Right down to calling themselves libertarians, a historically leftist ideology that now apparently means you're just too embarrassed to call yourself a republican

what blue collar work are you doing that pays so well?

My spouse found out about a month-or-so-long class for fixing oil burners. Fuck oil but I decided to go for it. The class was also free (thanks to covid relief money, not sure from which president). It was definitely not easy. They used a lot of words I had never heard before. But I survived! And graduated. I took my state's license test a few weeks later and passed. At that point, I started calling local businesses. All of them were super excited when they talked with me, but none of them followed up and some even canceled interviews they had scheduled (presumably because they googled me and learned about my sordid political past). Maybe the fifth business I contacted, which is probably the biggest in my state, brought me in for an interview the morning after I called them (in the evening). I've been working with them for two weeks and so far it's been alright. They said they'd start me off with $18/hr, but my first paycheck amounted to $13/hr, so I'm like, what the fuck is going on with that, I have to ask them in a couple of days. They said that once I'm comfortable enough to be working on my own, they'll pay me $24/hr. The thing is, they charge customers $200/hr for service, so starting your own business is extremely tempting. A worker co-op could be life-changing for a lot of people, too. We could train communists in the trades and also radicalize blue collar workers (although the former is a million times easier than the latter). There are thousands of burners for every technician within like a hundred miles, and the best techs can only fix about four per day, so there's no end of work to do and a lot of the customers are loaded. The only issues I can foresee are climate change destroying everything or oil burners getting replaced with heat pumps (which I welcome honestly).

What I would say at this point is that a lot of businesses of all kinds are desperate for help and would probably train you if you ask. You can call them, talk with them in person, see if the vibes are positive, and there are so many businesses it's probably not an issue to quit and move on if it doesn't work out. My experience thus far has been that blue collar work seems intimidating at first, but it just takes guided practice to understand. I don't know that the class I took was necessary. It was also, like, eleven hours a day when commuting is included, and even more than that when you factor in all the homework and studying I did, so yeah. Doing hands-on work with people probably makes it a lot easier than listening to three or four hours of lectures per day, which is what I did.

this sounds sick but how are you going to deal with county and state level officials fucking your shit up?

Guns. It's also not impossible that within five or ten years, the state will actually be too weak to bother with us. Who knows? Building up local power (backed with force) might be the only way we can even survive. I don't know. The plan is just: learn blue collar work. Start worker co-op. Train communists. Build (or purchase) housing. Expand into other moneymaking fields. Run candidates in elections. Defund the police. (Other towns around here don't bother with having police, though sometimes they pay the sheriff to patrol there.) There's also so many empty houses here (in excellent condition) that even if every single full-time resident remained here, we could still bring in thousands of squatters without having to build a single house. Squatting laws in this state basically make it impossible to legally seize someone's home—unless you have plenty of people with guns.

It's a terrible framework that was introduced by libertarians, the original liberals and monarchists understood that we inherently live in a collective society, the question is where do your laws and authority, and therefore freedoms, derive from?

Do they come from God or are they independent from that concept? If they do come from God, who then embodies God's authority on earth? If they do not, then where does ethical authority come from? Can authority ethical at all? If authority is inherent what is then the 'most' ethical system?

The original 'rights of individuals' guys believed in those principles because they believed it was for the benefit of the collective, individual rights were not considered to be opposing moral aims because it was understood that exploitation of your fellow man is not only bad for the trust within the collective society, but it was bad for the individual as well because they still lived within that collective society.

The issue is that we now live in an era where technology and higher levels of concentrated wealth has allowed a larger number of people than ever to completely remove themselves from living in society, and become.the Randian individualists that the libertarians envisioned. But unlike Rand's protagonists, they do not simply remove themselves from the equation, they then additionally seek to influence society so we must all be like them, either exploiters or exploited. What they don't realize is that by doing this weakening of the collective, they are weakening the very social fabric that their power rests on.

I'm just going to take it one step at a time and see how far I can go. It wouldn't be the first worker co-op in the USA. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do, aside for "wait for a revolution." I know people here are like: "organize." And I'm like: I am literally the only communist for a hundred miles. There is no one to organize. I am surrounded by liberals and fascists. The only proletarians around here are seasonal laborers, many of whom don't speak English and have numerous reasons to be distrustful of a random white person talking about communism in broken Spanish. Etc.