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pussymagicuniverse · 6 years ago

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Catamenial Mania: Looking Towards the Prevalence of Period Porn

it’s easy to blame porn. it’s easy to give porn credit.

throughout history, the depictions of porn and our interactions with it have offered reflections and refractions of humanity’s most truthful and most unaware designs. manifestations of the most extreme and the most banal flights into fantasy prejudices and biases for all to hear and see and come to.

it’s a safe bet to say that periods predate porn.

the scarcity of period porn has not gone unnoticed and was the topic of a talk at the first world pornography conference in 1998. it had crossed my mind on a number of occasions why period porn had never popped up as often as i thought it would, considering that it had never popped up at all. once i debated with someone that such a thing as yeast infection porn couldn’t possibly exist, least of all because having sex with a yeast infection is a horribly uncomfortable experience. and despite it all it only took a single search on PornHub to find a video.

it’s understandable that some people prefer to keep porn as a fantasy. but how can fantasies incorporate every conceivable thing but still want to keep themselves untainted by a little blood. how could period blood not be a part of someone’s fantasy, anyone’s fantasy, especially when it’s a fact that most people with cunts get especially horny on their period.

while there are a number of factors that play into what kind of porn is made, how it is made, who it is made by, and where it is accessible, in the hierarchy of censorship it turns out that one of the main hindrances to period porn are the payment processors rather than the porn industry itself. billing companies and payment processing companies such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal for example, impose content restrictions and strict regulations around the words used and content provided and reserve the right to refuse to process payments for companies and websites if they allow content on their platform that violates these regulations, due to their designation of such websites as ‘high risk.’ i was exposed to this thanks to a terrific thread by writer Lux Alptraum.

“the cunt cannot help the blood it puts forth. it cannot help but flounder in life and death and creation. ambiguity and instability are implicit in its folds and people with cunts are all too aware.” (click to tweet)

looking at one example of a list of forbidden words, at first glance it doesn’t seem entirely outrageous. it’s understandable that one wouldn’t want to be promoting or legitimizing abusive, violent, or non-consensual content. it’s understandable that one wouldn’t want to be associated with snuff films. some words come in a variety so it’s clear that someone wants to cover all their bases. one can rationalize how blood might come to be on that list in regards to violence or abuse or death. however, with the inclusion of ‘menstrual, menstruate, menstruation’ it becomes clear that blood isn’t innocently forbidden.

to highlight multiple versions of menstruation (not to mention ‘period’ is also on that list, right in-between ‘pedophilia’ and ‘popper’) and put them on the same level as abuse or bigotry or slurs is a blatant demonization of people with cunts. to instate a policy that underlines natural and healthy bleeding as something that should be restricted or forbidden is nothing more than a dehumanization. to say that the blood that comes out of someone’s legs is so shameful is so dangerous that even the mere mention of the word to describe such an act is impermissible does nothing but reflect the face of patriarchy.

even unrelated connotations suffer under this. according to an interview in a Vice article that investigates this censorship a BDSM site remarks that they can no longer use red candles in their wax play because “wasteland's payment processors seem to think melted red wax is a dead ringer for blood.”

there are no good reasons to look down on menstruation. there is absolutely no excuse and there is absolutely no justification that is not based in misogyny. it is the only blood that belongs outside and yet in our daily content we find ourselves exposed to every kind but.

“anything that denies a person with a bleeding cunt is demonstrative of patriarchy.” (click to tweet)

this is how power dynamics manifest now in the neoliberal world we have generated; through the withholding of not just money and profit but the ability of exchange in itself. these payment processors and billing agents have nothing to do with the money that is being exchanged but through the mere threat of withholding the act of exchange content disappears from sight. not to say that it’s impossible to find but how many people look further than PornHub or XVideos or whatever one’s main site happens to be. this lack of visibility is entirely intentional not towards creating a fantasy but towards upholding a system of oppression and erasure. porn companies and independent porn producers can keep making all the self-conscious and feminist porn they want, but billing companies will ensure that their content never becomes mainstream.

even the act of trying to find information directly from Visa or Mastercard proves difficult. Google searches don’t seem to register the term menstruation and instead change it to ‘period’ in their algorithms. whether or not this is a prerogative of Google’s or an SEO pairing function from the billing companies is unclear.

the act of withholding payment processing when others don’t abide by your values is neither new nor limited to the world of porn. as of the writing of this post the United States is still considering imposing financial sanctions on Venezuela that may lead to Visa and Mastercard being unable to process payments in the country. another effort against Maduro and his supporters, the United States expresses its dissatisfaction at dissent not by withholding money but by withholding the ability to use money.

it’s easy to think that through the withholding of money or the ability to exchange money, values may be influenced. it’s easy to think that that’s the only way to influence people’s behavior. but besides the fact that it’s fairly agreed upon that economic sanctions don’t really work, it’s absurd to think that the act of exchanging money is being withheld in order to keep people from being exposed to the blood that comes from cunts.

“to instate a policy that underlines natural and healthy bleeding as something that should be restricted or forbidden is nothing more than a dehumanization.” (click to tweet)

around the world one of the common denominators of patriarchy is the damnation of menstruation. the effects of patriarchal thinking vary around the globe but the misogyny of stigmatizing what comes out of a person’s cunt seems to be a constant. whether through refusing to call it by its name offering odd euphemisms in its stead taxing products designed to aid the process making products hard to find making people with cunts seclude themselves following them to watch them change causing pain misattributing pain ignoring pain silencing them deeming them impure deciding everything touched is impure or some other sort of nonsense.

not everyone enjoys period sex. not everyone enjoys watching period porn. this isn’t about preferences or comfort levels. this is about the erasure and mistreatment of something that happens to people with cunts at least 450 times in their lives. what other constant is so widely ignored. what other biological constant is used as blackmail against profit.

anything that denies a person with a bleeding cunt is demonstrative of patriarchy.

this denial is not new but nor is it timeless. in both roman and etruscan mythologies there existed a goddess of the dead of spirits of chaos called mania (or manea). in Greek mythology, Mania is the goddess of insanity and madness. her name ties her to another roman goddess called Mana Genita, whose name Plurarch derives the latin verb manare, meaning to flow to shed to pour forth. in itself this bleeding is the standard for normativity. its madness is essential towards existence. it is only through our own interactions with it whether we decide to respect it or vilify it.

there is nothing wrong with chaos. there is nothing insane about insanity. it is all a part of being alive being human being whatever this concoction of cells happens to be. but the more we deny what is basic in us the harder it will be to figure out what is extraordinary.

the cunt cannot help the blood it puts forth. it cannot help but flounder in life and death and creation. ambiguity and instability are implicit in its folds and people with cunts are all too aware. to watch those around you participate in its erasure is infuriating. but people with cunts never forget.

further play:

Erotic Red

Why is ‘Period’-Porn So Rare? An Explanatory Mess

Vampire Porn Challenges Period Sex Stigma

How My Periods Made Me More Aware Of Patriarchy In The North East

Period poverty: Scotland poll shows women go to desperate lengths

Citing Gender Bias, State Lawmakers Move To Eliminate 'Tampon Tax'

Period-Shaming Isn’t Rooted In Indian Culture, But In Patriarchy

Do Vampires Menstruate? The Power Of Jenny Hval’s New Album Blood Bitch

How did menstruation become taboo?

Rubyfloetics: A Period Poem Mixtape

marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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Restoring the Commons

Digital Elixir Restoring the Commons

Yves here. Even though this article implicitly accepts the idea of growth, which too often turns out to be groaf, relying more on commons-type structure is likely to become more and more important in an era of resource scarcity and relocalization.

By Douglas Rushkoff, host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY Queens College. Originally published at Evonomics

The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate good will.

The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who cooperate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset. The pastures of medieval England were treated as a commons. It wasn’t a free-for-all, but a carefully negotiated and enforced system. People brought their flocks to graze in mutually agreed- upon schedules. Violation of the rules was punished, either with penalties or exclusion.

The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other” player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself. For those entranced by the myth of capitalism, this can be hard to grasp. They’re still stuck thinking of the economy as a two-column ledger, where every credit is someone’s else’s debit. This zero-sum mentality is an artifact of monopoly central currency. If money has to be borrowed into existence from a single, private treasury and paid back with interest, then this sad, competitive, scarcity model makes sense. I need to pay back more than I borrowed, so I need to get that extra money from someone else. That’s the very premise of zero-sum. But that’s not how an economy has to work.

The destructive power of debt-based finance is older than central currency—so old that even the Bible warns against it. It was Joseph who taught Pharaoh how to store grain in good times so that he would be able to dole it out in lean years. Those indentured to the pharaoh eventually became his slaves, and four hundred years passed before they figured out how to free themselves from captivity as well as this debtor’s mindset. Even after they escaped, it took the Israelites a whole generation in the desert to learn not to hoard the manna that rained on them, but to share what came and trust that they would get more in the future.

If we act like there’s a shortage, there will be a shortage.

Advocates of the commons seek to optimize the economy for human beings, rather than the other way around.

One economic concept that grew out of the commons was called distributism. The idea, born in the 1800s, holds that instead of trying to redistribute the spoils of capitalism after the fact through heavy taxation, we should simply predistribute the means of production to the workers. In other words, workers should collectively own the tools and factories they use to create value. Today, we might call such an arrangement a co-op—and, from the current examples, cooperative businesses are giving even established US corporations a run for their money.

The same sorts of structures are being employed in digital businesses. In these “platform cooperatives,” participants own the platform they’re using, instead of working for a “platform monopoly” taxi app or giving away their life data to a social media app. A taxi app is not a complicated thing; it’s just a dating app combined with a mapping app combined with a credit card app. The app doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the revenue. Besides, if the drivers are going to be replaced by robots someday, anyway, at least they should own the company for which they’ve been doing the research and development. Similarly, a user-owned social media platform would allow participants to sell (or not sell) their own data, instead of having it extracted for free.

Another commons-derived idea, “subsidiarity,” holds that a business should never grow for growth’s sake. It should only grow as big as it needs to in order to accomplish its purpose. Then, instead of expanding to the next town or another industry, it should just let someone else replicate the model. Joe’s pizzeria should sell to Joe’s customers. If they need a pizzeria in the next town, Joe can share his recipe and let Samantha do it.

This is not bad business—especially if Joe likes making pizza. He gets to stay in the kitchen doing what he loves instead of becoming the administrator of a pizza chain. Samantha may develop a new technique that helps Joe; they can even federate and share resources. Besides, it’s fun to have someone else to talk with about the pizza business. They can begin to develop their collaborative abilities instead of their competitive ones.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Things in nature grow to a certain point and then stop. They become full-grown adults, forests, or coral reefs. This doesn’t mean they’re dead. If anything, it’s the stability of adulthood that lets them become participating members of larger, mutually supportive networks.

If Joe has to grow his business bigger just in order to keep up with his rising rent and expenses, it’s only because the underlying economy has been rigged to demand growth and promote scarcity. It is this artificially competitive landscape that convinces us we have no common interests.

We know that nothing in nature can sustain an exponential rate of growth, but this doesn’t stop many of our leading economists and scientists from perpetuating this myth. They cherry-pick evidence that supports the endless acceleration of our markets and our technologies, as if to confirm that growth- based corporate capitalism is keeping us on track for the next stage of human evolution.

To suggest we slow down, think, consider—or content our- selves with steady profits and incremental progress—is to cast oneself as an enemy of our civilization’s necessary acceleration forward. By the market’s logic, human intervention in the machine will only prevent it from growing us out of our current mess. In this read of the situation, corporations may be using extractive, scorched-earth tactics, but they are also our last best hope of solving the world’s biggest problems, such as hunger and disease. Questioning the proliferation of patented, genetically modified seeds or an upgraded arsenal of pesticides just impedes the necessary progress. Adherents of this worldview say that it’s already too late to go back. There are already too many people, too much damage, and too much dependence on energy. The only way out is through. Regulating a market just slows it down, preventing it from reaching the necessary level of turbulence for the “invisible hand” to do its work.

According to their curated history of humanity, whenever things look irredeemably awful, people come up with a new technology, unimaginable until then. They like to tell the story of the great horse manure crisis of 1894, when people in England and the United States were being overwhelmed by the manure produced by the horses they used for transportation. Luckily, according to this narrative, the automobile provided a safe, relatively clean alternative, and the streets were spared hip-deep manure. And just as the automobile saved us from the problems of horse-drawn carriages, a new technological innovation will arise to save us from automobiles.

The problem with the story is that it’s not true. Horses were employed for commercial transport, but people rode in electric streetcars and disliked sharing the roads with the new, intrusive, privately owned vehicles. It took half a century of public relations, lobbying, and urban replanning to get people to drive automobiles. Plus, we now understand that if cars did make the streets cleaner in some respects, it was only by externalizing the costs of environmental damage and the bloody struggle to secure oil reserves.

Too many scientists—often funded by growth-obsessed corporations—exalt an entirely quantified understanding of social progress. They measure improvement as a function of life expectancy or reduction in the number of violent deaths. Those are great improvements on their own, but they give false cover for the crimes of modern capitalism—as if the relative peace and longevity enjoyed by some inhabitants of the West were proof of the superiority of its model and the unquestionable benefit of pursuing growth.

These arguments never acknowledge the outsourced slavery, toxic dumping, or geopolitical strife on which this same model depends. So while one can pluck a reassuring statistic to support the notion that the world has grown less violent— such as the decreasing probability of an American soldier dying on the battle field—we also live with continual military conflict, terrorism, cyber-attacks, covert war, drone strikes, state- sanctioned rape, and millions of refugees. Isn’t starving a people and destroying their topsoil, or imprisoning a nation’s young black men, a form of violence?

Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us from manure- filled cities. We may be less likely to be assaulted randomly in the street than we were in medieval times, but that doesn’t mean humanity is less violent, or that the blind pursuit of continued economic growth and technological progress is consonant with the increase of human welfare—no matter how well such proclamations do on the business best- seller lists or speaking circuit. (Businesspeople don’t want to pay to be told that they’re making things worse.)

So with the blessings of much of the science industry and its collaborating futurists, corporations press on, accelerating civilization under the false premise that because things are looking better for the wealthiest beneficiaries, they must be better for everyone. Progress is good, they say. Any potential impediment to the frictionless ascent of technological and economic scale— such as the cost of labor, the limits of a particular market, the constraints of the planet, ethical misgivings, or human frailty— must be eliminated.

The models would all work if only there weren’t people in the way. That’s why capitalism’s true believers are seeking some- one or, better, something to do their bidding with greater intelligence and less empathy than humans.

Restoring the Commons

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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What is Leftism?

For most it means some form of socialism, despite the fact that there are plenty of leftists who are not opposed to capitalism (clearly from the actual history of socialism, not all socialists are opposed to capitalism either). Plenty of other arguments can be made about that, but let’s just keep things simple and assume that the two terms are synonymous. As is the case with most vague terms, however, it’s easier to come up with a list of characteristics than a definition. Leftism encompasses many divergent ideas, strategies, and tactics; are there any common threads that unite all leftists, despite some obvious differences? In order to begin an attempt at an answer, it is necessary to examine the philosophical antecedents to what can broadly be termed Socialism.

Liberalism, Humanism, and Republicanism are political and philosophical schools of thought deriving from the modern European tradition (roughly beginning during the Renaissance). Without going into details, adherents of the three (especially Liberalism) presume the existence of an ideal property-owning male individual who is a fully rational (or at least a potentially rational) agent. This idealized individual stands opposed to the arbitrary authority of the economic and political systems of monarchism and feudalism, as well as the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church. All three (LH&R) presume the capacity of anyone (male), through education and hard work, to succeed in a free market (of commodities and ideas). Competition is the overall ethos of all three.

The promoters of LH&R insist that these modernist philosophies-compared to monarchism, elitism, and feudalism-are advances on the road to human freedom. They believe it more beneficial for what they call The Greater Good to adhere to and promote a philosophy that at least proposes the ability of anyone to gain some kind of control over her/his own life, whether in the realm of education, economic prosperity, or political interactions. The ultimate goals of LH&R are to do away with economic scarcity and intellectual/spiritual poverty, while promoting the idea of more democratic governance. They promote this under the rubric of Justice, and they see the State as its ultimate guarantor.

Socialism as a modern movement has been greatly influenced by these three philosophies. Like those who adhere to LH&R, leftists are concerned with, and are opposed to, economic and social injustice. They all propose ameliorating social ills through active intervention or charity, whether under the auspices of the State, NGOs, or other formal organizations. Very few of the proposed solutions or stopgaps promote (or even acknowledge) self-organized solutions engaged in by those directly suffering such ills. Welfare, affirmative action programs, psychiatric hospitals, drug rehabilitation facilities, etc. are all examples of various attempts to deal with social problems. Given the premises of these overlapping philosophies and their practical frameworks, they have the appearance of being the results of intelligence and knowledge mixed with empathy and the desire to help people. Cooperation for The Common Good is seen as more beneficial to humanity than individual competition. However, socialism also takes the existence of competition for granted. Liberals and socialists alike believe that human beings do not naturally get along, so we must be educated and encouraged to be cooperative. When all else fails, this can always be enforced by the State.

Moderate, Radical, and Extreme Leftism Tactics and strategies

Regardless of the fact that there is plenty of overlap and blending-precluding real, discrete boundaries-I hope that describing these various manifestations of leftism will be a way to identify certain particular characteristics.

In terms of strategy and tactics, moderate leftists believe that things can be made better by working within current structures and institutions. Clearly reformist, moderate leftists promote legal, peaceful, and polite superficial alterations in the status quo, eventually hoping to legislate socialism into existence. The democracy they champion is bourgeois: one person, one vote, majority rule.

Radical leftists promotes a mixture of legal and illegal tactics, depending on whatever appears to have a better chance of succeeding at the moment, but they ultimately want the sanction of some properly constituted legal institutions (especially when they get to make most of the rules to be enforced). They are pragmatic, hoping for peaceful change, but ready to fight if they believe it to be necessary. The democracy they promote is more proletarian: they aren’t worried about the process of any particular election, so long as gains are made at the expense of the bosses and mainstream politicians.

Extreme leftists are amoral pragmatists, a strategic orientation that can also be termed opportunistic. They are decidedly impolite, explicitly desiring the destruction of current institutions (often including the State), with the desire to remake them so that only they themselves will be able to make and enforce new laws. They are much more willing to use force in the service of their goals. The democracy they promote is usually based on a Party.

Relationship to capitalists

All leftists privilege the category of worker as worker/producer, an entity that exists only within the sphere of the economy. Moderate leftists campaign for workers’ rights (to strike, to have job security and safety, to have decent and fair contracts), trying to mitigate the more obvious abuses of the bosses through the passage and enforcement of progressive legislation. They want capitalism to be organized with “People Before Profits” (as the overused slogan has it), ignoring the internal logic and history of capitalism. Moderate leftists promote socially responsible investing and want a more just distribution of wealth; social wealth in the form of the much-touted “safety net,” and personal wealth in the form of higher wages and increased taxes on corporations and the rich. They want to balance the rights of property and labor.

Radical leftists favor workers at the expense of the bosses. Workers are always right to the radical leftist. They wish to change the legal structure in such a way to reflect this favoritism, which is supposed to compensate for the previous history of exploitation. The redistribution of wealth envisioned by radical leftists builds on the higher wages and increased taxation of the corporations and the rich to include selective expropriation/nationalization (with or without compensation) of various resources (banks, natural resources for example).

Extreme leftists promote the total expropriation — without compensation — of the capitalist class, not only to right the wrongs of economic exploitation, but to remove the capitalist class from political power as well. At some point, the workers are to be at least nominally in charge of economic and political decision making (although that is usually meditated through a Party leadership).

The role of the State

Leftists view the State on a continuum of ambivalence. Most are clear that the role of the State is to further the goals of whatever class happens to rule at any given period; further they all recognize that the ruling class always reserves for itself a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and violence to enforce their rule. In the political imaginations of all moderate and some radical leftists, the State (even with a completely capitalist ruling class) can be used to remedy many social problems, from the excesses of transnational corporations to the abuses of those who have been traditionally disenfranchised (immigrants, women, minorities, the homeless, etc.). For extreme leftists, only their own State can solve such problems, because it is in the interest of the current ruling class to maintain divisions among those who are not of the ruling class. Despite the ambivalence, an attachment to the functions of government as executed by the State remains. This is the pivotal area of conflict between all leftists and all anarchists, despite the historical positioning of anarchism within the spectrum of leftism — about which more below.

The role of the individual

Missing from all these different strains of leftism is a discussion of the individual. While LH&R refer briefly to the individual, these philosophies do not take into account non-property-owning males, females, or juveniles — who are indeed considered the property of the normative individual: the adult property-owning man. This led to the complete lack on interest in (and the accompanying exploitation of) peasants and workers, a disregard that is supposed to be corrected by socialism. Unfortunately, virtually all socialists only posit the category Worker and Peasant as collective classes — a mass to be molded and directed — never considering the desires or interests of the individual (male or female) worker or peasant to control their own lives. According to the ideological imperatives of leftist thought, the self-activity of these masses is seen suspiciously through the ideological blinkers of the competitive ethos of capitalism (since the masses aren’t yet intelligent enough to be socialists); the workers will perhaps be able to organize themselves into defensive trade unions in order to safeguard their wages, while the peasants will only want to own and work their own piece of land. Again, education and enforcement of cooperation is necessary for these masses to become conscious political radicals.

A Generic Leftism?

So all leftists share the goals of making up for injustice by decree, whether the decree comes out of better/more responsive representatives and leaders, a more democratic political process, or the elimination of a non-worker power base. They all desire to organize, mobilize, and direct masses of people, with the eventual goal of attaining a more or less coherent majority, in order to propel progressive and democratic change of social institutions. Recruitment, education, and inculcating leftist values are some of the more mundane strategies leftists use to increase their influence in the wider political landscape.

All leftists have a common distrust of regular (non-political/non-politicized) people being able to decide for themselves how to solve the problems that face them. All leftists share an abiding faith in leadership. Not just a trust of particular leaders who portray themselves as having certain moral or ethical virtues over and above common people, but of the very principle of leadership. This confidence in leadership never brings representational politics into question. The existence of elected or appointed leaders who speak and act on behalf, or in the place, of individuals and groups is a given; mediation in the realm of politics is taken as a necessity, removing most decision making from individuals and groups. Leftists share this commitment to leadership and representation — they believe themselves able to justly represent those who have traditionally been excluded from politics: the disenfranchised, the voiceless, the weak.

The leftist activist, as a representative of those who suffer, is a person who believes her/himself to be indispensable to improving the lives of others. This derives from a dual-pronged notion common to all leftists:

Non-political people, left to their own devices, will never be able to alter their situations in a radical or revolutionary manner (Lenin’s dismissal of workers as never being able to move beyond a “trade union mentality” without some professional outside help comes to mind here); and

Those with more intelligence or a better analysis are both wise and ethical enough to lead (whether through example or by decree) and organize others for their own good, and perhaps more importantly, the greater good.

The unspoken but implicit theme that runs through this brief assessment of leftism is a reliance on authoritarian relations, whether assumed or enforced, brutally compelling or gently rational. The existence of an economy (exchange of commodities in a market) presumes the existence of one or more institutions to mediate disputes between those who produce, those who own, and those who consume; the existence of a representational political process presumes the existence of one or more institutions to mediate disputes between diverse parties based on common interest (often with conflicting goals); the existence of leadership presumes that there are substantive differences in the emotional and intellectual capacities of those who direct and those who follow. There are plenty of rationalizations contributing to the maintenance of such institutions of social control (schools, prisons, the military, the workplace), from efficiency to expediency, but they all ultimately rely on the legitimate (sanctioned by the State) use of coercive authority to enforce decisions. Leftists share a faith in the mediating influence of wise and ethical leaders who can work within politically neutral, socially progressive, and humane institutional frameworks. Their thoroughly hierarchical and authoritarian natures, however, should be clear even after a cursory glance.

Are All Forms of Anarchism Leftism

All anarchists share a desire to abolish government; that is the definition of anarchism. Starting with Bakunin, anarchism has been explicitly anti-statist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian; no serious anarchist seeks to alter that. Leftists have consistently supported and promoted the functions of the State, have an ambiguous relationship to capitalist development, and are all interested in maintaining hierarchical relationships. In addition, historically they have either tacitly ignored or actively suppressed the desires of individuals and groups for autonomy and self-organization, further eroding any credible solidarity between themselves and anarchists. On a purely definitional level, then, there should be an automatic distinction between leftists and anarchists, regardless of how things have appeared in history.

Despite these differences, many anarchists have thought of themselves as extreme leftists — and continue to do so — because they share many of the same analyses and interests (a distaste for capitalism, the necessity of revolution, for example) as leftists; many revolutionary leftists have also considered anarchists to be their (naïve) comrades — except in moments when the leftists gain some power; then the anarchists are either co-opted, jailed, or executed. The possibility for an extreme leftist to be anti-statist may be high, but is certainly not guaranteed, as any analysis history will show.

Left anarchists retain some kind of allegiance to 19th century LH&R and socialist philosophers, preferring the broad, generalized (and therefore extremely vague) category of socialism/anti-capitalism and the strategy of mass political struggles based on coalitions with other leftists, all the while showing little (if any) interest in promoting individual and group autonomy. From these premises, they can quite easily fall prey to the centralizing tendencies and leadership functions that dominate the tactics of leftists. They are quick to quote Bakunin (maybe Kropotkin too) and advocate organizational forms that might have been appropriate in the era of the First International, apparently oblivious to the sweeping changes that have occurred in the world in the past hundred-plus years — and they then have the gall to ridicule Marxists for remaining wedded to Marx’s outdated theories, as if by not naming their own tendencies after other dead guys they are thereby immune from similar mistakes.

The drawbacks and problems with Marxism, however — for example that it promotes the idea of a linear progression of history of order developing out of chaos, freedom developing out of oppression, material abundance developing out of scarcity, socialism developing out of capitalism, plus an absolute faith in Science as the ideologically neutral pursuit of pure Knowledge, and a similar faith in the liberatory function of all technology — are the same drawbacks and problems with the anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin. All of this seems lost on left anarchists. They blithely continue to promote a century-old version of anarchism, clearly unaware of, or unconcerned by, the fact that the philosophical and practical failures of leftism — in terms of the individual, the natural world, and appropriate modes of resistance to the continued domination of a flexible, adaptable, and expanding capitalism — are shared by this archaic form of anarchism as well.

Those of us who are interested in promoting radical social change in general, and anarchy in particular, need to emulate and improve upon successful (however temporary) revolutionary projects for liberation, rather than congratulating ourselves for being the heirs of Bakunin (et al.). We can do this best if we free ourselves from the historical baggage and the ideological and strategic constraints of all varieties of leftism.

#leftism #anarchism #marxism #socialism #communism

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drcontrarian · 5 years ago

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The New Normal - From a Real World Perspective

I think it is pretty ironic that our attitudes towards toilet paper reveal what shitty humans we are.

And it is ably demonstrated by ‘everyman-and-his-dog’ offering advice on the Post-Covid world and inane ‘tips to transform yourself in a crisis’ that masquerade as marketing advice; as if these pundits have experience in the effects of the pandemic.

On the plus side, true blue capitalists are hard to keep down and it is good fun to watch.

But that does not mean we can’t grapple with some of the issues we are all facing. I thought a useful approach would be to attempt to identify some of the underlying fundamentals that may indicate the direction/ momentum of change.

And then, just because I hate the generic ‘consultant-speak’ like ‘become more responsive’ and ‘identify strategic opportunities’ as the ‘changes’ we should embrace, I will instead offer specific, detailed tactical changes that may or may not play out, but are worth thinking about.‘

Before we get to the short-term (Part B)changes that will manifest post-pandemic 2020, consider the broader socio-economic context (Part A) that it will play out in.

PART A: Macro Changes

There are a few drivers that are shaping the landscape of our future.

ONE: Major changes information technology has brought about

The Guardian published a piece in 2017 that presaged the end of capitalism.

“First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.”

TWO: It’s what people want

It is what people want, probably in response to the helplessness that is induced by ONE above.

Recently, the ABC (Australia) published a piece that observed that senior officials from the governing (conservative) party as well as members of the community took exception to the way people were hoarding and ‘profiteering’ by arbitraging the shortages wrt to everyday items like toilet paper.

Seeking out gaps in the market and exploiting price anomalies are the everyday activities of anyone involved in any kind of trade, from shopkeepers and grocery wholesalers to money market high-flyers who trade synthetic derivatives of complex financial instruments.

As a free-market economy, successive governments of all persuasions for the past half-century have embraced the idea that government should not run commercial enterprise. They've preached privatisation, asset recycling and the fundamental belief that free trade and minimal government intervention will maximise wealth and lift society as a whole.

Traditionally conservative governments are responding in ways that left-leaning/ socialist regimes could until recently only dream of. Tom Quiggan said this in an article on ThinkSpot:

“The current government led response to the pandemic and the financial crisis appears to be panic driven. Momentum is growing behind the idea that governments should be able to bail out every individual and every industry that is facing financial stress. While this is normatively appealing, it is unsustainable for anything beyond a few weeks and unlikely to be productive. Throwing money at failing systems is how we got to the financial crisis we are in now. It also means that debt and taxes are virtually guaranteed to increase in the next years or services will have to be cut dramatically.

The children of today are the tax payers of tomorrow and they will suffer immensely if the system is not fixed.

These massive bailouts will have the effect of rewarding those who made poor decisions and wound up in debt. They will punish the prudent who were saving money during the perceived good times. This will fuel yet another divide in society as the prudent and hard working become distressed or angry at being fleeced (again) to support the imprudent and wasteful.

Quiggan is essentially heralding the undesirable consequences if the traditional conservative/ libertarian approach to the economy is not upheld. But it is not, and even the most casual observer will recognise this in the communities we live in.

One cannot possibly believe that traditional, industrial capitalism will not be transformed into something completely different. We are creating a new normal and we don’t quite know what it is.

Whether it is labelled as a ‘neo-socialism’ or a ‘neo-capitalism’ does not matter, but it is one where trade is less free and the government (or some central bureaucracy) holds power over supply. Because the government has played the role of payer and lender of last resort, why not payer and lender of every resort. Debt jubilees/ Universal Basic Income and the like are the nature of things to come.

It is either that, or war.

Cryptocurrency is the dark horse. It could undermine the power of a central authority and give people unfettered freedom to move money around at will, without knowledge or intervention of any government. It will likely be regulated before it fulfills its potential.

It should be exciting, but I find it scary. And the reason for that is philosophical. I don’t have faith in man’s ability to create something good out of this.

THREE: It is the nature of Man

(You can safely skip the next paragraph because it is a philosophical justification for my overall pessimism.)

From a religious philosophical perspective people are cast as ‘sinners’. Sinners are (by definition) those who ‘miss the mark’. If you want to get an idea of what the global culture is like (what it values) then simply look at the aggregate of what ‘trends’ on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Half the world’s population are on those platforms, so that is as representative a sample size as you can get.

What Nietsche meant when he declared God dead, is summarised by Mark Sayers:

“What we are experiencing is not the eradication of God from the Western mind but the enthroning of self as the greatest authority.”

Now what could go wrong when those who ‘miss the mark’ become the ‘authority’?

The first two observations about the changes happening are probably uncontroversial. My pessimism about the quality of that future outcome is arguable if you have faith that humans on the whole always improve things ; i.e we are progressive in a way that leads to a (greater) good or at least better.

I am pessimistic about Man’s ability to create a positive/ beneficial world when it becomes untethered from the Judeo-Christian fundamentals. Even if the idea of religion and God sits uncomfortable with you, any objective observer of history cannot realistically deny that ‘western civilization (and all of our laws) are founded upon these Christian foundations.

Whether we would be better or worse off when we divorce our societies from these belief systems is a matter of opinion (and I don’t need to debate that here) - but I offer it as my rationale for being sceptical about a humanistic framework as the basis for lasting stable societies.

PART B: Micro Changes

John Batistich writes in Smart Company predicting the following changes in the retail environment:

Consolidation (specifically in Supermarkets)

Higher concentration

Fewer stores

Online step-change

One department store

Two discount department stores

More local

Rent reversions

Percentage rent

Make expenses variable

Cash economy declines

Cashflow management

New concepts

Most of these observations are simple, legitimate extrapolations of current trends, so I will limit my commentary to a few observations:

Rent reversions will be at unprecedented levels for many categories in many areas - I predict that it will be up to 50%. (This will place pressure on Superannuation funds’ returns, adding to economic woes, and pressure on Boomers to remain in the workforce.)

Making rents/expenses variable is something that I long advocated (see Beat of the Mall). This pandemic has proven that risks can’t be isolated to between categories/ sectors and that variable rent is a sensible way of synchronising the timing of economic fluctuations (good and bad) between members of a supply chain.

The downside is that one person’s variable expenses is another person’s variable income. Variable incomes are typically associated with higher risks and higher risks are features of an unstable ecosystem.

In an article in QSR Magazine Micha Magid the co-founder of Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque (US fast-casual concept) , is brave enough to nominate fairly specific outcomes. I smummarised those in a previous post.

They are worth reading because they are very specific, practical outcomes that are articulated. For example:

Approximately 25 percent of all restaurants remain indefinitely closed with 90 percent of the closures hitting independently owned locations.

Delivery focused restaurant brands do very well into the end of the year.

Great ethnic restaurants become increasingly harder to find

The salad chains underperform the rebound as raw food still caries caution in the national psyche.

I would like to add a few more specific prognostications to this list as it applies to the hospitality sector:

The return to ‘business as usual’ will be a gradual process, initially driven simply by people getting frustrated with isolation, and then once restrictions are lifted, the high unemployment rate will depress spend. (A recession or worse is actually likely).

Retailers will start practicing surge pricing

Consumers will hate queuing, so ordering ahead, table ordering and click and collect will continue to grow

A greater focus on food safety & hygiene (keep cups may lose momentum)

Unreasonable demands for small (uneconomical) deliveries - accepted during the pandemic - will prove the undoing of many restaurants

Price of meals will escalate to accommodate rising input prices (drought, fires etc) and unsustainable delivery costs as competition is reduced and the remaining operators have more flexibility.

In response to the above, consumer demands and expectations around customisation and health will put pressure on production times and costs.

The life cycle of new concepts will shorten, making innovation nonviable for landlords whose capital contributions allowed many concepts to be born

#Covid-19

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legit-scam-review · 6 years ago

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HashFlare’s Exit and the Future of Cloud Mining

Cloud mining — a service that enables individual users to lease hashing power from dedicated cryptocurrency mining operations — came forth as professionalization and cartelization of the mining business began to drive out smaller and insufficiently equipped players from the scene.

Since there is no way to verify that the share of the mining rig you are supposedly leasing actually exists — even if returns on your investment seem to be flowing regularly at first — the scheme is widely regarded as a happy hunting ground for scammers. Perhaps the only way to steer clear of fraud is to rely on the reputation of the established cloud mining brands. But with the outbreak of the recent scandal around the cloud mining platform HashFlare, this option might also soon be off the table.

HashFlare, one of the leading names in the business, announced on July 20 that it has dropped its mining service of active SHA-256 Bitcoin contracts, pursuant to a clause of the platform’s terms of service reading the following: “The Mining process will stop if the Maintenance and Electricity Fees will become larger than the Payout. If mining remains unprofitable for 21 consecutive days the Service is permanently terminated.”

Citing the ongoing “difficult time for the cryptocurrency market,” the firm claimed that by July 18, the payouts were lower than the maintenance fees for 28 days in a row, which activated the clause allowing for the the conclusion of the contracts. The statement implied that HashFlare would be open to resume Bitcoin mining, should more favorable market conditions arise. Apparently, the cease only concerned Bitcoin contracts, as operations with other crypto assets available in the firm’s portfolio — such as Litecoin and Ethereum — proceeded as usual.

While this July has not been the brightest month ever for the crypto market, especially in comparison to December 2017, many users have rightfully questioned HashFlare’s reasoning. After briefly touching the floor at just above $6000 in the first days of the month, Bitcoin prices entered a steady upward trend, coming close to $8000 by the day that the contract termination was announced.

Additionally, the first week of the month saw the Bitcoin network’s hashrate drop massively as a result of heavy floods in the Sichuan province of China, home to a dense conglomeration of mining rigs. This should have led to a corresponding decrease in difficulty for the rest of the nodes. Even before the disaster, around the time when the mining platform’s dry season allegedly started in mid-June, the network’s hashrate plummeted to around 30 TH/s. As the HashFlare’s account of things seemed to stand in contrast with a widely accepted version of reality, the allegations of fraud began to pour out.

Stranger things

The cost structure for participating in the HashFlare enterprise consists of two types of payments: a one-off investment in the processing power itself, and recurring maintenance fees — normally covered from mining profits. One of the several poignant circumstances accompanying the announcement is that the cloud mining operator decided to terminate the contracts without reimbursing users for the remainder of the annual contract fees, which they had paid upfront.

The current mishap appears to be at least the second time on record when HashFlare unilaterally altered its contractual commitments. 11 months ago, the platform switched all SHA-256 and Scrypt contracts from lifetime to one-year, on the grounds of global mining hardware scarcity. Obviously, many cloud miners did not appreciate this development and there was even a petition on Change.org with some 2,500 signatures.

Coincidentally, those who held lifetime contracts before September 2017 can derive some satisfaction from the fact that, in the wake of the recent debacle, their losses were modest. Since the yearly contracts that relaunched 11 months ago were set to expire late August, these customers are only losing a month’s worth of shares of their yearly investment in hashing power. Compared to them, people who jumped in during the year are suffering a greater degree of damage, with the most recent investors finding themselves in the worst-case scenario.

Granted, infuriated cloud miners took to Twitter and Reddit right away. A sizeable group of people who suspected HashFlare of being a scam finally had the chance to savor their ‘I told you so’ moment. The Twitter user who goes by the moniker ‘Madoff wasn’t on the blockchain’ and specializes in exposing crypto fraud, gloated over what he considered evidence that HashFlare never really had actual mining facilities — despite boasting a brand new data center just a few months earlier. He also brought up a February interview with the firm’s customer relations manager Edgar Bers, pointing to numerous ‘red flags’ — inconsistencies that allegedly indicated the operation’s fraudulent nature.

While some users reported they were able to initiate the chargeback process for HashFlare payments with their credit card issuers, the less lucky ones said they were considering a class action lawsuit. The operator is based in Estonia, so strict European consumer protection laws could be potentially applicable to the case. However, some observers surveyed by Blockonomi noted that, by the time the claim makes it to court, the defendant could cease to exist or fight back by exposing the users’ personal data.

Another odd detail that plays right into the ‘scam’ argument is the new withdrawal regulations that HashFlare put in place just days before dropping the Bitcoin contracts. All of a sudden, the mining operator urged users to comply with a set of KYC procedures, severely restricting the ability of those who failed to comply to move their funds out of the platform. Assuming malicious intent, this move could serve at least two purposes: hindering the flight of capital upon the release of the news and getting some leverage over the disgruntled users who will make it to the courtroom.

Cloud mining’s dim future

Albeit there are many considerations that could point to malice, none of them look indisputable. In terminating the contracts, HashFlare followed the clause of their own terms of service, which every user had to sign upon registration. These terms were found to be unaltered since at least last year. The clause in question does not specify a particular entity that is supposed to certify that maintenance and electricity fees indeed exceeded the mining payouts. And. even if the evidence that those data centers actually exist is scarce, robust evidence that they do not exist is even scarcer. Hopefully, a trusted third party will soon enter the scene to shed some light on the true state of affairs.

Meanwhile, HashFlare’s competitors are doing just fine. Users on another major cloud mining platform — Genesis Mining — reported getting payouts on their contracts as usual. So did the customers of Minergate. HashFlare’s fluke might well provide a short-term PR boost to other major players in the field, as well as an influx of new users who will want to switch to a presumably more reliable operator. But, in the long run, the fallout from the demise of one of the most prominent cloud mining operations could prove a massive blow to the whole industry.

Cloud mining already has a reputation of a risky endeavor: While contracts are usually long-term and initial payments fixed, fluctuations of crypto prices render such investments a roulette. Especially with Bitcoin, massive crowds of new miners constantly enter the market, driving the hashrate up. A recent report by CoinJournal highlights the tremendous rate of its growth over the last several months. This is good news for the crypto industry at large, meaning that — despite the relatively unimpressive price dynamics of 2018 — more and more resources are pouring into the network. Yet, for mining enterprises, this primarily signals more competition, spelling death for those who come up short in the arms race.

Against such a backdrop, the lack of trust in service providers might become a deal-breaker. Why engage in an increasingly precarious activity that promises fewer payoffs, especially when you cannot be entirely sure that the platform facilitating your engagement is trustworthy? If HashFlare’s case entrenches in mass consciousness as a poster for cloud mining services, the model is unlikely to survive the ongoing hashrate rush.