askchapo

Not necessarily direct praxis but any kind of hand repair skill seems like just fundamentally good to learn and also a fun hobby, like hand sewing.

Hiking is a gateway to a lot of different useful skills and knowledge bases. It's good exercise for your core and legs which makes you embrace stress/pain productively. Revolution is mostly cardio and it's good cardio too. You learn your native ecosystems, all of the different components of them, and how society is built on top of them. Ethnobotany is as much a survival skill and poverty food enhancer as it is a really rich field of indigenous studies. I'm much better at intuitively reading the weather, land navigation, climbing, and general bushcraft skills after doing it. Being able to make a solid socioecological critique instead of just a socioeconomic one connects with people who align with us in important values but don't know how to connect the dots between economy and environment. The more time you spend hiking the more you learn the metabolic value of each individual species/land feature that becomes background noise in our alienation from nature.

It’s gonna sound lame but get a 90s copy of the boy scout handbook and learn all the stuff in it by putting yourself in situations where you will use them. For things like tourniquets and other first aid, take a class. Don’t be afraid to update the methods by looking up stuff online.

If you’re not sure why I suggested this: bsa operated at one point as a pipeline into the military for children. The skillset it teaches is basically hobby infantry.

Getting into fermentation could be interesting. There's the fun aspect like making beer or wine but there's also foods like kimchi or sauerkraut or cheese. It's good to know how to do and could be helpful at preserving food in the near future where it might be necessary.

A bit of a weird answer, but listening. Being an active, engaged listener when someone needs to be heard or understood is a skill that can be cultivated like many others - in fact, in case of ND folk like me, we had to learn and remember to apply it. It connects you to the other person, it's a nice thing to do, and it costs nothing except for your time.

An old school communist comrade of mine swears by geocaching

Tinkering on bicycles has given me a surprising amount of cross-transferrable skill as to maintenance or building a lot of (simple) mechanical systems and how forces work on them even outside of the bicycle world.

Pokemon cards so that after the revolution i have people to play pokemon cards with

I learned to make bread. It's cliche but if shit hits the fan, flour water and oil last forever.

Edit: also cardio. I only started running to be valuable to socialism. Good cardio can go a long way

Gardening.

I mean the classic is learn to quadcopter

lockpicking semi useful, especially techniques like raking and stuff I suppose, but not as useful as being able to cut or drill locks I'd think. bolt cutters and angle grinders can get you far. Though those don't exactly require much skill

Cooking for large groups is an important skill. You can scale this up from large batch/mealprep to small gatherings to large gatherings. I've seen several large gathering situations where it was extremely noticeable when there was just 1 person skilled with this, and also when there wasn't.

Scrapping/dumpster diving. Works best if you have a decent amount of storage space and a cargo-suited vehicle. Tapping the waste stream yields bounties. All sorts of things can be fixed up or sold or even used as-is.

No one's mentioned this yet, and I don't relish it personally, but being good@car is extremely useful. Everybody has car trouble once in a while, and being able to fix it yourself can save you or your comrades up to thousands of dollars a year.

Also, strength and conditioning, and a little bit of parkour. Nothing fancy like flips and spins, but being able to get up or over or down from a fence or wall or pole or tree is very useful. Being able to do a few pull-ups is a good baseline for practical fitness, along with being able to run a 7-minute mile. Body-weight exercises are all you really need; no fancy equipment is necessary if you understand how to work out a muscle group.

I got into lockpicking 6 months ago and its fun as hell, led me down a rabbit hole where i now want a flipper zero but i cant afford one

I can recommend woodworking. Yeah, you can get really fancy with it, with lots of expensive tools. But you can also keep things simple, mostly working with traditional hand tools. You can even build a lot of your own tools. If you want free material, you can recycle old obsolete furniture you get for free into new and useful pieces. (Think old entertainment centers built for old giant CRT TVs, desks with huge drawers for storing massive amounts of paper, etc.)

Yes, you can go full bougie artisan if you want, but from a more leftist perspective, you could follow the tradition of the country carpenter. An old-timey country carpenter was someone that had the skills and tools to help people with their needs in a cheap and effective manner. Their customers were poor and working people. Need a dresser or a table? They would build you something functional. It might have been made of whatever wood was on hand and from mismatched fasteners, they would produce something usable for a cost people could afford. They would be just as likely to accept payment in barter as in currency. The modern version of this might be developing the ability to offer simple repairs to even IKEA-type furniture.

With global trade breaking down, people are going to need to fix the things they already have. If the price of everything at IKEA triples, well suddenly repairing things is a lot more viable than just throwing it out and buying another one. I focused this discussion on woodworking, but the same applies to many fields. Start thinking about how you can help people not just by making new things, but by repairing those that already exist. We need to learn to get by, to make due with what we have, now more than ever. Develop the skills for furniture repair, basic appliance servicing, simple electrical and plumbing work, etc. In an era of both stifled trade and immigration, the need for people with basic everyday repair skills has never been greater. You can make it a career if you want, or you can do it just as a mutual aid activity. Hang a shingle and offer your services on a sliding scale if you want. But this is one of the most practical and rewarding ways you can help people in your community. You get to directly help people in a tangible way, using an activity that lets you use your own hands and build/repair something. It's the kind of work that's good for the soul.

Can recommend lockpicking purely as a hobby. I pick padlocks with paperclips and they make a very satisfying click when you succeed which your brain immediately starts to interpret as "time to release some reward chemicals". I don't think it is actually very useful, but it is fun and harmless.

Go out for nature walks and identify all the plants in your local area.

Socializing, leadership, organizing… you know, things that require you to touch grass and might be out of reach for some of us who are nd and/or have other constraints

I've been interested in "locksport", competitive lockpicking, ever since reading about it in a Wired article about DEF CON years ago. During covid quarantine I got a transparent practice lock and a set of picks and started learning picking. It's pretty fun and I find it relaxing, kind of like a fidget spinner. Masterlock padlocks are super easy but I haven't practiced much on doorknobs or harder locks.

I’m going to learn to fly a drone and take some intensive Spanish. Tons of people in my neighborhood speak Spanish and I feel like I could help my community more if I could communicate better. Also considering volunteering with habitat to learn some building skills and help with housing in my city.
I’ve already got most of the survival skills down, sewing, gardening, cooking, camping, foraging.

shooting

Gardening and food preservation are easy ones. Do try and avoid botulism though

I think that all basic everyday skills like baking, cooking, knitting, repairing stuff, camping, some diy builds in woodwork and such are good and things we can use in solidarity with others as well although they might seem mundane. But getting a bag of potatoes to go a long way for a lot of people is definitely a useful skill, one I learned from my prole grandma. Also fermentation and preserving food.

Food foraging if allowed/able to do that. Berry and mushroom picking. Fishing if eating fish. Learning your plants: edible wild plants, berries and shrooms even if not able to go get them.

A basic skill in orienteering which we thankfully learn in school. If already familiar with it, keeping it up by hiking or some sort of nature shenanigans.

Rowing and skiing, these are related to my location, but reassure me that I could disappear in the woods winter or summer and move relatively swiftly.

Gardening or learning to grow your own food or a part of it, maybe urban shroom gardening or micro greens if stuck in an apartment building.

Some self-defence sports also, they helped me reassure myself that I can fend for myself if needed.

We have been making a lot of stuff from used pallets for our tiny backyard. We make our own furniture or repair used stuff as well and bake all our own bread which I also gift to others.

Going into a makerspace to do crafty stuff can also be a way to find likeminded folks or people who could use hints in the right direction.

I used to target practice as a kid with an air rifle, but I want to go take an archery class next. A hunting bow might be a good thing to own, for food and other things.

Bookbinding! Its really fun to read a book you made yourself.

Happy to see so many lockpickers in the comments. Look into other forms of lock bypass and nondestructive entry. Firearms/shooting is obvious. I am going to start building fpv drones. Security culture is a good thing to begin developing if you haven't already.

Computers. Learning basic computer hardware, security, networking and all that sort of nerd stuff is important. Knowing how the inner workings of how machine works it’s very useful for subverting it, modifying it, and extending it for real leftist purposes. I remember setting up my Boy & Girls Club computer center in my teens I seeing use was really satisfying

Lockpicking is fun and has helped me out a few times when I lost keys. There's some cool clear locks you can get to help you understand how basic locks work.

Electronics and soldering are fun and useful, allowing you to repair and repurpose devices.

Amateur Radio is cool as hell, you can talk to people around your area or thousands of miles away, it dovetails nicely with electronics and soldering. One way to reduce cost of this hobby is making your own antennas etc. But you can get on the air in the US for $60, 35 for the license, a free exam, and 25 for a Baofeng GT-5R, which is FCC compliant and I've gotten good repeater contact at nearly 10 miles.

Programming is useful and basically free if you have access to a computer.

Physical activity of any kind is excellent, especially if you can combine it with one of the above listed activities. Radio lends itself to this with POTA and SOTA.