#Workers councils

[oceanicmarxist]

the luigi mangione thing has melted people's brains. this kind of nihilistic, individual terror isn't productive and it's what disillusioned liberals do when they feel as if they're the Main Character and that real politics (organising a mass movement) is beneath them.

mangione's assassination has no 'increased class consciousness' (as people are saying), it isn't class consciousness to think shooting ceos is okay/funny. this stuff undermines class consciousness by misleading people into thinking that the system can be destroyed by shooting all the 'bad guys'.

You should be trying to organise healthcare workers and agitating against the private healthcare system, not posting about how Luigi Mangione is a hunk or whatever dumb shit leftoids are doing these days.

Marxism long ago disclosed the underlying kinship between liberalism and anarcho-terrorism. Both liberalism and terrorism repudiate reliance upon the independent and revolutionary organisation and activity of the working masses which is the essence of Marxist politics. Liberalism looks to “progressive, peace-loving” politicians among the capitalist ruling circles to lead the way to the solution of the problems of society. Erstwhile liberals turned terrorist, though thoroughly disillusioned with the old methods, are nevertheless still contemptuous of the masses and rely upon conspiracy and dynamite to do the job. Terrorism is petty-bourgeois liberalism temporarily gone berserk. Both are equally injurious to the promotion of a genuinely proletarian revolutionary movement.

^ Ernest Mandel, 'Marxism or Neo-Anarchist Terrorism?'

[troonpolitikon]

Solidarity -- As We See It

[russia-libertaire]

The Soviets

'The workers, naturally enough, were the first to react to Bloody Sunday. Abandoning any hope of support from church or tsar, they turned for advice and organizational support to the opposition, especially to the socialists. The Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries were slow to respond: their leaders were still in emigration, cut off from their potential constituents and preoccupied by heated polemics with one another. Local activists did what they could to improvise meetings, protests, and strikes, and gradually their contact with the workers improved and assumed more organized forms. The result was a new type of workers' association, the Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies. First set up in the textile town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk to coordinate a general strike, the soviets were usually elected by the workers of the major enterprises in any given town, at the rate of one deputy for every 500 or so workers. They would meet in a large building, or even in the open air, where not only deputies but also their electors could attend and contribute to discussions. This was a close approach to direct democracy, since, at least in principle, any deputy could be recalled at any time if he failed to satisfy his constituents and be replaced by someone else. The members of each soviet elected an executive committee to deal with day-to-day business and to negotiate with employers, municipality, and police: often they would choose professional people, seeing them as more skillful spokesmen than they themselves could be. Through the executive committees the socialist activists gained influence over the soviets and sometimes directly organized them. The soviets were the best forum for radical intellectuals and workers to cooperate with each other at a time of political crisis. For the workers, they took a familiar form: their general meetings resembled overgrown and disorderly village assemblies, in which everyone tried to speak and mass enthusiasm welled up. On the other hand, the executive committees supplied the element of conscious policy and organization. The soviets' greatest moment came in St. Petersburg in October 1905, when they organized a general strike which disrupted normal production and communications not only in the capital city but over much of the empire. This was the decisive blow which compelled the tsar to grant the October Manifesto, promising civil liberties and an elected legislative assembly.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

[oceanicmarxist]

1929 cover of Bezbozhnik u Stanka, the magazine of the League of Militant Atheists in the U.S.S.R. Cover depicts industrial workers tipping Jesus into a garbage disposal while another smashes a church bell with a big hammer.

[oceanicmarxist]

"i'm a communist"

what you hope they mean:

facile rubbish

sects that lost

irrelevant politics from 100 years ago

things that aren't even communism

???

[mothsakura]

oh?? new ancient ocs???

[themistas]

incredibly specific i guess. but work setting sastiel is obviously castiel as that one coworker who does his job meticulously, seriously, properly, and continously gets screwed over by upper management (he never gets peace when he is done), who always takes it silently, nods and accepts it. and sam as the guy nearby who's part of the union watching it all unfold, giving a replay to the entire union office whenever a new screw-over happens -- sighing when castiel once again refuses to speak up when he suggests he does

[therighthandofvengeance]

Yes, Delenn started a war. Yeah, that's objectively bad. But do we really think that EarthGov would have given anyone the courtesy of asking about why they killed a significant (political) figure before committing massive violations of the Geneva Convention?

Obviously we shouldn't condone this behavior- but let's at least give it some perspective:

It's literally her first day on the job. she just finished her internship the night before

she's been trained for this role and this role alone, her life experience is limited at best and nonexistent at worst

her mentor just died -> that's essentially going from training wheels on flat and even ground, with a helmet to a unicycle on a mountain during fire season... uphill

nobody really cared about what she said until 20 minutes ago when she became One of Them

there were four other members of the Grey Council that were pro-war, she didn't decide to go to war by herself

[oceanicmarxist]

"calling off revolution"?

maybe we came from different universes, but i don't recall there being a point in early 1917 where the revolution that hadn't even happened yet was "called off".

by the women's march on international women's day on march 8th (feb 23rd O.S), there had already been at least five days of protests and strikes (first from the workers at the putilov factory).

will agree that people understate the role of the women's march, but to say that everybody had given up until those women marched is just inaccurate, the women joined up with other protestors to form a larger bloc which would eventually force the tsar to abdicate.

in case you forgot, Stalin purged, browbeat, murdered, and exiled most of those "bolshiveks" when

you can make a statement on IWWD without turning it into a sterile, sectarian screed.

Happy birthday to the bolshiveks, menshiveks, SR's, social democrats and liberals being fucking cowards and calling off revolution, only to be shamed into action by the women of St. Petersburg who came out in force in the streets on March 8th, International Women's day.

They went from factory to factory, throwing rocks and heckling the passivity of the union men that had rolled over in the face of the Tsar, and the next day they too came out into the streets in a show of solidarity with their sisters and siblings.

International Women's day marks the start of the 1917 revolution. Within days, the liberal Duke Lavrov called off the soldiers, and a short time later the Tsar himself abdicated the Russian throne.

the bolshiveks (especially under Stalin) would slowly begin to push the importance of this day under the rug, as they betrayed the decades of work that Russian feminists had been doing both within and outside of their ranks. Upon it's founding (under great pressure from radical feminists), the USSR was the first country in Europe to legalize abortion, only to revoke that right within a matter of years under the command of Stalin.

People have a tendency to forget the Febuary revolution, saying that it matters little since the bolshiveks end up winning in the end - but it behooves us, regardless of our political tendencies to remember the bravery of the women of St. Petersburg, slowly left out of our historical accounts in favor of those that ironically never could have won without them.

So, to working women everywhere: remember the power in your hands. You have the power to topple empires.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

If it happened once, it can happen again.

Happy International Women's day.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Liz Lamere on Alan Vega and Her Solo Career: Whatever Happens, Happens

Liz Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Liz Lamere's got a story to tell, and one that won't end any time soon. The former Wall Street lawyer and boxer and current singer-songwriter is also the widow and former creative partner of the late, great Alan Vega, the visual artist and vocalist of landmark proto-punk duo Suicide. Since Vega's death in 2016, Lamere has, in conjunction with Jared Artaud of post-punk act The Vacant Lots, worked to bring to light a wealth of unreleased material from Vega's vault.

After the release of 2017's It, the final album Vega recorded before he died, Lamere and Artaud discovered the material that would constitute the 2021 release Mutator. In 2022, they unearthed the songs that would be released this past May as Insurrection (In The Red). It hasn't been until now, however, where there's been a simultaneous awakening of all things Vega. In addition to Insurrection, Artaud co-curated "Cesspool Saints", an exhibition of Vega's fine art works, which opened two months ago at Laurent Godin's Gallery in Paris. Lamere, meanwhile, co-wrote Vega's biography with Laura Davis-Chanin, entitled Infamous Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat Books). (The foreword? By none other than Bruce Springsteen.) With a rich collection of songs waiting for ears--material that Lamere and Vega recorded and Vega meticulously documented between actually released Vega solo albums throughout the 90s and 2000s--it's become clear that Vega's backlog rivals of those like Prince and Arthur Russell, full of albums that are contextualized by what was recorded before and after them but that stand alone as cohesive statements.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

At the same time as everything Vega-related, Lamere has finally found not just the time but the will to release her own solo records, an artistic career that Vega always encouraged but never was able to witness. Her songs are certainly different than Vega's in terms of subject matter and aesthetic, but Lamere credits Vega's approach to music-making--be spontaneous and fearless and realize that nothing is a mistake--for informing her artistic process. She started working on her debut, Keep It Alive, during COVID lockdown, and finished the album in mere weeks. Her follow-up, One Never Knows (In The Red), released last month, took a little bit longer to make, understandably when Lamere was working on Vega's biography and Insurrection all at the same time. Thankfully, Lamere was able to separate the entities, another thing she took from Vega. "It wasn't too difficult to compartmentalize because I wore so many different hats and did so many different things, like Alan," Lamere said over the phone last month. "Alan could be hyper-focused on visual art, and then hyper-focused on music and sound. They might be different sides of the same coin, but whatever he was focused on, he was so in the moment and heavily focused on that creation."

To really understand Vega's perspective on art and life, you have to go far back into the oft-ignored details that inspired Lamere to start writing his biography. Vega was, infamously, 10 years older than everyone thought; various articles incorrectly referred to 1948 as his birth year rather than 1938, confirmed when the 70th birthday release of his recordings was announced in 2008. The parents of the man born Alan Bermowitz were Jewish immigrants. His first wife, Mariette Bermowitz (née Birencwajg), is a Holocaust survivor from Belgium; they met attending Brooklyn College. Lamere credits such a close familial proximity to persecution as a reason for the trauma Vega felt, and also why he chose to not use his birth name as his stage name. But such closeness was also why Vega chose to sing about difficult topics in his music. "Alan was always hypersensitive to any type of oppression or challenging situations," Lamere said. "He had tremendous empathy. He wasn't doom and gloom but more readily shining a light." Out of college, Vega worked for the Welfare Department, eventually quitting because he felt the menial work he was tasked with doing didn't allow him to make a true difference in the lives of the poor. But the experience helped him understand how to secure funding when working with the Art Workers' Coalition, and from the New York State Council on the Arts to help found 24-hour artist-run multimedia gallery MUSEUM: A Project of Living Artists.

Alan Vega; photo by Walter Robinson

Vega possessed the ability to apply what he learned from one effort to another, and his mind was well-rounded. He actually enrolled in Brooklyn College not for art, but for astrophysics, having received a scholarship as a result of his building his own telescope(!) But one day, the head of the Art Department witnessed Vega sketching portrait drawings in the cafeteria and immediately recognized Vega's artistic brilliance and convinced him to study art. (Vega's portrait drawings appear in the video for Lamere's "King City Ghost".) Vega ended up studying with legendary artists like Kurt Seligmann and Ad Reinhardt. When substitute teaching a class for Reinhardt during his senior year, Vega assigned students a self-portrait to be turned in the next class, but instead of collecting them, he told the students to rip them up. "When he was telling me the story," said Lamere, "He said, 'You should have seen the look on these kids' faces!'" But Vega viewed art as, in the words of Lamere, "coming from a pure place of expression," not of preciousness, and one worthy of consuming your life. Vega met Martin Rev and formed Suicide in 1970, garnering notice for their wild live shows throughout the New York punk scene. After they released their self-titled debut in 1977, they toured with The Clash, an infamous time during which the crowd, unable to understand the Suicide's artistic vision, would throw switchblades at the band. "Alan was willing to be...out there front and center and put his life on the line, literally," Lamere said. "He believed so strongly that what [Suicide was] doing was breaking new ground and important in its own right."

Vega had been releasing solo albums for a decade before Lamere came in the picture; he met her while making 1990's Deuce Avenue, the record that returned to the beloved electronic minimalism of Suicide. Though the actual release of solo albums was sporadic, he and Lamere never stopped making music. "When we were in the studio together all those years, I was very much the type of person thinking about releasing albums, whereas Alan wasn't structured in that way," Lamere said. "His thought was, 'We're going into the studio to create sound, and whatever happens, happens...' Part of his process was he would just keep moving forward. Unless I said, 'Hit stop,' so we could put out an album of what we'd been working on right at [that] moment in time, he would keep evolving and moving forward on new material." Vega constantly wrote poetry in his notebooks, often using what he wrote for ad-libbed song lyrics; Lamere was actively involved in mixing their recordings. At the same time, Vega was a staunch documenter. He would burn a CD of what he and Lamere had worked on in the studio and note down changes he thought they needed to make to each song. Even the titles of the songs from Mutator and Insurrection came from his notebooks.

Insurrection artwork design by Michael Handis

The extent to which, upon being done with a song or an album, Vega moved on, proved to be extreme, and would have ripple effects on Lamere's solo career. The two, along with French director Marc Hurtado, would tour Europe after recording a solo album and perform the unreleased songs they'd recorded. ("The Europeans have heard a lot of this stuff before," joked Lamere about Mutator and Insurrection.) For the songs that had been released, Vega would rely on Lamere to feed him lines so that he could give the audience at least something recognizable. "I would be chanting little phrases, he would hear that, and he would riff on it, and the audience would be happy even though the lyrics [were] mostly completely different," Lamere said. "I learned to 'sing' because Alan never wanted to rehearse anything...I kind of learned a little bit how to project my voice." Meanwhile, upon hearing it for the first time, Vega didn't even remember "Nike Soldier", a track long-time engineer Perkin Barnes had digitized and Lamere chose for a split single with The Vacant Lots in 2014. Lamere's the opposite. "When we first started mixing [Insurrection], I could literally remember and envision the days in the studio I was laying down [those riffs]." But the ultimate story comes from when Springsteen, touring Devils & Dust, invited Vega to one of his shows, as he had been covering Suicide classic "Dream Baby Dream" during the encore. "[Vega] literally was sitting with Jesse [Malin], they're waiting for the show to start, and on the PA comes the song 'Dujang Prang' that he and I had done in 1995," Lamere said. "Alan turns to Jesse and says, 'This is really good, do you know who this is?' Jesse said, 'Alan, that's your song.' That's classic Alan: been there, done that, don't wanna hear it."

It was during the release of The Vacant Lots split single where Vega gave Artaud and Lamere his blessing to unearth songs from the vault. The single happened when Artaud reached out to Vega, sharing The Vacant Lots' cover of Vega's "No More Christmas Blues". The two men became fast friends, as Artaud, living in Brooklyn Heights a subway stop away from Vega and Lamere in Lower Manhattan, often visited. "Jared would come over here and sit and talk to Alan for hours about everything," Lamere said. "He had listened to every piece of music that Alan had pretty much ever done. He understood Alan's philosophy of creation and the minimalism and the existential philosophers that Alan had studied." As for Lamere, Vega knew that her approach to producing his music was intuitive. "After Alan heard 'Nike Soldier', I said, 'Alan, you have no idea how much material is in the computer in the studio of what we've done over the years,'" Lamere said. "He said, 'I know. Once I'm gone, you should feel free to put it out because I trust your judgement. You've worked with me for so long, you're my co-producer.' I could go in and make these tracks sound completely different. But I make what Alan would want. He's still so present with us because he had such a strong influence on us. It's part of our DNA. That's the reality."

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Insurrection was recorded in the late 90s, and you can hear its influence on the material that would make up 1999's 2007. The album is a snapshot of an era for Vega, New York City, and the world at large. Dante, Vega and Lamere's child, was about to be born, so Vega's mind was occupied with the post-Gulf War, pre-9/11 state of a city and country rife with racism and capitalistic rot. (The mention of 9/11 is not teleological; Vega literally had premonitions of a terror attack in New York City.) Songs like "Sewer" and "Invasion" sport thumping, propulsive beats and clattering, machine-like percussion, the most messed-up club songs you've ever heard, Vega chanting like a street urchin. The presciently titled "Murder One" and "Genocide" are circular, droning, and forward-lurching. The instrumentation is perfect for Vega's mantras and pleas to "Make a new reality!' Lamere's One Never Knows, though a personal album whose singles' videos feature Lamere sort of half-boxing, half-dancing, a callback to her earlier career, echoes Vega's idealistic spirit. "Don't destroy the dream tonight," she sings on the dystopian "If Only", an almost 50-year-later spiritual sibling to Suicide's best known song.

One Never Knows, like Keep It Alive, was engineered by Dante at their Dujang Prang home studio, where Alan held his sculptures. Before the pandemic, Dante had been working with hip-hop artists, but as they weren't coming in during lockdown, Lamere asked him to help her with her solo debut. Dante sang in The Choir of Trinity Wall Street for 10 years and purportedly has perfect pitch, whereas Lamere is not formally trained. "He wants to help other people with their vision," Lamere said of her son. "I do say to him once in a while, because I run a lot of sounds through the keyboard, 'What key is this?'...He knows I like dissonance, so he says, 'If you like it, it works.'" Lamere's taking a key from Vega and not wanting to get technical any time soon. "I'm sure Miles Davis had his pick of brilliant musicians to work with, but Alan used to say, 'Miles Davis liked working with people who weren't necessarily formally trained.' They didn't say, 'You're not supposed to do that,' or, 'This is what you're supposed to do here, this chord progression.' No! It's none of that. There are no rules," Lamere said.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Lamere's planning on taking the same approach to her recording as playing live, but with a little bit of her boxing knowledge thrown in. "When I was performing with Alan, I was always playing effects machines in the background. It's a whole different animal carrying the show front and center," she said. "For me, it's like getting in the ring sparring. You have to be hyper-focused. The adrenaline kicks in. It's a great feeling...It scares the shit out of me ahead of time. In the moment, I absolutely love it. Alan was the same way. He wouldn't even be thinking about getting on stage, but as soon as he did, he kind of embraced it."

As always, her musical endeavors will constitute at least some work with the Vega vault. For one, according to Lamere, there are about 4 or 5 albums worth of material from the 8 years between the release of 2007 and Station alone, from when they were first raising Dante, as well as even more from after Station, despite Vega suffering a stroke in 2012. "I love the opportunity for people to hear what I'm doing and discover what Alan did and is continuing to do," Lamere said. "I love the fact that he's still influencing people from beyond."

One Never Knows artwork: Jasmine Hirst

[sampilled]

How was the Taylor Swift concert?

It was absolutely amazing!!!

It was so fun and usually I hate that stuff like this is in daylight(it only started to get dark when she started the midnights set) but it was actually great cuz she could see out in the crowd and she noticed people getting engaged (two girls. Rise up swiftbians) and congratulated them and it was sooooo cute

Her tour also broke records in Scotland!!!! Most attended music show ever!!!!!

[rotten-downer]

A little doodle based off a part of an rp I'm doing with a friend where Audrey showed up dressed as a council worker and just threatened everyone with a bomb she made.

[oceanicmarxist]

There's no such thing as an "anarchist revolution" or an "ML revolution". Revolutions never start out as explicitly communist. None of these sect labels mean anything in 2024 anyway.

One thing I think is weird about a lot of leftists is how like… entrenched we often are in our particular branch of leftism. I consider myself an anarchist, but like… I’ll be honest, I wouldn't be mad at an ML revolution. Why would I?

Like anything left of socdems basically I’m like “sure, sounds better than this”

And like the only thing that gives me pause in that position is when online MLs are like “execute the anarchists”

[journey-to-the-attic]

In the spirit of Chinese New year...

How would IK and the gang celebrate?

Asking diavalo and lucifer for angpao

Actually wait throw Mephisto in there too, he's old

-Azure Anon

upon hearing that the lunar new year is like ik's major holiday, diavolo is DEVASTATED because ik can't celebrate it in the human world normally (both because she's in the demon world rn, and also bc back home it's really just her, her dad, and sometimes aunt lisa), lucifer has to physically hold him back from declaring a devildom-wide celebration as a substitute

the 'elders' that ik gets red envelopes from are lucifer, diavolo, barbatos, mephisto, simeon and solomon (the youngest one by a very large measure, but he insists because he is one hell of an elder human). mammon attempts to wheedle a pouch out of lucifer too and because he's in a good mood it actually WORKS

levi and luke team up to help ik make lots of pretty paper cuttings to decorate the hol! they don't get super fancy with the celebration, everyone just gets together and chats over snacks and tea (and some liquor) - it feels pretty much like a normal hang-out, at least until diavolo pulls out the lion dance puppets because he thought it was SUCH a shame to miss out on it

at first they attempt to recreate a genuine lion dance, but eventually it just devolves into a convuluted game of make-believe: it's that chess scene 2.0 (apparently guaranteed to happen every time the gang gets together for a celebration)

[bigbihatemachine]

Mum: I don't understand why the council would treat you, a disabled person, so poorly!

Me: well yeah it's disgusting but their reasoning is none of this is support needs so I can go off my meds, that's not their problem, never leave the house, etc etc, none of these count as support needs-

Mum: stop! This is too upsetting to hear!

Me, who is currently living it as and as a direct result of my mother making me homeless: sure it def is upsetting