#Socialist Alternative In Action

[dykesynthezoid]

One of the topic choices for a big final essay I have to write by Monday is comparing how Alexandra Kollontai and Frantz Fanon depict the role of women in revolution and I’m like yayyyy nobody will escape my criticism yayyy!!!

[pissvortex]

i would obviously marginally prefer kamala harris over trump but i am under no illusion that progress is truly being won under bourgeois politics. i also don’t see “not voting” as a useful political action in the same way that i don’t see voting as useful either. what i support is building power for whatever miniscule scraps of a communist left exist in this country. the only real pragmatic application of that wrt election are, in my opinion, gauging the power that i and people in a similar enough bloc to me hold through a conditional vote. the only circumstance under which i will vote for kamala harris is if she supports a full permanent ceasefire in gaza. if she does not, then clearly her campaign has made a calculated decision that my vote and others like mine are not worth earning, and that a population of moderates in support of or functionally apathetic to the genocide are a more valuable electoral base. this at least tells us something in regards to our power and ability to coordinate a unified popular demand. if she forsakes our vote and wins anyway, obviously we have got a lot of work left to do (not that this isn’t the case anyway). if she forsakes our vote and loses in a way where she could have won if she had our vote, this makes her 100% complicit and morally culpable in everything trump does to the country. small comfort to us but what’s the point in having voted for her if she is fundamentally identical to trump? if she concedes to the demand and wins, we’ve achieved the best possible outcome of the bargain (even though she will probably not actually work towards a permanent ceasefire). this all requires a degree of coordination from us that i would like to see socialist organizations put forward - this is also practical in that the exercise of what power and coordination we have is useful for forming our capacity to express alternate modes of power. we’re living in hell in this country and this is how i choose to navigate it.

[a-very-tired-jew]

Absolutely wild to see a Jewish blog on here that has historically called out antisemitic rhetoric in media, such as Disney and AoT, fully embrace that same rhetoric when it comes to Israel and Hamas.

But I also understand.

I won't call anyone out, but if you can spot the similarities in AoT to Nazi rhetoric about Jews, then you can sure as shit spot them in the rhetoric of Hamas and their allies. Willfully ignoring it because "Western Civ is Bad" is an indicator that you have been radicalized by that exact same rhetoric, except this time it's coming from people you like or share interests with.

My Left leaning shalomies, you have got to be careful. You may identify as a Democratic Socialist, a Socialist, or even some form of Communist, but that "West Civ is Bad" rhetoric and talking points you're repeating that you heard from your more radical Comrade comes coupled with thinly disguised antisemitism. They're using your dissatisfaction with the state of things here in the USA and other Western countries to spread Holocaust Inversion/Denial, spread blood libel, ZOG, and other such antisemitic conspiracies.

How do I know?

I'm in my late 30s. In my 20s I was an avowed anti-Zionist. But as time went on more and more of the rhetoric I was being told by other anti-Zionists didn't make sense. It was a lot of Bundist talking points about how the diaspora was always safer while also denying the well documented pogroms that had happened against us.

While also denying what happened to the Bundists in the USSR.

What happened to people like Benjamin Zuskin.

And so many others who argued that we were "safe".

It was the Holocaust Universalization mixed with Denial and Inversion. It was so many things that when you looked at them in a bigger picture they ended up contradicting themselves.

It was the denial that Nazis allied with various regimes in the MENA to blatantly kill Jews for simply existing.

It was the denial that antisemitism was actually not a big problem nor as pervasive as it actually is.

Simply put, after enough time, life experience, reading, and thinking it became very clear to me that I had been fed a line of bologna. They had played on my dissatisfaction with the USA and its past actions.

I legit had the line "Israel only exists as a modern day concentration camp to keep all the Jews in one place and then exterminate them later. Jews need to be dispersed around the world to keep them safe" as justification to be anti-Zionist thrown at me when I was younger.

And it made sense at the time. You're fed so much pro-USA material growing up that eventually you find out the narrative that the USA lies, that the UK lies, that the West lies all the time. So you look for alternatives, but you end up embracing propaganda from even worse sources that are downright authoritarian and trying to deny their own atrocities and bigotry by pointing at others. You honestly swing so far the other way on the pendulum that you embrace and repeat rhetoric without fully understanding the nuance and complexity of it all.

When I hit my 30s I realized I had been taken for a ride. A veritable rube if you will.

And I see this same pattern in a lot of younger anti-Zionist Jews in that same age bracket. It's the same dissatisfaction that is being manipulated into antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. It's the denial that what they're saying is antisemitic because surely they, as Jews, know what that actually is, and even if it is, they can't be antisemitic because they're Jewish. Right? Right???

So I beseech you. When the rest of us are saying "hey, this is actually antisemitic" and you go "Um, actually... As a Jew..." please stop for a moment. Think why some of us would be pointing that out. It's not for Zionism sake or any other political ideology. It's because that hate fueled rhetoric hurts all of us and some of us have been in your exact same shoes.

So if you can see the antisemitism in something like AoT and Disney, then you can surely see it in these slogans, rhetoric, and actions of anti-Zionist activists. And if you don't...well hopefully this will make you stop and think.

[marxistcomedy]

The term commodity fetishism objectively should bring to mind the way economic actors, both rich and poor, declare themselves powerless before the pressures exerted by the world of commodities (“I’m sorry I have to fire you, but the market told us your services aren’t needed”). It’s conceptually quite similar to Adam Smith’s much-celebrated liberal notion of “the invisible hand of the market,” but rather than benevolent and wise Marx invites us to see this system as a sinister cult. The term commodity fetishism was never meant to scold people for liking material things; it’s not meant to generate guilt after the realization that one craves certain consumer goods (“I’m so bad, but those new shoes sure look pretty”).

Commodity fetishism describes the objective fact that in capitalism we don’t generally relate to each other as humans asking each other to do things, but rather indirectly command each other through commodities. If I go to a restaurant, I don’t beg the cook to make me a meal and the waiter to deliver it, nor do I imperiously threaten them with violence, nor do I cajole them into it. I just buy the meal. The meal itself then appears to command them to move, like a little god! And I in turn must similarly follow the commands of commodities in order to acquire the money to purchase such meals. This is how the factory comes to want to be used, and how the tropical fruit comes to want to find its way to Stockholm. As Marx puts it:

“To [producers], their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”

From this perspective, one of the central tasks of communists is to liberate workers not from work or desire itself, but from a generalized lack of decision-making agency in the face of crude economic fetishism. People should decide what people do, not commodities! Looking for alternatives to enslavement by commodities, some look back to feudal, religious, and romantic patriarchal forms of despotism, but socialists look ahead, towards socialism’s multidimensional interaction and negotiation, demotic and democratic.

[wolf-tail]

Disco Elsyium is not enough. We need more explicitly socialist fictional media.

This is important from like a serious, anthropological, society-wide reason. Like it or not, you are not going to get any more eople involved in the movement by just shouting "read theory" at everyone.

Yes, reading difficult texts is an important skill, but you are not going to be able unite the worldwide proletariat enough for any substatial revolution if that's literally all you have.

Listen to me.

Literally all people know is capitalism.

Capitalist realism has convinced the people living under it that this is just the natural order of the world, that there is no feasible alternative to it that could ever exist. Capitalism has become so all encompassing and suffocating that it is literally easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Even people who know it is explicitly bad think socialism is an impossible alternative because they have not been allowed to seriously engage with it at all.

In order to make people more willing to look into socialism as a concept, we need to break it into the public conscious. Direct action and praxis is one way. This is going to sound dumb, but fictional media is another.

As much as socialists like to hate on liberals for always viewing the world through the lens of pop culture media (ex: Harry Potter, LOTR, Star Wars, etc.), fictional media is an important and impactful part of our modern society. It has been so for decades, if not centuries.

Fiction not only reflects our society back at us, it can alter it given time and volume. It's some of the earliest media we're exposed to from childhood onward, and helps form the basis of our personalities, worldviews, and relationships to each other.

Fiction forms a huge part of the hegemonic ideas of our society.

Capitalists wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on propaganda movies that glorify the military and other instruments of capitalism and it's reinforcement if it wasn't effective propaganda.

If you get people comfortable enough with engaging with socialism as a fictional concept, you get your foot in the door for opening them up to it in reality.

[specialagentartemis]

I’ve increasingly seen the take that Gurathin, being the only one of the PresAux group originally from the CR, understands SecUnits better than the others and understands corporate greed and underhandedness and violence better than his idealist space socialist leftist colleagues… which always rings odd to me, because it’s well established that Mensah and Pin-Lee understand what they’re dealing with as intelligent, savvy professionals!

Mensah is the Planetary Administrator of Preservation; she is very nearly the President of the Whole Planet. It’s hard to believe she could get there and be regarded as a good leader of a small planet with neither military nor economic power in the galaxy and remain unaware of how the Corporation Rim works and how to deal with them to keep her polity safe. The company executives presented Murderbot to Mensah directly in their pitch for why the team needed to take a SecUnit; her multiple objections to this indicate that she does, in fact, know how unethical (and likely dangerous) SecUnits are.

Pin-Lee, meanwhile, is a corporate lawyer; she’s described as CombatUnit-like, and based on the fact that she went not only with this scientific survey but also with Mensah at the end of Network Effect on this short-notice and desperate chase across the galaxy, seems to be the go-to person to deal with off-world legal issues. Murderbot notes early on that being under the Company’s surveillance seemed to affect her more than the others. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that’s because she knows what shit companies put in their contracts, and what they do.

They aren’t naïve leftists who don’t understand how the Real World works, they are well-too-aware of the abuses and surveillance and callousness of companies!

(Ratthi watches Sanctuary Moon, evidently a CR production—Preservation aren’t isolationists. The whole Preservation backstory is of a community’s escape from callous, profit-driven corporate abandonment of their grandparents’ generation to die. I would think Preservation people would be, as a society, aware and very wary of CR corporations.)

Their trust they place in Murderbot in All System Red is very likely influenced by Preservation’s cultural values of dignity, support, freedom, responsibility to each other, bot citizenship, all that good stuff—but it’s certainly not blindly, naïvely unaware of alternative possible perspectives. And that’s why it’s powerful: they’re making a conscious choice, measuring its actions and its rights as a person against the propaganda and fear, that Murderbot deserves that respect and dignity and freedom and trust as a person and not just as an arm of untrustworthy corporations.

(And like. Also the fact that “Gurathin is from the CR” is not explicitly canon, either. We don’t know where he’s from originally; the CR is a reasonable interpretation, certainly, it fits the facts, but it’s still an interpretation that fans have to make rather than actually being text. And I think in these discussions that ought to be remembered too. )

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[yourbelgianthings]

i just want to encourage everyone to get involved with their local branch of socialist alternative, they’re across the us and in many other countries, i say this bcs US branches will be having public meetings soon to mobilize the community for protests and strikes, and having like minded people with a similar goal and the ability to take action can help combat hopelessness

[tanadrin]

RE "revolutionary leftists are revolutionary because they know they can't win electorally."

It astounds me a little that there are leftists who think that a communist revolution is more likely to work than, like, fifty years of community-building and electoral politics. Sewer socialism, union activism, and other boring activities have brought much more success in the U.S. than agitation for a revolution.

What I mean is, setting aside the moral concerns (violence is bad, even when it's necessary, and if there are practical alternatives then we should pursue them), I am not a revolutionary leftist because I think we would lose a revolution. For one thing, there is a considerable right-wing element in the country that is much better prepared for this kind of thing, and I think that the majority of the institutions in the U.S. would pick fascism over communism if they had to choose, but also, prolonged violent action is ripe for breeding authoritarianism.

Goatse is concerned that "the party" might "abandon or neglect its primary ends," but what is leftism if it is not, at bottom, an attempt to improve the living conditions of all people, et cetera et cetera? To the extent that social democratic parties successfully pursue this end to some degree, they're better than than an ostensible communist party that talks the talk but commits human rights abuses. And, more than the fact that U.S. leftism has some pretty fierce opposition that would probably fare better if The Revolution happened tomorrow, I think that, even in winning, we would lose, because what came out the other end would look a lot more like Stalinism.

I think one thing the hardcore revolutionaries in OECD countries don't realize is that the reason they can't marshal support for their revolutions is that the socialists won most of the issues that were salient in the early 20th century--workers got more rights, better pay, unions were legalized, etc., etc. But it didn't take restructuring the whole political economy to do it, which is immensely frustrating if you believe that any society without your ideal political economy is inherently immoral and impure, so in order to justify an explicitly communist platform you have to rhetorically isolate it from the filthy libs and feckless demsocs who it turns out have been pretty effective within the arena of electoral politics in which supposedly nothing can ever get done, and treat them as of a piece with the out-and-out fascists and royalist autocrats of the 1920s and 30s.

Which, you know. Is not persuasive to most people! Most people understand intuitively the vast gulf between the SPD and the Nazis; they see that, milquetoast and compromising though they may be, the center-left can deliver substantive policy improvements without the upheaval of a civil war or political purges, and this is attractive to people who are not of a millenarian or left-authoritarian personality.

Which isn't to say that communists don't often make important points! It sucks having to fight a constant rearguard action against the interests of capital rolling back the social improvements of the 20th century, and it sucks that liberal governments in Europe and North America have historically been quite happy to bankroll and logistically support fascists and tyrants in the third world against communist movements (which invariably only exist as communist movements because these same fascists and tyrants have crushed more compromising movements and only the most militant organizations have managed to survive).

But I agree with you: communists also talk a big game about how liberalism is the real fascism (what's that line from Disco Elysium I see quoted everywhere about how everybody is secretly a fascist except the other communists, who are liberals?), while also being awful at democracy. Suppressing dissent because your small clique of political elites is the only legitimate expression of the people's will (which you know, because you have declared it to be so) really is some rank bullshit. A system with competitive elections is still, well, a system with competitive elections, even if those elections are structurally biased in certain ways; all the bloviating that attempts to justify communist authoritarianism cannot really obscure the fact that authoritarian systems are cruel and brittle, regardless of the ideology being served.

[ceofcatgirls]

Sergio Leone really loves to write his characters in subtle ways. I think really well shown with how the trio is named. Tuco is the only one who actually uses his real name, even the complete version at times. He doesn't hide his identity like Blondie nor does he let his work persona overtake him like Angel Eyes. It certainly makes him feel more authentic, and most importantly, more human, which is a theme surrounding his character. He isn't ashamed of his origins and who he is, which sure it can be a bad thing due to what he's done, but I think it adds to his character, and makes key scenes like the confrontation with his brother all the more emotional and poignant (especially specific lines in that scene, like when he said he had no option to 'opt out' like his brother did, and enforces the suggestion that his brother makes that their parents actually quite liked Tuco; itd thereby follow-up that Tuco has pride in his origins and thereby the names given by his parents. Perhaps they only had a strained relationship due to poverty? Or do I just want to find more socialist ideals in media I like??). And all that messaging is conveyed just through his name!

I think smth similar can be said with Blondie and Angel Eyes, just as a contrast. Which makes sense because they're meant to be more mysterious and supernatural. But the naming of these characters is also quite smart. Blondie is a name given by Tuco, which makes their partnership all the more intimate, especially since Blondie is only 'Blondie' when he's with Tuco. But ofc that indicates he didn't start out as Blondie, so despite the intimacy there's also a sense of mystery. Angel Eyes most likely got his name from his job since that's what outsiders, and people that hire him, call him by. It really goes to suggest how as mentioned above, Angel Eyes most likely stopped blurring the lines between his real persona and work persona. Which adds imo adds to the eerie vibe he has going on. Idk, there's a certain type of horror to a guy who doesn't let himself have no limits to what he's willing to do, to the point that it fundamentally changes him as a person. Which is shown by his actions, and supported by his choice of name.

Hopefully I made sense, idk how else to describe it. Unique names that tell a story aren't uncommon in fiction, but I think the naming choices in GBU are particularly interesting, and indicate what the character and their arcs will end up like.

There's definitely more that can be said (ie, Angel Eyes being called 'Angel' Eyes despite unambiguously representing a darker side of morality, how his alternative name Senteza also adds onto the "force of nature" theme Angel Eyes has going on, how it makes him seem less "bad" and more "neutral" in the sense that he's only acting how people deserve to be treated, and how that alt name can even be stretched to have divine meaning as God is often known as a "judge" that will bring judgment to mankind in the future, etc etc etc) but this is already far too long and it was meant to be a quick post

What's the tldr?....... its that I keep finding more and more reasons to have Leone as one of my fav directors. Will anyone ever cook as hard as he did?

[beyondflashpoint]

Yoooooooo.

I’ve been bitten by the bug, and ye olde nostalgia got me thinking about Danny Phantom again, so I decided to play into that. I recently found the Show’s Pitch Bible, and it got me thinking about how I’d handle the reboot. On top of tweaking Jack and Maddie to make them less bumbling morons and more eccentric geniuses, I’d be aging up the crew, and settling Amity Park in Arkham County up New England way.

Danny, as you can probably tell from his human design, would be somewhat milquetoast, with grungy alternative leanings. Good at science, bad at math. Danny is, at his core, a good kid who loves his family. But he is still a kid.

I’ll probably go into them more as I work on the other characters, but I want to give Tucker, Sam, Jazz, and the Fenton parents more to do, even if it is just in the background. But for now, the Fenton parents definitely have only recently started Fenton Works. It’s been a lifelong dream, and between the two of them they’ve reached a point with their savings that it’s now a possibility. Maddie is a respected physicist, and Jack is… a bit of everything really. Test pilot, super spy, but mostly he’s an engineer. Maddie figures out how a thing works, and Jack can build it. The world of academia was… shocked when the most prominent scientific super couple announced they would be devoting the rest of their lives to pursuing superstitious pseudoscience, and this announcement has called their previous credibility into question, but no one can deny that Dr and Mister Fenton get results, if anyone can prove the existence of the supernatural, it’s the Fentons. Both are haunted by a supernatural experience from their youth.

Tucker Foley would probably have escaped the nerd label by his sheer programming and tech repair skills alone, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s also a total anime geek, and a self proclaimed furry. Tucker is an unabashed nerd, and not the suave tv friendly type. Cosplays, ttrpg, mmos, comic and action figure collecting, you name it, he does it. Proudly. And he’s been Danny’s best friend since they were in diapers. Inevitably some of that has rubbed off on Danny.

Sam Manson is relatively new in town. She moved in with her grandmother midway through freshman year after things finally came to a head with her super conservative parents. Falling somewhere between socialist and anarchist, classic goth and punk, Sam is a rebel, an activist, and everything your parents warned you about. She’s also the coolest person Danny and Tucker know. Sam has a borderline obsession with the occult, ghosts, demons, witches, you name it, she can’t get enough of it. Which may or may not have something to do with a family secret relating to why certain members of the Manson family have purple eyes?

Jazmine Fenton is Danny’s smarter, prettier older sister. Fascinated by psychology, and obsessed with figuring out the inner workings of the mind. In high school she was a geek. In college she is thriving. Fortunately, Fenton Works is close to the university she’s attending, and that means she’s never far from home, and more importantly never far from her family. Though her relationship with her parents is rocky, she’s been trying to mend fences after getting some perspective on the world. She and Danny were close growing up, and shared everything, so his recent trend of playing everything close to his chest is unnerving for her. She doesn’t understand when she stopped be Danny’s best friend.

That’s alls I gots for now. Maybe I’ll play around with writing a fic, or maybe a comic or something. We’ll see how this all develops.

[mad-wheelies]

Little reminder that Socialist Alternative is a political cult. Their main goal is recruitment and they do not care. They are known for being racist , especially to Blak people, they have caused little if any change and except hinder a lot of actions. Once you join they are incredibly hard to leave. This goes for their branch off orgs too, such as S4P, which have the same issues and ar just recruiting fronts. You cannot seperate them.

[auntie-histamine]

My therapist just sent me this article, and I think it should be required reading for everyone who's feeling scared this morning. Tumblr won't let me put the whole article under a readmore, so I've included a shorter, edited version below. I highly encourage everyone read the full article, especially as I couldn't include everything here that I wanted to.

Please be aware that I will not be interacting with comments and/or reblogs, unless it is to help with directing to resources mentioned in the article. I am grieving too, like many of us, and I don't have the spoons to facilitate anything more. Read, share, and get organized.

The below are selections the article "There is hope - 10 ways to be prepared and grounded for another Trump presidency" by Daniel Hunter from Waging Nonviolence.

1. Trust yourself I started writing this list with strategic principles (e.g. analyze your opponents weakness and learn to handle political violence), but actually the place to start is with your own self. Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of Trump’s rhetoric — telling people to distrust immigrants, Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans, the press and so on. This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust. Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.  This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you. Then take steps to follow through on what you need. If you’re tired, take some rest. If you’re scared, make some peace with your fears. I can point you to resources that support that — like FindingSteadyGround.com — but the value here is to start with trusting your own inner voice. If you need to stop checking your phone compulsively, do it. If you don’t want to read this article now and instead take a good walk, do it.

2. Find others who you trust Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other. She’s identifying a societal breakdown that we’re all experiencing. Under a Trump presidency, this trend will continue to accelerate. The constant attacks on social systems — teachers, health care and infrastructure — make us turn away from leaning on each other and towards ideologically simple answers that increase isolation (e.g. “distrust government,” “MAGA is nuts,” “anyone who votes that way doesn’t care about you”). If Trump wins: Get some people to regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded. I’ve written an agenda for such gatherings right after a Trump win that you can use.

3. Grieve No matter what we try to do, there’s going to be a lot of loss. The human thing to do is grieve. If you aren’t a feelings person, let me say it this way: The inability to grieve is a strategic error. After Donald Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future — and as a result they remained in shock. An alternative: Start by naming and allowing feelings that come to arise. The night that Donald Trump won, I stayed up until 4 a.m. with a colleague. It was a tear-filled night of naming things that we had just lost. It wasn’t anywhere near strategizing or list-making or planning. It was part of our acceptance that losing a presidency to an awful man means you and your people lose a lot. Ultimately, this helped us believe it — so we didn’t spend years in a daze: “I can’t believe this is happening in this country.” Believe it. Believe it now. Grief is a pathway to that acceptance. 

4. Release that which you cannot change Under a Trump presidency, there are going to be so many issues that it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all. I’m reminded of a colleague in Turkey who told me, “There’s always something bad happening every day. If we had to react to every bad thing, we’d never have time to eat.”  Chaos is a friend of the autocrat. One way we can unwittingly assist is by joining in the story that we have to do it all.  Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy. Nine months ago when we gathered activists to scenario plan together, we took note of two knee-jerk tendencies from the left that ended up largely being dead-ends in the face of Trump: - Public angsting — posting outrage on social media, talking with friends, sharing awful news - Symbolic actions — organizing marches and public statements The first is where we look around at bad things happening and make sure other people know about them, too. We satisfy the social pressure of our friends who want us to show outrage — but the driving moves are only reactive. The end result wasn’t the intended action or an informed population. It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action. Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking. Symbolic actions may fare little better under a Trump presidency. In whatever version of democracy we had, the logic of rallies and statements of outrage was to build a unified front that showed the opposition many voices were opposed to them. But under an unleashed fascist — if it’s all you do — it’s like begging the suicidal captain to plug the hole.  Let me be clear. These strategies will be part of the mix. We’ll need public angsting and symbolic actions. But if you see an organization or group who only relies on these tactics, look elsewhere. There are other, more effective ways to engage.

5. Find your path I’ve been writing scenarios of how a Trump presidency might play out. The initial weeks look chaotic no matter what. But over time some differentiated resistance pathways begin to emerge. One pathway is called “Protecting People.” This might mean organizing outside current systems for health care and mutual aid, or moving resources to communities that are getting targeted. Further examples include starting immigrant welcoming committees, abortion-support funds or training volunteers on safety skills to respond to white nationalist violence. Another pathway is “Defending Civic Institutions.” This group may or may not be conscious that current institutions don’t serve us all, but they are united in understanding that Trump wants them to crumble so he can exert greater control over our lives. Each bureaucracy will put up its own fight to defend itself.  Insider groups will play a central battle against Trump fascism. You may recall government scientists dumping copious climate data onto external servers, bracing for Trump’s orders. This time, many more insiders understand it’s code red. Hopefully, many will bravely refuse to quit — and instead choose to stay inside as long as possible.  Institutional pillars understand a Trump presidency is a dire threat. Then there’s a critical third pathway: “Disrupt and Disobey.” This goes beyond protesting for better policies and into the territory of people intervening to stop bad policies or showing resistance. Lastly, there’s a key fourth role: “Building Alternatives.” We can’t just be stuck reacting and stopping the bad. We have to have a vision. This is the slow growth work of building alternative ways that are more democratic. Each of us may be attracted to some pathway more than others. Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities to join the resistance.

6. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor If autocrats teach us any valuable lesson it’s this: Political space that you don’t use, you lose. I’m not coaching to never self-protect. You can decide when to speak your mind. But it is a phenomenally slippery slope here we have to observe and combat.  Put simply: Use the political space and voice you have. 

7. Reorient your political map A Trump presidency reshapes alignments and possibilities. The bellicose, blasphemous language of Trump will meet the practical reality of governing. When you’re out of power, it’s easy to unify — but their coalition’s cracks will quickly emerge. We have to stay sharp for opportunities to cleave off support. Even if you don’t want to engage with them (which is fine), we’ll all have to give space to those who do experiment with new language to appeal to others who don’t share our worldview of a multiracial true democracy.

8. Get real about power In Trump’s first term, the left’s organizing had mixed results. It was elections that ultimately stopped Trump. This time will be much harder. The psychological exhaustion and despair is much higher. Deploying people into the streets for mass actions with no clear outcome will grow that frustration, leading to dropout and radicalized action divorced from strategy.  Trump has been very clear about using his political power to its fullest — stretching and breaking the norms and laws that get in his way. The movement will constantly be asking itself: “Are you able to stop this new bad thing?”  We're not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships. In our country, pressuring elite power is reaching its end point. Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system. This tipping point of mass noncooperation will be messy. It means convincing a lot of people to take huge personal risks for a better option.  As a “Disrupt and Disobey” person, we have to move deliberately to gain the trust of others, like the “Protecting People” folks. Mass noncooperation does the opposite of their goal of protection — it exposes people to more risk, more repression. But with that comes the possibility that we could get the kind of liberatory government that we all truly deserve.

9. Handle fear, make violence rebound Otpor in Serbia has provided an abundance of examples on how to face repression. They were young people who took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings. They would joke amongst each other, “It doesn’t hurt if you’re afraid.” Their attitude wasn’t cavalier — it was tactical. They were not going to grow fear. So when hundreds were beaten on a single day, their response was: This repression will only stiffen the resistance. Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it — but it is about constantly redirecting. Activist/intellectual Hardy Herriman released a studied response about political violence that had some news that surprised me. The first was that physical political violence hasn’t grown dramatically in this country — it still remains relatively rare. The threats of violence, however, trend upwards, such as this CNN report: “Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during Trump’s presidency,” primarily from the right. His conclusion wasn’t that political violence isn’t going to grow. Quite the opposite. But he noted that a key component to political violence is to intimidate and tell a story that they are the true victims. Making political violence rebound requires refusing to be intimidated and resisting those threats so they can backfire. (Training on this backfire technique is available from the HOPE-PV guide.) We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great strategist Bayard Rustin. Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the government of Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott in the 1950s. Leaders like the newly appointed Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Movement organizer Rustin organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders — making a positive spectacle of the repression. Some leaders not on police lists publicly demanded they, too, get arrested. Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air. Fear was turned into valor.

10. Envision a positive future We’ve all now imagined storylines about how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to spend an equal measure of time envisioning how we might advance our cause in these conditions. As writer Walidah Imarisha says, “The goal of visionary fiction is to change the world.” In my mind if Trump wins, we’ll have to eventually get him out. There are two paths available to force him out. The first: Vote him out. Given the bias of the electoral college, this requires successfully defending nearly all local, state and national takeovers of elections such that they remain relatively fair and free. Winning via the path of electoral majority has a wide swath of experience and support from mainstream progressive organizations and Democratic institutions. It’s going to be a major thrust. In my scenario writing I’ve explored what that strategy could look like, including preparing electoral workers to stand against last minute attempts by Trump to change election rules and even stymie the election with dubious emergency orders. They don’t obey — and go ahead with elections anyway. The second strategy is if he illegally refuses to leave or allow fair elections: Kick him out. That means we are able to develop a national nonviolent resistance campaign capable of forcing him out of office. I’ve written several versions of this: One where large-scale strikes disable portions of the U.S. economy. If you recall from COVID, our systems are extremely vulnerable. Businesses running “just in time” inventory means small hiccups in the system can cause cascading effects.  Sustained strikes would face deep resistance, but they could swing communities currently on the fence, like the business community, which already is concerned about Trump’s temperamental nature. Trump’s own policies might make these conditions much easier. If he really does mass deportations, the economic injury might be fatal. In another scenario I explore another strategy of taking advantage of a Trump overreach. Autocrats overplay their hands. And in this imagined scenario, Trump overreaches when he attempts to force autoworkers to stop building electric vehicles. UAW workers refuse and keep the factories running. Eventually he’s unable to stop them — but in the process he’s publicly humiliated. A very public loss like this can cause what Timur Kuran calls an “unanticipated revolution.” He noted many incidents where political leaders seem to have full support, then suddenly it evaporates. Kuran’s analysis reminds us to look at Trump’s political weakness. Political hacks like Lindsay Graham appear to be sycophants — but if given the chance to turn their knife in his back, they might. This means exposed political weaknesses could quickly turn the many inside Trump’s campaign against him. That feels far away from now. But all these remain possibilities. Practicing this future thinking and seeing into these directions gives me some hope and some strategic sensibilities.  On the days when I can’t sense any of these political possibilities (more than not), I zoom out further to the lifespans of trees and rocks, heading into spiritual reminders that nothing lasts forever. All of the future is uncertain. But using these things, we’re more likely to have a more hopeful future and experience during these turbulent times.

[txttletale]

this is a question that on other blogs would likely get me exploded with hammers but you seem nice and i swear im just genuinely just trying to understand, but do you have any thoughts on why marxist-leninists are so dismissive of anarchists?

first of all i'd like to preface that i think that marxist-leninists being dismissive of anarchists (and conversely anarchists hollering about evil tankies) is something that is much more common among Posters Online than among people of either political persuasion who are actually meaningfully involved in communist organization -- if 'anarchist' or 'Marxist-Leninist' is primarily an online identity to you, then you're likely to want to signal that identity by loudly and pointlessly disdaining a designated out-group -- if anarchist or marxist-leninst praxis is something you actually do, you will quickly realize, however much you disagree or even dislike the other tendency, that for most practical purposes you will be much served working together when it comes to any anticapitalist or antifascist action.

secondly i'd also like to add that i, personally, am much more tolerant of anarchists than most marxist-leninists even by the standards of actual organizing. i have mutuals, friends, and comrades who are anarchists -- while i believe that the differences between marxism-leninism and anarchism are irreconcilable in a revolutionary situation, i believe that in the vast majority of the world the situation is so far from revolutionary that there is no material or practical conflicts between marxist-leninists and what lenin called "the best of the anarchists". many anarchists have made incisive and useful critiques of capitalism and even of socialist projects (even though i think those critiques are weakened by the anarchist inability to provide a viable alternative).

all that out of the way, here are some problems that i (and other marxist-leninists) have with anarchists:

#1: class-blind & idealistic theoretical frameworks. a lot of anarchists tend to view political systems and articulate criticisms in terms of extremely abstract ideas about 'power', 'authority', and 'hierarchy'. this flattens a lot of substantially different class relationships into broad and inexact categories such as 'domination' -- the result of this is that anarchists lose sight of class relations and the material basis from which power emerges and is maintained. often they will psychologize these elements, explaining systems and the way they function by projecting a psychoanalytical framework onto the holders of power. i find these analyses usually produce incoherent and politically useless truisms. being based purely on ideals and not on materialism leads a lot of these anarchist suppositions to tie themselves into knots -- as engels said, "a revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is", yet many anarchists are revolutionary (supporting the violent seizure of power from the bourgeoisie) but viciously opposed to the DoTP (the violent maintenance of power over the bourgeoisie), with the imo totally incoherent rationale that the latter is 'authoritarian' while the former is not.

#2: individualism. anarchists are generally very concerned with 'individual freedoms' and the importance of the individual as a political unit -- as i often say on this blog, i deny the individual as a meaningful political unit. to me 'liberation' means the working class as a whole being able to live comfortably without the threat of death hanging over their heads if they fail to sell their labour -- 'freedom' is only meaningfully possible when there is a liberation of the working class in totality. in its worst manifestation, this leads a lot of anarchists to totally reject the concept of socially necessary labour or the need for labour to be organised at all (cf. this meme)

#3: the cult of spontaneity. anarchists (obviously) do not believe in centralised organisations. i think, frankly, this is silly, because centralised organisations are the only body capable of mobilizing the working class to mass action. without centralisation, it's impossible to coordinate and act in unison -- that is, to do the very things that make any revolutionary action feasible at all. the revolutionary strategy of simply waiting for the people to 'spontaneously' rise up and install communism because they have all separately decided to is one that's, quite simply, fantastical and has no basis in reality. this holds true for action that falls short of 'armed revolution' too -- to be effective and replicable, direct action needs to be planned, deliberate, and coordinated, and this just isn't possible without an organizing body.

#4: repeating imperialist talking points. now this is not true of all anarchists -- there are lots of principled anti-imperialist anarchists in the world. however, there are also a lot of anarchists who will engage in borderline apologia for US imperialism, who will parrot lines about 'dictators' and 'totalitarian regimes', who refuse to oppose US imperialism because 'all states are the same'. this ultimately (in the most charitable interpretation) stems from #1, where the choice of whether or not to oppose US imperialism is seen mostly as a personal idealistic moral choice (decide What Is Good and What Is Bad) rather than a material choice about what political action can be taken. and of course there are many valuable critiques to be made of the USSR's many failures, and some of these critiques have been made by anarchists -- but some anarchists will descend to Black Book of Communism levels in an attempt to get one in on a strawman of 'Stalinism'

if you want a more detailed in-depth criticism of anarchism from a marxist-leninist perspective that i mostly agree with, this medium article is fantastic. but these four reasons are the main ones i -- while not dismissive of anarchists -- am not an anarchist and generally disagree with anarchist theory.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Trajectories for the Future

In "Dark tidings: Anarchist Politics in the Age of Collapse," Uri Gordon paints an ominous picture: "industrial civilization is coming down," so "anarchists and their allies are now required to project themselves into a future of growing instability and deterioration."[20] I am not so sure about the imminent downfall of industrial civilization or the collapse of capitalism, but I concur that we need to project ourselves into some image of the future in order to prepare for it.[21] A complication is that the future is partially decided by how we project ourselves into it and how we imagine it. There is not a predetermined future that we merely need to prepare for. It will be shaped by how we prepare for it and by what future we prepare for. To fixate ourselves on a particular vision of the future could affect us by constricting our capacities in the present to those actions that lead to that future, blinding us to other possibilities.

Gordon mentions some possible future scenarios, summed up as "grassroots communism, eco-authoritarianism, or civil war."[22] As the ecological crisis becomes more clear and people demand change, global capitalism might attempt to recuperate by making minor adjustments and putting on a "green face" without any changes in the system that is actually causing the crisis: capitalism itself. This can only buy time, and as the crisis intensifies capitalism will employ more authoritarian and repressive measures to stay in power. It can do this either in an authoritarian, neoliberal form, deploying superficial, liberal "progressive" rhetoric while preserving existing hierarchies; or it could instead turn to "eco-fascism," combining nationalist, racist and misogynist ideas of population control and "belonging" with the need to protect nature by totalitarian means. Both are tendencies that exist in the present.[23] In either case, it can only be a matter of buying time by managing the crisis until the inevitable collapse. In his piece Gordon suggests a number of praxises that are necessary in order to resist the authoritarian tendencies during this period of interregnum as well as to build alternative communities that prefigure a new way of life, independent of global capitalism.

Another, more recent, theory of possible futures is Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright's (M&W) "Climate Leviathan."[24] They see four different trajectories: Either the capitalist order will continue under an increasingly authoritarian global sovereign - a planetary regulatory regime that decides who gets to pollute and at which cost ("Climate Leviathan") - or it will continue without such a sovereign as reactionary and nationalist movements refuse any serious collective efforts to mitigate climate change ("Climate Behemoth"). The global sovereign might also emerge as a non-capitalist world order: the state-socialist dream of a global centrally planned economy but with an emphasis on reducing carbon emissions ("Climate Mao"), and finally there is the more unknown path which involves a rejection and transcendence of both capitalism and political sovereignty ("Climate X").[25] Although climate denying "anti-globalist" right-wing movements have gained political power in several countries in recent years, the authors doubt this "Behemoth" will be long-lived: at some point the climate crisis will become so apparent it cannot be ignored.[26] They find the capitalist "Climate Leviathan" the most likely scenario as it can be built on global institutions and structures that already exist.[27] Climate X is less certain but is the only scenario the authors see as a viable strategy for the future.[28]

There are several overlaps between Gordon's and M&W's theories. Gordon's vision of eco-authoritarian capitalism is not that far from their Climate Leviathan: an attempt to manage the escalating crisis while preserving the existing structures of inequality. In his updated version, he admits that the prediction that capitalism would adapt by accommodating environmentalist and progressive concerns has not been realized. Instead capital has tended to "opt for full-blown reaction" expressed in climate denial and national chauvinism[29] - a trend that aligns with their vision of Climate Behemoth. The main point of convergence in the two theories is the hope for "Climate X" / "grassroots communism" - a movement of movements struggling for social justice, equality and self-management. My own theory is close to these. I also think we will see an increase in authoritarianism and inequality, but I posit that this is not really a change in the system but merely an intensification of the tendencies already contained within it. But the growing crises do give room for and force into existence other forces with the potential to create something new. I too, place my hope in "Climate X" - not as a utopian unknown but as concrete and existing praxises that can be expanded and amplified.

My aim here is thus not to critique the previous theories but to supplement them with empirical cases of what is already happening as the world responds to climate disaster - how the state and capital tries to consolidate the existing political structures on one side, and, on the other, how communities are responding by changing their social relations. Examining these cases from the present can give us a better idea of what to expect from the future and where to focus our struggles. I also add an element to "Climate X" that is under-emphasized in the aforementioned works, which focus primarily on protest and resistance to the dominating powers with the goal of preventing the destructive course.[30] Given the fact that climate disasters are already happening we also need to take into consideration how we are going to survive in the future. The politics of adaptation must be considered from the grassroots level.

[threefolddefencespeech]

WorldCon!

So - WorldCon's over. I'm safely back home, very tired, only mildly ill, definitely getting the con drop or at least experiencing far too many post con emotions (what do you mean there won't be another one nearby for five years?). So perfect time to write a bit about it. I'm not going to get everything in here, but let's ramble incoherently about some highlights.

The Hugos

My spouse (and the rest of their team) won a Hugo! I am so proud and happy for them - it is, I say with incredible bias and no objectivity, very very well deserved. How could getting to celebrate that not be a highlight?

So. Let's move on to some book opinions. This year, I managed to read almost all of the best novel finalists (bar Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, which I'm still a few chapters into and ping ponging off. Let's say I'm pretty sure where my opinion was going to lie). So I get to have some more detailed opinions than most years, which is fun/regrettable for anyone who got an earful from me about Starter Villain!

It's always interesting to see what makes the Hugo shortlist. This year, a truly massive gulf emerged between my two favourites, the middle-of-the-roads, and one real "no, really, why was this here?" option.

Out in front were Saint of Bright Doors (Vajra Chandrasekera) and Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh). I can already see this post getting enormous, so I'll try and be quick (this is a lie).

Saint of Bright Doors is wonderful - the first chapter introduces us to a clear chosen one narrative, with Fetter raised with a destiny: to kill his cult leader father. The second rejects it utterly. Fetter ignores his destiny and his mother's calls, and immigrates to a city - one that has elements of socialist ideal, but gradually reveals more and more of itself to be a fascist police state, and in every case is wonderfully strange. He joins a group of fellow religious "unchosen ones". He drifts. His father's cult grows in influence, and threatens to pull him once more into orbit - but this is not so conventional a story as to fully let it. And he becomes fascinated with the city's bright doors, which lead nowhere, and are unopenable. In a less talented writer's hands, this would feel disjointed. Instead it's wonderful - a dreamy-but-grounded, mythic-but-real story of aimless reality pitted against religious destiny, of cults and pogroms and the structures that lie beneath the world. I have my problems with the ending. But had I liked it more, I suspect it would have been a worse book.

Some Desperate Glory tells a story of a militarised future human society, living to avenge the Earth. It is also, in many ways, a cult. Where Some Desperate Glory particularly succeeds is that its protagonist isn't an outlier. How many dystopias have you read in which the lead is an outcast, or always felt subtly wrong in the society, never quite fit in? But Kyr is in so many ways this future society's model citizen. Which makes her growth - her experimentation in the wider world - and the ways in which this society still abuses her, and still fails her because she can't live up to its ideals, far more powerful. She's not a comfortable head to make a home in, at least to start with, but it's a far better novel for that. While what the novel's doing is far clearer than Saint, it does go to some interesting places - and explores these cultish power structures on various scales. I have quibbles and gripes. Do I wish more page space had been devoted to developing the novel's visions of alternative versions of Kyr, rather than slamming in character development in fast forward? Yes, and I would have happily sacrificed a few big action setpieces (which is where I suspect that space went) to get there. But it's still a powerful book.

Saint definitely my preference there, but both worthy winners.

Then we had the middle of the pack.

Leckie's Translation State was... fine? I expected more, though. We had some alien weirdness, but it was wrapped around a story which had the exact same plot arc as a typical YA arranged marriage novel, with the characters ending up in exactly the same places you'd expect. Aside from one, who simply gets forgotten about. It was perfectly pleasant, but revolutionising the genre this is not.

Martha Wells' Witch King is a secondary world fantasy, told with a flashback-interweaving-with-present-events structure, in a way that's far more evenly balanced between the two narratives than most, with the past narrative holding most of the explanation of characters and relationships highly relevant to the present. However, it fails to really make it work - it sacrifices a lot of character development and foreshadowing for the actual plot to get this structure working, which means the actual key revelations fall a little flat when they come. It's not a bad book! There's some fun magic system stuff, some mildly interesting possession-of-different-gendered body stuff... but it's not life changing, just a fun attempted structural twist on an otherwise pretty classic secondary world fantasy.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - well, it's a middle eastern pirate fantasy. The historical inspiration is great here - rich and vibrant. But the prose is clunky - it's doing Historical Feminism but in a really obvious, unsubtle way that's clearly just 2024 views projected backwards, or at least that's how it seems from the "ah, we mens often think x about a powerful lady, don't we?" narrator chapter. I like engaging with these topics, but can I wish for a bit more nuance and some better writing? Mind you, I'm only a few chapters into this one, and keep bouncing off. It might get better when I push through. From what others have said, I doubt it - but I can't really say. I'm maybe being harsh from initial impressions here.

So most of this middle group are small twists or weirdnesses upon otherwise pretty familiar genre novels.

Then there's Starter Villain, which is the only "really, why is this here?" novel of the list. I suspect just because Scalzi's a big name in SFF, and name recognition gets you a long way at the nomination stage. While I might quibble with the middle group - probably there was more interesting SFF published last year? - this was a novel-length shaggy dog story. It's not funny enough to be farce or satire - but it's not doing anything else. The protagonist's main defining traits are "very divorced", "likes cats", and I suppose "vaguely nice". Everyone speaks in the same way. And this goes nowhere - other than a few jokes about dolphins and venture capitalists along the way. Maybe if this hadn't been up for the Hugo, I wouldn't have hated this so much. But I expected something. This was my first Scalzi, and I probably won't choose to repeat the experience.

So, how'd the voting turn out? Some Desperate Glory won, which I vaguely suspected - felt like it had broader appeal as a slightly more traditional novel than Saint of Bright Doors anyway. But Hugo votership, why did you do Saint quite so dirty? It's so far down the list. On the other hand - faith marginally restored by Starter Villain ending up in a clear last place.

Which is to say: probably good job overall, Hugo votership, but you're on some shaky ground. :P

The Panels

Panels! I went to lots of them. I was terribly sabotaged by my very first panel, Revolutions in Speculative Fiction, setting the bar far too high. I was largely picking panels based on people + a vaguely interesting topic, with a few exceptions. Ada Palmer's and Arkady Martine's definitely proved that method of panel picking works well.

...after Dublin, the other thing I learned (alongside picking based on people) was that I really shouldn't plan my con too inflexibly or intensively. So despite wanting to go to 4 things in every slot, I paced myself - I missed out on an interesting panel and went to hang out with people or Do Food occasionally, especially when emotion + tiredness demanded it, and I probably had a better con for it.

There were worse panels too. Several on interestingly nuanced topics had a tendency to regress into more basic topics - particularly into cultural appropriation 101. Cultural Appropriation 101 is not a bad panel topic! It's an incredibly necessary one. But it's also a panel I have been to several times now, and while I think other panels should certainly touch on it where relevant, I wanted a bit more than Different Topic 101 from "Ancient Cultures and Context" and the discussion of religion in fantasy, for instance.

Overall though, I had a good time with the panels - even when frustrating (cough, Scalzi showboating and talking over other panelists in "Systems as Villains" when he didn't actually have anything to say, cough), they were fuel for conversation with interesting people, and there were some truly interesting ideas in there too. Maybe I'll manage to incorporate a few into my own writing. I hope so.

Self-Indulgent Gender Stuff

I'll try not to ramble about this too much, but it was pretty significant to my con experience. This was my first con since coming out as a trans woman (it also coincided with my 1 year anniversary of starting HRT). Honestly, coming up to it, I was pretty stressed - despite knowing on paper that a substantial part of WorldCon is queer nerds, it didn't quite make it through to my brain, or at least I suppose endocrine system (I worry about my appearance anyway, and was just coming off a bit of a doomspiral about my features at the 12 month mark, which may not have helped!).

But everyone was genuinely very nice about it - including everyone I already knew, but who hadn't seen me since pre-transition. And you know, it did feel really good to be able to present the way I actually wanted to at other cons (pre transition, I can't deny a certain - large - amount of envy at fem con + cosplay outfits, and I actually get to do some of that now). I even got some compliments on my outfits, which was very flattering (plus one person inexplicably wanting to draw me at the Hugo afterparty).

Did that stop me from worrying? Silly question. I still spent a lot of the con convinced I looked terrible in so, so many ways, and had to frequently borrow some reassurance from spouse and friend (I'm so sorry). There were a few low points. But I'm so glad I did it. Hopefully the start of many more cons presenting more comfortably.

Plus, I have discovered a great secret. My terrible dancing is drastically improved by the addition of a swooshy skirt. (Well, maybe some other stuff helped too, but I'll go with that)

People

I've talked a lot about official, organised things where I was there as a spectator: panels, the Hugos. But really, so much of WorldCon is just spending time with lovely people.

I got to do lots of the con with spouse and a soon-to-be-ex-Oxford friend, who I have really fond memories of doing other cons with. Lots of silly late night dancing. Lots of in depth discussions, from the deeply absurd to the (maybe) absurdly deep (or maybe just the former all over again). I got to see other Oxford friends in the magic con zone! @frith-in-tombs between track stuff and @vivelabagatelle occasionally too.

I got to catch up with other friends, especially the ex-Oxford folks! It was lovely to spend more time with @howlsmovinglibrary again (who also ran some excellent panels, and has definitely sold me on this villainess book), as well as Entourage, @cardboardmoose, and others (if I haven't named you explicitly it's probably because I thought the only way I've got of naming you might be too identifiable, and I don't know your name on here).

I got to meet new people, which honestly is one of the best things at a con. I spent a lovely night chatting to @canmom about all sorts of diversely interesting things, from opera to game design - completely unexpectedly after inexplicably working up the courage to venture a "hey, you're not [tumblr name] on tumblr, are you?" (at least I didn't comment on anybody's shoelaces, is all I can say in my defence). I met a distant friend from Discord and compared very different con plans - and a truly excellent crocheted Mr Pages. I chatted with a few more in panels. I finally got to hang out with Roseanna more than in passing (typically we've wound up communicating only through a mutual friend, Entourage since we've never really overlapped properly - I remember back when she asked me about reviewing, and look how the tables have tabled!) and had a great time dissecting the Hugos. (Another very well deserved Hugo win btw). I also learned that apparently I was referred to frequently as DAF by her and said friend, and she's completely forgotten what it stood for? I have a pressing need to solve this mystery.

And of course, there are some friends I dearly miss being able to con with too. Perhaps one day we'll be able to do so again.

What Next?

As I mentioned, so many post-con emotions! Five years really is too long between travellable worldcons for my liking.

Which means resolution 1 is: maybe I should do more cons? While flying transatlantic for WorldCon feels like a Lot, I've never made it to an Eastercon before, and I think I'd like to.

I've also reached out to plan a few meetups with nearby-ish worldcon people like Roseanna - I miss the con energy, and I think I'd like to get some more chats about books and such in my life. (Alas, distance remains a barrier for yet others!)

I also want to engage with more SFF writing - I read a fair few novels, but I feel like I miss out on a lot of reviews and criticism these days, and I miss that.

And as always, I come away wanting to put more energy into my own creative work - I've been planning a bigger IF-ish game (than my small silly/gift games I've made) for a long time, and maybe this is the time I'll manage the sustained effort to make it happen (and feel like I have My Own Stuff next WorldCon!). Hehe. Well, I can dream, anyway.

I should probably also catch up on sleep at some point.

It was a wonderful, exhausting, fascinating con - thank you to everyone who made it happen, whether more generally, or for me specifically. :)