The Based Marxist

November is 5 months away.

You might hear about their "consultant class" and think that these are a group of experts that will guide them on how to become more popular and what strategies to pursue to gain more political power and influence. And maybe they once did. But nowadays they exist to justify their own salaries and the rightward shift that the Party inevitably takes in the aftermath of an election: to become more racist, queerphobic, anti-immigration, and pro-police and military. Because any other shifts or changes in policy would threaten their donors and justify hiring a different set of consultants.

Similarly, on the surface one would think a Democratic Primary would help identify the most popular candidate with the best chances to win a general election, as well as push all candidates to adopt more popular and successful policies to compete with each other. It is instead designed to funnel any energy that would otherwise be directed towards direct action or the support of a truly leftist candidate back into the Party. The candidate who then best embodies the desire for revolutionary change is kneecapped, sabotaged, and becomes The Party's Sin Eater for when the candidate that is selected loses the general election.

"It is difficult for me to imagine what 'personal liberty' is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

It would have been absolutely out of the question for a couple of young people, from the same social class but of different sexes, to go out together by themselves—or rather, everyone’s first thought at the mere idea would have been that ‘something might happen’. Such an encounter was permissible only if some supervising person, a mother or a governess, accompanied every step that the young people took.

Even in the hottest summer, it would have been considered scandalous for young girls to play tennis in ankle-length skirts or even with bare arms, and it was terribly improper for a well-brought-up woman to cross one foot over the other in public, because she might reveal a glimpse of her ankles under the hem of her dress.

The natural elements of sunlight, water and air were not permitted to touch a woman’s bare skin. At the seaside, women made their laborious way through the water in heavy bathing costumes, covered from neck to ankles. Young girls in boarding schools and convents even had to take baths in long white garments, forgetting that they had bodies at all. It is no legend or exaggeration to say that when women died in old age, their bodies had sometimes never been seen, not even their shoulders or their knees, by anyone except the midwife, their husbands, and the woman who came to lay out the corpse.

Today, forty years on, all that seems like a fairy tale or humorous exaggeration. But this fear of the physical and natural really did permeate society, from the upper classes down, with the force of a true neurosis. It is hard to imagine today that at the turn of the century, when the first women rode bicycles or actually ventured to sit astride a horse instead of riding side-saddle, people would throw stones at those bold hussies. Or that, when I was still at school, the Viennese newspapers filled columns with discussions of the shocking innovation proposed at the Opera for the ballerinas to dance without wearing tights. Or that it was an unparalleled sensation when Isadora Duncan, although her style of dancing was extremely classical, was the first to dance barefoot instead of wearing the usual silk shoes under her tunic—which fortunately was long and full.

And now think of young people growing up in such an age of watchfulness, and imagine how ridiculous these fears of the constant threat to decency must have appeared to them as soon as they realised that the cloak of morality mysteriously draped over these things was in fact very threadbare, torn and full of holes. After all, there was no getting around the fact that out of fifty grammar school boys, one would come upon his teacher lurking in a dark alley some day, or you heard in the family circle of someone who appeared particularly respectable in front of us, but had various little falls from grace to his account.

The fact was that nothing increased and heightened our curiosity so much as this clumsy technique of concealment, and as it was undesirable for natural inclinations to run their course freely and openly, curiosity in a big city created its underground and usually not very salubrious outlets. In all classes of society, this suppression of sexuality led to the stealthy overstimulation of young people, and it was expressed in a childish, inexpert way.

Seriously: Every. Single. Lie.

Also choosing between one of two oligarch-approved autocrats like you're betting on a sporting event every handful of years while otherwise being completely disengaged from the political process that you have no power to impact on between the aforementioned sporting events is NOT how democracy works, it's how an oligarchy pretending to be a democracy works.

Denver Urban Gardens started as a grassroots movement in the 1970s when North Denver neighbors created space for a group of local Hmong women to grow their own food. After transforming a vacant parking lot into the Pecos Community Garden, the group helped other neighbors start gardens, too. DUG officially became a nonprofit in 1985, and over the past four decades, it has grown and distributed more than 62,000 pounds of food throughout the metro area. In the nonprofit’s new food forest spaces, neighbors are welcome to enter and harvest a wide assortment of fruits, nuts, and berries. And unlike in DUG’s community gardens, where people pay a fee to have their own plots, this bounty is free. Beyond providing fresh food in neighborhoods that need it most, these agroforests reduce the urban heat island effect, create pollinator habitat, and combat pollution and climate change by absorbing and filtering harmful gases. They also create much-needed green space within communities. “Trees are so beneficial for mental health, neighborhood security, and certainly temperatures,” Appel Lipsius said. “You walk off the street into one of our food forests and it’s 5 to 15 degrees cooler.” Globally, farmers are increasingly turning to agroforestry techniques—which Indigenous peoples have employed for millennia—to improve, stabilize, and diversify crop yields in the face of climate change. And across the U.S., cities are embracing agroforestry as well. While Denver has a network of smaller food forests, cities like Seattle and Atlanta have very large standalone sites. Appel Lipsius points out that some cities may have community orchards—or simple plantings of fruit or nut trees—rather than multi-layered food forests.

There has been a lot of anti-communist propaganda spread about the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, particularly the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion, so I'd like to offer some more sources about Czechoslovakia which cover these topics well, are in English (unfortunately, not much socialist Czechoslovak literature has been translated into English, though I have been trying to translate some things from authors such as K. Gottwald, the first communist president, and other Czechoslovak theorists/economists) and are fully available online for free.