Source: currently in that situation. Plane tickets are non-refundable or changeable (unless you pay a huge premium for them). Hotels act like this is the first time they are interacting with foreigners and do not accept payment outside of their very specific local methods (like bank transfers, literally the simplest shit ever, but they only accept local banks). I made an honest mistake booking some plane tickets on the wrong date, and I cannot change the dates now. Nope. Not even gonna look at the one button we need to click to update the database. Thanks for the money sucker please fly with us again. We're in a global pandemic, have been for 2 years, and the first thing hotels and airlines did was make sure to say that catching covid was not a valid reason for getting refunds. This should literally be considered extortion. I gave ample time to both the airlines and hotels when cancelling (guess who caught covid 🙄) so they could sell the room or plane ticket to someone else, but it's even more insidious. If you tell them you won't show up they get to sell the room again _and_ keep your money. Why isn't it extortion? Well, you can probably guess. Airlines lobby very hard to keep their service as shitty as possible. I didn't live through the 70s but see how much better airlines were in those times: ample space, premium service. Prices were actually not that different from today (today you also pay a lot of airport taxes, the plane ticket itself is actually really cheap if you get a breakdown of the receipt). So just to spite them, you are better off being no-show. Then they can't double-dip, the fuckers. But the worst was probably my own local rail company (somewhat publicly owned, as all train companies are now under neoliberalism) telling me I cannot get my tickets refunded even with covid. They are essentially saying Yes. Yes you should travel on the train with covid and infect everyone else -- no more mask mandates or imposed quarantines here btw. So they don't consider covid to _prevent_ you from getting on that train. And it's not like this company is going bankrupt and they need to watch every cent. Far from it; service is getting both worse and more expensive year after year. Just so the private investors can buff up their portfolio and see dividends. Thankfully I have travel insurance that I didn't even know about, and they _might_ be able to take care of refunding me the cancellations. They didn't get back to me yet. But for the plane ticket I booked on the wrong date, I'm on my own apparently. This is where capitalism gets us. Always chasing money, no matter the cost. If you could get money from squeezing people, literally squeezing them like you're making the hardest snowball ever, they would do it to you without thinking twice.

Seeing that we have a ton of members now, I'm interested in reviving the translation project of a Peruvian book called CIA Shining Path : Political Warfare from Spanish to English. This book has never seen circulation outside of Peru and even finding the PDF was difficult. But I have it here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/888127637057339456/901878199896670279/642_digitalizacion.pdf The author was a trade unionist close to the pro-USSR Alvarado government (or at least very favourable to it), and in this book he denounces Shining Path and Gonzalo as CIA agents. This is our chance to bring this book outside of Peru and the Spanish speaking sphere for the first time in history. Even if you don't agree with the subject matter, I think this remains a very interesting book full of good info (historical geopolitical facts on South America for example) that should definitely see more distribution. We started the project sometime last year and our schedules being what they are, all the volunteers (me included) got too busy and we put it on indefinite hiatus. If you speak good Spanish and feel this is a worthwhile project, I can definitely use your help. In my opinion this project does not require much central planning; it's a google doc so just hop on it, and start editing wherever there is a need. What we do is once you've corrected a paragraph you color it red to show it's done, and move to the next. That way you can translate whichever strings you want at whichever time you prefer and we make progress. You could do one sentence, one paragraph or one page a day as your time permits. What we have so far is a machine-translated copy in English and, armed with the original PDF, we go through the document line by line and correct the sentences to the best of our abilities. I'm writing this on the prolewiki community because the original plan was (still is for now) to publish it on prolewiki's library, as well as make PDFs and disseminate them. But yes the editor would technically be ProleWiki. If you're interested just comment here and I'll add you to the project!

How to wage guerilla warfare in the age of the hydrogen bomb.

This is during the month of Ramadan. Palestinian resistance groups instantly activated their co-cells to decide what to do. This means Hamas, Fatah, the communists and even the ISIS-adjacent group whose name I forgot right now. They are calling for general mobilisation to defend the mosque. The Telegram channel I follow blew up with 33 messages overnight. Palestinians are responding to the call to defend the mosque: https://t.me/GazaNewsPlus/1157 Occupation forces have been deployed and started dispersing the defenders with tear gas grenades and flashbangs. The fight started in the early morning of Friday April 15th local time. Real ammunition has been found in the mosque, fired by the occupation. A few dozen Palestinians were injured and were transferred to hospitals, but no deaths have been reported yet. I haven't had news in over two hours but will update as needed. # The analysis so far: This is highly reminiscent of Operation Sword of Jerusalem last year. Similar events led to the biggest joined operation (and biggest Hamas operation) so far, where hundreds of rockets were fired on the occupier over the summer, after they tried to attack the same mosque. Returning to the Mount is an extremist group that even settler police doesn't like and arrests. They are also known as Chozrim Lahar. They also said they would offer cash rewards for sacrifices to the mosque, as per their beliefs -- the police says they've forbidden them from that. I can't find much more information about them unfortunately but if they are cause for concern enough for both Palestinians and the settler police, and they can offer cash rewards, they must have some amount of influence and funds. Checking their facebook, which has not been updated since 2018, I can see they are a very complex group though -- at times they call Israel and apartheid state, and at other times they were giving out flags of their settler country. The Al-Aqsa mosque was started before 680 C.E., and is the biggest mosque in Jerusalem. It is an even more important structure during the time of Ramadan, which lasts a whole month and we are only halfway through it. We can see here that the occupier is scared of retaliation, and is still reeling from Sword of Jerusalem. I remember bibi's fascist successor running to the US Senate to ask emergency money for the Iron Dome, as they had almost entirely depleted it (and even while using it, plenty of rockets made it to the ground). Palestinians are still united (this can be seen in the mobilisation to defend the mosque), and this scares the occupier.

With the many account requests that we've had, I noticed that more than a few of our new members say themselves they don't really understand Marxism in their applications. I'm taking this opportunity then to help them out with this. If you would like theory recommendations then just ask in the comments and I'm sure many people will be happy to help, though my own favourites are *Principles of communism* (Engels), *Elementary principles of philosophy* (Georges Politzer) and *How Marxism works* (Chris Harman). # What is marxism? Marxism is essentially a framework with which we analyse the world, both present and past, and maybe sometimes the future -- but that honestly rarely works. It's a comprehensive, exhaustive ideological framework that explains what's going on around us and how we can respond to events in a way that "makes sense". This response makes sense because it correctly, accurately identifies the causes, the reasons and the developments of those events. Then, using Marxism again, we can have an answer to them. - Why did Israel annex Palestine and why are they conducting a genocide? - Why is Russia invading Ukraine? - How did China manage to pull a billion people out of poverty? - How did Roman civilisation fall when they were so big and strong for such a long time? - Why is the US always invading countries? - - I hate my job and whoever invented capitalism should rot in hell. Those are all questions (and one affirmation) that Marxism can answer within its framework. The strength of marxism, I think, is not only in all the powerful analyses that were proven right in time, but also in the fact that it always yields very similar results. If we conducted a test to prove a hypothesis and it yielded very different results every time, then the test would be faulty and the whole method might be called into question. This is what happens with liberals, who analyse events through all sorts of different angles that always seem to be competing, like parallel lines that are very close, but never meet somewhere. Marxism has simply three components, which Lenin outlined in a very early work simply titled *[The three sources and components of marxism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm)*: 1. The philosophical aspect of marxism, that of dialectical materialism. 2. The economic aspect, the labour theory of value. 3. The societal aspect, the class struggle. I wouldn't however necessarily recommend that text to a complete newbie as it points to different historical events and currents that you might not be familiar with. It is not even the point here to delve into those three components, there are many texts that go into all of these (in order: elementary principles of philosophy, Marx's *Wage labour and capital*, *Value price and profit*, and finally honestly any marxist text will talk about the class struggle). When we make a marxist analysis, we tend to focus on the first and third components, but all of them are inseparable from each other and actually interact with one another at all times. The basis of the class struggle is the labour theory of value, and dialectical materialism is a facet of life that guides our actions. These components interact in many different ways than the one I illustrated here. The class struggle is usually the most apparent component in our daily lives, but it is not the most important component; all of them are equally important. # What marxism is not Marxism is not dogmatic (claiming to be self-evident truth), or deterministic (determining that things _must_ happen a certain way as they have been preordained). Marxists themselves do not claim that. We are not saying communism is inevitable, we are saying that as long as capitalism exists, there will be a bourgeoisie and there will be a proletariat, and these two will always have diametrically opposed interests, and so the struggle will always remain, even if it hides below the surface at some points in time. We are not saying however that the proletariat is bound to win, or that they will win by some fated event (sorry, we still have to put in the work). We call marxism a science however because we make hypotheses, test them out through the optics of marxism, and see where that gets us. We also change our "rules" as we test those hypotheses. I wrote about the interaction between theory and practice [on prolewiki](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Praxis) if you're interested, but in short we test things out through this framework, and what works becomes theory and what doesn't work is discarded or reconsidered. Much like science revisits what it thought was true (for the longest time we thought there was no mathematics outside Euclidean geometry), marxism reconsiders what it thought was true to always stay relevant and up to date. This also answers some concerns that I've heard over the years, that marxism was synthesized by some white guy in the 1800s so what does he know about the 21st century? We have not been resting on Marx's writings alone, and today still there are plenty of writers, analysts and theorists that improve the science. Marxism is not a system of government. The system of government is socialism and then communism. However, a marxist framework informs political decisions and helps us understand them through the class struggle. But it does not say "as a marxist you should make laws that do this or that". Marxism does not claim to always be right, and most marxists don't claim that either. We make mistakes too, because we did not consider all the facts, some were not available to us or we were not careful in our assessments and mischaracterised a fact (e.g. not properly understanding the class dynamics in one or another crisis which leads to a faulty analysis). Sometimes we make mistakes because we just don't know the topic very well. Marxism is also not moralistic. In fact, it is possible to defend marxism without ever giving moral arguments. We give simple observations about the state of the world in the past and in the present day, and the way we act on them is not determined by marxism either; it's not a code of conduct. Liberals decry marxism because it is the ideology of the proletariat, but they could use it too to analyse events, and make capitalistic decisions out of them. Marxism is not individualistic, but we recognize _personhood_. Individuality is a recent concept, that is not tied to simply being a human, but to being an _individual_. That's a concept tied very closely to liberalism, which we don't agree with in many ways. One key difference, for example, is that liberals will look at individual events or people to make their conclusion, whereas we look at groups and their dynamics and movements. During the religious wars in early Renaissance Europe, liberals would say that people just kinda got crazy over religion (christians and protestants) as they were so fanatically religious they were willing to kill each other over it. Our analysis is simply that Christians represented the old noble order and Protestants the new bourgeois order (free artisans and merchants not bound to a liege), and the wars of religion were really about fighting over who would become the dominant class. But you know one thing that vindicates us? Down the line, bourgeois academy recognizes our conclusions as true, except they rewrite them in their own words. Nowadays academia agrees with this marxist assessment, but this was not the case for a long time. Marxism is not holistic, which is kind of a buzzword some non-marxists use sometimes to try and explain marxism. Marxism is dialectical, not holistic. This is a very difficult difference to explain, I think if you don't get it yet you will once you understand dialectics (I recommend Politzer again as well as our articles on prolewiki.org). Marxism is also not eternal. At this specific point in time, marxism the ideology most capable of answering our questions and needs for the future. Liberalism was a progressive philosophy as well in its time, replacing the old stagnant, very Christian philosophies of nobles and kings. One day marxism will need to be replaced too, and we can't know what our descendants will come up with, much like liberals of the Enlightenment could not predict that marxism would be invented only 130 years after them.

I don't know if this is already well-known in communist circles or people don't care at all and have never heard of this podcast lol, but here is my advice: if you want to learn the history of china, don't waste your time with this podcast. Basically Chris Stewart, the host, is an anti-communist American living in China. He teaches at an American school in China. That is already sus. In episode 38, he called the marxist analysis of class conflict ahistorical (class conflict that is) without elaborating. Talking about the battle of Guandu during the 3 Kingdoms period, he said the nationalist (Chiang Kai Shek's) analysis was through the personalities of the commanders (as was customary) whereas Mao's analysis was on the stratagems used that led to victory. He then went on to rant that to "Maoists" (I doubt he even knows what that means), this battle was part of the class struggle "even though both were warlords", and that it was a "very ideological analysis". What I think he meant to say was that Mao made this analysis in a specific context and made a marxist analysis of the battle. Not that "maoists" (I think he meant marxists in general) uphold Cao Cao as some great champion of the people lol. Or in other words, what Mao thought of Cao Cao was his business only and Chris would not even have ranted about it if China was not the PRC today. (Also, remind me who won the civil war Chris?) I thought it would be a cool series to learn about the lengthy and sometimes complicated history of China, and it works on that regard, but just think: if he can drop stuff like that without substantiating, where else did he mislead us? Where is he going to mislead us? But above all I want to say, who cares what the KMT and CPC thought of this battle that happened 2000 years earlier. Cross that bridge when you get there on episode 600 or whenever. I saw a later episode, completely out of topic but released to commemorate the Tian An Men colour revolution, was titled "UK cable on Tiananmen square massacre". You know, the cable from an overlord diplomat in colonial Hong Kong, who _heard_ what happened in Beijing and relayed that in a cable (without naming his sources). Despite nobody else who was in Tiananmen relaying the claims in that cable lmao. And yes, Chris reads the whole cable and then has the gall to claim he is doing a history podcast 😂 His podcast is currently at the Ming dynasty, which was followed by the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China, so he is slowly moving towards contemporary history and, inevitably, Mao and the PRC. What is he going to say about it? I don't want to character-assassinate this guy I barely know but wow, finding his pasty white face online shattered any illusions I had about this podcast finally finding some sense and stop with the anti-communist slant. I thought he was at least ethnically Chinese but no, he's just an "expat" in China using a VPN to sell us his Patreon and Audible lol. Dude you can probably just ask the chinese gov to subsidize your show, I'm sure they would love teaching the world about the history of their own country. On the history side of things, I find the podcast very bourgeois and oriented towards the dynasties. It's all about court intrigues so it's not entirely groundbreaking either. It's the kind of history lessons you got in high school. It is not a marxist analysis of China, nor is it about cultures, technology, mores, or civilisation. It's kinda hard to follow too, as we don't have maps over the audio format and he rarely reminds of the dates -- though I find it got better after the timeline switched to CE. Yes Chris, there is such a thing as ideological readings, no matter what you think about it. And your ideological reading is the one of the noble dynasties close to the emperor that wrote this history down. Is there anything better than this drivel to learn the history of China?

We do not want to give lessons to anyone, but figure that many may be interested in the synthesis of our internal debate that led us to choose what we did. Additionally, is there interest in learning what worked for us and the techniques we are looking at or deploying?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158364 > I'm taking the opportunity of this huge influx of new users to let them know we have a report function! I'm not sure it's integrated in the mobile apps yet, but it works great on the website. > > To access it, click on the ... (three dots) menu below someone's comment, then click on the waving flag icon: > >  > > We have tons of applications coming in at all times, and some trolls will probably make it through the cracks. If you see something, report it!

I'm taking the opportunity of this huge influx of new users to let them know we have a report function! I'm not sure it's integrated in the mobile apps yet, but it works great on the website. To access it, click on the ... (three dots) menu below someone's comment, then click on the waving flag icon:  We have tons of applications coming in at all times, and some trolls will probably make it through the cracks. If you see something, report it!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/139677 > And we're using our enemy's handbook for further humiliation 😎 > > So to recap: > > - gasoline is the base > > - paint thinner to help the cocktail spread, the typical mixture is 50/50 > > - styrofoam to help thicken it and conserve thermal heat (logically you wouldn't use it with paint thinner, thick molotov for pinpointed damage and thin molotov for crowd control) > > - weak bottles; the mixture has to explode everywhere, not stay in the bottle. Beer and wine bottles are surprisingly tough. You can weaken it by etching streaks in it, or find a beer brand that makes weak bottles. > > - a chemical igniter is safer than lighting a rag on fire, but can be more difficult to make. A simple igniter is soaking a rag in sugar and potassium chlorate, then put sulfuric acid in the mixture. What I believe needs to happen is for the rag to touch the mixture, which should happen _after_ you throw the molotov or while you are throwing it, but not before. > > - aim at the ground, not at vertical stuff. > > Their use is mostly for show, it makes a nice ball of flame that will keep the pigs at bay. But they are not actually that powerful. However, they are very cheap and easy to make for protestors.

And we're using our enemy's handbook for further humiliation 😎 So to recap: - gasoline is the base - paint thinner to help the cocktail spread, the typical mixture is 50/50 - styrofoam to help thicken it and conserve thermal heat (logically you wouldn't use it with paint thinner, thick molotov for pinpointed damage and thin molotov for crowd control) - weak bottles; the mixture has to explode everywhere, not stay in the bottle. Beer and wine bottles are surprisingly tough. You can weaken it by etching streaks in it, or find a beer brand that makes weak bottles. - a chemical igniter is safer than lighting a rag on fire, but can be more difficult to make. A simple igniter is soaking a rag in sugar and potassium chlorate, then put sulfuric acid in the mixture. What I believe needs to happen is for the rag to touch the mixture, which should happen _after_ you throw the molotov or while you are throwing it, but not before. - aim at the ground, not at vertical stuff. Their use is mostly for show, it makes a nice ball of flame that will keep the pigs at bay. But they are not actually that powerful. However, they are very cheap and easy to make for protestors.

- Armed civilians without giving them a uniform. [Breach of Geneva Conventions](https://philarchive.org/archive/YVOUEA) - Ukrainian special forces command said Russian artillerymen will no longer be taken prisoner and will "all be killed for being complicit in criminal orders". Killing surrendering soldiers is a [war crime](https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v2_rul_rule47_sectionb). [Collective punishment](https://casebook.icrc.org/glossary/collective-punishments) is also one. Edit: they have since taken that statement back. I have not. - Did not activate air raid sirens to [warn civilian populations](https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=06805C92A0A4A7A1C12563CD0051C0F9) of artillery and air strikes. People have already died because of this; Russia gave warnings as per protocol which Ukraine did not relay in time. - As per the discovery of biological labs near the border with Russia, there is a very serious possibility Zelensky is guilty of [producing biological weapons](https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/bio/1925-geneva-protocol/#:~:text=The%201925%20Geneva%20Protocol%20prohibits,force%20on%208%20February%201928.). The labs have been confirmed by the US gov, but no proof yet that they were meant for biological warfare. - Forcing battles to happen in civilian zones, thus exposing them to danger and [preventing their protection](https://www.redcross.org/content/dam/redcross/atg/PDF_s/International_Services/International_Humanitarian_Law/IHL_SummaryGenevaConv.pdf). - Possibility of using [child soldiers](https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v2_rul_rule136), as the Ukrainian army is now training children to use AKs, during wartime. - Ukrainian forces were (accidentally) caught using Red Cross vans to transport soldiers and materiel. The symbol of the cross itself can only be used by the organisation and is protected under the Geneva Conventions; it can [only be used by medical units](https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/news/2020/red-cross-emblem-symbolizes-neutrality-impartiality.html) who must then be treated like civilians. Feel free to contribute. (the list above only reflects crimes Zelensky himself can be responsible for, to the best of our knowledge based on information that comes out of Ukraine. This list is also not legal advice, as only a trial will be able to determine which crimes have been committed and who is responsible for them).

With the war, they believe they finally have that opportunity to strike at Russia like they have been wanting to for hundreds of years now. What other war led to such sanctions, censorship, and repression of opinions from citizens? What other war led to the belligerent arming their civilians after not even one week of fighting, and conducting recruitment drives to find foreigners to die for them? Ukraine is advertising for people to join! Even Nazi Germany was treated better than Russia is. I'm starting to believe that NATO's goal, and by extension the imperial masters' goal, is to completely, irrevocably, entirely starve Russia out and destroy them like they did back in the 90s. Can you imagine the humiliation the US must have felt when they made sure the USSR was dead and buried, only to have been unable to install a puppet? They've been waiting for this for years, what's happening right now in the "international community" was probably even all laid out in a binder somewhere and they're just enacting the plan.

I'm curious what you comrades think of this article that I found. I'm still clarifying my revolutionary feminist stance (what it is, what it means) and that's how I learn. (looks to be super maoist and inactive since 2018 though)

I wasn't an anarchist per se but I was open to the idea, because I was exposed to it on reddit (subreddits like r/socialism, r/latestagecapitalism, and it was actually r/shitamericanssay that got me to read marx!). I thought, you know, if it's a popular ideology and it's close to marxism (which to me meant close to the USSR, Cuba, etc) then surely it's legit and should be treated seriously? Like you can have ML revolutions and you can have anarchist revolutions, depends on the situation. But then after I started reading enough ML theory to really understand what the leninist part of it was AND also talked to more anarchists I realized they had nothing of value to offer. My opinion radically changed when someone simply asked: where are the successes of anarchism? And I saw there were none, and I stopped entertaining the idea anarchism could ever get us anywhere or coexist with marxism-leninism.

Please leave your comments here rather than on medium as I don't check it at all and have notifications turned off there.