The only power being built when people "start their business" is their own power, to the *exclusion* of the power of the working class. This is a direct appeal to the petty bourgeois aspirations that drive reaction and uphold the capitalist system.

https://twitter.com/kaefairy_/status/1956545244255887571

The role of communists is not to "integrate with society," it is to *directly oppose* the status quo, to defeat and destroy the existing state. ACP does the opposite of this by appealing to and entrenching those who have the most to gain by the maintenance of the status quo.

If you're wondering why we use the colorful phrase "social-democracy is the left wing of fascism," try to understand how ghoulish it is to see this through the lens of "Americans will have to pay more for coffee."

Coffee is one of the most egregious examples of unequal exchange.

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1883617048011669887

In Colombia specifically, the vast majority of coffee pickers are migrant workers, largely from Venezuela. They make around 11-16 cents per kilo of raw cherries picked. This work is done at a grueling pace during harvest season, and then the work dries up when the season ends.

"Two things can be bad" liberals are a peculiar phenomenon. They emerge after realizing that they've been lied to about the sheer brutality of the old regimes, but before it dawns on them that these are the same people who taught them about the "terror" of the other side. Why are you listening to the Butcher of Bengal about the Savior of Auschwitz? Why are you learning about Mao in schools built on the graves of 100 million natives? How can you let the perpetrators of the war on terror teach you about the crimes of their victims?

I'm seeing a lot of misunderstanding around fascism lately. Especially with regard to whether or not we all contain some barely-restrained "primal" fascism, just waiting to burst free. I'm sure Marxists already understand the problems with the "essential nature" argument.
(1/23) But there is still a great deal of work to be done in teasing out the mechanics of fascism. A lot of theoretical work has been done over the past century to present a Marxist analysis of fascism (some more useful than others).
(2/23)

After Italy, Japan, Austria, Britain, France, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, and Spain had all signed non-aggression pacts or territorial treaties with Nazi Germany, the USSR finally decided to solidify what they knew was a very temporary peace with them as well. 🧵 Both knew this was a transient arrangement. Both saw the other as an existential threat; the Nazis' Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, Italy, Hungary, and Spain made it very clear that communism was their primary enemy, and nullified Weimar-era peace treaties with the USSR.

There is a persistent and troubling tendency among the broad and vaguely-defined "left," that decries education and intellectualism as "bourgeois" and "elitist."

At its core, this error stems from a valid critique of the role of education as a tool of hegemony. (1/18) The conflation of bourgeois intellectualism -- which serves to reify the hegemonic social order -- with the act of study *itself* is, paradoxically, a consequence of insufficient study. In fact, revolutionary study is the ONLY way to break the hold of bourgeois hegemony. (2/18)

Let's have a little talk about the median and how to lie with statistics!

Median is commonly cited as a useful measure of general economic prosperity, because it is very simple: the figure smack in the middle of the list, unlike the mean, which averages everything together.

https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1755237240039522614

For example, if you have an economy where the top 10% are ASTONISHINGLY wealthy compared to everyone else, their presence skews the mean:

10
12
13
14
16
17
84

The mean in this example would be 24, which is way higher than everyone *except* the outlier. Not helpful.

This is the cornerstone of the pandemic erasure campaign. They couldn't completely convince people not to give a shit about themselves or others, but they managed to shift the "calculation" in favor of business-as-usual by repeating the total fabrication of "COVID is mild now."

https://twitter.com/luckytran/status/1753127292727927260

Other factors:

Economic enforcement of this attitude. In many cases, it's not that people are terminally selfish, it's that they're financially punished for being conscientious. Lack of legally-mandated paid sick leave means every potential sick day is a risk calculation.

JANUS: What COVID variant JN.1 means for you.

You're probably aware that we are in a "COVID wave" right now. Testing is still tragically low right now, so it's hard to get a view of just how many cases are raging right now. (1/21) But wastewater data suggests we are at the second highest point in the pandemic, beaten only by the initial appearance of omicron.

For years, we've been hearing about "waves" of COVID. (2/21)

"Colonialism isn't about the settler working class" is an incomprehensible position for Marxists to hold. Do you not understand the construction of national identity as a vector of exploitation? How the nation was designed to supplant class in the public consciousness? You can emphasize all you want that racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are constructs, but that doesn't mean they aren't MADE real by their use in the hegemonic, hierarchical structure that ennobles the material relations of our global society.

A pernicious mythology that has flourished largely unchallenged in both the public consciousness and the medical profession is the concept of the immune system as being "strengthened" by infections. The idea goes that your immune system starts off inexperienced and vulnerable, but through exposure to various pathogens, it becomes generally better at fighting pathogens. It's envisioned as a military being hardened through combat experience.

"How does the risk of long COVID differ from the myriad other risks humans tacitly accept?" I think this is a very important question, so here's my attempt to explain the scale of risk:

The main differences are the transmissibility, novelty, magnitude, and commonality of risk. Transmissibility:

Pretty self-explanatory. You can't transmit Lyme disease or a horse riding injury to someone else, and you certainly can't *accidentally* do so simply by breathing on them. You might be willing to accept the health risks of smoking,