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redsolon · 11 months
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Real Democracy
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Despite liberal claims, Athens wasn't the source of our modern bourgeois states. Even the most democratic of the liberal democracies is only a "democratic republic", a marketing gimmick if there ever was one. Athenians did not recognize republics as democratic, but as what they are: oligarchies. Republics have always emerged out of the desire of elites to divide political power fairly among themselves. Key to this project has always been the maintenance of the ruling class as a ruling class, and the prevention of any one faction within it from siding with an outside class force to overthrow them. Greek Tyrannies, despite the inevitable dysfunction of hereditary rule, usually came to power on the back of popular discontent, as a way to discipline the aristocrats and force through reforms.
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Election is a filter process that privileges the most eloquent, the most well-connected, the most acceptable and personally appealing, and those with the most time and resources (which in a settler-colonial context, means able-bodied cis-het white men). Unless re-election is forbidden, once in office an official can use their position to enhance their wealth, influence, and notoriety, and thus increase their odds of getting re-elected. Thus the "democratic" office becomes a kind of property, even hereditary property. The ideal of election says that the people own the office, but the reality shows that the incumbent political class do.
While direct voting is a possibility, in reality asking everyone to vote on everything translates quickly into asking everyone to be a professional politician, or to spend all their free time obsessing over politics. This is unrealistic. Some claim that only having a motivated minority vote on any given issue is ideal, because the uninterested are usually both uninformed and unaffected; that the non-voting public implicitly consents to their concession of power. Anyone who's dealt with voter turnout has had to confront the material, social, and psychological barriers to voting, even for people who can be identified as having a material political interest in the issue--and yes, this also applies to ballot initiatives. Not everyone can be perfectly informed about every upcoming vote that affects them--and is that even how people want to live?
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To concede to the limitations of voting-based systems is to accept that the most structurally disadvantaged people don't deserve a say, and that if people miss an opportunity to intervene in an issue that it turns out affects them after all, then they are out of luck. Statistical, demographic representation is the only system which guarantees everyone an equal chance to have a say at every level, regardless of background. It also possesses many of the benefits of electoral systems--a dedicated body of people who are employed full time to investigate an issue before voting on it--and some benefits beyond pure election--breaking the incentives for corruption and vote-buying. Both bourgeois and proletarian republics have shown the severe limitations of a purely electoral system. Even if we include election and direct voting in our systems, sortition needs to lie at the core.
During crisis, if delegates are killed, then every republic relies on unelected officials to be interim officials, breaking the system's legitimacy claims. Systems of mass voting require secure, wide spread vote collection and tabulation at all times. If the voting system is every disrupted, the entire system ceases to be democratic according to its own standards. Sortative bodies, however, can be reassembled at any time with no delay, and only require that the few individuals selected by lot are able to be escorted to wherever they'll meet (or that they have access to secure communications). No other system possesses such a high level of speed, efficiency, and robustness.
Remember: every ancient republic, and most modern, fell to reaction and tyranny. The Greek democratic model never fell to internal enemies, only to external invasion. In fact, while Rome fell to tyranny forever, Athens was the system which rectified itself after a brief period of tyranny. And from a communist perspective, sortition is the system which most embodies the Mass Line at large scales.
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As we learned in the recent rail union contract negotiations, ruthless profit-seeking has made conditions for railworkers unbearable. It’s also made railroads less efficient. America badly needs a national rail service owned and operated for the public good.
Earlier this year, the federal board charged with overseeing America’s rail network called a hearing to discuss widespread complaints about higher costs and poor service. Predictably enough, rail executives sought to blame the pandemic and labor shortages for the likes of gridlock and supply-chain breakdowns. But the dysfunction on America’s railroads is neither a product of COVID-19 nor the result of nebulous constructs like the so-called “Great Resignation.” As Matthew Buck explained earlier this year in an article for the American Prospect, the single biggest contributors have been corporate monopolism and financialization — both of which contributed to the horrendous working conditions at the center of the recent showdown in Congress.
Thanks in large part to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan–era deregulation, American rail has steadily become more consolidated — the number of major carriers shrinking from forty to just seven between 1980 and the present day. Unsurprisingly, there’s little evidence that this shift has made rail transport any more efficient. It has, however, made the rail business incredibly lucrative. In an effort to wring as much profit from railways as possible, company barons have in turn cut costs, laid off workers, and introduced a host of other changes ostensibly geared to improving the quality of service. Central to this project has been something called “precision scheduled railroading” (PSR), the brainchild of late executive Hunter Harrison. Under PSR, as Buck explains:
"Railroad management’s job is to drive down the 'operating ratio,' or operating expenses as a percentage of revenue. In other words, Wall Street judges railroads’ success based in part on spending less money running the railroad and more on stock buybacks or dividends. Theoretically, focusing on lowering operating ratios pushes railroads to be more efficient, to do more with less. But when railroads have the market power they have today, they can instead 'do less with less,' as shippers and workers put it."
The upshot, in addition to appalling conditions for an ever-diminishing workforce, is that railways — a basic utility relied upon by millions every day for commerce and transport — are now treated more than ever as an asset designed to be milked for profit than a service structured to meet need.
For shareholders, the whole arrangement has worked out brilliantly. As companies like Union Pacific have laid off tens of thousands of workers, revenues have gone through the roof and billions have been paid out through dividends. Measured against more relevant metrics, of course, it’s been a catastrophe: even before the pandemic, both overall productivity and the number of usable track miles were down. When COVID-19 brought with it backlogs, derailments, and higher costs, however, it became glaringly clear that cutbacks to the railways driven by their hyperfinancialization have rendered them a significant weak point in the country’s supply chain.
One lesson in all this is that an enterprise can be profitable — and thus “efficient” in a narrow business sense — without actually working particularly well or operating effectively to service the needs around which it’s ostensibly erected. This is true in most industries, but it has always been particularly applicable in the case of rail. As the late historian Tony Judt once explained, the very idea of competitive or market-based railroads is, for very straightforward reasons, fundamentally incoherent:
"You cannot run trains competitively. Railways — like agriculture or the mail — are at one and the same time an economic activity and an essential public good. Moreover, you cannot render a rail system more efficient by placing two trains on the same track and waiting to see which performs better: railways are a natural monopoly. . . . Trains, like buses, are above all a social service."
Judt was primarily writing about Britain’s railways, but the essence of his argument applies to America’s as well. Actual “competition” is a non sequitur when it comes to railroads and, fittingly enough, private monopolism has left a handful of rail giants with what are essentially noncompetitive fiefdoms in different corners of the country. Deregulation has additionally allowed the tiny remaining handful of companies to discontinue service on unprofitable routes, leaving whole regions cut off. With greater control and fewer constraints on the terms of their operations, they’ve also been at liberty to raise prices and introduce new fees. Bottlenecks, in fact, often provide further opportunities for such price-gouging — one executive boasting on a 2019 earnings call that Union Pacific is in a position to “take some pretty robust pricing to the market” (i.e., charge more regardless of efficiency or the quality of service).
A further corollary, of course, is that those who actually make the trains run and keep the tracks in working order have been increasingly expected to do more with less and endure a brutal work culture no reasonable person could possibly defend: having gone three years without a raise, many railworkers are now required to be on call more or less around the clock and expected to report for shifts of up to eighty hours on as little as ninety minutes’ notice. Unable to take time off even in the event of an emergency, many also face punitive attendance policies that can see them suspended or terminated if they can’t show up for work.
Freshly reimposed by a Democratically controlled Congress without substantive modification, these horrendous conditions are a potent symbol of what happens when an essential public good like rail is turned over to Wall Street. Smashing the monopolies, introducing stricter regulation, and giving workers paid time off would certainly be a good start. For the sake of its supply chain, transport needs, and basic economic fairness, however, what America ultimately needs is a single national railway, owned and operated in the public good.
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personal-blog243 · 9 months
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kp777 · 1 year
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redshift-13 · 2 years
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It’s amazing to me that anti-fascist partisans like Fiorentini have been alive until the present day.  We can easily let ourselves imagine that history is well behind us when in fact its reach is uncannily long and continually pokes through into our lives.
You might have passed Fiorentini on the street and would be oblivious to the fact that at that moment, now in 2022, this old man was once again recalling an incident of valor or horror or both from WWII, and that it took place right underneath your feet on the same cobblestones.
Fiorentini’s grandparents’ lives could have pushed well back into the middle 1800s.  He might very well have heard stories from them of the olden times, both the celebrated figures and humble routines of daily life, the formation of the Italian state, the movement of its capital from Florence to Rome, and so much else.
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thoughtportal · 2 years
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It’s impossible to get inside Musk’s head to know what he’s thinking — I’m not sure I’d even want a peek at what goes on in there. There’s certainly a possibility this is serious, and that his offer letter is a display of hubris by a man with virtually limitless wealth and few people around to contradict him. But there’s also a chance this has already gone wrong and he’s getting tired of it, so he’s presented an offer he knows the board will reject that will allow him to say he was turned down. And in the meantime, he can keep railing against the platform, instead of backing off with his tail between his legs.
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marxman1 · 5 months
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charoland · 2 years
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A partir de su 6to número, armamos equipo con Atolón de Mororoa para trabajar en la propuesta editorial y artística de la revista. Esto implicó, por un lado, revisar la propuesta global del producto impreso (grilla, tipografías, criterios de jerarquización, uso del espacio) para elaborar un diagnóstico que nos permitiera establecer qué cosas podíamos mantener y cuáles debíamos ajustar o reformular para cumplir los objetivos editoriales y periodísticos de la revista. Por otro lado, nos permitió pensar la identidad de la revista y el tono que podíamos construir desde la imagen. Fue así que, para entender nuestra intervención, comenzamos por analizar y ordenar la a estructura periodística interna. Apuntamos a comprender a la revista como una seguidilla de artículos relativamente cortos que giran en torno a un tema común (el de cada número) y que se agrupan en secciones con tonos estables y bien diferenciados. A la vez, una serie de artículos destacados (y bastante más extensos) que interceptan estas secciones.
A partir de esto nos enfocamos, primero, en sistematizar criterios (tanto los ya existentes como los nuevos) con el objetivo de ganar claridad en relación a la estructura de contenidos y su comprensión por parte de lxs lectores. Luego, propusimos estrategias editoriales que nos permitieran un recorrido visual dinámico, ubicando los contenidos destacados de forma intercalada entre el resto de las secciones y proponiendo un micro sistema editorial específico para este tipo de contenido: uso del color, aperturas de nota, jerarquías tipográficas, uso de la grilla, etc. Otra parte del desafío radica en comprender el tono de los distintos contenidos y lograr un matcheos adecuado con distintxs ilustradorxs, pensando en la escala específica de cada nota así como en la escala total de la revista. De igual forma, trabajar en el concepto de tapa.
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romanticsuspense · 2 years
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There’s a reason the carceral state is happy to promote the proliferation of arms among its citizenry. It knows that such proliferation poses no threat to its rule. But there’s a deeper more insidious logic at play beyond pandering to gun manufacturers. A gun culture builds the specter of perpetual threat, thereby heightening the atomization and alienation of ordinary people in a capitalist society. The false sense of security offered by guns only serves to further disempower people by undercutting collective trust and community strength.
Nivedita Majumdar, “The Socialist Case for Gun Control”
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twitterexile · 2 years
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arcticdementor · 2 years
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(link)
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kropotkindersurprise · 6 months
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hey would you happen to know of any sources for dutch news that aren't libbed up
We dont really have that many great places for that sadly in the Netherlands, as far as I know. However, here's some more or less radical sources that I sometimes like who publish somewhat regularly:
Doorbraak.eu - Leftist news, often cover demonstrations and other Dutch leftist news that's ignored by mainstream media
Buiten de Orde - Physical monthly magazine of de Vrije Bond, the largest Dutch and Belgian anarchist union.
Socialisme.nu - the newspaper of the main Dutch Trotskyist group, de Internationale Socialisten. They, being Trots, of course also have a physical paper that you can subscribe to.
Jacobin.nl - Dutch branch of the socialist newspaper/newssite Jacobin.
Kafka.nl - Research and news from the antifascist research group Kafka, basically the only group that actively tracks and researches fascist groups and individuals in the Netherlands. Send them some money if you can, cause their work is really important.
Dutch friends, let me know of any good ones I didn't mention. I probably missed a bunch.
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haggishlyhagging · 10 months
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“Miriam Kramnick (1978) is one of the few commentators on Wollstonecraft who outlines the nature of the ridicule she was subjected to and the significance of this form of sexual harassment. Wollstonecraft was the recipient of 'barely printable insults', states Kramnick. ‘Her own contemporaries called her a shameless wanton, a "hyena in petticoats", a "philosophizing serpent" or wrote jibing epigrams in the Anti-Jacobin Review, like
For Mary verily would wear the breeches
God help poor silly men for such usurping b…..s
Twentieth-century readers have called her an archetypal castrating female, "God's angry woman", a man hater whose feminist crusade was inspired by nothing more than a hopeless, incurable affliction — penis envy’ (ibid., p. 7).
Even feminists have been careful about associating with her and: ‘The name "Wollstonecraft", once considered synonymous with the destruction of all sacred virtues, disowned by the feminist movement as it marched for votes or pressed for admission to universities, became an obscure reference indeed’ (ibid., p. 8). When women sought to convince men that they were honourable, respectable, and deserving of equal representation in the institutions men had created for themselves, there was little room for Wollstonecraft, who had challenged those institutions and who had gained a ‘reputation.’
Like many of the reviews of Aphra Behn, some of the reviews of Wollstonecraft's work and life, on her death, were vicious. Her work should be read, declared the Historical Magazine (1799), ‘with disgust by any female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion’ (vol. I, p. 34). This was about as far as critics could go in the pre-Freudian days, but once he had made his priceless contribution, the attack on women who did not conform to the precepts dictated by men assumed a new and greater ferocity.
‘Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type,' argue Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham (1959) in Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come. Unconsciously ... Mary and the feminists wanted ... to turn on men and injure them.... Underneath her aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist like her mother, as indeed all the leading feminist theorists were in fact.... By behaving as she did Mary indicated.... that she was unconsciously seeking to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him. It came out in her round scolding of men. The feminists have ever since symbolically slain their fathers by verbally consigning all men to perdition as monsters' (pp. 159-61). Really?
With the framework formulated by Freud, it again became easy to ridicule and harass women who developed any analysis of patriarchy, to dismiss them without having to refute their ideas. The scientific dogma took over from the religious dogma which had been seriously discredited (by women like Wollstonecraft) and both these male-decreed belief systems have been used ruthlessly against individual women and against women collectively. In her own day Mary Wollstonecraft was maligned for her moral sickness; with the advent of Freud it was her mental sickness. The principle is the same and it was a principle that Wollstonecraft herself identified and discredited - the principle that if women do not cheerfully confine themselves to the place to which men have relegated them, then there is something wrong with the women rather than the place they are expected to occupy. Mary Wollstonecraft understood that women would continue to be perceived as abnormal while the limited experience of men was treated as the sum total of human experience. One of her main protests was that men did not know how the world looked to women and, while they insisted that it looked no different from the way it looked to men, women were without space to discuss, share and confirm their feelings and ideas. And in this, Wollstonecraft is one of a long line of women who have come to understand the significance of male power to name the world and to say what is and what is not important, valuable, and ‘logical’.”
-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them
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redshift-13 · 2 years
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https://twitter.com/james_muldoon_/status/1555908628829413378
https://jacobin.com/2022/08/silicon-valley-privatization-future-big-tech-transportation
A striking (no pun intended) statistic: “...3.7 million people that have been killed by motor vehicles in the United States alone since 1899.”
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thoughtportal · 2 years
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It is through organizing in a near-constant state of triage, as so often happens among activists, that burnout happens fast. The pool of organizers shrinks as people are forced to return to the things that constitute the rest of their lives: children, jobs, families, food, art, and love. Without a deep community to fall back on in difficult times, good organizers drop out of the movement. A political organization that just wants to nourish the soul isn’t practicing politics, but a political organization that refuses to acknowledge all the parts of ourselves that make us human will be prone to decay.
Eberhart says:
There have to be spaces where people spend time together, where they share in joys and struggles, getting to know one another’s stories, encouraging one another in work, passing along ideas and opportunities of how to engage for a more just society.
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marxman1 · 7 months
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The Democratic Party is responding with extreme sensitivity to a series of exposures of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) published by the World Socialist Web Site about its convention, in which delegates resolved to remain a faction of the Democratic Party and voted against holding DSA elected officials accountable for supporting imperialist war and voting to illegalize strikes. The WSWS’s coverage of the DSA convention was read or viewed tens of thousands of times, including on several prominent YouTube shows where the articles were read aloud.
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