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one-divides-into-two · 2 months

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"If we treat the Stonewall Uprising as initiating the modern gay mass movement in 1969, the left-adventurist line was initially dominant, and fell by the wayside in the late 70s. Those who led the first wave of the LGBT movement of the 60s understood themselves (however incompletely) as participating in a revolutionary movement and process: In broad strokes, the early “left” line groups of gay liberation located the center of gay oppression in the family form itself and were explicitly in solidarity with the women’s movement as in many ways the same as their own (ideologically if not always practically). The British Gay Liberation Front’s Manifesto reads

The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family...At some point nearly all gay people have found it difficult to cope with having the restricting images of man or woman pushed on them by their parents...we are expected to prove ourselves socially to our parents as members of the right sex (to bring home a boy/girl friend) and to start being a 'real' (oppressive) young man or a 'real' (oppressed) young woman

The Boston Gay Men’s Liberation group argued in their manifesto for the collectivization of childcare and housework, saying

Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over ‘their’ children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing

Others explicitly aligned themselves with the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles of the time –Third World Gay Revolution went so far as to explicitly call for armed struggle towards establishing socialism. The gay struggle, to these organizations, was necessarily part of the struggle for the end of capitalism and the liberation of all oppressed and exploited peoples.

Nevertheless, these groups primarily took the left-adventurist line, and the failure of these organizations to place politics in command and take up Marxism fully (despite its influence within the movement), and the failure of the leading Marxist organizations of the time to cast aside their chauvinism, place politics in command, and embrace the LGBT movement (most notably RU/RCP, which maintained that homosexuality was “perpetuated and fostered by the decay of capitalism” and to be eliminated under socialism until 2001 and engaged in conversion therapy-style practices on their gay cadre), allowed the bourgeoisie to co-opt the movement and suppress its revolutionary strains. By the end of the 1970s the main left-adventurist groups that emerged from the movement's popular initiation via the Stonewall Uprising (GLF, STAR, TWGR, etc) had collapsed, and were replaced by the newly dominant right-opportunist trend, represented in groups like Lambda Legal (founded 1971), GLAD (1978), and the Human Rights Campaign (1980). Occasional left-adventurist ruptures emerged over the succeeding years, with ACT UP's break (rooted in part in gay and lesbian anti-imperialist solidarity work in the preceding years) from Gay Men's Health Crisis representing the most significant of these, but over the next three decades the bourgeois "marriage equality" became the central demand of the movement, with the implication that once these various reforms proposed by the right-opportunist trend were enacted, the gay movement would cease to be necessary.

In the first two decades of the 21st century these reforms were realized, and the idealist fantasies of the leading bourgeois gay organizations were not. These reforms were granted because they reaffirmed the bourgeois family form, successfully assimilating the leading upper strata of LGBT people as a method of defusing the movement as a whole. While in some ways the broad social acceptability of homosexuality, transness and gender nonconformity have increased, the reaction to these reforms has produced a vicious effort to oppress the lower strata, typically trans people.

Indeed, all empirical evidence points to the continuing existence of anti-gay and anti-trans oppression. In our younger years, parents, teachers, and other authority figures will attempt to suppress any expression of homosexuality, transness, or gender non-conformity. The passive and active social enforcement of your sex/gender role is a universal experience, but is felt particularly acutely by those most directly in contradiction with those roles. When this fails, authority figures sometimes resort to violence and sexual abuse – gay and trans children suffer higher rates of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse across the board as compared to their cis and straight peers. LGBT people as a whole make 10% less than the average worker. This is felt more acutely among trans people, particularly trans women (in line with their cis counterparts), who make just 60% of the average. What bourgeois sociological evidence does exist points to significant discrimination in housing, jobs, medical care, etc. Accessing medical care is a struggle of its own for trans people – getting the treatment needed for basic day-to-day existence is often humiliating and expensive.

For younger LGBT people, particularly trans people, this political sequence has produced significant "whiplash." We grew up in a period of a real increase in broad social "acceptance," and being told that these reforms would guarantee an end to our oppression. But the utter abdication of leadership by the rightists following the reforms (after all, "we won") and the reactionary backlash has left the movement with a vacuum of political and organizational leadership at a crucial conjuncture. In the absence of this leadership, small groups have begun to emerge, largely taking up the left-adventurist anarchist line, sometimes explicitly. In some ways, this is a positive situation for communists. The broad masses of LGBT people are crying out for leadership in their struggle against the reactionary offensive, and the failure of the bourgeois rightist line to provide its promised victory has revealed to many gay and trans people, particularly those of the lower strata, the bankruptcy of reformism.

The current assault on our self-determination by the reactionary wing of first-world politics presents us with an opportunity to smash that trend, to effect a final rupture. Gay and trans people, particularly trans people, are increasingly forced into direct confrontation with the bourgeois state (through its repressive laws) and its extra-legal shock troops (with trans events becoming one of the primary targets for street fascist attacks). Not since the AIDS crisis have we seen such direct confrontation – and with it, openness to revolutionary communist political projects.

The task before communists in the gay movement is therefore to rectify the line of the movement through theoretical and practical struggle, to offer leadership to the gay and trans masses, and transform this movement into a detachment of the world proletarian struggle for communism."

Half the Sky: Preliminary Materials for a Proletarian Feminist Politics

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sgiandubh · 2 months

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Offer and demand

For comparison purposes, kindly find below what a devoted Ozzie fan will have to be prepared to pay for a pic with one or several of the participants to the Hublander Australia 'A Visit to The Highlands' event, this week-end, in Sydney and Melbourne:

On top of that, there is an extra option I have never seen for European events (and correct me if I am wrong). You can buy signed personal items and autographed pics for somebody who cannot attend (personal items cost a little extra, no idea why). Here is an example, for S:

Just to have an idea, remember (I will always LOL at this word, from now on, and that's really a shame, because I use it a LOT, irl) these are the prices in Australian dollars. A pic with S would cost you around 115 euros or 125 USD and the most expensive group pic would lighten your purse by around 360 USD or 333 euros.

All this, like for the Paris Landcon, are on top of what you pay for access and the rest of the side gigs, depending of your tier of choice. Those can set you anywhere from 200 Australian dollars for the standard entry ticket to 1800 Australian dollars for the Platinum Tier, where I hope S will pour you a dram or something - nope, not really, that was really a cheap joke, forget about it. You do the math, it's easy.

If you take the time to compare with the Paris Landcon, the discrepancies are clear. The Australian Lollapalooza easily costs the double. But before you screech and wail, do remember two things:

Prices in Australia and France are not really the same. Same goes for the disposable wages of the people buying these tickets. Same goes for the logistical costs (venue rent, talent accommodation and fee, insurance - very important!, other administrative expenditures like legal costs: never forget these people also sell licensed merchandise, which comes at an extra cost itself, etc).

Also, event organization is a business in itself. There is a market and a pool of potential clients for this type of business. Demand and offer meet (or should do so) on that market and the result of this encounter of sorts should reasonably reflect what the people are willing to pay for whatever you peddle around, from bagels to Scottish fantasies. Too expensive - nobody will come. Too cheap - the talent you hope to attract would, in all likelihood, not show up, especially if it takes 10 to 20 hours of flight to get there.

Now add to this the need to satisfy just about everyone in the room. The simple need to make sure that the person who paid 200 dollars for the basic ticket would not feel left behind those who paid nine times (yes, nine times, for Australia, land of plenty) more. That is not an easy task and those figures you have seen are not what you may think they do represent, on face value.

Last, but not least, a wee secret: the bulk of the talent's fee comes from those autographed pics you bought extra, the Q&A sessions and the Platinum Meet and Greets - isn't that a strange form of Marxist distribution circuit (but I digress, forgive the scholar). The rest is probably going to cover operational costs.

Nobody robbed you. Nobody forced you or hypnotized you. You will meet the real people, not some denizen of Abuja who pretends he is Mr. Blue Eyes. And S will not get richer after Melbourne, only more tired.

You're welcome.

PS: merci à toi; chérie, pour l'info and also a heartfelt thank you to you, New Friend on the Block. You know who you are! 😘😘😘😘❤️❤️❤️

[Edit]: @joey-baby tells me the Oz fans can buy the recording of both days. That is a local exclusive and I surely hope we'd see some of it in here. Thank you! 🙌

#fandom #shitshow

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txttletale · 1 year

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nothing about ai art is new

[we’re sitting in a taco bell drive through and ive abused my control over the aux cord to make you listen to indie rock classic apollo 18 by they might be giants for hours on end]

so there’s been a lot of yammering on about stable diffusion and how it will revolutionize/destroy/democratize/annihilate the world of art, depending on which impassioned twitter thread you read. what they all have in common though is (incorrectly) treating this as some radical new shift, an unprecedented leap forward caused by cutting-edge technology. this is wrong: nihil sub sole novum.

this post is not about:

ip law

whether ip law is a good thing (no)

whether ai art is Real Art (what is this girls 1917?)

how AI art actually works (as far as i can tell, like this)

this post is about

karl marx babeyyy

so in a sexy little number called wage labour and capital, carlos marx lays out some of the foundations of marxist theory. these include the labour theory of value (that the value of a thing, whether expressed in the use of something or in its exchange for other things, is only created or increased when a human being performs labour. e.g. fabric + hours of human life = clothing, which is both more useful and more valuable in exchange terms than the fabric) and the division of labour

to make a long and well-written argument short and poorly formulated (seriously, read the original, it’s like 25 pages), the price of a commodity* rises and falls around a base price that’s based on the cost of production. ‘wages’ are simply the term for the price of the commodity of ‘labour-power’, or hours of human labour**--and therefore, they rise and fall around the cost of producing human labour.

now, how much does that cost? pretty simple. first there’s the basic costs of the labourer continuing to survive day to day. then there’s the costs of them having children who can grow up to be labourers and keeping them alive too. finally, there are the costs of the labourer’s training, and these can far outstrip the first two. it’s expensive for a capitalist to hire a digital artist because the cost of producing digital artists (the survival of a human being + years and years of practice) is high--so the commodity of their labour power is priced highly.

however, marx also succintly explains supply and demand--concepts everyone’s probably semi-familiar with. when there are many sellers of a commodity, they compete for buyers by offering their commodities at lower and lower prices.

bearing in mind that ‘wages’ are just the price of the commodity of human labour-power--this means that technological development in production has a twofold depressive effect on wages: not only are less people employed (if a capitalist can produce twice as much of a commodity, they’re not guaranteed twice as much of a market--so they will instead tend towards producing the same amount at half the cost), but more people are capable of doing the work. so for the same process of production, there are more people capable of doing it, and less people needed to do it. as marx puts it:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified.

The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

when marx wrote this, he was talking about artisan craftsmen who made goods by hand in small workshop. since then we’ve seen this exact process sweep across every industry, devouring the manufacturing sector, now creeping second by second into the white-collar service economy. now, we are seeing this on the horizon for artists--there’s far more skill in creating AI artwork than some people give credit for, but it is ultimately in terms of time and accessibility easier and broader to do--it will have these effects if it is able to produce output on par, or even just slightly worse than, professional photographers and artists, for a fraction of the cost of labour-power.

so, like, why have i just written all this? to point out that the phenomenon people are scared of wrt AI art driving already precarious working artists into poverty is not some new and endemic technological horror. it is a social process that’s been ongoing for centuries--and the productive forces are not going to roll back, because capitalism demands ever-rising profits which demand ini turn ever-lower costs of production, including (especially) lower costs of production of skilled labour. if you are trying to stop stable diffusion AI tech from being used then you are trying to stop the horse by pulling on the reins of the cart.

if you are scared that AI art is going to make your passion and profession economically worthless, the tools themselves are not your enemy--it is the system that decides how these tools will be used, that art becoming easier to make is a vector by which to divide and precaritize working artists instead of to broaden access to the joy of creation--in the same way that industrial production has been used to create the system of wage-slavery instead of providing for all, in the same way that will repeat over and over again until the system that allocates resources and labour to maximize profit instead of human welfare is toppled and replaced

[the drive thru employee politely clears their throat. i turn to them and say ‘oh i didnt want anything i just like the smell out here’ and drive away directly into a lake]

*in marxist terms, a commodity is anything that: 1. has use value, as in, someone wants to have it and use it--eat it, wear it, play with it, watch it-- 2. has exchange value, as in, it can be exchanged for other commodities (price is a reflection of this exchange value through money), 3. has value through the application of labour power (someone has worked to produce it. even raw materials count--coal power plants don’t buy coal that’s still in the ground)

**engels explains the distinction between labour-power and labour in the introduction to the 1891 edition:

“What the economists had considered as the cost of production of “labour” was really the cost of production, not of “labour,” but of the living labourer himself. And what this labourer sold to the capitalist was not his labour.

At the most, he could sell his future labour – i.e., assume the obligation of executing a certain piece of work in a certain time. But, in this way, he does not sell labour (which would first have to be performed), but not for a stipulated payment he places his labour-power at the disposal of the capitalist for a certain time (in case of time-wages), or for the performance of a certain task (in case of piece-wages). He hires out or sells his labour-power.”

#ai art #aiart #stable diffusion #communism #long post

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trans-girl-nausicaa · 10 months

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On “An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto.”

Preface:

I am not an Anarchist, I am a Marxist, however, I think you will find that my disagreements with this piece are mostly compatible with an Anarchist position. (And if not… well… I don’t care.)

Full text of the piece may be found here.

I will be examining excerpts, while skipping over parts of the manifesto that repeat itself or are just not relevant to the points the author is trying to make.

(Side note: I do not mean any ill-will towards the author and I have nothing against them personally. I simply think that this text has very bad ideas that I strongly disagree with.)

The text begins:

“Before I begin in earnest, let me be clear: this is not a call for pacifism.”

This is an important distinction. The author does not want pacifism, they simply want to lose the revolution.

“I believe in fighting back with anything and everything we can get our hands on, however, I have grown tired with the continued fetishization of guns in radical (specifically anarchist) spaces.”

Please keep in mind the phrase “fighting back with everything we can get our hands on,” because it is contradicted many times in the rest of the piece.

I find their assertion of “fetishization of guns in radical … spaces” weak. Does it exist? Maybe, but they provide no examples of such, nor any descriptions of what it might look like.

(I can provide an example of a type of gun fetishization by leftists. Many American leftists have an affinity for guns originally designed in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, manifesting, for example, in an irrational preference for AK models rather than the much more reasonable choice of an AR. But that is not touched on by this author and is a topic for another post entirely. Please do not buy a Makarov for self-defense purposes.)

Part I: “Illusions and Delusions”

They begin this section with a description of how Things Sure Are Getting Bad In America.

From the second paragraph:

“With each law passed, each drag story hour threatened, each captured display of violence on film, I see many with whom I find affinity echo some version a similar refrain:

‘This is why you need to buy a gun’

Every time I see this refrain, I pause and sit with the unease that rises from my guts into my throat and out my nose. I sit in the unease until a question formulates ‘What do you think a gun changes?’”

I’m going to legitimately answer their question.

A gun multiplies your capacity to do violence.

I don’t mean metaphorical violence or structural violence or figurative violence, I mean physical violence.

The oppressed peoples of America see that there is some kind of tide turning against us. And we are arming ourselves because not only is violence inevitable, it is already present.

I saw in the news how there was an armed standoff between the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and right-wing ‘protesters’ at a drag show. Many of the EFJBGC members were armed with AR-15 rifles. It is indisputable that they were a lot more intimidating than if they were unarmed. Some of the ‘protesters’ were armed as well, but the armed EFJBGC members outnumbered the armed ‘protesters.’ At that stage, in that context, intimidation was clearly a desired outcome. Sometimes intimidation is a necessary weapon against your enemies. We are “fighting back with anything we can get our hands on,” right?

“I’ve been around guns my whole life. I learned how to shoot at a young age, first a shotgun, then a rifle, then a handgun. I learned how to clean and care for a gun.”

I will refrain from casting any aspersions as to the author’s skill with a firearm. The problem is not their familiarity or skill, rather their errors in judgement.

Next we come to a real declaration.

“In no subtle words, believing that gun ownership is a meaningful answer to the violence enacted on marginalized peoples is to reify the illusion that to possess a gun is to increase one’s proximity to “safety”, and that to possess more guns is to become even “safer”. Owning a gun will never make you safe, because there is no such thing as safety in this world for the marginalized, for the Black, the targeted nonwhite, for the poor, the visibly queer,”

And they go on with a list of marginalized demographics, but I wanted to stop it at “the visibly queer,” because I find that significant.

I think it is incorrect to tell someone at risk of being gay-bashed that they should not have a means of exerting more violent force in a fight.

I am visibly trans and have been harassed on the street by random aggressive people many times. I’m lucky to have escaped such encounters through various means but I eventually decided that I was done taking chances. If you don’t have a need for self-defense, that’s cool for you I guess, but my life experience has been very different. I carry a 9mm Glock loaded with hollow-points in a concealed holster. I train regularly.

I wasn’t “safe” in the first place.

The next point they make makes me really wonder who they think they are arguing with.

“If you wish to continue breathing, there is no gun you can possess to prevent the sheriffs from carrying out an eviction. There is no gun you can possess to turn your heat back on.”

Nobody thinks this. It’s an irrelevant thing to bring up. Moving on.

“If someone really, truly, wants you dead, no gun will keep you alive, unless you turn yourself into a machine of pure vigilance, sacrificing living for the hope of survival that can never be guaranteed.”

This is literally not true. If someone really, truly, wants you dead, and tries to kill you, and you shoot them until they stop moving, they’re gonna have a much harder time killing you.

It seems that the author here is taking the nihilist point of view where there is nothing you can do to give yourself better odds in violent altercations where the other person wants to kill you.

Regardless of political ideology I never tolerate nihilism.

In their next paragraph they are truly self-contradictory.

“If there is to be a path towards anything resembling “safety” it will not come from individually arming ourselves, even in large numbers. It will come from a generalized culture of antagonism towards both formal and informal institutions of power. It will come from a culture of spontaneous resistance, from insurrectional potential. Guns may be a part of some explicit actions within that culture; however, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing it about and may (as I will touch on later) hinder its continued existence. The only chance we have at protecting each other is gaining ground in the social war of our time.”

Let’s put aside the “generalized culture of antagonism” as that is within the purview of social movements overall and is therefore beyond the scope of what I can write about here.

There is a contradiction between their assertion that we should not individually arm ourselves and their assertion that guns may be necessary for social change. Ideally you should not spontaneously take up arms at a flashpoint of social change without previous experience and training with firearms, and the best way to have experience and training with firearms is to already have firearms so you can actually train with them. Their idea of a “social war” that apparently does not include firearms is ludicrous and unimaginable in the United States of America. If there is to be an actual “social war” with genuine insurrectionary activity, the right-wing and capital-owning opposition to those insurrections will be shooting at you. ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,’ as they say.

“Rather than taking an offensive position of articulating worthwhile actions and carrying them out, many revert to a defensive (even reactionary) positioning of arming themselves and simply waiting for the coming genocide, for the coming collapse. They may have other projects that they take part in but they are mostly ways to kill time. They don’t attempt to gain ground and so they don’t risk losing ground. Still, they are convinced of their own radicality because they armed themselves, they have primed themselves to defend the marginalized (potentially including themselves), the most radical thing one can do.”

What can I say other than ‘citation needed.’

Sure, if all you do is buy a gun and nothing else, then arguably you’re not a part of a revolutionary force. But that’s not what I see. I see people unionizing their workplaces, taking part in mutual aid projects, or, in fact, merely surviving.

What, in actual fact, is so bad about left-wing individuals increasing their capacity for self-defense?

The next paragraph is almost laughable coming from an Anarchist.

“We can’t shoot our way to liberation, not if liberation means the ability to determine for ourselves what a life worth living would be. A few shots may help, but they will never be the sufficient form of resistance against a world built upon the logic of concentrated power, of which guns are a primary mode of expression.”

Aren’t y’all supposed to be insurrectionists?!

Aren’t y’all supposed to desire the literal downfall of the State?!

Why are you struggling against your own means of fighting back against Power?

Or…

“…concentrated power, of which guns are a primary mode of expression.”

Perhaps the author believes that guns themselves are bad because they ARE a form of increasing one’s power.

This is a ridiculous point to take. If guns are bad because they increase an individual’s power, then you can logically proceed to the position that ALL forms of individual power are bad. Are we to conclude that individuals should not even learn how to fight hand-to-hand, because that skill and physical prowess is a form of individual power? How about physical fitness in the first place? How about owning a car? How about owning a home? Where does it stop?

I will provide a quote here that is better than anything in this manifesto.

In the words of Mao Zedong,

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Part II: “The Concentration of Power and the Reproduction of Daily Life”

“I think people acquire guns because of the fantasy of possessing hyper concentrated power. We live in a world of incredible alienation and disempowerment. We look outside and believe ourselves broadly incapable of affecting our surroundings. In this context, a machine that, with the push of a button, can irreparably alter our existence is easily fetishized.”

I understand what they are saying here, but it isn’t actually an argument against the necessity of the ownership of guns, so it’s irrelevant.

”These power fantasies inevitably blind the radical from recognizing the experimental space opened before them, and so these radicals actively repress the experimentation and insurrectionary potential of others in those spaces. I saw far too many such ‘radical’ policing forces in 2020 to ever trust a person who shows up to a riot carrying an AR.”

This is actually something referencing real life that I wish they would expand upon. They don’t really go into detail as to what “policing” they observed, so I’m left without an ability to meaningfully comment.

I myself was left with disillusionment in the wake of 2020. What I saw was a lack of organization that created power vacuums that were easily exploited by opportunists, whether that meant self-proclaimed ‘organizers’ or ‘security’ forces or just highly charismatic grifters. However I don’t see the problem as being guns. I see the problem as a lack of power structures. A highly organized group of people is empowered to resist bad actors. I have observed that masses of people with no plan and no organization are highly vulnerable and, in a sense, weak regardless of how large their numbers are. This is why huge masses of unequipped, disorganized protesters, even violent ones, can be cowed, kettled, and dispersed by much smaller numbers of well-equipped and well-organized police departments.

It is the organization of human effort that multiplies our efficiency and power.

I will provide another quote that is better than anything in this manifesto.

In the words of Ralph Chaplin,

“When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, But the union makes us strong.”

Part III: “Fetish as Smokescreen”

This part is interesting because, although I disagree with it, I have never seen this kind of argument before.

“Perhaps the consequence of the continued fetishizing and fantasizing that feels most pressing, is how it alters our relation to the arms manufacturers themselves. I rarely, if ever, see these manufacturers recognized as viable targets of direct action even at the height of anti-police mobilizations despite the fact that the only reason the police are able enact violence on the scale that they do is because these manufacturers supply them with near infinite arms.”

The interesting thing about this is that they are almost onto something here. Yes! It is true that the police get their power not only from their organization but also from their arms!

There is an entire military-industrial complex that arms American police and military forces! In fact, American manufacturers of CS gas see their products not only used on American protesters domestically, but also supply their gas canisters to the (essentially) American client state of Israel so that the IDF can continue to violently enforce a settler-colonial apartheid state.

However, it might be a misstep for the revolutionary-minded left to indiscriminately target arms manufacturers.

Rather, targeting arms manufacturers other than the ones that exclusively supply the american & international militaries seems like a bad idea.

As anti-imperialist action, it would certainly be a wonderful thing to stifle the American nation’s exports of violence and terror on the international community. (Especially if said revolutionaries were able to seize some such arms for themselves!)

However, I do not think that reducing the amount of arms able to be brought to the American civilian market is a wise move in 2023.

The American right-wing, American police, and American military are all three enemies of the American left-wing, and they are all better armed than us. Until we can raid factories and armories and seize military-grade arms for ourselves, we may take to heart this old quote…

“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Anyway, I shall finish up this section with another defeatist quote from the author.

“…we will never be able to match the police or military in the arena of arms procurement, and even if we could, the only way we’d be able to match them in an arms-focused conflict would be to turn ourselves into a military of our own with all the loss of autonomy and life that entails.

I refuse to admit defeat, and I refuse to fulfill some dutiful role within a misnamed revolutionary military. I desire life, I desire a life worth living.”

The author here declares that the left-wing should not form a revolutionary military in the case of a revolution.

I guess they hate winning.

Part IV: “Expropriate, Use, Destroy”

The author here flip-flops again and outlines a way in which the revolutionary left may ethically use guns.

“…guns may serve some purpose within specific actions and so it feels worthwhile to throw out a potential way of relating to them in the moments we deem them useful.

We expropriate (both individual armaments and the means by which to produce them) in order to break away from participating in the profiteering of the gun manufacturers while simultaneously dispossessing our enemies of their means to brutalize us.

We use what we have expropriated in the ways deemed worthwhile when we have deemed such actions necessary.

We destroy what we have expropriated to the best of our ability.

Most importantly, we destroy the means by which these arms are produced. So long as there exists a way to quickly mass produce arms, there will always be a timebomb waiting for the next police or military to emerge.”

This is a ridiculous proposition. They are outlining a post-revolutionary world where the dominant order (whether that is an Anarchist one or a Communist one) voluntarily disarms itself rather than consolidating and solidifying its power… leaving itself vulnerable to easily-concealed clandestine arms manufacturing!

What are you going to do, destroy every CNC machine? Every 3D printer?

At this moment, rebels in Myanmar are fighting against the military junta, and apparently a popular choice of firearm among the rebels is the FGC-9, a semi-automatic 9mm carbine that is made of both 3D-printed and simple metal parts.

The FGC-9 was specifically designed to be easy to manufacture, and as 3D-printing and other manufacturing methods become more advanced, surely people will produce even more designs for homemade guns.

Hell, the assassination of Shinzo Abe proves that even in a nation where personal firearms ownership is all but abolished, it is still possible for a determined individual to make a doohickey and exert an act of political power.

Anyway. Next comes a myopic and, frankly, liberal statement from the manifesto author.

“At its most simplistic, a gun is a machine designed with the specific purpose of killing. The majority of handguns and rifles produced today are designed with the specific intention of killing people. I refuse to accept the normalization, and fetishization, of such a machine within anarchist spaces.”

Wow! Guns are for killing people! Amazing! Nobody ever known that before! And you say killing is bad?! Truly groundbreaking stuff here!

Next comes a little bit of creative writing, I guess.

“While I’m not so naive as to believe there will be some idyllic future in which no one harms anyone else, I am certainly idealistic enough to believe a world without these machines is possible. If you disagree, fine, you can stand in defense of the gun factories, maybe even point one at me as I light the match.”

So they… envision a future where they will be gunned down for trying to destroy all gun factories? What is this amazingly nihilist imagination that can conjure something so divorced from material reality?

“Winning, to me, looks like the ashes of every precinct and prison mixing with the ashes of every factory, the ones that make guns included.”

Every factory? EVERY factory? At the risk of misinterpreting this piece… It seems that is person is not just against manufacturing guns, but rather, no industrial manufacturing whatsoever? So no trains, no pacemakers, no computers? Sounds like a pretty bad future to me. No thank you.

The piece ends with a few repetitions of their already established points.

I want to take this person seriously, and I want to empathize with them, but I just truly think these ideas are terrible.

At the end of the day, I think that individual capacity for self-defense for leftists and marginalized demographics is a good thing.

I also think that to win a revolution you are gonna want to form militias.

Of course, in the current tenor of America, forming leftist militias is prohibitively risky due to the power and hostility of the State.

I think that this will change in the future as the American empire seems to be decreasing in power. As its international influence wanes, it will increase its depredations on its residents, which will accelerate its own collapse into civil disorder.

I can’t predict how long this will take, of course. But a breakdown of civil society would include a lot of interpersonal violence, and perhaps even civil war.

#long post #an anarchist anti-gun manifesto

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pokenk · 7 months

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The ultimate Rickon post from a guy who doesn’t know how to analyze text and just talk about whatever thought Pop into his head

HE AND SHAGGYDOG WILL NOT DIE

Osha will turn into a Marxist like all the freefolk

He’s the strongest stark when it comes to warging because he mentions weird dreams when he’s like 3 and he’s only had Shaggydog for Like a few months

HE AND SHAGGYDOG WILL NOT DIE(PLEASE)

He’s gonna be suffering from major abandonment issues

He’s probably going to resent Robb and his mother a bit considering that from his view, they left him and the Skagosi hate the stark so they’re probably going to be trying to convince him that his families bad

Alternatively the Skagosi worship him as some form of God I don’t have a reason for this I just find it to be funny if Davos goes to skagos expecting Rickon to be suffering , and he’s just big chilling

He will have a pet unicorn

HE AND SHAGGYDOG WILL NOT DIE(PRETTY PLEASE)

He also might stay on skagos because weather true or not Davos may believe it’s the safest for a child

He activates Davos father mode

He could also show the danger of warging because all the characters who are currently wards that we know of aren’t too terribly affected considering how young the kid is maybe shaggydog is overwhelming is human mind?

If this happens we see him before Jon Snow’s resurrection in TWOW so we can get a sense of oh shit he might not come back, right

Bonding moment between him, and all the other Starklings

I hope we get some bonding moment between him and Arya and she thinks about them a lot in her POV’s

I hope we get to see Bran contemplating the consequences of what he did to Rickon

He see that most of his family live again. So he thinks it’s only a matter of time before Robb his father and catelyn show back up because like seriously only three of the starks are dead.

Absolutely despise in Theon

he’s the number 1 Bolton hater

Shaggydog is the number 2 Bolton hater

HE AND SHAGGYDOG WILL NOT DIE( PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE)

Hopefully, with his older age, he gets a POV

He’ll be able to zigzag

He is azor ahai

he’s not going to be set dressing other peoples POV’s anymore

Osha is his real mom

Lady Stonehart gives an hour long speech about why he’s the rightful Lord of Winterfell. and yes, she does have to put her hand on her throat to give the speech.

He bites Jamie Lannister

HE AND SHAGGYDOG WILL NOT DIE(SO HELP ME OLD GODS)

#if you couldn’t tell I really like rickon even though he’s got like 10 line of dialogue #he’s probably going to die #asoiaf #jon snow #house stark #bran stark #rickon stark #arya strak #Osha #davos seaworth #lady stoneheart

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scariercnidaria · 11 months

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another kerapin modern au where lapin is a medieval history professor at a uni and keradin is a financial lawyer who took one of his classes because he was interested in the crusades and he needed a history credit 8 years ago. he ended up dropping the class after a semester and a half at his therapist (pastor) (who just so happened to be a friend of the police officer assigned to the case) polite "suggestion" (restraining order threat), after developing a bit of a psychosexual obsession with lapin and doing a little trolling (targetted harrassment/stalking). in the interim keradin got another therapist (real one) (court mandated) and is on mood stabilisers now but still has not stopped seething about professor cadburys evil woke cultural marxist agenda.

lapin in this scenario is living with amethar in theos Eternal Bachelor Pad. he was living with amethar and caramellina (with reduced rent in exchange for tutoring jet and ruby who are probably like 14 in this scenario [so sorry for de aging them all a little bit i know im committing old men yaoi crimes it just makes slightly more sense this way. itd still be like. lapin 56+, keradin 31, amethar 44, theo ~46, caramellina 49]) until The Divorce (over finanicial disputes - amethars business is crumbling and is bringing caramellindas down with it as she just cant keep funnelling profits from her business into amethars in order to keep it afloat any longer; amethars purported unfaithfulness is not really an issue here because um This is just politics).

theo is trying to find an excuse to kick lapin out without making amethar feel worse about the situation but the only thing he has on him is that hes a bitch and smokes weed outside the laundry room sometimes but its been legalised and anyway lapin is never late on rent cause he has like 700 jobs (on top of being a history professor, lapin also has a side hustle leading bdsm/consent workshops at the library and also moonlights as a professional dom at a local sex club) (he also is still tutoring jet and ruby (for money this time) and has a positive relationship with caramellinda (they bitch about amethar) but she wont let him move back in because she "needs space"). theo thinks they have a weird gay thing going on (and hates it) and lapin is aware that theo thinks this and plays into it (because its funny) (and also hates it)

meanwhile in the keradinosphere, he has been consistently working ~60 hour weeks at his one (1) job at the same law firm for the last 5 years with no (0) promotion. his life is literally: work (10 hours), gym (2 hours), commute (2 hours each way), doomscroll on The App (5 hours), sleep (3 hours) every day forever.

on saturdays he works from home and on sundays he has church and then spends 3 hours sitting on a bench at the park "chilling out" (staring into the distance) (he doesnt own any books) before going to his court mandated weekly therapy session. his apartment is a textbook r/malelivingspace populated with an absolutely obscene collection of anime posters, lifting equipment, nerd shit replica medieval weapons or something and also an ever-rotating cast of Windowsill Plants Of The Month because he cant stop accidentally killing them and bursting into tears. his therapist tells him this is progress and that his drywall & security deposit will thank him

at some point some disaster hits keradin or something and they make him take sometime off work, and strangely without spending 10 hours under high stress bullshit every day + some melatonin he is actually for once in his life able to get more than 3 hours of sleep per night. at the same time, keradins The App experience starts being psy-op'ed by a memepage called xXsugarPlvmF4IRY_ who has infiltrated his niche internet tradbulb /fit/ microculture and begun flooding it with """ironic""" grecian gay sex "RETVRN" propaganda. this is a big hit as far as engagement among terminally online perpetually enraged historypilled incel-adjacent men such as keradin, and 6 hours of seething at ancient femboys combined with 8 hours of sleep and his brain unshrivelling somewhat results in him starting to have Gay Sex Dreams, which metastatises into him having Regular Gay Thoughts in the conscious world. he is too mortified to tell his pastor (because it is a liberal church and hes worried hell be supported) so he tells his therapist instead in hopes that they will recommend conversion therapy.

spoiler alert they dont. they encourage him to test the waters at his own pace by passing him a flyer for a consent workshop at the library later in the week in hopes that it will help him Get Comfortable With Sex As A Concept. keradin shoves the flyer in his sock drawer hoping to ignore it but is so haunted that he stays up all night doing some inspired googling and eventually learns about bdsm and is like woah! just like bulbo from my self-flagellation! he tries his best to resist the urge but he cant stop thinking about it and hes found he quite likes getting 8 hours of sleep and this New Stress is compromising that. eventually he looks up the number for a local sex club and books an hour and a half-- the following day, so he doesnt have time to chicken out-- with "father candi" (priest roleplay) ($120 out of pocket) (he tries not to think about having to face his actual pastor after this).

keradin goes there and surprise surprise its lapin.

keradin thinks he seems a little bit familiar but he cant quite put his finger on from where... so he discards the thought, and lapin straight up doesnt recognise him either so it all goes ahead.

lapin asks about boundaries and keradin is like "what are boundaries" so lapin spends the first hour and 15 minutes explaining boundaries and trying to get keradin to come up with something, anything dear bulb please. eventually they settle on a very rudimentary list and lapins like. ok that took ages we have 15 minutes left if you want to try and scene and keradin made it this far he isnt going to leave without at least trying gay sex It Would Kill Him. so they do an incredibly light d/s scene involving a confession booth or something and keradin comes within 2 minutes and then hits lapin with the old "if by my life or death i can protect you i shall". and lapin is like. um ok. thats nice. your time is up tho do u want a warm wet towel and a glass of water. ok. cool (<- his ass is clocking out immediately)

keradin immediately goes home and books another time slot precisely one month to the hour after the last one. during that month he goes back to work, is assigned to do some donkey work noone else wanna do on some fraud investigation around some local failing businesses, replaces his windowsill plant again, spends marginally less time on The App and somehow manages to look his pastor in the eye. he doesnt tell his therapist about the experience but they do ask how the consent workshop went and keradin lies and said it was good it was interesting and they ask like is that it so he badly paraphrases something lapin said about boundaries to get them off his back. they give him a flyer for the next one and keradin still doesnt go.

the month passes and he goes back and has another epic gay sex moment with father candi. and it becomes a regular occurance. every month, on the dot, like clockwork. for a while keradin is fucking crushed under the pressure of trying to come up with a non-gaysex reason for why he has to leave work before 7pm for once every month on the exact same day but nobody actually cares enough to ask him. and hes relaxed. hes not on The App. his windowsill plant lives for 2 months this time. so its just. like. good. its just a good situation.

...maybe too good.

[EXTREMELY LOUD BULBIAN GUILT SFX]

lapin, largely unaware of this, thinks the whole thing is pretty amusing. he knows that keradin works some stuffy office job and has some major religious hangups but he mostly just wants to be beat up a little and then praised and he always walks out 5gorillion % less stressed than he came in and its like ok. lapin can do that. its literally the least weird thing anyones ever asked him to do in a scene. yeah keradin is hot but mostly lapin wants to put him under a microscope and study him like a bug. its like having a favourite customer. he doesnt really think about it outside of when he knows its coming up its literally not that deep.

besides, he has other things to worry about like more pressingly: that amethar is being investigated by the IRS for being bad at running a business and if he goes to prison then theres no way theo will let him keep staying at his flat (the novelty of playing along with theos "weird gay thing" suspicions wore off, like, so fucking quick). he could go stay with his old scene partner "sugar plum mommy" but her whole place looks like serial experiments lain and he will not be able to grade papers over the sound of her bumping grindcore out a subwoofer she stole from a nightclub 4 years ago for 13 hours straight while she joshua citarellas the target audience for europa universalis into getting gayer than they already were.

meanwhile keradin literally cannot stop thinking about hot gay sex gay religious old man sex in your area click here right now and he feels crazy wazy and conflicted and awful about it and on the verge of getting psychosexually obsessed again. he decides to bring it up with his therapist finally because what are they gonna do? court mandate that he gets More Therapy? they end up being like ok yknow what would be really good for this actually is if you Went to the consent workshop ive been telling you about all this time. it would definitely help. its at the library its free. theres one in 30 minutes. ill drive you there (maybe not precisely).

either way. keradin goes. and guess whose fucking running it.

keradin stays but sits in the back and only feels slightly awkward but for once its like. no this is. it would be a good thing if father candi saw that i was here. i am listening and learning.

and he sits there.

in the back of the library.

set out like a lecture hall.

listening and learning.

and it slowly dawns on him exactly why "father candi" seemed so familiar.

#kerapin #keradin deeproot #lapin cadbury #acoc #a crown of candy #d20 #dimension 20 #nsft #this might be my fucking masterpiece jesus. this took me 4 hours #keradinposting

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attn-all-pickpockets · 11 months

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top 5 txf episodes

I loved this prompt but also it was very hardddd, I mostly chose ones that I never shut up about lmao

"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"

This is my girl, this is my ride or die. I was in the Northeast when the first category 1 hurricane hit in like 50 years and I had to drive through the outer bands in a rental car with a spare tire on it and when we got home I made everyone watch this because it's my comfort episode that accompanies me through moments of triumph as well as crisis. Scully befriending the depressed old man psychic is such a great storyline for Scully and this whole ep really lets her shine. Scully has such a kindness and playfulness that she typically only shows with Mulder, but her fondness for the deadpan comedy stylings of Bruckman made her fond of him and her heartbreak when he dies is such a perfect scene. Also I just think of her smile and "there are hits and there are misses, and then there are misses :)" a lot.

2. "Leonard Betts"

If someone asked me what is the episode of The X Files that feels like the quintessential episode, I would say "Leonard Betts", which I think some would think as a weird choice. But this episode is what this show was at the height of its popularity to me. It aired after the Superbowl and the cold open is one of its best with a beheading, followed by the corpse waltzing right out of the morgue. The banter between Mulder and Scully is top notch and full of perfect Mulder quips ("blinked or winked?") and incredulous Scully deliveries ("Mulder, they're worms") and even if the scientific explanation of "evolutionary cancer" is deeply ludicrous from a scientific perspective, it is a great x-file. And the ENDING of finding out Scully has cancer is such a gut punch, just a phenomenal hour of tv.

3. "Paper Clip"

This is on here because I love the Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip trilogy so much and I have to shout it out. I will always cape for early mythology because I think the fact that became a muddled mess makes people forget how damn good it was to begin with. So much of the early character work was done in these episodes and they're so compelling. Bringing in real history with Operation Paper Clip and connecting Mulder's father to the people Mulder is trying to investigate was a great move (that they didn't totally deliver on imo, but "sins of the father" is a great idea at the very least) and expanding the scope and complicity in the conspiracy really put what Mulder and Scully were up against in perspective. Mulder relenting and choosing to go out of hiding for Scully so she could see her sister and their conversation in the hospital room after Melissa died are some of my favorite moments of the show.

4. "Folie a Deux"

It's hard to pick a Vince episode and this could just as easily be "Pusher" (which was the episode that got me to seriously ship msr) or "Bad Blood" or almost any other episode he wrote, but "Folie a Deux" is special to me. Mulder's mental wellness and people's belief that he's crazy has been an angle that has always been present and Vince framing this as a joint delusion on Mulder and Scully's part is so fascinating and a fantastic bit or writing to me. Mulder is so discredited and dismissed in this episode and the only person who listens to him is Scully and that's a perfect distillation of their dynamic and the show itself. Also the episode is Marxist to me.

5. "Jose Chung's From Outer Space"

I thought to myself "well I can't have two Darin episodes on here" but…of course I can! This is one of the greatest episodes of TV of all time. Not just of sci-fi or network or pre-00s TV, of all TV ever made. This is one of the episodes that sets The X Files apart from its clones or other cop procedural shows and it's that it can switch genres and tones and bring this post-modern, storyline hopping masterpiece out and no one thinks twice about its place in the show or season. A lot gets said about how funny it is and the melancholic tone Darin brings to his writing, but I find myself so impressed by they way the writing and directing work to make the timeline jumping work and not end up confusing the viewer. I'll eventually talk about this more, but the shot construction to create anchor points between a re-enactment and the scene of the narrator telling this story to Mulder and Scully is so great.

#the x files #ask

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iberiancadre · 2 months

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I've talked about this before but I have a deep dislike of sentiment like this within "leftist" circles, regarding unions. And it's practically always from USamericans, go figure.

(Before anyone interprets this post on bad faith, which is inevitable, I am not against being in a union and I am not telling people not to join a union, it's the most inmediate form of protection workers have and that is, in fact, good)

It's this overbearing insistence on joining unions, treating it like the best (and only) way of achieving workers' liberation, and I think that shows either a bad understanding of what unions are or a bad understanding of how capitalism works. Unions are bargaining bodies for workers, that's it. They aren't revolutionary, and they aren't going to kill your boss. And I want to really hammer in this point. They aren't revolutionary. Precisely because their role is to bargain, and to achieve better conditions within the system of salaried work.

You are never going to "liquidate the ownership class" by getting longer breaks, paid holidays and an excellent health plan. Keep in mind, bargaining with the capitalist is necessary, and that in itself isn't non-revolutionary, not necessarily. But the only purpose of a union is to bargain. I really don't think people get this. A union's only purpose is to bargain, it is to negotiate. Negotiations also necessarily imply compromises and unsatisfactory deals. Unions are not a magic key to not being exploited, and they especially are not the way to liberation.*

I think this is especially prevalent in the US because of two things:

Their labor movement is so fucked that any kind of opposition to capitalism is by default radical. And therefore some people feel it's enough to just tell people to join a union. However, this isn't unique to the US and many places have it much, much worse

Living in the imperial hegemon makes it very easy to ignore any other place outside of their little sphere. People can go years engaging in left-of-DNC circles but without ever leaving their USamerican community, they end up not knowing who James Baldwin is, to give a topical example. This affects the US labor movement by allowing them to ignore other places' struggles, so it's very easy to see anything they do as the horizon of political action. They only need to look to their own country for examples in action, and the truth is that the labor movement in the US has been largely very mild. In the cases when it has not been mild (notable exceptions include the Black Panthers), it's largely forgotten, demonized or revised in bigger circles.

So you get people who call themselves communists just for being unionists. But a communist is someone who identifies the core of exploitation to be the very structure of capitalism and work and attacks it. You are not a communist, however, for believing the core of exploitation is your shit boss who refuses to pay for dental.

And what's funny is that 90% of what people on here claim to be communist and anti-capitalist is just the norm on most of the world. People will hype up the DSA or VoteSocialist2024 as if they're breaking ground, and then you read their programs and they're just socialdemocrats. They are nothing more than reformists, just another manager of capitalism.

My father works for one of the biggest textile manufacturers and distributors in the world, and unionization is the norm, it's a "union job" but it's still shitty and exploitative. There are in fact 3 unions, and they engage in petty electoralism within the workplace, only sometimes actually protecting worker's rights, and that's a country-wide norm. This is what unions end up becoming when they become established, especially with a friendly government in place.

CCOO was a union created in the late fascist dictatorship in Spain, and they were genuinely fighting (with guns!) against the dictatorship. And the moment the dictatorship ended and they became the largest union in the country, they slowly became less and less radical, and more complacent. Last year they signed a labor reform that legalizes highly precarious and inconsistent forms of work contracts. That's not "liquidating the ownership class", that's just social-democracy when it doesn't need to be the opposition anymore

To wrap up, a note on syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Unions are by their very nature an organization that only operates within one aspect of the life of the working class, the workplace. Sure, it's the main one and the part that defines us as a class, but it isn't the only one. In order to actually "liquidate the ownership class", you have to take power by force, and that will have to involve intervening outside of the workplace. What syndicalists used to claim is that unions can be the base of a socialist society and organize the entire working class to destroy capitalism. However, at that point, you have created a party and called it a union. And not only a party, but a myriad of them, each with their own characteristics and desires. So a multi-party system. I will not get into the viability of multiple parties in socialism in this post, but they are not unions in anything by name.

Footnote under the cut:

*I know I'm repeating myself a lot these days on this topic, but if you live in an imperial core country, there is no way to have prosperity (as the example above puts it) without some of that wealth coming from imperialism. It does not matter if your particular country never had colonies, it does not matter if your country is stereotypically nice (fuck the Nordic countries). And no, the expoliated wealth does not only remain within the capitalist class, there is always at least some circulation of wealth from the capitalist to the workers within any welfare program. If your workplace can afford to have long breaks, that is at least in part because your capitalist is profiting from the exploitation of the third world, and because the entire economies of imperial core countries uses the wealth extracted to support their deficits and to stabilize their currencies.

It's not a hard concept. If you can understand that it's basically impossible to manufacture batteries for renewable energy without exercising violence on places like the Congo, it's not that hard to understand the same is true for most things.

#real marxist hours #unions #finally got (mostly) all of my thoughts on this into words #accidentally posted before I completed it and now there's two posts :(

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yourlocalfallofthewest · 5 months

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My first materialist analysis: the political economy of ancient Greece and its cultural development.

Culture, as defined by Oxford Languages as “ the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group”, is a reflection of a people’s material reality, as demonstrated by part 1, chapter II of Political economy, “Social Conceptions of the Primitive Epoch”

“He [primitive man] attributed spiritual existence to the forces of nature. This was the so-called animism (from the Latin anima-the spirit, soul). Primitive myths and primitive religion were born of these dim conceptions in men of their own nature and that around them. In them the primitive equality of the social structure was reproduced. Primitive man not knowing class division and property inequality in real life introduced no corresponding subordination in his imaginary world of spirits. He divided the spirits into his own and others’ friendly and hostile. Division of the spirits into higher and lower appeared only when the primitive community was breaking down.”

In this essay I will be focusing on one example of this, the greek god Hermes.

The well known religion or mythos of ancient or classical era greece(i.e. The time when slave owning was most prosperous) was rich and replete with tradition and devotion, and the philosophical and political development was equally developed. The reason for this cultural, economic, and political development, was due to the slave-owning society. For example, labor in any form was seen as “unfit of the free man”, and (prominent, slave owning) historian and philosopher Herodotus’ book Utopia, which pictures a perfectly organized state, shows this perfect state being a slave owning one, and aristotle claimed that Nature made slaves for the free men. Page 32 of the soviet textbook Political Economy describes the state of states like greece.

“On the basis of slave labour the ancient world achieved considerable economic and cultural development. But the slave-owning system could not create the conditions for any further serious technical progress. Slave labour was distinguished by extremely low productivity. The slave was not at all interested in the results of his labour. The slaves hated their labour under the yoke. Frequently they expressed their protest and indignation by spoiling the implements of labour. Therefore the slaves were given only the crudest implements, which it was difficult to spoil.”

Hermes is one of the oldest olympian gods, with our first known appearance of him being inscribed tablets from the Bronze Age, dated to ~1100 BC, or the Greek Dark Ages. He was seen as the Herald of the Gods, and served other miscellaneous roles in greek society such being “the patron of gain”, a god of animal husbandry, which shows the prominence of husbandry in the reality of slave owning greece, whether that be small owning peasants, or slave laborers. He was also credited with invention of the lyre, dice, and more. He was characterized as being impish and curious, and treasure chanced upon was said to be a gift from him.

As he appeared in Homer’s odyssey, an epic written during the “golden age” of ancient greece, at the height of technological progress under slavery and along with it the height of cultural development of the slave owning and free population, he was a messenger between the gods and a guide to humans. He provided aid to odysseus numerous times, such as instructing him to eat a mysterious herb so he wouldn't be transformed into a pig like the rest of his men when he arrived at the island of the witch Circe, and telling Circe to release him and his men. In his infancy he is said to have breastfed from the goddess Hera without her knowing, and when she caught him, her milk splashed across the sky and created the galaxy we reside in, the Milky Way. He is said to have wandered out of his mother’s cave when he was one day old to see the world, then found a tortoise, killed it, and hollowed out its shell to make the lyre.

As demonstrated in this brief essay, hermes was very culturally significant on many layers, and shows how not only culture flourished with slave labour, but how culture is reflective of reality, not just a set of beliefs.

I am entirely open to criticism (actual criticism not what an anarchist thinks it is) so if you have any thoughts on this, please tell me!

#marxism leninism #communism #marxism #socialism #amari writes #real marxist hours

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 5 months

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Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 20, 2023

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism.

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does.

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement.

More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#horse race #political Cartoons #Mike Luckovich #democracy #voting rights #human rights #the rule of law #right wing extremism

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somfte-on-main-and-mizzen · 7 months

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In the mid-19th century, socialism and communism were largely synonymous, and as often as not they referred to the dream of a future without all the institutions at the service of bankers, landlords, and factory owners; a future without the State. Since Marxism crowded out the utopian variations of socialism, however, the term has come to refer to the authoritarian shift in the international anticapitalist movement.

[...] This brings us to their primary weaknesses, which, ironically, are also interrelated and also connected to their class and subjective relationships to the workers’ movements that they did more to weaken and destroy than the police agencies of most contemporary governments.

All of their hypotheses about causation and order—where these oppressions come from, how they will change, how to change them—are worse than trash. They are either phrased in a way that is pseudo-scientific and untestable, which helps explain why Marxism has held increasing appeal among leftwing cults the more Marxist experiments proved to be real life failures (cults thrive on pseudo-sciences). Or, their affirmations about the future of capitalism and how to change it that were phrased in a falsifiable, testable way have all proven dreadfully wrong. Exactly as their anarchist contemporaries predicted.

[...] Many of us, perhaps most of us, will not get another chance for a revolution, for creating a world meant for life and not for the extraction of profit and power. We had a real shot a century ago, and we blew it. Since then, the hour has grown very late. Despite this, or likely intoxicated by the sense of urgency, many of us have forgotten our history and are turning again to the false promises of the State, in the forms of progressive, charismatic politicians, ecosocialism or eco-Leninism, the Trotskyist or Stalinist sects that have begun proliferating again, or the crypto-authoritarianism of the latest new cult of grad students who think they know better."

[...] It’s not too late, though. To recover our memory of generations of struggle. To learn from our recent setbacks. To discover ways to help as many of us as possible to survive the inferno that capitalism has become. The State is a machine for controlling and exploiting a society. It has no other function, any more than a car can grow strawberries or make milkshakes.

But communities of living beings acting in solidarity? No one is better positioned to define survival and to achieve it. Survival, and life, and joy, and healing.

#i know this is from june but i only just now got around to reading it #one of my main takeaways is that he seems to be saying that the term 'socialism' has essentially been rotted out by State socialisms #and that the things implied by 'socialist' in the mid-19th century are nowadays better encompassed by the word 'anarchist'#because for most people in the world anymore 'socialism' means a Sate #anyway it was an interesting read #i love that he has a substack #peter gelderloos #anarchism

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edwad · 7 months

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tbh i don't really understand in what sense capitalists and even landlords don't work. mind you this isn't some defense of them because i agree with that anon that that isn't what's wrong with them. but like capitalists often have grueling 15 hour per day schedules, what are they doing during that time if not working?

if you take marxs word for it in the results manuscript then capitalists are performing productive labor by doing things to ensure the appropriation of the surplus (landlords don't quite get the same treatment, unless they are petty proprietors working the land themselves, although something similar could be said about supervisors vs owners of capital). the real problem though is how to strike some balance between what is and isn't "labor" in this sense (it can't just be some number of hammer swings or ounces of sweat produced). but if you start including capitalists and landlords in this way then it becomes a bit harder to justify the marxian notion of profit. in fact, you start leaning more into the (post-)ricardian "vulgar" "apologetics" for profit as the reward for the capitalist's labor etc. for years now i've said we need something like a marxian theory of the entrepreneur, which most marx-disciples are allergic to but which i think deserves some attention. and it wouldn't be enough to settle for the usual response where marxists don't have a good answer for something in economics so they simply defer to schumpeter.

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selamat-linting · 2 months

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just meet up with a bunch of comrades from out of town, one of them is nonbinary! which is awesome because i've been feeling real down on being the only gay marxist leninist in town. and then we spent like hours doing some good discussions and talking shit about liberals. and they compliment the way i talk! yay they think im outspoken! and one of them offered me a chance to be a journalist, which is cool, but doesn't pay as much as sales, and i kinda like my old job but hey! its still just words, not an actual job offer. but its nice to know i have a way out to other fields if the sales job fall apart.

#posts about my life

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denimbex1986 · 8 months

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'There is one triumphant moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer: an imaginative flash of apocalyptic anxiety for a post-nuclear world. In the film’s final exchange, Nolan leaves us to consider a man’s regret for his development of the atomic bomb that brutalized the civilian families of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a moment that neither Oppenheimer the film nor the man deserves.

Nolan cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror as a reference for Oppenheimer — a revelation that exposes the superficiality behind its tangled narrative. In Mirror, Tarkovsky weaves disparate narrative strands to plot the scattered thoughts of a dying man. It ditches the comfort of linearity for conceptual cohesion. The result is inventive, transcendent. It compels a new ontology of film.

Nolan perverts Mirror’s legacy. His structural subversions are confused. What is Oppenheimer even about? What are we meant to make of its protagonist? The film meanders — Nolan treats its chronologies like wind-up toys. They are left upon release to determine their own divergent trajectories: the humiliation of Lewis Strauss, the loss of Jean Tatlock, Kitty Oppenheimer’s depression. Those that attempt to assign meaning to this film will often say that it is about Oppenheimer’s regret. This is what Nolan would have you believe, if the film’s final scene, that one triumphant moment, is any indication. Then what do you make of its preceding three hours? Its preoccupation with the physicist’s reputation and romantic life leaves little room to contemplate his culpability. One redemptive sequence of the film is a harsh cross-examination in which Oppenheimer admits that he recommended Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decimation. But Nolan’s reproach is insincere — the film answers his sin with Rami Malek’s moment of glory, in which his character defends the physicist’s honor. This is the incoherency of a noncommittal Nolan who juggles ideas with little concern for where they land. He abuses Göransson’s score to foster some mirage of thematic cohesion.

One can only imagine what Stanley Kubrick could do with Nolan’s footage. He might allow us to at least sit with an image long enough to contemplate it. Nolan commands the edit like a schizophrenic autocrat, dictating the placement of film with misguided conviction. He would rather have us glimpse at Jack Quaid’s astonishment than spend a few seconds with an atomic bomb. Nolan champions this film as a historic development for practical effects in cinema — so let us look at the effects, Christopher!

An unsuspecting casualty of Oppenheimer’s disorientation is the American Left. Do not be fooled by Nolan’s sympathetic treatment of the film’s Communist Party; he grants no real credence to Leftist ideas. He condescends them. In the same breath that Nolan condemns McCarthyism, he justifies its characteristic paranoia through his sensationalization of the Chevalier incident. He scorns the thought that the Manhattan Project could have been a nationalist strategy of empire-building. His neglect of the Japanese and Indigenous American victims of the Project is a whole other discussion. Oppenheimer carries this cosmopolitan attitude: “Let us play nice with the communists, everyone deserves a right to express their beliefs,” and so on. It understands communism as some respectable but still misguided alternative lifestyle — the way that an agnostic might tolerate a religious moderate. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marxist doctrine, which places socialism as the exclusive order of social organization that must, as the historical dialectic demands, wholly replace capitalism. Nolan’s communists are lethargic, innocuous. The Nolanite brand of technocratic, liberal idealism infantilizes the American Left at the same time that it upheaves Nolan’s very own industry.

It is a shame that Oppenheimer is an impressive film. Its performances are tremendous. Its score is tremendous. Every Nolan release carries a certain smugness — this grand, attention-seeking self-importance. It is a pretentious attitude that will have cynical critics often root against him. And yet, as with Interstellar, Dunkirk and the like, Oppenheimer succeeds by embedding its problems into a popular vehicle for technical flourish. So long as Nolan can claim critical success, popular filmmaking will continue to sedate its audiences and justify ideological perfidy. The Left is not safe with Nolan.'

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #Rami Malek #Hiroshima #Nagasaki #Andrei Tarkovsky #Mirror #Ludwig Goransson #Lewis Strauss #Jean Tatlock #Kitty #Stanley Kubrick #The Manhattan Project

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