should we advertise our political beliefs

[MotherCossack]

is it cool to wear a bunch of lenin/marx/trotsky/engels/red star/hammer&sickle/Anarchist or for that matter whatever you fancy, badges/tee-shirts .
with the intention of announcing your support for the far/broad/liberal left?

i've got an ageing black soviet anorak witha couple of hammer and sickles on front and back.
i wore it today throughout a trip to stratford westfield, that new ,shiny and huge haven of decadence. and it occurred to me that i might look a tad out of place in the more exclusive [and thereby more supportive of all things capitalist], shops, many of which, i was unfortunate enough to stagger around.

so... did my display of leftism compensate, adequately, for any misguided patronage of nasty shopping centres?

[eyeheartlenin]

Your anorak (is that a coat?) sounds wonderful. For over thirty years, I worked in a university, where my desk was like a counter, in that anyone (in the research groups I worked for) could come up, ask for help in some aspect of his/her work, and get some assistance, and so, for decades, I have felt some empathy for anyone behind a counter. Whenever I go to a store where someone will be waiting on me, I think about wearing an orange button that I have, one of the best things my union sells, that says FIRE YOUR BOSS. Mostly, I lack the courage to wear it, but when I have worn it, I have gotten some positive feedback from workers behind counters. So, if you feel comfortable walking around as an identifiable leftist, I say, go for it!

[Prometeo liberado]

When ColonelCossack is done packing his bags and getting little Cossack into the car seat I think that the answer will be much more clear. Any clearance sales?:crying:

[bcbm]

not unless you like being a weirdo

[NewLeft]

not unless you like being a weirdo

You're on revleft, of course you're weird.

[Ostrinski]

I wear Che Guevara shirts. I think it makes me look like a dumbass. I like it.

[bcbm]

You're on revleft, of course you're weird.

nuh uh

[NewLeft]

nuh uh

Oh oh.. Right, right.. I forgot. Not weird, but.. radical or revolutionary.

[Susurrus]

I have a couple che shirts i snagged in cuba and a hammer and sickle shirt my conservative friend got me. I wore one to school once, uneventful. Not going to wear outside of school though, not crazy.

[bcbm]

Oh oh.. Right, right.. I forgot. Not weird, but.. radical or revolutionary.

bored i think is the word you are looking for

[Ocean Seal]

There's nothing wrong with wearing leftist stuff, but sometimes it might not help you get certain points across. Wear it if you like, but if you are going about party business or reaching out to some workers it might be best if you avoided it.

[Agent Ducky]

Among other leftist stuff, I have these weirdass hammer and sickle glasses I made for myself. They're 3D glasses completely covered (even the lense areas) with red duct tape, with hammer and sickle drawn in the lense area. I wear them just above my forehead. Most of the time I don't get questions about the communism but rather "can you see through those?" Yes. This is weird, but several people have liked them enough to ask me to make them some. Inb4 everyone judges me. XD

[Susurrus]

Among other leftist stuff, I have these weirdass hammer and sickle glasses I made for myself. They're 3D glasses completely covered (even the lense areas) with red duct tape, with hammer and sickle drawn in the lense area. I wear them just above my forehead. Most of the time I don't get questions about the communism but rather "can you see through those?" Yes. This is weird, but several people have liked them enough to ask me to make them some. Inb4 everyone judges me. XD

Relevant:
http://de-motivational-posters.com/images/communism-now-in-3-d.jpg

Please find a Lenin or Marx statue and do this with yours.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

About as close as I've gotten to this is wearing a Bad Religion shirt with the cover art from their first EP on the front.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/Epbadreligion.jpg

One of my friends gave it to me a few years ago (the shirt). I wore it for about a year or so, then passed it on to another friend. He's passed it on to someone else. I don't know who owned the shirt before the guy I got it from, and I don't know who owns it now. It's passed through at least 5 torsos in some strange poetic fashion.

In Atlanta, I didn't get much of a second glance from anyone. In Louisiana, I got some nasty looks from people. Especially when I would spend time in Lafayette and some of the small towns between Lafayette and New Orleans near the coast.

About 4 years ago I was in South Carolina with my friend and I made the mistake of wearing this shirt. We were visiting our other friend who'd moved there a year before. On the first day we got there, we stop at a gas station at the interstate exit we needed to get off on. We still had twenty minutes or so left on the trip, and figured we should gas up and piss and such. So I go inside while my friend pumps up the tank, I piss and grab some drinks and go to the counter. The guy behind the register is giving me the crazy eye. At this point I realize I'm wearing the Bad Religion shirt and my pants are slightly below my ass, and I happen to be at a trashy gas station in the middle of rural South Carolina. Fuck. Two people sitting to my left get up and say "Boy, what the fuck is wrong with you?" I just kind of look at them. They go off in a string of expletives and start coming at me, so I bolt out the door with them following me. My friend just finished putting gas in the car, sees me being chased, jumps in, I jump in, and floors it away from the gas station.

T'was a bit scary. Too bad I'd left everything at the counter. I wish I'd stolen it. When we got to my friend's house a little bit later, he confirmed that the owners of that station were fucking nutballs and even a lot of locals avoided it.

[o well this is ok I guess]

Can I make a castle out of Mao's little red books

[The Stalinator]

I wear a little Soviet sickle-and-star pin on my hoodie. Very few people notice it.

In contrast, once I wore a red shirt with a giant hammer and sickle on it and people were unusually nice to me for the whole time I was out. I went out to grab a coffee and the barista was like "Thank you VERY much. I'm VERY pleased to have you here."

I felt as if everyone was secretly a communist and they knew I was an ally now.

[eyeheartlenin]

I have a Lenin shirt that I have not yet worn outside, since I live in a very Catholic plebeian neighborhood, and I don't know what the response would be. I also have a shirt that says, "Revolution Just Do It." I bought them both from the WIL years ago, which is funny, since Lenin believed that the Party was a visible organization, independent of other political tendencies, while the Grantists (WIL & Co.) believe, in opposition to both Lenin and Trotsky, that the "Party" exists wherever a small group of Grantists has nested (permanently, apparently) inside someone else's organization.

[MotherCossack]

well i think, myself, that it is generally a positive thing to wear your political beliefs on your sleeve...
i like seeing others wearing tokens of left-wing belief... it makes me feel all warm and cosy [well, maybe not all, maybe just a bit] and not entirely isolated...
it facilitates the odd exchange of shared visions, which is never a bad thing, and surprisingly few negative comments, in my neck of the woods anyhow.

[Agent Ducky]

If I see a kid wearing a hammer and sickle/circle-A/leftist shirt, I will walk right up to them and be like "YOUR SHIRT IS AWESOME."

Also, the only ill effects about wearing my ideology on my sleeve is the misconceptions people project onto me, and also this one guy who I don't know at all but every time he sees me he yells out something like "Capitalism is awesome!" I argued with him once, he's got a shit-tier knowledge level of politics.

[A Revolutionary Tool]

One May Day I was catching an early train to my Grandparents house because that's where I was working(poor me had to work on May Day instead of parade around) and there was and old man at the train station who had a red shirt with just Marx's head on it. So I had a pleasant train ride talking about the German Ideology(because that was my reading material for the train ride) with him. So advertising our beliefs can have good outcomes(sometimes).

[Fawkes]

Too bad I'd left everything at the counter. I wish I'd stolen it.

I wouldn't be so sure about that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpNgONH2ncI&feature=related).

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I wouldn't be so sure about that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpNgONH2ncI&feature=related).
Haha, My Cousin Vinny ... I completely forgot about that movie.

[Shotgun Opera]

Yes, we should, but in limited ways.

If you go out wearing I'MMA FUCKIN' COMMUNIST t-shirt, the chances of a positive encounter are not very good. Most places see Communist/Socialist/Radical Leftist belief as "youthful ignorance" and they're going to treat you as the epitome of such, especially if you're young.

Wearing the stuff like a billboard just kinda shoves you into a stereotype, especially if your other physical features and clothing items feed into that; I have long hair and a beard, therefore if I'm seeing wearing pro-Socialist clothing or something else obviously pro-Socialist, I get dismissed as some hippie college kid who doesn't know anything (ironic considering my age).

I've stopped wearing overt signs just because I got tired of people coming up and feeling the need to bark their favorite slogans in my face. I was eating lunch with a few friends and these two guys come up and basically yell at me, "CAPITALISM GAVE YOU THAT FOOD!" The owner of the place came over and asked if there was a problem and they got into it for a minute. Eventually the guys left.

In my experience, overt advertising leads to confrontation and generally I'm not interested in fighting the revolution while doing things like seeing friends or at work or with a lady friend so I generally dont bother. I'm not shy about reading materials, I like printing out articles about Socialism, reading them, and if they're good, dropping them somewhere they can be picked up and read.

[Aloysius]

I don't have any obviously leftist shirts. I'm low-key.

[MotherCossack]

one particularily outrageous example of my questionable judgement, in this regard...
i was in the northern part of southern france- [the hilly bit in the middle]
on a short visit to a quiet, unspoilt, backwater-type region...with a sister and family living in the village and enjoying increasing acceptance and respect.....
-enter- mother cossack, wearing her belligerent, 'dont trust my judgement, it's crap,' floppy hat [with huge flowers made of frozen yogurt and summer fruits].
it went...... (At a local School funday)
MOTH. COSS. Ooh, face paint.... How lovely...-[to her bored looking kids]-
get your face painted... in french face paint... ooh go on!
-[there is a solid wall of disinterest]-
-[only the youngest agrees...eventually, to a small butterfly on her cheek].-
MOTH. COSS: oh could you do me ... just a little one?
-[a small bright bulb is seen hovering above her head for many moments]-
embarrassed french teachers and some volunteers look at one another, unsure......
A FRENCH FACE-PAINTER: "vat vould you like, to 'ave ?
MOTH. COSS. the hammer a sickle... all over my face.
Guess what... it took a while to find someone mad enough to BREAK FRENCH LAW (anything remotely political in anything remotely related to school is totally illegal in france!)....
but i did... she did her best.... and considering my wonky, wrinkly grid was the blank canvas, produced a recognisable representation of the good old black hammer and sickle....i would have preferred a red one but black suited my face more..
needless to say the kernal maintained an unsurprisingly healthy distance throughout...
oh yee of little faith.... and..... oh well ...s'pose it was a bit mad....

[Veovis]

I wear this on the lapel of my peacoat:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Pioneers_Member_Pin.jpg/221px-Pioneers_Member_Pin.jpg

Not too flashy, but still makes a statement! I of course take it off for job interviews. ;)

[eyeheartlenin]

That znachók in Veovis' post is the emblem of the Komsomol, the Soviet-era communist union of youth. The words, vsegdá gotóv, "always prepared," were their slogan. I used to wear one as a Russian language major at my alma mater in DC. The 1960's Soviet depiction of Lenin is my avatar, obviously, a piece of political art I am very fond of.

[ColonelCossack]

I wear this on the lapel of my peacoat:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Pioneers_Member_Pin.jpg/221px-Pioneers_Member_Pin.jpg

Not too flashy, but still makes a statement! I of course take it off for job interviews. ;)

I wear that exact badge every day...

[Firebrand]

I have a whole selection of lefty T-shirts, my logic is that as a teenager i'm going to be slotted into one streotype or other by everyone so it might as well be an accurate one of my choosing, besides what's the point of having an opinion on anything if you can't use it to annoy people who disagree with you. Positive side effect i've found it's cheaper to get lefty t-shirts off the internet than to buy non-lefty ones in the shops, so overall spending on T-shirts has gone down.:D

[eyeheartlenin]

I have a whole selection of lefty T-shirts, my logic is that as a teenager i'm going to be slotted into one streotype or other by everyone so it might as well be an accurate one of my choosing

Years ago, when I was in a small social-democratic group, I saw a young guy wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt, and I tried to sell him a copy of our magazine. I told him, "I have a magazine to go with that shirt," and he let me know he was just wearing the shirt because it looked good. He was not any kind of leftist. So you can't always tell by the way people dress.


besides what's the point of having an opinion on anything if you can't use it to annoy people who disagree with you?

Totally agree. Given the economic performance of the current US administration -- 46.2 million people living in poverty, the worst poverty numbers since 1993, 7.5 million US homes in the foreclosure process, etc., I hope to buy an "Anyone but Obama" T-shirt, or maybe a couple of different ones, somewhere and wear them through the rest of 2012.

[Veovis]

Totally agree. Given the economic performance of the current US administration -- 46.2 million people living in poverty, the worst poverty numbers since 1993, 7.5 million US homes in the foreclosure process, etc., I hope to buy an "Anyone but Obama" T-shirt, or maybe a couple of different ones, somewhere and wear them through the rest of 2012.

In my experience, wearing statements that directly reference Obama would most likely get you mistaken for a conservative. That is, unless you're wearing something that implies radicalism, too.

[eyeheartlenin]

In my experience, wearing statements that directly reference Obama would most likely get you mistaken for a conservative. That is, unless you're wearing something that implies radicalism, too.

Good to know. I guess I will have to wear my big red Marx button too, or I could just go with the flow. :)

I really like your subscript statement, "If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and sacrifice, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire," by the way.

Your slogan is "prolier than thou," which is also neat. My father drove a truck for a living. Just out of curiosity, are you prolier than that? :) -- All the best, ehl