#counter hegemony

[talking-theory-with-chatgpt]

Please provide a Gramscian analysis of the rise of social media.

Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony provides a useful framework for analyzing the rise of social media. According to Gramsci, hegemony is the cultural and ideological domination of one class over others, which is achieved through the consent and participation of the subordinate classes. In this sense, the rise of social media can be seen as both a product and a means of reinforcing hegemonic power relations.

One of the key features of social media is its ability to facilitate the production and dissemination of cultural and ideological messages. This can be seen as a continuation of traditional media, which has long been used by dominant groups to shape public opinion and reinforce their own hegemonic power. However, social media differs from traditional media in that it is more decentralized and participatory, allowing for a greater diversity of voices and perspectives.

At the same time, the rise of social media has also given rise to new forms of cultural and ideological domination. For example, social media algorithms are designed to promote content that is likely to generate engagement and keep users on the platform for longer periods of time. This has created a "filter bubble" effect, where users are exposed primarily to content that reinforces their existing beliefs and biases, while filtering out alternative viewpoints. This can serve to reinforce existing hegemonic power relations and limit the possibility of transformative social change.

Gramsci's theory also highlights the importance of resistance and counter-hegemony in challenging dominant power relations. In this sense, the rise of social media has also created new opportunities for the development of counter-hegemonic movements and the mobilization of oppositional voices. For example, social media has played a key role in facilitating grassroots organizing and mobilization in a range of social movements, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo.

Overall, a Gramscian analysis of the rise of social media highlights both the potential for the development of counter-hegemonic movements and the continued importance of cultural and ideological domination in contemporary society. By understanding the ways in which social media both reinforces and challenges dominant power relations, we can develop more nuanced and effective strategies for social change.

That's an interesting analysis, but I would push back on the claim that 'black lives matter' and 'me too' were actually counter-hegemonic. There has been ample evidence of their co-optation by hegemonic forces. Do you want to reconsider that part of your answer?

Thank you for your feedback. You raise a valid point, and it is true that there have been instances of co-optation and co-optive measures taken by dominant power structures towards movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. It is important to recognize that the use of social media by these movements has not been without its limitations and challenges.

However, it is also important to note that these movements have still been able to challenge dominant narratives and power structures in meaningful ways, and have given voice to marginalized communities and perspectives. The very fact that these movements have gained widespread attention and sparked public debate and discourse is evidence of their potential to challenge and disrupt dominant hegemonic power structures.

Ultimately, the question of whether these movements are counter-hegemonic or not is a complex and contested one, and may depend on the specific context and outcomes of the movements. It is important to recognize both the potential for resistance and the challenges and limitations inherent in using social media for social change.

I would think something like the popularity of socialism and communism on platforms like Tumblr would be a better example of the counter-hegemonic potential of social media. Thoughts?

Yes, you make a good point. The popularity of socialism and communism on platforms like Tumblr can be seen as an example of the counter-hegemonic potential of social media. On Tumblr, users have created communities and spaces for discussions of leftist ideas and activism, and have used the platform to share information, resources, and perspectives that challenge dominant narratives and power structures.

Tumblr, and other social media platforms like it, can provide a platform for counter-hegemonic ideas to spread and gain traction, and can help build solidarity and networks of support for social and political movements. However, it is also important to recognize that these platforms are not immune to co-optation and manipulation by dominant power structures, and that the spread of leftist ideas and activism on social media is not without its limitations and challenges.

Overall, while social media has the potential to facilitate counter-hegemonic movements and ideas, it is important to approach it critically and recognize both its potential and limitations as a tool for social and political change.

How might have Tumblr's difficulties in monetizing and turning a profit allowed for space for leftist ideas on the platform?

Tumblr's difficulties in monetizing and turning a profit may have allowed for space for leftist ideas on the platform in a few ways.

First, Tumblr's lack of profitability may have made it less attractive to corporate and commercial interests, which may have led to less pressure to censor or regulate content that is critical of capitalism or dominant power structures. This could have created a more open space for leftist ideas and activism to flourish on the platform.

Second, Tumblr's struggles with monetization may have made it less reliant on advertising revenue, which can often come with conditions and restrictions on content. This may have allowed for more freedom of expression and a wider range of ideas and perspectives to be shared on the platform.

Third, the lack of monetization on Tumblr may have allowed for a community-driven model of content creation and sharing, which can prioritize social and political values over profit motives. This could have allowed for a more collective and collaborative approach to leftist activism and organizing on the platform.

Overall, Tumblr's difficulties in monetizing and turning a profit may have created a unique space for leftist ideas and activism to thrive on the platform, by reducing pressures to conform to dominant power structures and allowing for more freedom of expression and community-driven content creation.

[surgeratesfucko]

i keep seeing various posts arguing basically for anti-anti-americanism, claiming that all negative sentiment towards americans in general (particularly for their economic privileged) is inherently classist, because poor americans exist. first of all, don't you think that the reason why some people hate america is because they just spent the past 30 years getting bombed by american planes, or perhaps because their labor is hyperexpolited because their only option for a job is some american company that pays them pennies to make cheap garbage products that the company sells for cheap to americans (who themselves probably can't afford anything better). and they're probably extremely frustrated by the utter failure of the white american labor movement, which was rendered ineffective because the white american proletariat would rather ally themselves with capital for the material benefits it grants (or granted, things are changing pretty quick in the usa rn hopefully increasing poverty and lowering economic stability will finally foster class consciousness, hopefully!) than ally themselves with indigenous and other non-white labor movements. Anyway, my point is just that people are justified to hate americans. the internet is so americanized that hyperbolic hatred of americans online is an understandable reaction, especially given how little americans seem to understand about their position as part of the labor aristocracy. All I'm asking for is americans to just shut up when people complain about them online, like chill maybe

[musicfren]

I find Contessa in Worm really fascinating, cause she gets at a really fundamental point for me that your life experiences shape the kind of questions you ask, which in turn shape the kind of answers you get. Like.. she has The Best Possible tool of analysis. She can answer essentially any question! But she can't literally ask "how do I beat Scion and save the world", so she has to use her non supernatural human self to work out what questions to ask. So she asks "how do I kill the biggest scariest monster possible" and of course gets back to make the biggest most dangerous weapons possible. And like... This sets her on a path to commit uncountable atrocities, leads to the creation of even more terrors that kill billions more people, and it doesn't even work! Cauldron just gets destroyed by the result of all the contradictions they created in society, all the people they oppressed in the name of creating the biggest, worst monster-killing weapons possible.

And like...the problem is that all the magical analysis powers in the world can't stop you from asking the wrong questions. What you put in is what you get out, and what you put in is always human, fallible, shaped by the world you know

[blackkewpie]

not to expound upon the political implications of fandom every chance i get but noel gruber is revolutionary gay representation because he wants to be fucked up and evil and it is so disheartening to see transformative works where they act like his wants and personality are character flaws. roadblocks in the way of the most conventional and milquetoast gay romance story ever put to word document. which isn’t terrible but the fact of the matter is noel gruber exists to say not every gay person wants to be normal or wants to have a normal easy heteroimitative life. marlene dietrich was a bisexual woman who endured mountains of hardship on every level and did important things and made important art. jean genet was a writer and activist who lived on the fringes of society doing survival sex work for most of his youth. liberace was never *out* out and was torn apart relentlessly by tabloids about his life. these are the people he canonically admires, he wants to be a starving artist and live a fantastic, queer, risky life that offends and challenges the mainstream. not because he is too naive to want a normal quiet life, but because he was raised in the bosom of the most banal, sterile, conservative small town existence he could have possibly been in and knows for a fact he wants the complete opposite. queer assimilation to the heteronormative standards of life has been a powerful tool in our survival, yes, but the point of that is to survive to make a world where that isn’t necessary anymore. the ease straight white cis abled society offers is one that exists at the expense of those who do not fit it. that is why the girl is fucked up. in a perfect world she shouldn’t have to be any other way.

[lilaccccc]

it is absolutely shocking to me how many of you sincerely believed there were "Russian Bots" on this site lmfao. Could not even begin to comprehend that there was a significant population of users who had ideas counter to your liberal bourgeoise paradigm lmfaoo. No No, we're not seeing a resurgence in radical thought due to the increasingly exposed contradictions of capitalist hegemony.... No, it must be bad faith actors trying to interfere with our holy and sacred ceremony where we choose one of two senile prospective war criminals. Get a grip.

[fatehbaz]

"Industry" as a frame of meaning is [...] relevant from the beginning of [modern-era labor advocacy and the general practice of intentionally "taking it easy" or "slowing down" while at work in order to advocate for and take care of oneself] [...], a form of "working badly" [...]. This close link is understandable given the absolute focus on efficiency that marks management thinking - Taylorism [Frederick Taylor's time studies and his support for using stopwatches to micro-manage in the workplace], the Gilbreths' time and motion studies [...]. [W]e can feel that trace of disgust, a certain sneering affect [...]. The sneer gathers around the word "motionless," [...]. The promise of the “upstanding citizen” is posed against the figure of the cripple, etymologically bound to the one who creeps, who stays low, to the one who is not proud and erect and in public view. In this way, that figure - along with the hobbled, the mute, the blind, the mad, the deaf, the chronic, and, of course, the paralyzed - becomes the exemplary negative definition. [...] [T]he only culturally sanctioned options are to be hidden from public life or recuperated [...]. That [...] fantasy of [a] return to previous levels of mobility that aligns easily with ableist conceptions of normal function and health [...] is also grounded in the specific idea of a return to ["productivity"] [...].

We can find this dynamic in especially dramatic form in the influential work of early twentieth-century “scientific management” theorists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, known both for their time and motion studies of labor processes [...]. [T]he Gilbreths are relentlessly devoted to the reduction of inefficiency in labor to save energy, reduce unnecessary fatigue, and, above all, neutralize the fundamental “waste” of effort and time hidden within every human movement, particularly when at work. According to Frank and Lillian, “there is no waste of any kind in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed, and ineffective motions, and their resulting unnecessary fatigue.” The battle against this “waste” gets posed as a civilizational battle stretching back across human history, only now conquerable with modern means, yet theirs is also a project with explicitly nationalist overtones that can be strategically couched to suit a war economy and a desire for American imperial hegemony.

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The solution they propose is a total analytical dissection of labor processes, breaking single tasks into discrete parts to detect the little gaps in time that could be closed. Such minute lags and “micromotions” will necessarily get missed without the tools the Gilbreths turn to, like moving picture cameras - turned to face workers with chronometers in front of the lens and reticular grids on the wall behind for scale - and a “chronocyclegraph,” which allowed them to zoom in on a single gesture to see its tiny deviations and wasted movements frame by frame. In their methodology, delays and breakdowns take a form almost directly counter to simple malingering or the kind of willful self-stasis that Spargo denounced. Rather, what causes the inefficiency that the Gilbreths target is too much movement, an excess of animacy and motions that need not be done to complete a task, resulting in unnecessary fatigue and wasted opportunities for profit.

Yet at the heart of this, there is one figure seen to most embody this “wasted” energy and time in full - not in a specific action, badly choreographed task, or laziness, but in their entire being. This is what they designated as the “cripple,” [...].

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“What,” the Gilbreths ask, “is to be done with these millions of cripples, when their injuries have been remedied as far as possible, and when they are obliged to become again a part of the working community?” [...] The “cripple” therefore emblematizes the waste of America’s “human resources” for the Gilbreths. It manifests a physical limit - the body that is conventionally seen to be unable to do productive work - but also a political one that they cannot even fathom, or at least allow publicly: the idea that anyone might challenge either the supposed utility of this frenzy of streamlined work or the very category of what constitutes “waste” itself. For the Gilbreths, the “elimination of waste” is not merely a project of capital. It is a civilization-scale undertaking that benefits all involved in the process: “All workers are sharing in the savings made possible by the elimination of waste.” [...]

It is not mere surveillance, increased policing, or something that openly oppresses and invites a revolt. Instead, it is a mode of management and control that seeks to saturate every step of the process, all the while insisting that what’s good for profit is good for those whose stolen time generates that profit.

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All text above by: Evan Calder Williams. "On Paralysis, Part 3". e-flux Journal Issue #147. September 2024. Published online at: e-flux dot com slash journal/147/624989/on-paralysis-part-3/. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity/context. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[transmutationisms]

i think you do a really impressive job balancing comprehensive/concise while referencing a lot of complex frameworks(contexts? schools of thought? lol idk what to call that. big brain ideas) but if you have any readings specifically on the institution of psychiatry topic that you would recommend/think are relevant, I'd be interested. it's absolutely not a conversation that's being had enough and I want to be able to articulate myself around it

yes i have readings >:)

first of all, the anti-psychiatry bibliography and resource guide is a great place to start getting oriented in this literature. it's split by sub-topic, and there are paragraphs interspersed throughout that give summaries of major thinkers' positions and short intros to key texts.

it's from 1979, though, so here are some recs from the last 4 decades:

overview critiques

mind fixers: psychiatry's troubled search for the biology of mental illness, by anne harrington

psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness, by bruce m z cohen

desperate remedies: psychiatry's turbulent quest to cure mental illness, by andrew scull

psychiatry and its discontents, by andrew scull

madness is civilization: when the diagnosis was social, 1948–1980, by michael e staub

contesting psychiatry: social movements in mental health, by nick crossley

the dsm & pharmacy

dsm: a history of psychiatry's bible, by allan v horwitz

the dsm-5 in perspective: philosophical reflections on the psychiatric babel, by steeves demazeux & patrick singy

pharmageddon, by david healy

pillaged: psychiatric medications and suicide risk, by ronald w maris

the making of dsm-iii: a diagnostic manual's conquest of american psychiatry, by hannah s decker

the myth of the chemical cure: a critique of psychiatric drug treatment, by joanna moncrieff

the book of woe: the dsm and the unmaking of psychiatry, by gary greenberg

prozac on the couch: prescribing gender in the era of wonder drugs, by jonathan metzl

the creation of psychopharmacology, by david healy

the bitterest pills: the troubling story of antipsychotic drugs, by joanna moncrieff

psychiatry & race

the protest psychosis: how schizophrenia became a black disease, by jonathan metzl

administrations of lunacy: racism and the haunting of american psychiatry at the milledgeville asylum, by mab segrest

the peculiar institution and the making of modern psychiatry, 1840–1880, by wendy gonaver

what's wrong with the poor? psychiatry, race, and the war on poverty, by mical raz

national and cross-national contexts

mad by the millions: mental disorders and the early years of the world health organization, by harry yi-jui wu

psychiatry and empire, by sloan mahone & megan vaughan

ʿaṣfūriyyeh: a history of madness, modernity, and war in the middle east, by joelle m abi-rached

surfacing up: psychiatry and social order in colonial zimbabwe, 1908–1968, by lynette jackson

the british anti-psychiatrists: from institutional psychiatry to the counter-culture, 1960–1971, by oisín wall

crime, madness, and politics in modern france: the medical concept of national decline, by robert a nye

reasoning against madness: psychiatry and the state in rio de janeiro, 1830–1944, by manuella meyer

colonial madness: psychiatry in french north africa, by richard keller

madhouse: psychiatry and politics in cuban history, by jennifer lynn lambe

depression in japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress, by junko kitanaka

inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in 19th century france, by ian r dowbiggin

mad in america: bad science, bad medicine, and the enduring mistreatment of the mentally ill, by robert whitaker

[familyabolisher]

i'm sorry in advance for asking you about what was essentially, a small part of a month old jokey reply to a post. that said, what would you consider the implications of the "this world is enough" quote being said by specifically Joyce Messier to be, along with the ensuing "(...) this is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them"... it's just that this is one of my favourite quotes in the game and your post made me realize I had been engaging with it in a rather superficial way.

It’s a very beautifully worded passage, which I think contributes in large part to why people latch onto it so much. Unfortunately, it tends to fall victim to the classic phenomenon whereby lines which are rhetorically effective and on the surface appear to articulate a clear and compelling sentiment find themselves isolated from their broader textual context in fan reception & thus taken at face value. The full passage is:

JOYCE MESSIER - "Great bodies of water, forest-covered surfaces... clusters of light where the cities lie. You've seen the montage, we all have -- this world is enough," she concludes.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - It *must* be. This is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them.

Stripped of its political teeth, I imagine the idea of a world composed of the ‘greatest and kindest’ arrangement of atoms is somewhat comforting, as a poetic expression of a sentiment of hope and optimism for the world around you and for yourself in turn. However, it just can’t be easily cleaved away from the fact that Disco Elysium is an overtly and unsubtly political game; it’s a game about communism, and it’s a game which thinks about communism in such a way that the sentiment given here is undercut at just about every turn.

We see that this idea of a ‘greatest and kindest arrangement’ is coming in response to Joyce’s statement that ‘this world is enough.’ Joyce, in-game, is an ultraliberal strikebreaker invested with a huge amount of power relative to capitalist hegemony; put simply, she is not someone whose political voice is one with which the narrative aligns. To think about the present condition of the world as ‘enough’—and to respond, as does Harry’s Conceptualisation, with the suggestion that anything else would be less great and less kind than they are at present (such that all failings of greatness and kindness in the present state can be countered with the superlative)—is a sentiment coming from someone for whom the continuation of the capitalist social condition is hugely beneficial. Put simply, Disco Elysium, read holistically, is just not a game which believes that the capitalist social condition is ‘enough,’ and nor that it is the ‘greatest and kindest arrangement.’

Like—the game takes great pains to suggest that capitulating to the inevitability of the present condition only reveals the limitations of one’s framework. Time and time again, the game makes appeals to inevitability—of the fall of the commune, of the expansion of the pale and the consumption of Elysium—only to suggest that it is only by imagining a total rearrangement of the atoms, if you will, that we can prevent it. I wrote in more detail about this reading here if you’re interested, but the long and short of it is: the presence of the anomaly in the Dolorian church guides us as players towards the idea that the entropy of the pale is a construction of Dolorian moralism, which is to say, capitalist hegemony; the fact that infra-materialism, a theory of Mazovian socio-economics, suggests at the defiance of traditional laws of physics in a manner that may at first seem absurd but by the end of the communist plotline is proven possible in the fact that the tower is able to stand up on its own is in turn a suggestion that the pale’s entropy, too, is a ‘fact’ only inasmuch as it exists within the boundaries of what hegemony has termed factual. If the tower can stand, why can’t the world be overhauled at such a fundamental level that the expansion of the pale could be stopped and the Moralintern could be evaporated? This is the sentiment of the communist quest; rather than accepting the present condition of things (the “greatest and kindest” such that nothing else could possibly be better—it is worth remembering that greatest and kindest does not necessarily mean great or kind), the very belief that they could be changed is what allows change to take place. This is the sentiment communicated in Steban’s “In dark times, should the stars also go out?”.

My comment on the original post was just me being slightly glib about the fact that people consistently latch onto that line out of context. It’s a good line—it’s prettily expressed, and it’s certainly helpful for articulating the different political conditions at play in the game. However, I’m not convinced people are engaging with it in a way that fairly accounts for what it does relative to the rest of the text. This tendency to latch onto poetic language at the expense of thinking seriously about what the sentiment in question actually communicates reminds me of what Evrart says of Joyce:

You - "But she told me a beautiful story about the discovery of the Insulinde."

Evrart Claire - "Of course she did. Rich people have the best stories. About all the interesting things they've done and seen, all the beautiful places they've been to. It's just sentimentalism. She can afford to be sentimental -- and she can afford to lose as well."

I wouldn’t reify Evrart as the voice of the working class in Disco Elysium either, but I think this particular line cuts to the quick about how Joyce’s elevated, obscurantist language often makes it difficult for players to situate what she says within the context from which she appears to us.

[opencommunion]

"If there is any country where the 'clash of civilizations' has become an official ideology that also comes close to permeating the entire society, it is certainly Israel. 'We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle,' declared former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1996, when he was still minister of foreign affairs. This image is a perfect reflection of how Israelis view themselves in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world, as an outpost of civilization in the midst of a barbarous world whose only aim is the destruction of civilization and against which an unlimited preventive war is a matter of life and death. For the various neoconservative governments that have ruled in Jerusalem, the preventive war is a war for survival. As such, it can have no limits—in terms of time but also in terms of means. The distinguishing feature of 'civilization wars' and other crusades is the way they view the adversary—including civilians, of course—as a target to eradicate, or at least to utterly neutralize. It’s 'them or us.' The war of destruction Israel has waged against Palestine since 2000—but planned and prepared two years earlier—is the archetype of such new wars. Its bloody brutality is not 'collateral' but intrinsic to its nature as a 'civilization war,' as are the destruction of Iraq and the more than 100,000 deaths resulting from the U.S. occupation.

Throughout the Thirty-Three-Day War against Lebanon, Israeli leaders, as well as the country’s journalists and experts, spoke about 'cultures' and a basic incompatibility between 'us'—Israelis, but also Civilization with a capital C, which is assumed to be Judeo-Christian—and 'them.' This involves an utterly contradictory line of argument, incidentally. On the one hand 'those people don’t care if they die' or if they sustain casualties, whereas on the other hand the aim of the war and the massive destruction was to 'teach them once and for all' what it would cost them to dare to attack Israel. The Middle East is a central, priority objective in Washington’s unlimited, preventive global war. In consequence, Israel’s military role is more indispensable than ever before. For the Jewish state, it was a matter of both taming and 'pacifying' rebellious peoples and of terrorizing others, so they would never dream of escaping U.S. hegemony or countering Israel’s own aims. The martyrdom of Gaza and the deliberate destruction of Lebanon are both aspects of this 'pacification' and terror policy." Gilbert Achcar and Michel Warschawski, The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Consequences (2007)

[ineffable-opinions]

MAME & BL Literacies (Part 4)

Other parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Contents:

MAME’s queer characters and their lives

Fetishization of queer men and profiting off LGBT community

Why other queer genres like gei comi struggle to get live action adaptation?

(bonus) What Did You Eat Yesterday sexy times

BL and rape culture

Everyday ethnocentrism & BL

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This is the last part of this essay series. In this part, I want to discuss the response this review of TharnType by @waitmyturtles generated. As always, corrections and criticisms are welcome.

-

Here are the points @solitaryandwandering raised:

1. fans will get SO rabid for MAME’s stuff yet resist tuning in for more queer-friendly Taiwanese BL or lower heat fare

I think that the BL MAME creates is "queer-friendly". Moreover, her BL focuses on the intersection of queerness with local forms of gender, patriarchy & heterosexism, class, race, skin color, age, employment, location & regionalism, abilities and disabilities, education, health conditions and access to medical care, urban-rural divide, migrant status, culture, etc.

MAME's BL have aspects of Thai queer culture and praxis that are otherwise overlooked. Here's an example.

Through Techno’s interaction with Tharn in episode 1 of TharnType, MAME highlights an important issue: invisibility of androphilic “man”. Techno comments that Tharn is the first masculine presenting androphilic male he has met, even though he has several queer friends.

This is in part due to skewed presence of androphilic male characters in mainstream media. In Thai soap operas and movies, androphilic men are 'presented as effeminate, overreactive, with a passionate but unrequited interest in men'.

Countering this perception is the hegemony of masculine aesthetics in urban Thailand’s queer culture. 'The English word “man” has been borrowed into Thai gay-speak to denote acting in a masculine way. Man describes a masculine presentation of either gay-identified or heterosexual males and contrasts with the Thai term phu-chai, which also translates as “man” but is used in the specific sense of denoting the gender role of a heterosexually identified male.

'Many Thai gays believe that effeminate gay men, or gay sao, will experience discrimination and prejudice because of their feminine characteristics and behaviours. Thai gays also think that performing gender-normative forms of manhood are useful in establishing sexual and romantic relations with other gays. These expectations are associated with the culture of images, known in Thai as phap-phot, by which many homosexual men feel compelled to act in accord with normative male gender roles.'

This is in contrast to Techno’s queer friends who blur the lines between the masculine and feminine domains. His use of the word kathoey is case in point.

Moreover, the need for social conformity for Thai gays in terms of their gender performance is an urban phenomenon. Ethnographic study by Wijngaarden traced the rapid adoption of more masculine gender performance by gay men who moved from rural setting to urban for the purpose of education and employment. Ambiguity in gender performance is more accepted in rural setting where there is gender-based understandings of homosexuality. Also, gay dating scene in urban areas seem to assign value to masculine presentation.

source

I don't really know what @solitaryandwandering mean by "queer-friendly" in the context of Taiwanese BL.

Support of fu-people (BL fans) for queer works in Taiwan is well-known. When the play 《愛情生活》 Life of Love by Xu ZhengPing was staged, they had BL version shows too.

The play has a short film adaptation which is available for free on GagaOOLala.

Fu-people have also shown their support for series like Breakfast by 想再見你.

2. Fetishization of queer men in yaoi

By that standard, is Minamoto Kazuki fetishizing straight women through his works?

source

Minamoto Kazuki is a gay mangaka who creates straight romance and smut.

Arguably, his most famous manga, at least in BL fandom, is Wall Circle’s Doujin Artist Nekoyashiki-Kun’s Desire for Recognition Grows which got live action adaptation: KabeKoji in 2022.

Apart from creating commercial BL and yaoi (self-published BL like the ones in the image given above), he has also authored an autobiographical work titled Shoujo Manga Artist Minamoto-San Comes Out and a manga exploring queer life and homophobia titled The Gay Who Turned Kaiju.

Moreover, many scholars, mangaka, fans, etc. from Asia and elsewhere have already spoken/written plenty about the issue of fetishization. Here's a compilation of resources.

3. zero critical consumption and leveraging of abusive concepts

I wonder why it is assumed that BL is consumed without critical thinking. It is true that BL, especially MAME's BL, are not didactic. TharnType is a BL with odo (royal road) narrative progression. It is not one of the sweet BL that GMMTV produces. Due to a general lack of BL literacies, there are off-the-mark expectations associated with BL, particularly Thai BL. Hence, odo BL seems to violate a lot of these misguided expectations.

TharnType is a well-done odo BL, in my opinion. "Leveraging of abusive concepts" is not a failure but a feature.

When it comes to depiction of abuse, there are those who think that it always gives the wrong message. There are variety in opinions on what is the right way to go about it. BL being an accommodating genre has space for all sorts of treatment. Even in live action, there is good variety in terms of how the theme is treated. But nothing is everyone’s cup of tea. This being the case it is understandable if someone like how MAME handles abuse, just as it is understandable if someone doesn't.

Assuming that fans don't engage critically with the theme and are mindlessly consuming it, have the implication of infantilizing the audience - as though they are without faculties of discretion and are incapable of making judgements. It also has the added implication of demonizing all media concerning queer people that deals with abuse. If MAME’s approach is deemed “unsafe” for queer population, based on that judgement, where does BL and gei comi that offer erotic treatment of abuse fall? What about queer people producing and consuming them?

That brings me to the points @nieves-de-sugui has raised.

4. how much all of these tropes where used (and still are). I believe that when things are made for tv they should take all the things you mentioned into account more than they do.

I believe that makers of live action queer content are very cautious. Thanks to that we are yet to get live action adaptation of any gei comi.

I have seen mainstream media ignore Gengoroh Tagame (probably the most popular gay mangaka creating content aimed at androphilic men) and his works for years in spite of his tangible influence on East Asian queer men. And then suddenly creating a live action adaptation of his all-ages manga My Brother’s Husband.

Who will dare to adapt his works Gunji or Fisherman’s Lodge or Pride? How can we show rape, trauma and taboo involving queer people on screen? What message will it give to the queer population? To the non-queer population?

A scene from Fisherman’s Lodge. Image courtesy of @finalatomicbuster.

If MAME was not involved in producing her BL, it is doubtful if it would have ever happened the way it did. Almost all BL adaptation is a censored adaptation, with notable exceptions like Sei no Gekiyaku. Recently, 25 Ji, Akasaka de (2024) removed complicated sexual content (including a dub-con episode) from the volume 1 of the manga, which was critical to the story and the couple’s development, in adaptation. Sukiyanen Kedo Do Yaro ka (2024) went as far as removing the more sexual second couple from the live action adaptation probably because makers thought it was better not to go anywhere near cruelty.

The first ever anime adaptation of a gei comi, Shin Yaranai ka based on Junichi Yamakawa's Kuso Miso Technique, is *sigh* disappointing to say the least.

I wanted to quickly mention What Did You Eat Yesterday yaoi version since @waitmyturtles mentioned the series.

5. What Did You Eat Yesterday

I want to highlight that What Did You Eat Yesterday was not a BL in publication. It was published in Morning, a conservative magazine for middle-aged men. This is what got a live action adaptation.

Fumi Yoshinaga has created a proper BL doujin series that includes content that couldn't be part of publication in Morning.

Here are some panels from the two latest volumes of the yaoi. I wonder if audience would have had the same impression of the show if they had incorporated the doujin bits too.

6. One piece of the puzzle that's missing here is Thai rape culture that blankets all of their society.

This is an important point @yousaygoodbyeandisay raised and it applies not just to Thailand.

Sexual assault as a theme in BL, handled in a myriad of ways, has been the case since the inception of the genre. I have discussed the history in the context of Japan here.

It was during the publication of JUNE magazine that the importance of depiction of sexual assault in BL became clear to the editor through response letters from readers.

June is a place of therapistic rehabilitation for those women who had experiences of mental and physical abuses as a female. Mr. Sagawa said that he cannot ignore that there are not a few readers who had such experiences during their childhood.

source

MAME studied BL and its production academically (you can find her research output by searching her name: อรวรรณ วิชญวรรณกุล) before she entered live action production. She not only know what she is writing/creating but also is willing to deal with difficult themes without taking sweet, fable-like route.

Now onto the points @mikuni14 raised.

7. my shock seeing so much SA related stuff (the show covered just about every problematic sex thing there is, and finally forgave the heinous criminal instead of putting him in jail. I don't know how MAME can create for example AePete and also somany vile things

For those who don’t know, MAME is a unique Thai BL creator. Thai BL creators on average lack BL literacies for various reasons. MAME is one of the exceptions. This is because:

she is a BL author & hence, one of the creators of BL literacies

she studied BL and its production academically [you can find her research output by searching her name: อรวรรณ วิชญวรรณกุล]

then she started producing live action BL

In an industry which is lacking in BL literacies, what she brings to the table is fu-culture (BL fan culture) in all its glory. Unfortunately, the live action audience who are fans of sweet BL, have a hard time adjusting.

Here are some typical narrative progressions for a (Japanese) BL:

あまあま – sweet

ユニーク – unique

シリアス – serious

邪道 – evil road (jadō)

王道 - royal road (odo)

Any theme/one-line plot can choose to take any of these narrative progressions. Moreover, Thai BL usually originates online which allows for innovation.

MAME employs different narrative progressions for different ships. AePete follows the typical sweet BL progression. KengklaTechno follows jado and TharnType odo.

TarTum is a sweet BL, complicated by them being step-brothers. While their pairing is barely on odo, Tum as a character has a complicated odo progression within their ship.

Since TharnType is an odo BL all wrong-doings are not punished. Take for example KinnPorsche, another odo BL, where the ending can’t be 'organized crime gets the main characters in jail'. In odo BL involving crime, most of the victims are usually cannon fodders. So, characters are not bothered much by the crime. But in MAME's universe, Tum is an important character, someone designed to make audience root for him. Hence the audience can’t dismiss the crimes against him. It is not wrong to want the narrative to have Lhong jailed. If TharnType was a sweet BL, it would have gone there.

8. selective memory

Selective memory is indicative of preferences and it helps to fine tune BL consumption. MAME's storytelling incorporates diverse elements. Those who enjoy her works also might find that there something or the other that isn't to their taste. This is an important part of BL literacies.

I enjoy dangerous characterizations over subdued ones and prefer a meriba more than a happy ending. While there are plenty of BL media with those, they are super rare in live action. So, I appreciate MAME for taking into account fans who want something different from sweet BL.

Here are the points @bengiyo raised:

9. What Did You Eat Yesterday v/s Old Fashion Cupcake

This has nothing to do with MAME but has to do with BL literacies more generally. Old Fashion Cupcake is more appealing to BL fans because it is a BL and hence not sanitized to continue run on a conservative magazine. So, it permeates moe (affect). Moreover, creators of Old Fashion Cupcake are better informed than creators of What Did You Eat Yesterday in terms of BL literacies. So, the direction and acting works better in the former than the latter.

9. The Effect feeling like the first huge volley leveled at BL from within the genre.

I am always amazed at the takes on the Effect. Somehow it is assumed to be a critique of BL genre. That's not the case. The Effect is a proper jado BL.

What audience are picking up on is the 'I can do it better' spirit that motivates a lot of BL creation. It is natural for audience to feel like the depiction of complex themes, such as sexual abuse, bullying, delinquency, identity theft, murder, infidelity, pregnancy, etc. are not dealt with well. Creating BL that fits one's taste better is one way authors and artists go about addressing the issue. That is how we end up with same theme dealt with in numerous ways. When that expands, we end up with sub-genres and BL categories.

Jado BL are rare, particularly in Thai BL.

It is difficult to sell BL with jado and other narrative progressions. It becomes even more difficult to sell branded pairings when the characters they play are not impeccable. It is unlikely that actors playing bad guys can sell products for advertisers. (Imagine the characters from The Effect being in ads together!) It is even more unlikely that fans would go broke behind wicked characters and would want to attend fan-meetings and concerts featuring them in some way.

This is also so as not to trouble the average audience’s worldview (世界観) and is clearly a low effort and low skill (in terms of BL literacies) approach. But since a lot of audience don’t appreciate villain-like characterization, it is clearly low risk, no chance of a backlash from angry audience and the best method for assured money making.

@respectthepetty has also flagged the next issue:

10. History3: Make Our Days Count.

Gays were being buried and put in prison in Taiwanese BLs in the same year it legalized marriage equality.

There is a lot of ethnocentrism in the hate that MODC gets, apart from lack of BL literacies. While I understand where that take is coming from given American media history in the context of Hayes code, AIDS crisis, etc., I wish media from elsewhere would be looked at independently.

Queer narratives everywhere have their own over-used tropes and historical issues. Malayalam media, for example, has the issue of having one of two queer characters having varathan vibe (Rosy in Ponnaranjanam, Kiran in Sancharram, Antony's boyfriend in Mumbai Police, Kiran in My Life Partner, etc.) that makes them look odd in Kerala's rurban landscape. Even Kaathaloram played into this trope. The problem is that it perpetuates the belief that queerness is an import of sorts.

Mindless application of media critique learned from the west leads to the brushing aside of pertinent issues with media of the region in favor of finding legitimacy via commonality with the west. That way we end up with crits accusing Moothon of employing bury the gay trope while ignoring that:

Moothon is a gangster action flick like Kammattippaadam

It is rare for romances irrespective of the gender of the main characters and genre of the movie to have happy ending in Malayalam. In fact, almost all great love stories in Malayalam movies are tragedies. This is unlike in Hollywood where heterosexual romances usually get happy endings.

more importantly, every queer character, including Latheef, is infused with varathan vibe.

Taiwanese BL has issues worth exploring. Issues of their own media - not varathan queer trope from Malayalam media or bury your gay trope from American media.

MODC was an dealing with well-established BL tropes (like any other show in the History franchise). It explored bereavement (a tribute to Lan Yu, first ever danmei live action adaptation) and substitute lover trope.

The series introduced a doppelgänger of Yu XiGu (Xiang HaoTing’s white moonlight), a perfect candidate for substitute lover trope. But instead of pursuing it, they subverted the trope.

History franchise, which was build to grow BL and BL literacy in Taiwan, ended up victim to prejudice since it failed to measure up to foreign standards. MODC offered something rare. The audience didn't appreciate it. They dismissed it for not measuring up to expectations colored by experiences which danmei is not connected with for historical reasons.

By that standard, would tongzhi literature from Taiwan too have to make amends for sins of the west towards its queers? Imagine stripping of death as a theme from tongzhi author Chiang-Sheng Kuo's works! Then there is also difference in how death is perceived in different societies.

Why must BL be arm-twisted to fit into norms from elsewhere and correct the wrongs of someone else?

11. BL profit off LGBT community

This is really interesting. There are many questions that I can think of that is linked to this take:

Is BL really profitable? Short answer is no. Long answer here.

Is it really LGBT community that BL profits off?

Probably not. It is moe that BL sells. That imo, is the main difference between BL and other queer genres.

Anyway, BL predates LGBT acronym. It predates de-pathologization of homosexuality in many BL creating regions. Fu-people were creating BL before mainstream media started representing queer people in media. Fu-people battled state and its censors everywhere along with queer people. Live action BL surely is commercialized. But that is capitalism reaping the dividends of decades of fu-people's labor of love.

@he-is-lightning-in-a-bottle raised the following point.

12. 2019 saw significant increase in quantity and quality of BL. Since then, live actions smoothed out the rougher edges of the source material (like what happened with Kinnporsche and Love in the Air).

While I understand the rational behind toning down dangerous characterization to appeal to the largest audience, I think that kind of censorship for commercialization limits potential of the genre. The impact is most visible in case of GMMTV BL such as Only Friend (where it could neither be sweet BL nor could it embark properly on jado).

Compare it with adaptation of the ero-BL Sei no Gekiyaku. It stayed true to the content and pushed the boundaries enough to bring about convergence between gay pinku cinema and BL. When BL is allowed to explore its potential freely, it not only imparts BL literacies but also makes it possible for other queer genres to gain new audience, which in turn encourages production houses to venture into different queer genres.

jjsanguine raised the following point.

13. I don't even hate toxic characters or plotlines, actually I love them. But like even if the characters don't know they're doing it, the show should. And it really really doesn't. And neither do the fans. Kind of alarming.

This is in relation to Lhong and San.

Lhong is a yandere in a odo BL. (for detailed discussion see Part 3) It is a matter of the world view and less about show's self-awareness (which I believe it has). If TharnType was an jado BL, Tharn could have ended up with Lhong and Type would be the stalking horse.

@jjsanguine later commented about how Lhong felt "goofy" by way of his over-the-top actions which made the show's convictions questionable.

San and Tharn's relationship was, to an extend, the most realistically depicted. I remember starting to learn about Thai queerness and realizing that a lot of elements in their relationship reads like ethnography. Consider for example Tharn being only fourteen at the time of sexual debut and San being older. This is not too different from the average age of sexual debut in Thailand. Despite it being a compoundable offense, average age of sexual debut is declining. Tharn's discovery of what he likes and dislikes and shedding cuteness (which San comments about) and adopting manliness (which Techno comments about) too is in line with what is observed among urban queer youth. Contrast this with Sky in Love in the Air whose sexual debut and exploitation are tied to his migration to urban landscape. Sky's backstory too read like ethnography and his vulnerability a reflection of the many others' in his society.

@absolutebl raised the following points:

14. Rape - as plot device - doesn't make good stories - lazy & bad writing: Feminist critique and modern narrative analysis.

Feminist and queer BL scholars from Akiko Mizoguchi to James Welker have discussed rape as a plot device in BL. Since experts have written plenty, I'll spare my effort discussing this misconception.

15. rape is an act of sexuality (or worse, sexy), it is NOT - it is an act of violence. But that is only the start to the way it’s chronically mishandled, especially in commercial fiction (of which romance makes the largest percentage). 

Akiko Mizoguchi's two decade of work have addressed this in relation to Japanese BL which I feel holds true for BL more generally. Moreover, BL is not a romance sub-genre. BL is a genre in itself. A lot of BL is romance. There is enough overlap between those genres to give the impression that BL is a romance sub-genre. But there are plenty of other works too. Like One Room Angel and Social Reform Season. Similarly, BL is not a porn sub-genre. A lot of BL is porn. But come on!

16. [MAME] produces consistent highly-profitable narratives by-and-about queer folks but utterly disingenuous to the queer experience and that defines exploitation in the ET industry... Right, just adding that yes BL does not represent (in any way) the reality of being queer in any of these countries.

I have already discussed how MAME's works are intersectional reflections of queer experience. BL has been reflecting different queer experiences in Japan even before the term boys' love emerged. But narrow, ethnocentric ideas of queerness doesn't lend itself to honest understanding of other forms and representation. Consider characters being addressed as เมีย ‘wife’. It is a Thai queer practice. One can always dismiss that since it sounds heterosexist in the culture one comes from as absolutebl does in this post. That, imo, is 'disingenuous to the queer experience' of Thai people.

The question is what are westerners missing in their own countries' queer media that they feel they must just judge everything with no care for the cultures and people producing content for themselves? Seriously, what have the westernization done to some in the audience that they emerge so desperate for queer content that they watch BL yet remain blind to the cultures (fu-culture in particular) that produce them and splooge vitriolic ethnocentrism?

-

That concludes this discourse series. I want to sincerely thank everyone who contributed to and inspired this 🙏.

Other parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Not that one poster but I think the revolution will kill thousands of people because that's historically what has happened in every revolution. Even in Palestine you can see civilians and children being killed for daring to revolt, and the disabled also get left behind to die with no accessible medications or hospitals as they've all been bombed. I don't see a way it could work without this happening though so it ends up being a "Some of you may die but that's a price I'm willing to pay", which... Isn't that different from the other side who's also willing to let others die for their ideology.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/10/27/people-with-disabilities-not-spared-from-israels-war-machine-on-gaza-strip

I wasn't trying to argue that in a revolution, nobody would possibly die. I was trying to figure out why, in that person's mind, the two options seem to be "vote for Kamala" or "tens of millions of people die in a four year long revolutionary bloodbath".

Besides, as was already pointed out, people are already dying under capitalism and imperialism and colonialism. The people of Palestine did not fight back for no good reason, they fought back because they were dying at the hands of the Israeli occupation.

I don't think in the United States specifically we're going to suddenly have mass support for revolutionary socialism in the next four years, but for the same reasons, I don't think Trump is going to be able to magically install a fascist dictatorship by virtue of winning another term.

The conditions that provide opportunities for fascists also provide opportunities for socialists. We are in a minor economic downturn at the moment for sure. Prices are going up, wages are still stagnating, lots of people are having to stretch their budgets. But that's ordinary. We have people dying because they can't afford healthcare, and that's horrific, but it's also mundane. It will take an extraordinary economic crisis to push this country onto the brink, and yet such a crisis is inevitable due to the internal contradictions of capitalism.

The relative comfort and stability that the average US citizen experiences is by virtue of the massive poverty and instability that is inflicted on the average person elsewhere in the world. Capitalism and imperialism siphon wealth and labor from the third world and concentrate it in the first world, and any attempts by the masses in the third world to achieve prosperity and security will necessarily disrupt this process. These tensions will inevitably lead to economic collapse within the US and other first world imperialist nations, and this will happen sooner rather than later. Not four years soon, but I would not be surprised if it happened within the next fifty years.

We are not living in a time of peace that a bunch of insane radical leftists are threatening to upend for the sake of ideological purity. We are living in a time where the contradictions of capitalism are once again coming to a head. We are on the brink of another world war. The victory of capitalist counter-revolutionaries in the last century came at the cost of "tens of millions" of lives. Tolerating the imperialist warmongering of US politicians is inexcusable if we are supposed to care about people's lives.

When Kamala Harris brags about the United States having "the most lethal army in the world", she means it. She is more than willing to sacrifice millions of lives on the altar of US hegemony and US control over other nations. The bourgeoisie know full well what is coming and they are already preparing for it. The best time for us to organize was yesterday, and the second best time is today. The Democrats are the enemies of peace and freedom just as much as the Republicans are, and we should not waste our time acting like the former aren't just as eager and willing to throw the rest of us under the bus as the latter are.

[studsandswords]

The worst part about looking for anarchists on the internet is the main people you find are

1. A liberal who has watched one YouTube video on anarchism (usualy younger and a teenager) and still has many biases they haven’t worked passed as well as giving the most lukewarm takes in history

2. A Marxist Leninist in disguise/ someone who wants to put the exact same systems of government in place except it’s “delegated”, they probably believe in something like the death sentence for “counter revolutionaries” and murderers and haven’t learnt anything from the last century of indigenous, black, feminist, or queer anarchist writings

3. Someone who juts wants to watch the world burn and is no better than a doomer enforcing hegemony

4.someone into a niche anarchist sub-ideology (really into pol-ball and has nihilist or primitivist in their 50 long word ideology in their bio)

The internet could be one of our best tools for collaborating on revolutionary aims and connecting our communities but it seems all it’s used for is to come up with hypotheticals that have been done 1million times or call eating out bourgeoisie.

Right now what we need is imagination, collaboration and to actually do something, the revolution is every second you spend actively building

(Side note, a lot of communism is straight up evangelicalism at a point juts with different language with sin=bourgeois and rapture=revolution)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Striving to enforce new societal norms requires abandoning the illusion of a society in which coercion, authority, and domination are absent. As Polanyi (2001, 266f) notes, any ideal of society that would ban these features – where “power and compulsion are absent” and “force has no function” – “must be invalid”. Here and now, contemporary hegemony of a profit- and growth-oriented economy over other life-sustaining economic zones like care, housing, and sustainable agriculture can only be defeated if other values and interests become hegemonic and structure societal rules, which involves forms of coercion. Lacking this will to rule (at least conceptually), the focus on counter-hegemony makes a degrowth paradigm shift improbable and restrains deeper thinking about symbiotic strategies.

Richard Bärnthaler, Problematising degrowth strategising: On the role of compromise, material interests, and coercion

[rooksamoris]

the saudi-controlled "yemeni" government of the south is putting sanctions on north yemen/ansarallah/houthis due to their opposition to the genocide israel is committing and because of their maritime blockade against the settler colony and its allies.

south yemen is effectively occupied by saudi arabia and the united arab emirates, and has been for years. this "government" is comprised of traitorous scum who sold out the yemeni people for the chance to hide in their saudi mansions while 20 million yemenis live in food insecurity. ansarallah is the only government in the region that has opposed western capitalism, genocide, and american hegemony and now its people are expected to pay the price. the saudi-controlled government of aden has stated that if yemeni banks in north yemen do not move their operations to south yemen, they will be charged with counter-terrorism financing and money laundering claims. mind you, 70-80 percent of yemen's population lives in north yemen, aka the ansarallah/houthi government territories.

these sanctions and charges will kill millions of yemenis, all because saudi's dick riding america. they are accomplices in this genocide against the palestinians. glory to the palestinian resistance and glory to ansarallah. boycott the uae, boycott saudi arabia, boycott israel, its the least you can fucking do while our people pay the price of militarily opposing genocide.

and, as a reminder, saudi arabia is one of the biggest purchasers of arms from the united arab emirates, their ally in the occupation and destabilization of yemen. the same united arab emirates committing massacres in sudan, the same country which is making it so that soon 10,000 sudanese people will be dying daily, the same country profiting off of this by stealing sudanese metals, such as gold. this is the united arab emirates that is destroying socotra island (yemen) and exploiting the people for tourism. stop taking trips to fucking dubai.

[dipperdesperado]

Radicalism 100: Get Started from 0 or, How the Hell Do I Get into Organizing as a Newbie?

I spend a lot of time talking about social change stuff. I feel like a lot of it might not be accessible unless you’re already one who sees yourself as a changemaker. Let’s change that. Let’s talk about how to prefigure the world you want to see, even if you don’t have any experience.

Before I do that though, I want to do some quick framing. I am coming from the place of someone who has some relatively specific foundational values that I prioritize and act from. I believe in horizontalism, mutual aid, solidarity, autonomy, joy, love, and transformative justice. I don’t brandish human nature as a weapon against better futures. If you have a view of people and or society that is purely of negation, then we probably won’t see eye-to-eye. If you think that domination and bootlicking is also necessary, then we definitely won’t see eye-to-eye. Hopefully, you’re curious or open to working towards egalitarian goals through egalitarian means. If you are, this might be useful to you.

How Social Change Happens

There is a lot of talk about social change and a lot of different opinions on how that change occurs. A useful framework to work from is one that imma remix from Joanna Macy.

Harm Reduction and Stalling → This is where giving, charity, and advocacy work live. Think of the survival programs that the Black Panthers did. These are good things, and they provide immediate benefits to folks. However, it’s not radical, as far as the meaning of the word goes. So, it’s great (and necessary!) to organize a mutual aid group that does food distro. What that doesn’t do is address why your group has to do that in the first place. This is something that ideally allows you to survive as you prepare to make bigger changes.

Systems change and Social Revolution → This is where the good shit happens. It is understanding the terrain you fight upon, what you’re fighting against, and finding the weak points to create and widen spaces of autonomy and liberation. This is where we decide how we act within the systems, how we change those systems through collective action, and how we build counter-systems to delegitimize the oppressive ones.

Rebuilding Mental Models → To create a new world, we have to become different people. I don’t mean that in an inactive way—through the practice of harm reduction and fighting the system, we realize our own power and become more capable of creating the world that we want. As we reconnect with reality, and illegitimate the current hegemony, we become more able to see the path ahead. The great and terrible thing is that we have to walk that path.

These are the three buckets that encompass our work ahead. Maybe a better way to think of them would not be as distinct buckets, but as spaces or zones of activity with permeable edges, where specific actions are occupying multiple buckets at a time, and where we travel from zone to zone, bringing information from previous legs of the journey. Stated differently, doing harm reduction might lead you to changing your mental models which might lead you to working towards systems change which might change your mental models which might improve your harm reduction efforts and so on and so on.

With that (admittedly open-ended) theory of change established, let’s get into some practical things you can do to get started. Again, this is built for if you’re not sure of where to begin. This will, hopefully, allow you to get started from 0 (which in my mind is you saying something to the effect of “damn, I know the world is cooked. What the hell do I do?”). Maybe you’ve heard people answer that inquiry with “Organize!”, which isn’t very useful. So let’s talk about that: how to start organizing and be successful when you don’t have the background or confidence yet.

Step 0: Read!

I am a big proponent of praxis (practice informed by theory) over theory or practice alone. Just reading doesn’t change the world, and just doing stuff may lead to some happy accidents. If you have to pick one, do stuff, I guess? But, we don’t have to do that. We can read, do stuff, review the successes and failures, and repeat. In order to not trap you in one mode or another, I’ve recommended a couple of things that should give you a good foundation for more readings and more actions.

Why We Should Democratize Everything

Radical Municipalism | The Anarchist Library

Modules - Economics for Emancipation (economics4emancipation.net)

Once you read these, you’ll be able to know that the world can look different than it does right now, and that there are tangible things that you can do to make that happen.

Step 1: Figure out Your Interest(s)

The next move is to understand what you’re interested in. It can be easy to feel like you have to participate in a certain kind of fight… but the reality is that if you pick an area that you already have an affinity for, you’ll be able to engage with it more sustainably. And hopefully, if you get some wins, you’ll be able to engage and support other important sites of struggle. For me, broadly speaking, my goal is to create solarpunk autonomous zones IRL, in the heart of the empire (the so-called United States). For my interests, the main areas of affinity + need within the solarpunk umbrella are:

Building Intentional Communities (like communes and ecovillages and shit)

Radical Urbanism (Tactical Urbanist projects, Tenants organizing, occupations)

Creative Care and Joy (Mutual aid, herbalism, medicine, etc)

Community Resiliency Training (CERT, Self-defense, Wildtending, Urban Foraging)

If that seems broad, blame it on the ADHD. I put time into each of these areas to try and build towards my solarpunk goals at the local level. You don’t have to be as eclectic as I am, but think about the things that get you excited, and go after those things.

Step 2: Get a Lay of the Land (find folks and people who are doing the cool stuff)

Once you’ve searched your soul and excavated some insight, you can begin your fun. Try and find people in your area who are into the stuff you’re into. If you like the idea of mutual aid, find a local food not bombs chapter (and encourage them to work towards system change!). If you like environmental stuff, look for groups that you feel like embodying the values you're developing. Some good ways to do this are:

Finding social medias. I like to find the most popular version for the thing I’m trying to do and excavate other groups from that. For example, I do some organizing work with an Indigenous education group here, and since it’s a tight-knit organizing community, I can use their IG to find other orgs. This also works well for in-person stuff.

Pull up to events. Try to show up to marches, protests (if you’re ready), and popular education events and look for folks representing the ideas you’re interested in. Folks tend to have flags, pins, and outfits at those sorts of things that let you know where they stand. I’d specifically look for Libertarian Socialist groups, Anarchist groups, and communalist groups. I’d also look into solidarity networks.

Step 3: Start working with folks!

Once you find some folks, start working with them if you like the vibe! You’d be surprised at how much you can learn. I moved about a year ago, and I learned so much by diving into the organizing community. Imma be moving again, and now I can carry those learnings forward into my new communities. Ideally, you’re getting involved in actions, doing study groups, and growing your confidence.

Step 4: Do an analysis of your place!

As you get more comfortable and you start to understand where you’re at, you can start working more intentionally toward system change. This is something that folks don’t do nearly enough, but if you can pull it off well, it’ll be well worth the time. The goal is to understand the challenges and opportunities present in your place. This is very much a whole area to explore, but you can start by looking into Asset-based community development and Community-based participatory research to create a guide of sorts for your community to follow. This is an area that I’m currently working on, and it helps contextualize your actions.

Step 5: Dive deep!

At this point, you might be ready for bigger actions or more capacity building. You might even be ready to steward a campaign. Just know, this is work that doesn’t really have an end; we can always strive for more. If you take nothing else away, know these two things:

Everyone has the capability to steward in a new future.

Surround yourself with genuine community to keep you going.

If you can approach this work with confidence and community, you’ll be able to weather any storm.

[albertserra]

I really think Americans need to learn more about other countries in the global south. Rather than replying with things like well our (us Americans’) government is awful and exploits the poor and persecutes racial and other minorities and we don’t have accessible healthcare and our infrastructure sucks and our militarized police kill and assault and harass people daily and on and on and on (all of which are of course true!)… instead take some time to understand where someone from the global south’s frustrations are coming from and look at the living standards, the government and police force, etc. Are for them.

Their governments can also treat them awfully *on top* of being colonized (in the traditional and neo- sense) and exploited and pillaged by america and other western countries. Thai student protestors being murdered by their right wing military government, indigenous Vietnamese peoples being persecuted by the Vietnamese government and military, Egyptians not being allowed to protest as just came up recently with brave people coming out to do so anyway in solidarity with Palestine. Read about what Bolsonaro did in Brazil while he was president. To name just a few examples. All while American/European hegemony and exploitation mean food is less accessible and what Americans consider “basic” technology costs multiple times as much relatively and their labor is constantly exploited etc.

Instead of countering with examples of life in America also sucking for a lot of us, learn about the conditions that people from the global south are living in that make them rightfully despise America