Taking the Struggle from the Rittenhouses to the Financial Houses

When I first got the idea to write an article addressing the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, it was only a few days ago, and I figured I would be able to publish the article within a day, because I'd already written a couple posts examining the issue from my perspective on Facebook, and it would only be a matter of editing to consolidate them into one.

But Marxism is a science, not a dogma, and when our understanding of the facts change, our application of Marxism must change as well.

Some news about the ads around here.

Apparently my previous ad service has been doing browser crypto mining without my knowledge. They paid next to nothing anyway, so I've fired them. For all none of you who'll miss the opportunity to get shitcoins pitched to you, I feel your pain.

I could just as easily not have ads at all; it would certainly make my life easier. But, as funny as this may sound, there's a certain legitimacy in advertising. Ads say a lot of dumb capitalist things, but they also say, in essence, that the advertiser believes in the medium it's advertising in. It's a declaration of solidarity of sorts. To a certain degree, a website that has a select few tasteful advertisements looks more established and legitimate than a website that does not.

After reviewing the advertising situation, I'm convinced that I will have no luck whatsoever selling ads through any established agency. First off, literally nobody is catering online ad sales to a communist market. That's just not a thing. If I sell ad space to any currently existing ad company, it'll be a wild mismatch of product and reader. I can't imagine any of my readership actually bought any of the shitcoins being hawked, and I certainly hope they didn't.

"The New Deal and the Fifth Party System" is up on the bookshelf!

I gone done did me a theory again, y'all. It's called "The New Deal and the Fifth Party System" and I hope you'll do me the honor of reading it.

I've mentioned in previous essays, and in Class Analysis and Rev, that I think that communists who actually want to die in a communist America ought to be Republicans. There are so many different arguments for it, and I have only begun to make them. Nevertheless, this notion flies in the face of mainstream socialist theory, which still maintains that we should all be AOC simps. I'll leave that job to Chuckles Kirk, however.

Mostly I've made the historical argument for our involvement in the GOP: that it was once a Marxist workers' party that did cool Marxist workers' party things, and can be made to do so again. I've also pointed out that Trump proved it is manifestly the easier of the two big parties to take over, and that it's already become an anti-imperialist party again of its own accord.

Well, in this essay, I delve more deeply into the history of America's party systems, what question our current party system is designed to answer, and the proper communist orientation to this party system. So please, check it out!

Kent Chamberlain and the Red Rock Forests: Pictures

I kept alluding to this thread in the main thread. Indeed, this might be the worthier of the two. I got me some pixels that day, y'all. I'm going to break it up into sections, so you can know what you're looking at. It's hard enough for me to keep it all together; it's been long enough now that I have to group the pictures by date to even know what I'm looking at.

First was some scenic area I stopped at before even getting to Highway 89. It didn't make it into the main narrative because there isn't much to tell besides the pictures. Anyhow, after you make the jump, here's that:

Kent Chamberlain and the Red Rock Forests

It's been a while since the last installment of this series, and I'd better write it up while my memories are still relatively fresh. I never did get back to it, because life has a way of going sideways all at once, especially in Nevada. But here, in the autumnal tranquillity of the Omaha 'burbs, I've got coffee and I've got jazz playing in the background, so let's do this.

I woke up in a Utah rest area off I-70 just shy of Green River. I pulled into Green River soon after that, in search of some gas and coffee. I paid for the gas with my quarter supply, and I made my own coffee with their hot water and some soup cans I've kept for this purpose (usually the hot water comes from my fireplace though). Refuelled, I got back on the interstate, getting back off of it on Highway 89 headed south. I was not yet aware of the price of admission at Bryce Canyon, so I was headed in that direction.

Racists criticizing theory

Critical race theory is a chimera. It's been banned in various states by Republican politicians responding to their voters, but Democrats respond that those schools weren't even teaching critical race theory, and their opponents don't even know what it is.

So, nobody can agree on what it even means, yet the conservative working class is utterly enraged by it and that's all the proof the middle class and bourgeois radlibs need to dismiss them all as irredeemable Klansmen.

What the hell is going on? What should we as communists uphold in this situation?

Let's start with a personal example. As a teenager, I was a libertarian. Member of the Libertarian Party and everything. I wasn't greedy, I wasn't rich. I had a hard childhood where I felt unfree, and this was the party that seemed to believe in human freedom the most. So I joined. Having still been brainwashed by the false consciousness of capitalism, I also incorrectly figured their economic platform of extreme free market capitalism would liberate the workers if ever truly implemented (as opposed to the "crony capitalism" that libertarians blame capitalist problems on).

I was a reactionary on a theoretical level when it came to economics, but my heart was in the right place. On just about every other issue, I upheld the correct line as I understand it now: I was anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-cop. And even economically, I had similar praxis to today: I wanted to start businesses to employ people at good wages. I just hadn't realized all of communist theory yet, and those businesses were going to be capitalist ones run by a really nice boss instead of the collective enterprise I'm starting now, where we're all equal and vote on everything.

The good intentions were there, but the theory wasn't.

Then I went to college.

"Everything happens for a reason."

What an infuriating phrase. People say it at the worst times, too: at a funeral, during a tragedy of any sort, when you're fuming or distraught and unprepared to get into the finer points of philosophy, like "Did the Holocaust happen for a reason, Janice?" And what's more, they seem to say this as comfort. Like it's helping.

But why?

I think some people like the sound of their own voice, and will just trot out the first nostrum that comes to mind, regardless of occasion. But that alone can't explain the utter domination of our culture by this phrase.

Is it said out of ignorance? I've heard it out of workers and bourgeois alike, so if it's ignorance, it's some element of false consciousness that the bourgeoisie swallowed wholesale itself first.

But because the workers can't afford the luxury of utopian thinking, if it's believed by widespread numbers of workers, it has to at least not be hurting them, or even perhaps helping them, if they have believed it for any length of time. Predestination and magic as memes involved in religious practice reoccur over and over again over the millennia, both of them demonstrations of some kind of belief that random chance does not ordain the cosmos.

But why?

What is so useful about the belief that everything happens for a reason?

Back in Omaha for the winter

Hello everyone, long time no post.

As always, there's a good reason for that. The laptop is on its last legs, but everytime it seems to get better at the last moment so I don't replace it. If the laptop's electric is bad, the van's electric is worse, and I have to resort to electroshock therapy half the time to get it moving. Going into town from my homestead became such a chore that I ended up dreading it, and avoiding trips for all but the most important things, because it'd often be a day or two before I could get the van moving again.

It's not the battery, and after extensive unprofessional diagnosing I'm pretty sure it's not the alternator either. I haven't fully ruled out the spark plugs, but I don't think it's that either, because sometimes when the electric is low the AC will randomly come on even though it's off. That is a symptom of every Chrysler owner's most dreaded problem: a fault with the electric brain. The electric brain is a part that never used to exist, it's not strictly necessary to the operation of a motor vehicle, but it improves gas mileage at the cost of rendering the vehicle a particularly well-engineered brick when it dies. The electric brain itself isn't particularly expensive, but like many things in a Chrysler it's buried someplace almost inaccessible, in this case inside the engine block. So a few hundred dollars of part is accompanied by about a thousand dollars of labor.

The van isn't undriveable, after all I did get here in the end. But it's touch-and-go enough that I won't be leaving Omaha in the spring until and unless it's fixed. And it was getting less driveable as the weather got colder, which is why I called the season a bit early and came home. But at least this way, I get to see the leaves fall.

Camping cuisine: personal pan pizza

As I'm not dying, I'm also not starving. I've decided to take more pictures of the fancier things I cook, in order to prove that point.

Today's entry is pic related: a deep-dish personal pan pizza, chicken and bacon with buffalo sauce. My extended family is based around the Chicago area, but the Noo Yawkeh gripes that "it's a fuggin' casserole, not a pizza" have somewhat landed. (IMHO the best pizza comes not from Chicago or New York, but from St. Louis. Imo's Pizza, or really any shop that'll make you a pie with Provel cheese, is the best pizza money can buy.)

That said, in the middle of the desert, this is a pretty tasty casserole. I've levelled up my dough-raising skills and I'm pretty proud of the results. There's a non-zero chance that I'll be making this in Omaha over the winter too. Also, on a more personal note, this is my birthday. I'll probably be celebrating out in the field when this is published, but if I'm in town I'll swing by and post something up.

This is your weekly notification that I am not in fact dead yet

I have never, ever been good at technological communication. I'm a firm believer in the notion of putting the phone away when people are talking to you, of prioritizing the folks in the here and now versus the folks across the wire. And then I moved to a place where I would never get an unwanted call again, where even making a phonecall required driving into town.

Maybe it's the spectrum folk's difficulty with multitasking that causes this in me. Here I am doing something, anything, and my flow is interrupted by a ringtone. I know this is part of it, because people that send five texts in a row irritate me by disrupting my concentration with every notification. (I've done it too and probably will again, but I'm trying to remember not to.)

George Galloway and the Great Experiment

Over across the pond, the left has enjoyed slightly more success since World War II, and therefore has a little bit more of an institutional structure. One of these institutional structures are the labor unions that still provide much of the funding to the Labour Party to this very day, and several of these unions are in the hands of literal comrades.

Over the years, one such comrade has been a fellow by the name of George Galloway. In 2005, George Galloway ran a campaign under the ephemeral Respect Party, appealing to the anti-imperialist left in the critical swing district of Bethnal Green and Bow who felt they had nowhere to go during a byelection. He won outright, destabilizing internal Labour politics in the process. This hastened the end of the Blair-Brown years and the beginning of the era of anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Well, with Corbyn thrown under the bus by candidates for building roads in the Falklands Polly Toynbee, Nick Cohen, and their pals in the bourgeoisie's paper of record the Guardian, warmed-over Blairite Keir Starmer has taken over Labour. He's proceeded to stand for nothing, letting the Tory government of Boris Johnson get to his economic left several times without effective pushback. (That in itself is another tale I've waited a while to tell, but the story of our Tory quarries' poring over hoary theory isn't core to the moral of this story so I'm foregoing it; sorry but more later for sure.)

Anyhoo, the fall of Corbyn has left Galloway and his ilk on the Labour hard left with zero influence in the party now. On that basis, Galloway decided to resort to the tactic that had already successfully dickpunched the Blairites once before: running in a byelection as the candidate for a throwaway lefty party. The contours were going to be a little different this time though, and Galloway was going to go in a direction either pioneering or heretical for a leftist, possibly both.

On the end of Krystal and Saagar on "Rising"

I started watching Rising with Krystal Ball and some Republican in August 2019. I say it like that because initially, she was the draw for my commie ass. But I'm now watching my last bit of Rising with premier contemporary Republican theorist Saagar Enjeti and his Bernie-voting friend Krystal.

This show has fulfilled its deepest purpose, at least as far as I'm concerned. Seeing a Republican who wasn't a stereotype of heartless ignorance changed my thinking. It got me to connect the dots between our ideologies. The heartlessness in the Republican coalition is just caused by the propaganda fed to the workers; it's false consciousness and not their fault. The ignorance is deliberately kept and maintained by the rich through that same false consciousness, or as the GOP now calls it, "fake news."

Meanwhile, I came to see the Dems not as my halfhearted allies who just needed to be radicalized more, but as wealthy decadent bloats paying just enough guillotine insurance to forestall the loss of their enterprises. In the Democrat-Republican split in American politics, I came to realize it mirrored exactly the split in socialist politics between reformers (the Bernie camp) and revolutionaries (all hail the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism; also hello).

Notes from this wasteland

I am not actually dead, in fact.

I've been wrestling with inept financial institutions who can't figure out how to send me a replacement card. I have over $200 waiting for me from Patreon (thanks again, everyone, from the bottom of my heart), but I can't access it because whatever stupid financial organization doesn't feel like taking the five seconds to make sure they can get pennies every single time I buy something. And until they do, I have to ration the tiny amount of funds I have in cash, so I can afford the money to buy the increasingly-expensive gasoline that's critical to travelling to town.

Which means I don't travel to town. Which means I don't write updates to travelogues that I planned to write a month ago. I'm only here now to check my mail and, after failing to find a piece of financial-grade plastic inside it, castigating the company into resending one if they're interested at all in keeping my business. Having done that, it now costs nothing to hang out and post stuff.

And I've got stuff to post, boy howdy. I didn't finish the travelogue of the Denver trip, because I can't upload pics and format HTML for them offline. But I have content that will get gradually rolled out.

Tiny little status update from the 2nd

It's a week later for all of you, and yet four posts later, it's still the same Friday evening at a Burger King. (What is linear time, anyway?)

And before I head out, I'm reminded that I took a couple pictures before I left home this morning, just to give y'all another glimpse into my life and into how things are going.

So anyhow, after the jump, I'll show you around.

Kent Chamberlain and the River of Treasure: Pictures

As alluded to in my last post, I photographed two things between Denver and Green River: a fire near Avon, and a rest area by the Colorado River with gold on it. So here's the other pic of that fire, oriented as a portrait, which makes it annoying to use in mixed media like blogs because it takes up more picture space than a landscape, which is why I didn't use it in the other post. (You would be surprised to see my blogging process: I put altogether too much effort trying to find just the right pics, in just the right proportions to maximize the amount of pictures in each article without making it looking crowded with pictures. Hopefully I succeed, but I digress.)

In any case, after the jump, literally every single other picture is going to be from that rest area.

Kent Chamberlain and the River of Treasure

When last we left off, yours truly seemed to be stranded in Denver with no way back.

This was possible to endure. First off, as soon as that Patreon payment went through, I'd be able to leave. Second off, living and driving everywhere in one's RV means the only obstacle to staying somewhere is finding parking. Thanks to years of experience, I know a few places where I can park for the night for free in Denver; some for several nights if necessary. So if I had to, I could wait for the payment.

That seemed suboptimal, however, as my dad would say. For one, the crops I'd left behind were just starting to show their real promise. For another, I really hate not being in control of so fundamental a situation as where I can go.

Happy Fourth of July, y'all! Keep cool in this heat.

How am I celebrating? I don't know. It's not Sunday the 4th yet as I type this, but only Friday the 2nd. I probably bought some hot dogs to grill (not burgers, because I buy burgers every time I come here to post), maybe the smallest jar of mayonnaise I can buy to use before it goes bad so I can make potato salad, maybe I bought a watermelon since mine aren't even fruiting yet.

Grilling outside isn't really unusual for me these days. I've taken to even heating up the water for my morning coffee on my outside grill, because even at 7:00 in the goddamn AM, it is too hot to be heating up the house any further with cooking fires. Once the realization set in that it was generally going to be this way until at least September, I decided to take further action.

Kent Chamberlain and the Front Range Quest: Pictures

As promised, here's a bunch of pics from the last post. Make the jump to see the full set.

Kent Chamberlain and the Front Range Quest

Not long ago, I took a trip to Denver. A friend from Nebraska had stuff to bring to me, and it was too much stuff for him to bring in one trip. So we decided to meet up in Denver, which was about as far as he could travel between workdays.

Unlike previous trips, I tried a new path this time. I went south towards Ely, then drove across Highway 50 to I-70. This was the first day. After hopping on the interstate at Salina, I trundled on in the darkness until I found a rest area.

Utah got rest areas, y'all. Utah got the best rest areas in America. They have wifi and they look like pic related. This trip is going to be multiple posts long and chock full of pictures, and Utah having excellent rest areas is a big chunk of why. The morning I woke up east of Salina, I hung out for an hour or so checking the news before I went about my day. Considerate Mormons are considerate. I love Utah so much. Fix your weed laws and it might actually be a New Jerusalem.

There are several places along the road that aren't even rest areas per se; they have the basic bathroom facilities that Nevada considers a full-blown rest area, but they're mainly just a place to park and appreciate the view. Local Native artists also sell their wares there, and the state doesn't seem to bother them, which is cool.

Homestead and garden update: 6/27/2021

I promised an update on my homestead a while back, and then went radio silent. It was because of several reasons: apparently Blogger causes my laptop to overheat so I can't use it easily unless I can go hang out in an air-conditioned place long enough to write up some posts, and even though I can code HTML, I have to finish my posts online because I can't code for the images offline. I've also been super busy with the homestead, which, dun dun dun...

...did survive.

First of all, foremost of all, let's talk about the garden. I took this set of pictures right before I left for a trip to Denver, which I'll schedule to post sometime later this week. (I'm writing all of this on Friday, trying to work my way through a vast set of photos.)

I was worried that leaving this garden alone for a week would result in some dead crops. But outside of a couple of the more weakly-rooted mustard leaves, that didn't happen. Instead, the crops seemed to take the opportunity to spread their roots deep to suck out the remaining moisture, and now those huge root structures are helping push them up. So I'm super stoked. Follow me past the jump and see something besides this gorgeous repotted cactus that I tricked into thinking it's raining.

So my foray into mycology. This here is a genuine golden oyster mushroom in a fruiting stage. I'll cut it in a few days, cube up the mass, and fry it with onions to make mushroom sandwiches. I am definitely going to expand my mycological holdings as soon as I have the space to. I'm thinking I might buy some spores and some sawdust, and just grow it on the floor on the walkways. I won't be likely to step on one, and usually the grainmass isn't fruiting so it'll usually be an empty walkway. But I have to build that greenhouse first.

Kent Chamberlain and the Mountain of Gold

For a while now, I've lumped all my adventures in Nevada under the collective heading "Nevada agricultural collectiveposting" because, eh, close enough. Unlike other blogs of mine, I'm trying to keep a handle on the number of labels I post, to make the label feature usable to find different "genres" of posts quickly. My overwintering in Omaha's ending, indeed by the time I finished writing this it already has, and there's several picture sets worth of adventures I've yet to tell, because precious little of it has to do with the homesteading. Instead, it's all got to do with goldhunting, or other various and sundry side quests off in the mountains somewhere. If it vaguely made me feel like Indiana Jones as I did it, it'll go in this section.

When I first packed out to go to Nevada, I came equipped with gold panning equipment and an excellent USGS publication from 1973, Placer Gold Deposits of Nevada, as well as the various maps cited therein, all saved on my phone. I've never panned gold before this, but I've watched a really great Youtube channel on the subject, and studying for my geography minor in a region with a lot of nearby coal, oil, and mineral fields equipped me with a basic knowledge of geology and the processes that cause rocks. Being a historian in the American West also required me to learn about how gold panning works in order to understand its role in the region's history. So I don't think I entered blindly.

How did the homestead hold up through the winter?

I had fitful dreams in Omaha that I'd drive back west in the spring and discover that the shack aspiring to be a tinyhome one day that I'd started out in the desert would be wrecked. Blown apart by winds and the uneven pressure of the earth before a proper floor could be built. Flooded due to floodworks dug hastily at the end of the year that wouldn't be able to keep the house dry against a hundred-year storm. Eaten apart by mice, held together by spiderwebs. I had no idea what to expect, and my subconscious mind was more than happy to fill in the blanks, the dick.

Well, I rolled up the day after I left Denver, and I decided to capture the moment on camera if you'll look to your left. Now that I'm back onsite, I plan on taking a lot more video to post up on here. (Boy howdy was uploading it a time... I'll keep that in mind in the future.)

In any case, after taking stock of that, I began dealing with my crops, a process that's still ongoing, and one that I'll describe in detail (with pictures!) in my next update.

Another trip through the Rockies

I haven't posted in a while, and for a very good reason - I went back to Nevada. By way of my college town, where I spent a week and change catching up with old friends and waiting out some nasty late winter storms.

But I'm back, and this time I have a blog, and some confirmed readers outside of the realms of random (but beloved!) strangers from Leftbook. Let's start from the beginning.

First off, that gorgeous pic to the left. I ended up doing a favor for some friends and delivering some goods to Denver, getting some gas money in exchange for saving them a trip. Denver is slightly out of the way; I can travel from Omaha to the collective by hopping on and off I-80. But if the detour pays for itself, well, I-70 west of Denver is probably the most picturesque piece of interstate in America. It certainly has the most picturesque traffic jams; I don't generally whip out my phone in heavy traffic but everyone was at a standstill.

Fill The Wedding Hall With Guests Y'all

It is written about an early socialist philosopher that He said the following:

Matthew 22:1-10 And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.” ’ But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them [a]spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.

Why do I bring this up? Because Marco Rubio backs the Amazon warehouse unionization drive in Bessemer, Alabama as a way to own Amazon for having woke PR departments. His reason to back this is not my reason to back this, to put it mildly. He doesn't like the idea of unions in principle, doesn't have anything against billionaires in principle, but is so triggered by culture war bullshit that he's gotta own the libs by organizing Bessemer.

The Quantum Mechanics of Kennedy and Khrushchev

There is a peculiar notion among some people in the hard sciences that they practice the purest, surest forms of knowledge. Biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, and physics is just applied mathematics, and mathematics is axiomatically true (probably). All of these fields' laws and theories can be tested empirically with quantifiable data, or with basic logical analysis as in mathematics. A historian like me, on the other hand, only has sketchy qualitative data with which to work, no way to ethically repeat experiments in the field, and constant interference from politics seeking to assert historical narratives favorable to themselves. (And the less said about literature majors, the better.)

But this notion coyly pays tribute to the truth of the matter when it mentions how each field just applies knowledge from another. Every field does this, at least if it prospers in scientific discovery. Sometimes a new set of eyes is needed to see what's in front of them. Sometimes a bit of knowledge locked away in the advanced section of one field can help drive fundamental discoveries in another. History owes a lot to other fields. Radiocarbon dating, for one, has made mute stones sing like canaries at long last; so thank you, nuclear physics and chemistry. Linguistics has given us a lot of evidence for human migration throughout history, as has DNA sequencing. The hard scientist chauvinist might rebut, well, these are all hard sciences or soft sciences giving to history. What has history ever given to us?

My answer would be: understanding the nature of existence itself. Thank you, Khrushchev and Kennedy.

That time I was stuck in a desert for a week

The car battery may be a humble, uncomplicated piece of technology; a long-known bit of acid and base bolted together, but it demands our respect. Everyone talks a big game until they turn those keys to the sound of inadequate electric whimpering under the hood; then we are all equally powerless before our Maker. Some people have been stuck in grocery parking lots, others at the mall, others on vacation.

I was stuck at home for a week last year, but "home" is a desert, with little help. Make the jump and I'll elaborate on the story.

Repairing the solar system, finally; also spring planting begins!

I used to have a solar panel system (as well as a hot water tank) on the top of my van. It, and the days of design work that went into it, were wrecked in a Nevada windstorm. I decided to keep things simpler this time.

I went to the stores here in Omaha trying to find those metal bars that people put on the top of their cars. You see them out in the wild all the time - the ones that make it hard to tell what vehicle's a civilian and what vehicle's a cop when you peer through your rearview. They're all over the place, but apparently no merchandiser in this town has ever heard of such arcane wizardry. So I improvised with ratchet straps, galvanized fencing wire, and some bungee cords on top for good measure. After a couple trial runs through the interstates of the Omaha metro on relatively windy days, I'm comfortable with their performance. They slid around and sailboated a bit up there before I added the bungee cords, but the straps held them firmly to some piece or another of the roof, because they're wired to the straps.

Some updates on what I've been up to: working on Missions to Mars

I've been busy in reality lately. The winter wasn't as keenly felt in Nebraska as Texas, but I did do a lot of shoveling for it. I also rebuilt the solar power system in my van, but that's significant enough that it'll have to be the subject of its own post.

Besides that, I've been drawing my greatest work since Carta Caela, a map of Mars. I already put the title in the work, it's going to be "Missions to Mars: 1971-2021." We've been doing this successfully for fifty years, and I've compiled a lot of information about it that's never been in the same place before. I think I might try a showing for some of this work eventually. If I can get a couple companions to this piece done, as well as a zodiac star chart series i have planned, I just might hit up the contacts i have for one. (I don't believe in astrology, but people do, and this series would just provide scientific knowledge about the stars in a given constellation; these maps can unite believers and skeptics, an instance of the artist's class need to appeal to the broadest possible paying audience.)

Revolutionary-Era Indochina

I've made a map to accompany my picture of Ho Chi Minh. You can read all about it, and access higher-resolution copies of this art, by subscribing to my Patreon.

Spruce Mountain

Making this post inspired me to draw one of the images I took, and so I did. You can get the full story on my Patreon, as always.

Basilica Cistern

The Basilica Cistern is my latest artwork, and I made my Patreon post about it public so everyone can see how I hook up my patrons: high resolution artwork (not the 1000xwhatever post directly above these words), plus a dive into the history and/or the art style of the work in question.

It's worth the price, so please, support the work I do and help yourself to some great artwork in the process.

Was the Indus Valley civilization a peaceful communist utopia?

I just found my new favorite YouTuber. I'm not alone out here in the history communistposting corner.

I suppose it makes sense. I used to see a lot of my fellow libertarians (yes, there once was a time) into history. But the type of person who was that trope is increasingly becoming communists these days as capitalism gets discredited. So hopefully my historical vanguardism... really is a vanguard.

As to the subject at hand, I've got a couple hunches from the available evidence. I don't think the Harappan civlization was completely equal, but I think the reverse of Stefan's "the craftspeople lived in the cities" hypothesis. I think it's likeliest that the merchants lived in the cities, and were part of... merchant collectives, basically, and the collective nature of their enterprises as well as the fairly regular proceeds from mercantile activities allowed them a relatively equal lifestyle. They may have been vertically integrated, directly employing the labor crafting their trade goods, and therefore giving both them and the merchants equal wages. Seventeen of these organizations as represented by the seals could be explained by the difficulty in establishing market dominance through fully voluntary means, and then alliances and cartels between some of them to bolster their ability to compete against the others. All of these would have evened out to a relatively egalitarian existence for those who lived in the cities, with the peasants in the countryside living lives less archaeologically visible to us. Those lives could have been the same minus some of the infrastructural amenities (no flushing toilets), but those infrastructural amenities are most of the wealth visible today so that one change would make them invisible to the spade.

The Ishtar Gate of Ancient Babylon

I've got a new post over on my Patreon that my subscribers should definitely go check out. It's about this beautiful piece of work, and I go into more detail about the history of it and how I reconstructed what it looked like. And, as always, I offer a much higher resolution version than the one presented here. For five bucks a month, it's practically a steal.

But, to run down the basics, this is a reconstruction of what the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon would have looked like in its original setting, with the Processional Way in the background.

Announcing the creation of a new message board, Immortal Science.

Because of the recurring censorship of the Zuckerbourgeoisie, the need for message boards independent of Facebook has never been more apparent.

So I built some.

I was impressed by how easy it was. Ten years ago, setting up new message boards took me a week of custom coding, complaining from members that their favorite features weren't working as intended, cursing as new features I was trying to develop kept failing, and general soul-crushing drudgery. The stiff competition from Facebook has evidently forced message board hosts to up their game. I was able to find a good host with solid developer tools that lets me do just about anything, and get the new forums set up and looking the way I want it to look, in about a day.

So go make an account. If we all post theory there and just link it to Facebook, if we post links to the forum when we post memes on Facebook, we can protect our comrades from the whims of the zucc. Or, to quote a good band, it could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team.

Saturday shitposting, 1/30/2021

I've been convalescing a bit after my very own version of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. To wit: I've published a book, built a forum, and started a Patreon filled with new art. So I kinda forgot to give you your weekly Saturday shitposting. So it's getting posted on Sunday, but the timestamp won't reflect that.

While I was convalescing, I couldn't stay completely unproductive. In between the excessive load times of the one-more-turnity of Civ V, I drew some art that'll drop later this week. I'm also going to post up some more sidequests from Nevada; I'll be writing the post today but it'll drop later this week. I've also got some random bits of theory that should probably get fleshed out and posted as actual articles here.

Anyhow, on to the meems!

Archaeology and Spruce Mountain: A photo essay

Last year in Nevada, I went on a decent number of what I can only describe as side quests.

South of my agricultural collective lay Spruce Mountain. It dominates the landscape across the northern Ruby Valley, as you can see in the image to your left, taken by Snow Water Lake in the spring. It's not the nearest mountain to the collective, but going off the top of my head I believe it is the tallest. It also has turquoise deposits, and like the rest of Nevada, archaeological features of interest.

The whole area of the Great Basin has been settled, abandoned, resettled, and abandoned again, by the looks of the archaeological record. Anywhere that doesn't have a regular source of water is subject to this fate as miners come in, take what they can while there's a market for it, and leave once there isn't. Houses and structures get built, then abandoned to the ravages of time once they're no longer useful. Sometimes people leave behind items in good working order; I got a cooking pot and skillet this way.

Saturday shitposting, 1/23/2021

Welcome to the first shitposting post of the post-Trump shitlib era, yo dawg. We're still not done with Capitol insurrection memes so we'll be clearing a backlog of those before we move on.

Most of the inauguration memes thus far have been some kind of take on Bernie wearing mittens watching an inauguration that by all rights should've been his. They're funny and all, but I can't help feeling inherently shruggy about them. Like, you lie down with imperialists, and this is what you get. You should've caucused with the Republicans bro, and then Trump's administration might've been yours and you'd be getting a second term. The GOP would've voted for you; you were gonna cut Medicare spending and let them keep their guns, but it's lost now, you tried to kick Lucy's football and are now consigned to scowling at losers getting inaugurated. Sucks to be you brah.

Before we make the jump, I'd like to remind everyone that I have a Patreon and you should totally join it. For the low low price of five bucks a month, you can give me steadier finances and obtain for yourself high-resolution scans of my artwork. Get over there and do that, and then jump back here and check out these maymays.

And... jump!

Uncle Ho, and an announcement about my new Patreon

I was commissioned by my good comrade Julian to draw a picture of my favorite revolutionary. After thinking it over long and hard, I chose Ho Chi Minh, albeit a picture of him that included a picture of Lenin and Stalin too because it's so hard to choose.

I chose Uncle Ho for another reason too: my comrade Kyril has a Vietnamese girlfriend, and has avidly followed Vietnamese history and politics to boot. When my comrade Owen needed medicine, Kyril stepped in to help because he had the ability to send money online (and at the time, I didn't), and I offered a picture of Uncle Ho in gratitude. Kyril waved it off, but I'm still grateful to know people so dedicated to one another's well-being and united in solidarity despite living across the world from one another. So in no small way, this goes out to y'all.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to announce the launch of my Patreon. While I will continue uploading all my art here for the public to view for free, I'm going to upload high-resolution scans of everything over there too, for my patrons. That includes this very picture. You can become a patron for only five dollars a month, and then you'll have access to a library of art for your own noncommercial use. Print it out and decorate your walls with it; I had my own originals hanging on my walls in my last apartment and was told it looked like a "treasure room." I also had an ex-girlfriend literally bow before me when she saw a map I drew for the first time. You too can announce that you're a person of taste with your decor, and it's only five bucks a month. The frames will cost more than that! And of course, you can feel good about supporting my socialist agricultural collective; your patronage will literally help shelter and employ comrades who need it.

Upolu Island, Samoa, and an announcement about my art career

I think I'm on a Pacific kick with my artwork. My last piece was a mountain in New Zealand, and today I'm drawing crystal-clear waters off of Upolu Island, Samoa. I got the original off of a Google search, make the jump to see it:

Class Analysis and Revolution is hereby published in full!

I'm so happy about it that I decided to skip the rest of the serialization and just give you the last three chapters all at once. It's a Martin Luther King Jr. Day miracle! Go read it on the blog if you want the memes, or just download you a copy of the e-book to read offline.

The final publication of Class Analysis and Revolution is also the closing of a chapter of my life, but a beginning of a much bigger one all the same.

When I began writing this book, I lived in Florida. I had finally read up enough communist theory to start having ideas of my own about it all. My first idea was the triangle compass, featured prominently in the beginning of the book, as well as the subject of its own essay. The triangle compass proved its worth as a tool of class analysis, but the conclusions it was giving me ran counter to the synthetic left theories prevailing in Leftbook at the time (and today, to a slightly diminished degree). Nonetheless, they checked out with my own knowledge and experience in life, and I continued elaborating on them. The triangle compass led me straight to Marxism-Lincolnism, the application of Marxism-Leninism to the material conditions of American bourgeois democracy.

Saturday shitposting, 1/16/2021

Ho boy have I got a haul for you today. Ever since the Capitol riot, there has been a neverending flow of 24-karat maymays for your perusal. I've got maymays for weeks. I'm only late posting today's batch because I finished marking up Class Analysis and Revolution.

It's been hard figuring out exactly where I stand on this whole Capitol riot sitch, but I figured out basically that when cops and fash attack each other, the only true winner is America. If I had to pick a side, I guess I'd marginally be for the cops, because I truly despise treason. But the shitlib panopticon the cops are upholding is pretty godawful too. But we did elect Biden, he is the rightful President, and if our government sucks as a result, that's a choice we the American people are going to have to live with. The meems aren't funny unless they jive with one's gut, and so finding meems that keep that balance between shitlibs and fash has been a challenge. But I've got weeks' worth of them now.

Anyhoo, let the shitposting begin.

Mt. Taranaki, and an inquiry into the philosophy and praxis of art

Before we talk about the piece up top, I'd like to remind everyone that we're now five chapters deep into Class Analysis and Revolution, and if you haven't checked it out yet and are interested in modern leftist theory at all, you totally should. I'm releasing a new chapter every day right here on Tankie Doodle, and the last chapter will drop on the last day of the Trump (or maybe now the Pence?) administration.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand. My friend Graciela took a picture of Mt. Taranaki in New Zealand and posted it on Facebook, and I thought it was beautiful enough to draw. And surprisingly enough, I found the time to sit down and do that just now, from start to finish in one sitting. My last artistic foray took me a couple weeks, but it was a bit more complicated, with a lot of human architecture and highly articulated trees, leaves, and blades of grass in the field of vision. This has little of that; it's a study in striking silhouettes at sunset setting a sentiment. (You're welcome for that sentence.)

I'm happy with it; I really like it as a piece of art. But there is a little bit of a problem I have with it, and if you look at the original photograph after the jump, you might see it.

New bookshelf entry: the first chapter of Class Analysis and Revolution!

I've begun serializing Class Analysis and Revolution, y'all. I will post a chapter every day for the next eleven days, with the last chapter going live on the last day of Trump's administration, a coincidence I didn't plan but that I embrace all the same. The first chapter is up, but you might as well start with the brief introduction.

This has been a moment building for a while. A lot of it was in the editing moreso than the writing. I know what I want to say, I just want to say so much, all at once, and it comes out all jumbled and confused. Editing it so the arguments progressed linearly and flowed from one to the other was the hardest part. I also had to figure out where to stop. There were initially going to be two extra chapters, one dedicated to what I expect a post-capitalist United States to look like, and one class analyzing the People's Republic of China. But the book is ambitious enough as it is; explaining to my comrades the dialectical logic in joining the GOP is going to be difficult enough that I should dedicate the first book to that. What comes after the civil war that will prompt can and rightly will be the subject of its own entire book. Class analyzing China in a fair and evenhanded manner is also going to be a weighty matter that will require all manner of documentation to ward off charges of revisionism from the Maoist ultras on the one hand, and charges of ultraradicalism from the Dengists on the other, and will also require its own book.

After the entire book has been published serially here, I'll release it in .pdf format, with a PayPal link attached since I won't be able to sell adspace on that. I want this knowledge out in the world, first and foremost. I'd like to be paid for it as a secondary matter, but I actively encourage people to steal, share, host, and republish this book. The method of class analysis it explains is simple enough to be understood by just about anyone, yet profound enough that it can change the world, I believe, if it becomes widely adopted by the working class.

Saturday shitposting, 1/9/2021

Dayum some shit went down this week. It's refilled by shitpost buffers to the point where I can make another one of these bad boys happen.

Not that I got to be a part of the online trauma bonding day-of. After the cops let the fash waltz on into Congress, because of course they did, Facebook went nuts banning any hint of disharmony. I caught a three-day postblocc for saying "begone thot" to a reactionary. It's just as well; I spent the next three days finishing Class Analysis and Revolution. It is a done thing which is done, I just have to mark it up for the internet, and then make an ebook version. It will be available for free download, or you can read it right here, also for free, and get the full maymay bidness. Just so long as you read it, it's all good. I'll be releasing that sick puppy chapter by chapter, because it's downright massive. Updates to come.

I'm also sick of being thrown off of Facebook for telling the truth to different flavors of reactionary. If Facebook can ban the President, what hope does my commie ass have of dodging a banhammer? I was going to build a forum anyway, and now I'm definitely going to build a forum. We're running out of time.

Anyhoo, meme dump below:

Ryokan no Shinrin

Since I've come back to Omaha for the winter, I've been watching a bunch of Zatoichi films. The main character is a blind masseur/gambler/swordfighter named Zatoichi, a former yakuza who can't seem to leave his past behind no matter how hard he tries. He's also preposterously good at swordfighting, ending dozens of mooks onscreen in dozens of seconds, slicing candles and handing the lit tips over to someone on swordpoint, and slashing the sake bottles of yakuza bosses mid-drink.

Black Scammer, 24-hour postbloccs, and reading Settlers.

They're also probably cops. I'm on 24-hour postblock because I called one of these grifters a "piggie." Butthurt cop is butthurt.

It's remarkable how quickly it happened, too. Immediately after posting the piggie comment below, I was on postblock. It's as if they had people on the inside in Facebook, or something.

Their biggest "accusation" against me is that I'm white. Nevermind my Shawnee, Potowatomi, and Haudenosaunee ancestry; I don't get to live here without grovelling before them, I guess, because some of my ancestors came from Scotland. My ancestors had more revolutionary energy in their little toes than the entire Black Hammer org; they knew implicitly that the working class must be united in resistance to imperialism and capitalism, which is why all these people oppressed by British colonialism intermarried with each other as equals.