In my place I’m seeing communal polarisation increasing. Or it is becoming more evident. How would one oppose that in a populace where religion and caste hold good sway, without the opposition giving it more power accidently?

That is a very difficult question to answer! You may already know better than I do, being embedded in your local context. But I can suggest some things to consider.

The first is that religion is not a simple good or bad thing when it comes to organizing. It is another consciousness that can compete with or work with a liberation project. It will depend on its structure, how it exerts powers and who it antagonizes vs. helps. There are two big negative forms of political religiosity that are dangerous to liberation. The first is the obvious reactionary conflation of religion with tradition and factionalization, where it is used as a way to create a societal rift and oppression on the basis of religion. This is largely a distraction from the material basis of oppression, but is it very effective and harmful. The second is when religion is used to “check out” of struggle. For example, I know a local religious leader that tells people that it’s okay that so many children are killed by Israelis in Palestine because they are martyred in heaven, the only thing that really matters. While this soothes some of the pain, it can also lead to a form of material apathy and turning away from action. With that said, there are also things like liberation theology and working with religious groups towards liberatory ends. It’s something that has to be navigated on a case-by-case basis. It is not wrong to, for example, adopt the position that X group is copptonf Y religion and that this should be rejected, even if you do not personally subscribe to religion Y in the first place. You will be more powerful if you (as in, any organization you may be in) find a group that focuses on religion Y from an angle that is compatible with yours and for you to keep each other safe and strong.

Regarding caste, does this mean you are in South Asia or otherwise interacting with th concept of caste as derived from it? This is also a very challenging thing to consider and there are very good points to be made for addressing caste first vs. class first and how they overlap and are different. If you are in India, I would focus on how you might oppose Hindutva from an angle that is caste-critical and whether there are people in your area that are interested in opposing both. People who have been assigned a lower caste will be more likely to see the injustice and be able to act in their own favor and build momentum, though you can also find and make good use of “caste traitors”.

Anyways your question is really about communal polarization. This is not something you can simply prevent as its own quantity. What you can do is build towards the better factions within that community and push your own projects. Our enemies create this polarization, they create and maintain fascists and the false consciousnesses that divide us against ourselves. We can’t create unity that centers those false consciousness, is what I’ll suggest. Class consciousness is at least a correct consciousness that opposes this division and if you include the additional valid liberation struggles you’ll be able to build from firm ground.

I should say that this is not the kind of thing anyone can do alone. All of this would only be realistic to discuss as part of an organization to which you would be contributing your efforts and knowledge. So my real advice is to see if you can identify an anti-capitalist group in your community that seems at least 70% good and see if you can join it. And please do so as safely and securely as possible (in-person communication is best, do not use Whatsapp or Facebook etc).

I’ve seen leftist n leftish organisations being affected by this.

Lefty orgs are basically always in some form of drama or crisis, so this isn’t necessarily an odd thing, haha. I can’t give a useful opinion without knowing more about how they’ve been affected, though.

Thank you.

Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.

Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.

There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you’re really interested in, in particular.

I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It’s simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.

There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.

Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson’s Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it’s the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.

If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won’t be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx’s main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich’s summary and then Michael Roberts’ commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you’ll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.

I’ve been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don’t have the foundation and context(didn’t understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.

That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It’s a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren’t like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It’s a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren’t making a lot of sense.

Are there any books that you’d recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?

For the skills I personally don’t think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven’t read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it’s a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just… not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it’s the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you’ll end up in jail or something.

Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.

As has consistently been the case for people in our position, our power comes from our ability to organize and take collective action and to develop the question you asked even further and for the conditions in our own countries. This in contrast to what our rulers tell us gives us power (in reality, they give us instructions on how to maintain their power), which is usually some kind of institutional cooption, like joining an NGO or nagging people to vote for their oppressors or doing some slight participation in a milquetoast political party.

Increasing our organization and choosing good actions to take is not an easy process, though it is often surprisingly simple to describe. To be more organized we have to meet with one another, we must gain the skills to convince others to join up with us, to compile the information needed to contact interested parties, to strategically work in coalition with other organizations, to train each other regularly in the core tasks or running any organization. To choose the right actions to take, we must read political theory and history, teach this to each other, and understand how it applies (or does not) to our current situations. The political theory that is the most useful is that which is usually not taught, not even to criticize, but is glossed over or told stories about - it’s the political theory of the left and a fearless critical reading of history.

Because our institutions educationally neglect us so severely, particularly when it comes to the tools for our own liberation, it can take a while before you might feel like you are confident or ready to go. That is okay and normal. There’s nothing wrong with taking some time to read or to simply try things out a little first.

So I would recommend two things.

The first is to begin reading the political theory of the left and history. There may already be great authors and movements where you live, or there may have been some in the past. They can help you get an idea for who our enemy is (the ruling class) and what different movements have attempted (successfully and not) in the past. Try just one book at first. I often recommend that people start with Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti, as it is a good primer in what we all need to unlearn, or at least take a skeptical lens to, when it comes to the mass media telling of history and politics vs. what actually happened. The value of reading is that it will help you and everyone you talk to choose good actions to take collectively. Those who do not understand the nature of the system we must fight will choose the wrong actions and may even hurt our interests. So education is not just a good thing in itself, it is a tool of political organization.

The second is to get involved with an organization that does mass left politics. There are certain kinds of organizations I would recommend avoiding and I’ll explain more if you ask about it. But most organizations that take a proper ground-up approach and are not an NGO will probably be a useful experience for you and your ability to politically organize. It will likely be useful even if you eventually leave that group for another!

Don’t have a genocidal sundowning segregationist nominated without a rank-and-file voting process with multiple candidates. Or accept that you are not really in charge of any of this when it comes to The Democratic Party and therefore you should place your political focus on ways to build and wield power that do not depend on it.

Use something like rclone (that can use file change deltas) when you just need to copy files to remotes and feel free to combine it with an incremental backup solutions like Borg or restic or some custom rsync scripting. Example: keep a Borg repository of your laptop or emails or whatever with whatever retention policy you want. Then copy your repository anywhere with rclone or similar.

At least put a content warming up for this kind of thing. It may be edgy and entertaining for you but it can be harmful to many who are marginalized.

A single hand pie filled with brown sits in the center, slowly crumbling to bits

Sure but I’ve gotta ask: why not write 7 paragraphs of run-on sentences like a true proletarian!?

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don’t.

This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.

As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a “Mexican” regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.

But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?

At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.

It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon’s Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.

So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!’ crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).

Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I’ll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.

Bowman is pro-Israel, lol. He has opted to give them basically every material support that he’s had in front of him. DSA had an internal rift over his Zionism where the right wing of DSA wanted to support him regardless.

This is a good lesson for all vaguely left folks interested in electoralism. Even if you try to triangulate to seem less “extreme” or fly under the radar, the capitalist party apparatus will reject you and come for you eventually. You won’t even be able to point to your legacy later, as your cowardice will be the only thing in the rearview mirror. There will be no groups built from your leadership or longer-term wins from your efforts. Instead, you will have supported the genocidal status quo and harmed your own supposed base. So don’t play pretend or capitulate or triangulate. Lead and agitate and organize.

You think the Marcos government returned from partial alignment to the full alignment with the previous neocolonial regime under the thumb of the primary global superpower that already occupies their country and has done so for over 100 years because “China scary”?

lmao

That’s the joke lol

Capitalists: why should I have to pay for your training? Go into debt so that you’re pre-trained. Thanks! And by that I mean submit.

The current Marcos government is a shift towards the United States and is gladly offering up The Philippines, a neocolony of the United States, as a forward base for the “containment” of China. This includes a reversal in both policy and propaganda when it comes to the South China Sea.

Channeling the racists that the Banderites love so much.

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

This is something I’m very familiar with.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

This is largely the case, yes. Research universities do the basic research that industry then turns into a product and makes piles of cash from. And you are also correct that subsidizing STEM education is a subsidy for industry. It very specifically is meant to do that. It displaces industry job training and/or the companies paying to send their workers to get a degree. It also has the benefit of increasing overall supply in theur labor market, which helps drive down wages. Companies prefer having a big pool of potential workers they barely have to train.

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

That’s good!

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

I think your approach is better. I also prefer to write better-quality code, which for me entails thinking more carefully about its structure and interfaces and using best practices like testing and CI.

If the government is the US (federal), I think you are technically supposed to release your code in the public domain by default. Some people work around this but it’s the default.

But anyways, the example you’ve given is basically that you’re paid with government funds to do work to assist industry. This is fairly similar to the people that do the work for free for industry, only this time it’s basically taxpayersl money subsidizing industry. I’ve seen this many times. There is a whole science/engineering/standards + contractor complex that is basically one big grift, though the individual people writing the code are usually just doing their best.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus.

Perhaps it makes the world a better place, perhaps it doesn’t. This part of the industry focuses a lot on identifying a “social good” that they are improving, but the actual impact can be quite different. One person’s climate project is another’s strategic military site selector. One person’s great new standard for transportation is another’s path to monopoly power and the draining of public funds that could have gone to infrastructure. This is the typical way it works. I’m sure there can be exceptions, though.

Anyways, I would recommend taking a skeptical eye to any position that sells you on its positive social impact. That is often a red flag for some kind of NGO industrial complex gig.

Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Well you’re paid so of course it wouldn’t be that.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

Sometimes the industries will open bug reports for their free lunches, yes. A common story in community projects is that they realize they’re doing a lot of support work for companies that aren’t paying them. When they start to get burned out, they put out calls for funding so they can dedicate more time to the project. Sometimes this kind of works but usually the story goes the other way. They don’t get enough money and continue to burn out. You are paid so it’s a bit different, but it’s not those companies paying you, eh?

You aren’t harmed by closed source derivatives because that seems to be the point of your work. Providing government subsidy to private companies that enclose the derivative product and make money for their executives and shareholders off of it.

They’re also not even the same category. Organic vs. non was about what kinds of chemicals amwere allowed to be added. Herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing. GMOs are about whether a certain technology was used to genetically engineer the plants (artificial selection vs. the techniques of molecular biology). But they get all mixed up together as a result of marketing and a public that does not receive information any other way.

There are dangers with GMOs but they’re about farming sustainability and corporate power, particularly the use of IP law. The food itself, so far, is perfectly safe.

Also, organic food is not necessarily safer. You can still put fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides on organic crops, you’re just restricted to the use of certain kinds. You still need to wash organic produce to get rid of potential residue.

The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it’s free and they don’t have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I’ve seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.

The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It’s just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.