another facet of capitalism. They reinforce and use the power of the ruling class (aka owner/1% class) over the rest of us in the working class along with Conservatives and Republicans/GOP/Libertarians.

Capitalism has only existed for a tiny slice of human history. There has been commerce, international trade, even, for 150,000 years that we know of. It’s only been about 500 for Capitalism, if you consider mercantilism its infancy. That’s how long a minority of humans have been exploiting the majority of others in order to extract the surplus value of the labor of others and label this theft “profit.”

Wage work is still a relatively new concept, having only started in the 18th century in England, and it was met with resistance even back then! It has been seen as a form of slavery by many going all the way back to Cicero in Ancient Rome.

I am a Communist. I believe people are more valuable then the things we create, and that definitely includes profit. I believe working people should have power over themselves. I believe that everyone should have a fair, just, enjoyable life, not simply a few predators and parasites at the top who utilize a system of theft created by white men who enslaved other humans to continue that system of exploitation and extraction on us today. I believe that those at the top have employed a system of propaganda indoctrination as well as a carceral state to control the working class, and I see evidence of it every day. I am a cult survivor having escaped in 1996 from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I have a keen sense for recognizing cult tactics. It became quickly apparent to me as I was shedding JW propaganda back then that there was another layer. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but after the 2000 election and 9/11, I began to realize it was our way of life itself.

After leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I spent a great deal of time reading about critical thinking skills and have been developing those and will continue the rest of my life, as does any wise person. I encourage you to become familiar with basic scientific thinking, cognitive biases, being able to identify reliable sources of information, logical fallacies, and self-criticism. If you loved Neo in The Matrix, those are the skills he ultimately uses to save humanity. Sure, the guns helped, but that was just because they had to fight the reactionaries defending the system before they could get to the root of the oppression of humanity and deal with it.

Humanity has been recording its logical failings for a long time. The reason things like history and philosophy are so important to our everyday lives is that we have the ability to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors so that we do not continue repeating them. But that is only possible if we either make the effort to know those things ourselves, or have trustworthy sources of information – that we can verify – informing us.

This has gotten longer than first intended, particularly since I’ve only gotten about 3 hours of sleep and I’m writing this from my phone in bed!

Finally, I’m just going to repeat what I’ve said on the Facebook page, which is that I have no obligation to host any particular person or conversation that I do not want to. That is not a violation of their First Amendment rights, because I am not the government trying to suppress their speech. You have no explicit right to free speech in a private forum, and I will not tolerate the presence of Fascist chudwankers here on the website, or on any social media platform. They will simply be blocked. Trust me, I have no issue with it. I was raised in a cult that practiced shunning, so I was forced to develop that skill as a child, and it has never left me.

That said, I hope that comrades and allies are doing as well as possible this morning. This week I am recording a new episode and will be recording old episodes for better sound quality. Thank you so much for your support and understanding. I appreciate you all very much! ????????

In Solidarity,

The Birb

The post Weekend Chudwanker Convention appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I’m Gen X, myself. Hey, yeah! Remember us? Nobody seems to these days, but that’s been par for the course with us our entire lives. And you wonder why we’re so damn cynical. Anyway.

There a systemic issue, particularly amongst those (of ALL ages) who possess the diseased Boomer Mindset of “I got mine, fuck everyone else” where they have blamed the Millennials for all of their woes and that has been repeatedly proven to not align with objective reality. I am not here for that and I am trying to educate so that MAYBE, just maybe, our species stands a chance against what’s coming.

If you’re reading this blog, likely you already recognize this. And if you’re like me, every day, you are retyping some version of this all out to explain to others who haven’t yet. I thought I’d make a blog post and a meme to summarize the basics on this matter that can be easily linked and shared.

There are some Baby Boomers who are particularly sensitive about all of this, and I made this meme for them. It really applies to ALL situations in which people are recentering the real issue onto themselves personally and letting their ego speak on their behalf instead of their rational mind, because they fear being the problem. If we fear being a problem, we should work to determine if we are in the first place, and if so, correct it. If we determine we do not fit the defined conditions of the problem, there is no need for us to say “But -I- am not like that” in order to get personal recognition for being a compassionate human being. We SHOULD be compassionate human beings. There are no cookie or gold stars to be handed out for that. We are just so used to cruelty being the norm, it feels unusual when someone demonstrates empathy and compassion. But it SHOULDN’T – empathy and compassion should be our norm!

We also need to think outside of our own behaviors and personal lives when we are considering SYSTEMIC issues. We need to learn about those and determine how we can contribute beneficially to our system and to others in it, instead of serving the whims of the ruling/owner class/1% at the top – WHO WANT US DIVIDED. They want you to stumble on your fragile ego as it pertains to correcting these societal wrongs, because solving these problems means they won’t have all of the money and power any longer. Why would you serve their needs instead of those of your own kith and kin? We will never be able to address climate collapse, income inequality, and Fascism if we are all stuck in a state of fragile ego. It is counterrevolutionary and it will just keep getting us more of the same kind of horseshit the world has now. It is hard work and there are lots of things that we will need to personally work on that will require us to be teachable. So let’s be teachable.

Hey, as always, feel free to use my memes if they are useful to you in your own work. Credit me or don’t – what matters to me is the signal boost to get the message out there.

Stay Shiny,

The Birb

The post What Is Boomerism? appeared first on Comrade Birb .

In Solidarity,

The Birb

The post Podcast Delays appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I must apologize again for the lack of podcast episode last week. I’ve not been feeling well, and as it turns out, as I discovered at urgent care yesterday, I have shingles. So I’m now on a course of medications for those, and trying to keep on top of the pain levels as much as possible. The prednisone is helping today, so I’ve been working on some new memes using art from the very talented artist, Alifstyle on Fiverr, as well working on the script for this week’s podcast. 

One of the key takeaways from everything I do that I want listeners and readers to ruminate on is the fact that Capitalism is a pyramid scheme, just like Multi-Level Marketing schemes. And just like MLM’s, Capitalists have used propaganda and cult tactics to indoctrinate the American public in order to keep us compliant with their demands, even if we don’t recognize those as such. I’m not the only one who says this, and there are many who’ve said it longer than I have. If you don’t understand this, I have spent a couple hundred hours of my time GRATIS, so far, writing and producing my podcast, this site, and its associated social media accounts in an effort to offer education, so please utilize it.

Capitalism has no solutions to the climate emergency, either – because it creates the conditions that caused the crisis in the first place, and stopping those practices would be too unprofitable for Capitalists. This intersects with the income inequality that is causing an even greater divide between the wealthy in power, and the rest of us. It’s all connected, and the Capitalists are desperate to sell you on their intentions to reform themselves. But how do you reform a system that relies upon the exploitation and extraction of people and planet in order to enrich a minority of humans? The practices of this system are making our planet increasingly inhabitable with each passing day, all so a few rich people can win the “high score” of Capitalism before they scurry off to their survival bunkers.

If you think Capitalism can continue alongside a survivable planet – you are woefully misinformed by those who profit from your ignorance, whether it is genuine, or if you have applied cognitive dissonance, and frankly, there is a moral divide between you and I, because your continued ignorance is a holdup to our ability to address these problems in a way that (1) minimizes deaths of the oppressed, particularly marginalized groups in the short-term (2) maximizes humanity’s chance of a livable future via immediate implementation of radical anti-capitalist, pro-social (get it? SOCIAL-ism, centering politics on ALL people and our ecosystem rather than on capital and a minority of humans who are actually capitalists) policies and practices. Your fear or arrogance is problematic. But I’m here trying to help y’all with that.

I understand that having our entire way of life challenged and uprooted is overwhelming. That is why I have made myself available as an educator – to share what I have learned. I am disabled by chronic illness and pain. It -costs- me something personally to invest myself into this work, and I have chosen it because of my love of humanity and our planet. I feel morally obligated to try and help us save ourselves.

If you are fearful or biased against reading socialist/Leftist books or other media – ask yourself why, particularly if you are a person interested in social and economic justice. Are your feelings yours, or feelings your family, friends, school, or job inculcated in you without any conscious debate or deductive reasoning on your part? Are you fearful of being mocked or questioned by family or friends? What is your refusal to learn more about socialist policy and practice based on?

I grew up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they told us not to read publications other than theirs, but PARTICULARLY, publications that were critical of their beliefs. It is a common cult tactic. And guess what? Capitalists have managed to use it in order to shape our society. I’m sure that sounds crazy if you aren’t already versed in Zinn, Loewen, and other historians who have brought us a people’s history – the real stories instead of the propaganda. This includes the fact that our nation was founded by racist white supremacists who enslaved Black people, as well as some Indigenous Americans (many others were victims of genocide at white settler hands), whose policies and philosophies on Black and Indigenous people continue to impact those marginalized people, as well as the rest of us, down to this day. This goes beyond the fact that the Founding Fathers owned slaves and enacted racist policies. That’s the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Just wait till you find out what’s underneath. It is vital that you are aware of those matters, especially if you are a white person, so that you can confront the indoctrination we all underwent and determine which of your thoughts are actually YOUR thoughts regarding politics, policy, race relations, the duty of leaders, and so on. It is also imperative if we are to unite, organize, and overthrow this corrupt system.

I will ask the same question I asked about the books the JW’s banned – if that information is so dangerous to my faith in these beliefs, if you are telling me that I “already” have the truth about reality (really, meaning sharing your personal view), how can these “ironclad” ideas be so easily disproven by exploring a book? Why would you assume that one book is all it would take to abandon those beliefs? If they are as truth-based and undeniable as you claim, shouldn’t reading anything critical of those beliefs be harmless and only reinforce the fact that those beliefs agree with objective reality? And if your argument is that I, personally, am incapable of discerning “truth,” then that’s not a very good argument about why you would want me to stay on “your side” of a matter, because then wouldn’t I simply be offering evidence of my ineptitude by choosing your beliefs, too? If you only think I’m right when I agree with you, that’s just ego talking, and it’s the 21st century, so, time to send that packing if you want to be a modern human.

Anyway, my meds are wearing off. Shingles are no joke. I’m going to leave you today with this article about what Karl Marx has to say about our environmental problems today. I hope you will think about the fact that we were not taught Marxist or class theory in school as a matter of course here in the US, and why, given his importance to the rest of the world, they would want to keep us from learning about it. If his ideas are such shite compared to Capitalism, wouldn’t they want to at least show how, in more detail than the propaganda we were given? Food for thought.

In Solidarity,

The Birb

The post Capitalism Is A Pyramid Scheme appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Well, profit is what is left over after paying out all of a company’s expenses. Who produced that profit? Was it investors, sitting on their yachts, while workers labored to produce the goods or services that generated that profit?

People will say, “You have to have money to make money,” but do they really consider the implications of that? It means that you either must possess wealth in the first place, meaning you inherited it, or you are one of the lucky few who managed to have all of the favorable variables in the same place at the same time and got rich – but that was still blind luck, regardless of how much work you put into it. Lots of people put in a lot of hard work every day, but not everyone becomes wealthy from it. It is typically a connection to the ruling class that helps someone eventually succeed – even if they themselves aren’t aware of that connection. Money changes everything. 

So, if you think being lucky enough to win the generational, or actual, lottery is the metric by which we should determine who receives profits, then I have news for you: ruling class, capitalist propaganda has shaped your opinion. Don’t feel ashamed – it is very common, because their indoctrination of us starts very young. As I’m covering in the podcast, our history textbooks are full of propaganda designed to persuade us to buy into a national origin myth that justifies the exploitation of most in order to enrich a few. But that’s all it is – propaganda. And it’s high time you broke free from it – because we are facing a global climate crisis unlike anything modern day humanity has dealt with before, and it’s human-made. It’s going to require radical, swift action on our behalf to help mitigate and manage the effects if we want our species to survive without “untold suffering.”

Given that the capitalists are the ones who drive this climate crisis with their policies and practices, neither they nor their two corporate-owned parties can provide us with solutions. We the people must do that ourselves, and it seems to me that if we weren’t all struggling financially, that would certain help us in those efforts, n’est-ce pas?

So try and wrap your mind around our new reality, and do it quickly, please, because our opportunity to create policy and practice changes that get implemented quickly enough to cope is a limited window, and it’s closing quickly.

Let’s organize!

The post Profits Schmofits appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Greetings Comrades!

Today’s podcast is a bit shorter in length, but I hope you’ll find it just as informative as my previous episodes.

The book I’m quoting from today is the same that I’ve been recommending every podcast thus far, and I hope you are planning to read it soon. Click on the meme below to read more about it at the Zinn Education Project, which you should also explore.

As mentioned in the episode, here is a link to my new Patreon, if you would like, and can afford, to send a buck or two my way every month for the work I’m doing here. Thanks for reading and listening. If you have any questions, please feel free to send me a message, either from the comments form, or on Twitter.

The post Podcast #4: Columbus and the US Origin Myth appeared first on Comrade Birb .

I’m working on this week’s podcast episode, in which I will be discussing some of the historical propaganda we are exposed to this time of year regarding the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. Information will be drawn from the James W Loewen book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and I’ll be continuing this theme through the month, exploring the first “settlers” in America, the “first Thanksgiving” and many other historical events of which you are, in all likelihood, unaware. I’ll be starting this week with Columbus, and I hope you’ll listen and find it educational. I also hope you’ll read the book for yourself.

I’ve also started a Patreon for my work here, and if you are able and would like to, you can become a patron for as little as $1/month to support it. I will be continuing to produce the podcasts, and hope to add vlogs and some original music I’ve been working on in the future. I appreciate any financial support, but what matters most to me is that you are listening and learning, so if you cannot afford it – I completely understand!

I’m dealing with some of my chronic health issues flaring this week, but I’m still aiming for releasing the podcast tomorrow.

Do you have any questions? Suggestions? Please get in touch. 

Thanks y’all!

In Solidarity,

The Birb

P.S. I just realized that “Podcast and Patreon” follows the same syllable pattern as “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” and now it’s stuck in my head.

The post Podcast and Patreon appeared first on Comrade Birb .

In today’s podcast, we’ll explore the concepts of Class-Based Societies and Wealth Inequality as it relates to our current socioeconomic system of Capitalism. Links from related or source material are found below.

How much you need to make in each state to be part of the 1% – Pay close attention to the difference between what you have to make to mathematically qualify as part of this percentage, versus what the average – AVERAGE – income is. That means there are many with income far above that amount.

The book I mentioned, Lies My Teacher Told me, is discussed on the Zinn Education Project website, which is something you should explore beyond their write-up on this book. It represents the work of historian Howard Zinn, who wrote about so much history that is not covered in US textbooks, and it is because these are stories that refute the propaganda the ruling class uses to manipulate the working class. You can purchase the book used here or new through any bookseller.

Some reading about white fragility.

Here’s an article regarding redlining. I also spoke about government enforced segregation, and you can read about that here. You should also check out this article regarding how things look today, segregation-wise, in the US.

I mentioned in my second episode that Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. I’m not the only one out here saying that, either. Here’s a couple of graphics for your consideration. The first is from 1911. The other is from today and is updated for our times. But the same basic structure is in place. These issues we are facing are not new. They are still present because the ruling class has refused to give up power, and has instead used their power to unscrupulously shape their world in their favor.

Be sure to click on each image to embiggen it, and think about how the economy has grown more complex since 1911, but the basic structure has remained intact. Then contemplate how the ruling class has poured so much money into anti-union policies. Who profits from our lack of working class organization? The bigwigs up top wouldn’t pursue just any policy position with conviction or funding if it didn’t serve their purposes. So maybe think about how much anti-union propaganda you’ve absorbed over your life and contemplate whether any animosity you have toward the concept of collective bargaining is truly your own, or if that thought was planted there by someone who profits from you holding that belief.

Image from Wikipedia

Image from CrimethInc

Once you become aware of the class divide, why it exists, and how it is maintained through manipulative practices by the ruling class, you are probably going to get pissed off! But never fear, I will be covering ways to proceed in future episodes. In the meantime, you should probably check out my social media presence (see the sidebar for links, or scroll to bottom of the page and a popop window will appear with links) and follow me there for daily food for thought, because I share a lot of information you could be benefiting from, and that’s not just me tooting my own horn. I am doing this in service to others, and many people have found that valuable. I hope you do, too.

In solidarity,

-The Birb

The post Podcast #3: Capitalism, Class-Based Societies, and Wealth Inequality appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Greetings comrades!

In today’s episode, I explore the commonalities between Capitalism and the economic systems that preceded it. I hope you’ll listen and share it with your family and friends.

This is hard work we are doing, trying to deprogram ourselves and decolonize our minds and our social structures, so there are going to be times when we will struggle with the emotional labor of it all – and if we are white, we need to work extra hard not to be fragile. We need to be accountable for the racist, white supremacist structures that have enabled our privilege. Even if we aren’t the ones who built those, we still continue to benefit from those, and that is at the expense of our non-white comrades. This meme popped up on my social media timeline today, and I think it is something to both take to heart and mind, and remember it when we start feeling defensive. It is far more courageous to be accountable than to weasel away from it.

I’m working on lots more content to be released every Thursday. If you have a story idea, are interested in being interviewed, being a guest, or if you are a Leftist artist producing art, music, poetry, or fiction and would like to be featured either on the podcast or blog, please get in touch!

Here are the links mentioned during the show, and others that you may find helpful.

In Solidarity,

Trase/The Birb

Book Recommendation (yes, again, you really need to read this.)

https://thenewpress.com/books/lies-my-teacher-told-me

Feudalism 

What is feudalism? Definition of medieval feudalism

Medieval Life – Feudalism and the Feudal System

Mercantilism

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Mercantilism.html

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mercantilism

Capitalism

https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/plantation-corporation

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades

Unhoused Population 

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/once-a-national-model-utah-struggles-with-homelessness-idUSKCN1P41EQ

Today’s Read: Thousands of Working New Yorkers Are Living in Homeless Shelters

Wealth Inequality

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-income-inequality-record-high-generational-wealth-2019-9

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/26/income-inequality-america-highest-its-been-since-census-started-tracking-it-data-show/

https://nypost.com/2019/10/22/the-have-nots-of-the-world-are-over-the-wealth-gap/

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-less-taxes-than-working-class-wealth-gap-2019-10

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics

MLM’s and Cult Tactics

https://freedomofmind.com/multi-level-marketing-groups-defraud-consumers/

https://freedomofmind.com/bite-model/

Capitalism Consumes Our Free Time

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/

Today’s featured image is this sassy meme from @leftytits on Instagram,

whose page you should absolutely be following, if you aren’t already! 

The post Podcast The Second appeared first on Comrade Birb .

Greetings, comrades!

I know it’s taken longer than originally anticipated, but here’s the debut of my podcast! I want you to be able to read for yourself the articles and information that I cite, so here’s a set of links from today’s episode, which I hope you’ll give a listen to at the link below.

EDIT 10/19/2019 16:32 est: A dear friend kindly pointed out that I mistakenly credit “A Wrinkle In Time” to Ursula LeGuin, when I SHOULD have said “A Warrior Of Earthsea.” Ha! My fingers were on autopilot writing that in the script. Mea culpa. ????

“Lies My Teacher Told Me” Book on the inaccuracies of US History Textbooks & Classes

https://thenewpress.com/books/lies-my-teacher-told-me

https://the1a.org/shows/2018-08-16/lies-my-teacher-told-me

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/history-education-post-truth-america/566657/

Climate Emergency & Capitalism 

https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/i-would-people-panic-top-scientist-unveils-equation-showing-world-climate-emergency.html

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/sep/20/climate-emergency-poses-major-threat-to-future-global-health-say-top-medics

https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2019/10/13/big-oils-direct-responsibility-for-the-climate-emergency/

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/20/global-climate-strike-facebook-amazon-and-twitter-workers-walk-out.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/09/magazine/climate-change-capitalism.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736

Climate Survival Bunkers of the Rich & Famous

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/amazing-doomsday-bunkers-of-the-super-rich/

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/doomsday-luxury-bunkers/index.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaire-bunkers-shelter-wealthy-during-apocalypse-2019-6

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday-preppers/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/us/apocalypse-doomsday-capitalists.html

Warning Signs of Fascism

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/holocaust-museum-warning-signs-fascism/

https://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-identifying-fascists/

http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/yale-professor-jason-stanley-identifies-three-essential-features-of-fascism.html

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanley

https://medium.com/park-recommendations/fascism-a-warning-madeleine-albright-e357f12d0d7c

Declassified CIA/FBI Programs & Their Victims

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/mk%20ultra

https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/

https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_cointelpro.html

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/badges-without-borders-stuart-schrader-imperialism-policing-cold-war

https://boingboing.net/2014/05/09/how-the-cia-created-the-unabom.html

https://listverse.com/2015/05/28/10-real-victims-of-the-cias-mkultra-program/

Please let me know if I missed any links I mentioned in the story and I’ll be happy to edit with updates.

Have questions? Comments or suggestions for an episode theme? So long as you are interested in talking about how humanity can move forward in a just, inclusive, equal manner, please send me a note. Head over to my contact page.

P.S. If you are a Capitalist Apologist (aka, bootlicker, in the parlance) here to defend this unjust, unfair system that is killing us all, then if you send me a note there’s a good likelihood I’ll delete it. OR, depending on my mood and how many spoons I have left, you might also get mocked mercilessly here and on social media. So, roll the die, I guess, but you will not change my mind about Capitalism. I don’t owe you a debate. I don’t owe you shit. 

The post Podcast Debut Episode appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The post Podcast In Process appeared first on Comrade Birb .

The post Welcome Comrades! appeared first on Comrade Birb .