erik_houdini

I really should start an anti-Entrepreneur channel. Listen folks, even if you make every single piece of art yourself, your tee shirt company? You aint selling without significant capital upfront. Can you drop 30k on an IG ad? I sure as fuck can't that's what I make in a fuckin' year. That nets you a single ad with 100k likes on IG, keep in mind likes =/= sales. Can you write compelling blog posts? Can you establish a personal brand? Do you not realize how soulless it is to have a "personal brand", to commodify yourself?

You know how much I make from my site a month? Less than $200 a month, and that's with a blog, a website, branding, a discord, networking with other artists, leveraging influencer friends, etc. I once donated 100% of my profits to my friend's trans healthcare fund, a whopping $150 dollars!!

This is peak neoliberalism though, extreme atomization, individualism, the idea that anyone can "be a business owner". It's bootstraps to an extreme. I often tell people if we didn't live in a capitalist hellscape I wouldn't be selling my art on tee shirts, I'd be content with just making the art. My goal has always been to link up with other artists to create cool art, and artists are getting fucked raw right now. 1099? Nah, here's a an upfront check cut to you for a single commission at a time. How the fuck do you even organize that? For all the failures of the situationalists, we are long gone from the days of collective art movements, it's every motherfucker and his dog for himself.

The entire thing creates a contradiction internally for me. I want to make art, I want to make art people can enjoy, I spend hours and hours learning my craft, and for what? To peddle tee-shirts while the world burns? It's fucking wack dude. Maybe it's the booze tonight but man, this one hit home. I have had this internal debate so many times, does it make me less of a Marxist to sell tee-shirts? Am I going against my own principles as I attempt to make my name know as an artist? Even if I attempt to carry a revolutionary spirit within my art, do these actions not negate that? Can one truly detourn a super structure as deeply capitalist as a "brand". I do not know, but I know that rent is always due, always increasing and things are ever bleaker.

Trump's narcissism is more or less a wild card.

I was gonna post this here but figured it would be better in r/maoism but that's a dead sub so check it out https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4247798

love to see it

That military victory against true guerrillas is possible seems doubtful on the basis of modern experience, barring the use of methods approaching genocide,

War of the Flea, pg 26

"Clear and hold" operations, patterned on the French oil-slick technique, failed to remedy the situation, for the obvious reasons. The "clear and hold" strategy is always doomed to failure because the government, while strong enough to clear any given area temporarily, cannot hold many such areas without dangerously scattering its forces. In the face of a determined "clear and hold" drive, the guerrillas simply withdraw and redouble their activities elsewhere.

War of the Flea, pg 86

All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.

Mao - "Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong" (August 1946), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 100.

Take the Ultra pill, reject reformism. You have been watching a force of teenagers in adidas track suits with RPGs handling the most well funded and well equip military in the world, in urban warfare. You should be taking notes, Gaza is the climate plan, Cop City = Gaza Strip.

This type of thing is something that legitimately disturbs me and concerns me because I've written some pretty heavy-handed shit on my own platform and I'm pulling in you know four to seven thousand views visits a week, which aint much but I get a little paranoid about that

I've brought this concern up to some comrades in the past. Like, hey, you know, I live alone. I don't really have a lot of comrades IRL. You know, putting my voice out there, just something to think about. And usually their response is, "it's not that deep. It's not that serious. You're being paranoid, or they don't do that type of thing anymore." Which concerns me because some people don't realize what happened to our previous leaders. Or have we become so comfortable within the system that we forget that we're against it in the first place?

I'm not saying my reach is some fantastic amount of reach, but they visited people over less, and I honestly wouldn't even know what to do if the FBI came knocking on the door, they'd probably shoot my dog.

Insanity. "Write your representatives" The representatives in question:

Here's what we should do:

take the video, when he pauses to think, cut in footage of the victims, then bring the main video back when he talks again. There's so many horrific videos that can be used for this. The juxaposition would be jarring.

Read Revolutionary Morality

Anarcho-Maoism

Yeah, death squads would absolutely be spun up. Keep the military from getting their hands dirty.

someone with a serious disdain for abandoned bicycles