AlbigensianGhoul

Minor correction, Smalls is the Amazon Union guy.

Kinda funny how Corbyn went from nobody, to beloved, to hated and now he's getting relevant again. I think he's a masterclass example of how social democracy alone is not enough to fight the entrenched reactionaries of Europe.

The event sounds cool! European comrades are too geographically close to not do more stuff like this.

I'm not sure what I should be noticing. Is it the Communists 2 section? If that's the case, I prefer the current big ones on desktop. The colourised photos look great and are a bit easier to tell at a glance who the author is. But on mobile the smaller ones are way less cluttered. And it's harder to "hover" over the pictures on a touchscreen too. And if I were to pick one of the formats, I'd pick just the name of the author, and if possible the number of works right underneath it. They are all "Library works of Author" after all.

I usually don't link wikipedia because I assume it's beneath the level of interest and knowledge of people on forums, but you clearly have some homework you need to do. So here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas_(2014%E2%80%932022)

Some (hopefully) constructive criticism/feedback. You might want to look at the Bureau of Labour Statistics for some data on those professions too.

I fail to see how "capital controlled" and "non-capital controlled" industries don't match 1:1 with the private and public sector and could just be named that. Some of the conclusions are already well known (labour today is too expensive to the bourgeoisie, specially in the first world), but others seem too broad and deterministic. Similarly, the third group also seems to basically just mean "self-employed" unless I'm missing something.

It requires roughly the same skills to survive and isn’t terribly interesting in and of itself, usually.

I don't really follow on either of these. Since there is less of an incentive to "de-skill" these industries, I'd assume that they require a lot of skill (and dedication) to work. Good examples might be public sector education or public healthcare, which are usually very hard jobs that only get worse by the active sabotage from the privatising sector. They are also usually the most populous professions.

And on the interesting part, it's obviously subjective, but as Graeber points in Bullshit Jobs, it'd be really hard to maintain jobs that require big qualifications, have terrible workplace conditions and don't pay well. Teaching fits the bill and I don't think many people would classify that as "uninteresting" despite it being very stressful.

The labour intensive group is things where there isn’t really capital accumulation at all, and skilled labour is the main source of “value add”. Skilled builders, craftspeople, anyone who can add value to a material or process simply because they’re good at something, with only very simple tools.

You might want to separate this into a whole different orthogonal axis. For instance, software development is usually very reliant on a highly trained workforce and has small capital requirements, but it is still the realm of capital accumulation. The same applies to surgeons, the few employed engineers. Whether those serve capital accumulation or not depends mostly on them being in the public or private sector, though in the end in bourgeois countries all industries will be converted to serve that purpose anyway.

These kinds of jobs are comparatively rare, and probably the kind of thing luddites wanted to preserve.

Maybe that could be just me misunderstanding the definition, but going off of the previous paragraph, software developers are one of the top 20 most employed professions. Other less popular industries that might fit the bill are artists of any kind. They are not that rare, and definitely not things that only "luddites" would want to preserve. Labour for the sake of production and meeting needs, with no accumulation of capital as you put it, is exactly the sort of thing communists might want to preserve. From your examples, builders are also something worth keeping or even expanding. Right now there is no automated alternative to builders in sight.

I agree with your conclusions on which industry to go to. I'd just like to point out that in many cases we have very little individual choice on that. One might have all sorts of qualms about working at an Amazon warehouse, but if it is the job most likely to keep them alive and to be hired, there's not much one can do.

Another facet of it that usually correlates is the presence of unions. They always serve as a counter-balance to capital accumulation by forcing the employers to provide rights, and are generally easier to find in the public sector. UPS, teachers, nurses. So by going into a private sector job you're already on an uphill battle for rights, but on the other hand you have "ease of hiring" since they can just keep firing workers to get fresh blood.

It is a fresh thought, to me at least, that skilled decapitalised work might be a reasonable starting point in movement building.

From your assessment they are a small proportion of the population, so that'd be much harder to organise. I'm not sure exactly what would make them a more attractive demographic than the other two, since the first is where the majority of proletarians already are, and the second is where the labour movements are traditionally stronger and can provide real life examples of the benefits.

Feel free to elaborate and correct me.

I suppose some people over on Hexbear might have some good stuff on that front. They have many anarchists in there, and they're usually of the more pragmatic sort and won't attack you for being "authoritarian" or fail to acknowledge colonialism. I think their equivalent community is !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net but they also have !anarchism@hexbear.net.

Edit: linking comms bugged out there.

I usually don't spring that one on them because I'm pretty sure that a lot of Ukraine enjoyers don't actually know about the Donbas war. It'd be a while to explain, so I try to meet them in the middle a bit, but yes, that would have been the absolute best decision back in 2014.

Section 1

• No.

• I'm considering requesting an account, but I feel like I still have a quite a bit to learn until then. I occasionally draft and re-draft answers to the verification questions in order to force me to study a bit. I guess I also don't fully understand the application process. For instance, is there room to appeal if my verification answers contain some glaring mistakes but I recognise and correct those?

• Yes, which is why I want to create an account. In all honesty, my most common contributions at my current confidence level would only be fixing a couple of typos, grammar errors and transcription errors and some phrasing that I've noticed while reading. Eventually I might also want to help out with some pages relevant to the South Atlantic world.

Section 2

• I visit it about once a day.

• A certain admin's reading list ;). Besides that I also like to check if there are pages for historical events and people that are currently mired in lib propaganda, and sometimes I also just click on "Random Page" just to learn something new while on the bus. It's like wikipedia dumpster diving but without the dumpster level content.

• Very positive, it's much easier to get a shallow understanding of things I explicitly avoided reading about because it'd take ages to form a critical opinion of. Before then I had to literally check the sources on wikipedia all the time before trusting the content there and it took a lot of time to find out that yet another "commonly known fact" is complete bunk. It's also nice to have so many good references compiled in a single page for ease of reference.

Section 3

• I think one point that is unequally developed is the Country Pages. Some countries like Brazil have huge and well written pages despite not being the first thing I think of from an ML wiki, but then Syria (which is usually a point of modern interest and discussion) has a tiny page and doesn't go into much detail of the ideology and functioning of Assad's government.

I also don't really like how sometimes there are whole paragraphs without citations, sometimes even referencing authors but not when exactly they said that thing. This one on the last paragraph is a mild example of that.

• I don't have any individual page that I have a particular issue with, besides lack of content. I guess I could make a small complaint that Cuba's page is a bit bloated on the History section (which I think could become its own very interesting page), with the other sections very small. Since Cuba is geographically is the ML state right in the middle of the NATO domain, I think they could use a bit more of love there.

• I'd say it "reads like wikipedia" which I guess is around a 7 on the academic scale. Formal enough to be taken seriously, but still accessible enough that I can read it without having to look up definitions of words.

• In so far as encyclopedias can be credible, it's at the top. Having gone through my fair share of those, I don't think that any of them can be the absolute most credible and neither that they should strive for it. That is why I generally avoid encyclopedias that don't provide lots of citations for their statements so that they can easily be verified by other editors and users. But Prolewiki is usually better at this in the citation front than most Wikipedia non-STEM pages, so it's at least a good start. Obviously I wouldn't put it as a reference in an article, but I would acknowledge it as the starting point of research or link it to casually interested folks.

Bonus question: It's a bit of "more is better," because I think the only issue right now is it being small sometimes. I don't know how the internal process works, but if there isn't already, I think it might be cool to have a "Help wanted" list of pages that could use a bit more love.

Extra bonus questions:

• Yes, and they're much better to browse than marxists.org

• They're pretty neat! I just think that it falls apart a little bit after you actually click a card and are met with a ton of "Library: " links. Some of those are obvious on what they are, but others have specific titles that are hard to put in context without previous knowledge. Mao's work for example can have some cryptic titles like the "Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung" which I didn't even know was the one I knew as just "little red book" (also it seems that the one on the PW is broken). I think they could use some small (1 paragraph) prefaces to at least understand what they are about at a glance. I'm pretty sure I've seen some wiki-like website that had a category page with a feature like that, but I can't recall which and don't know if it's possible with mediawiki.

Edit: Just want to point out that despite the criticisms, it is no joke the best website I've learned about this year, tied only with lemmygrad itself.

We don't need to know what "bad" means, right? Ukraine is bad due to some magical inherent property, not because of instituting drafts and migration bans, right? I am of the position that the war (which wasn't necessarily unprovoked to begin) wasn't the main cause of those things I am criticising, the government proposing those is the one at fault. I think that framing is at least a bit more complete than just "Ukraine bad."

And never mind calling critical people Russian apologists, like one can't hold critical views of both sides of a conflict.

Even though we don't agree on these things, I think that's a nice thing of you to say. Thanks!

Enjoy watching Mother Russia get decimated by secondhand weapons that were mothballed in a wearhouse.

Please don't deny reality just because it's uncomfortable to your genocidal desires.

Russia has been holding strong to the land for about an year now, and it seems the Ukrainian counter-offensive didn't work as advertised. Nobody should be enjoying anything in this war, including your imagined situation of Russian obliteration, but thankfully that is only your sadistic thoughts and not reality. This war needs to end ASAP, or what we will actually see is just even more of what we're already seeing, a lot of suffering and death of both Russians and Ukrainians (but mostly Ukrainians) for absolutely nothing.

AFAIK there was no such vote, but even if there was it would not have counted the separatist regions of Donbas. That's the main issue with this war, it was already ongoing in some form long before Russia invaded last year, going on since around 2014. Since the invasion, the government has also declared there will be no elections and started banning or even arresting the opposition (like the communist party).

The situation of democracy in Ukraine right now is incredibly shaky at best, which is why a lot of people (like me) criticise the government a lot. I understand that it'd be hard to have a referendum on the initial marshal law, but banning all adult men from even emigrating, and sometimes sending those who try to escape anyway back to the front, is to me a serious abuse by the government. IIRC During the start of the war, they also relied a lot on volunteers for the military, but now they've turned a lot to drafting civilians, which doesn't bode well for how many people actually want to fight. But it's really hard to get proper statistical data from Ukraine due to the aforementioned marshal law.

Being in the military reserve myself against my will, I deeply believe that nobody should be forced into military service. Not only does it sound really inefficient to have uninterested personnel, but it also is a gigantic breach on a person's rights and can mentally and physically scar them for life, not to mention the risk of death.

Usually, yeah, reading and investigation is the main basis for getting informed. Specially for something so far away. How do you get "informed"? Through sheer willpower and thought?