#create a problem then solve that problem that's the capitalist way

[imaveryevilenby]

it's been months but I'm still upset abt the fact there were SEVERAL banks in the Chicago pride parade

remember guys companies and banks are run with profit in mind, the minute they think supporting gay people won't make them a profit, they'll go right back to hating our fucking guts

honestly would not be surprised if the same companies that walk in pride parades are the ones that lobby the government for less gay and trans rights

[autolenaphilia]

I don’t care about accusations of ”pedophilia.” I will not give a fuck, I won't investigate your claims, I will just ignore it.

For one thing the accusation of pedophilia is often entirely meaningless. This is because pedophile/pedo etc are words that carry the taint of child rape, of calling up the disgust such an act naturally produces, but are accusations that don’t require such an act or a victim of it. If you call someone a “child rapist” that has weight, but you also have to back it up with a victim this person supposedly raped for the accusation to actually be meaningful. But words like “pedophile” carries no such demands, it literally just means “someone who has an attraction to children.” It doesn’t require an actual victim. It’s an accusation about how someone feels in their head and can thus be liberally applied. Someone criticizes your asinine submarine idea to rescue some children in a cave? Call them a pedo. And even words that once had a more specific meaning, such as “grooming” can be stretched beyond all meaning to mean whatever it wants to. Someone talked to under-18 people about sex and gender in a way you don’t want to? Call them a groomer.

In a culture of pedohysteria, pedojacketing is easy. And it’s especially easy to weaponize it against queer people, the idea that queerness spreads through queers recruiting children by molesting them is one of the oldest queerphobic narrativeness out there. I’m using “queer” here because this is a narrative used both against gay and trans people. But in the present transphobic/transmisogynistic backlash it’s most often used against trans people, especially transfems, as transmasc people are more often infantilized.

But on a more deeper level “pedophilia” is the wrong framing of the real problem of child sex abuse. It’s literally a medical term, a diagnosis. It makes child sex abuse a problem of some sick individuals with a diseased attraction.

This is of course a bad and antifeminist understanding of what rape and sexual violence is. It’s an inevitable and natural expression of power. The widespread rape of women is caused by the patriarchy, of men having power over women. And the misogynist oppression of women with sexual violence naturally extends to young girls. But all children are disempowered in our society. Adults have power over them in the patriarchal family, in the capitalist school system and other institutions of our society. Sexual violence against children flows from the power adults institutionally and systemically have over them. The vast majority of sexual violence towards children comes from the family and schools, not the “stranger danger” of creepy weirdoes hiding in bushes.

This is the reality that the framing of sexual violence as the result of sick individuals with a diseased attraction obscures. And it inevitably calls for a reactionary carceral and psychiatric response, justifying the police, prisons and psychiatric institutions. That’s why “what will we then do with the pedophiles?” is such a popular clichéd response to prison and police abolitionism. This very framing of the problem calls for a carceral response. If the problem of child sex abuse is sick individuals instead of the system, if we constantly root out and punish individuals we will eventually solve the problem.

In reality carceral responses actually make the problem of sexual violence much worse. The police, prisons and involuntary psychiatric hospitals are violent expressions of power and thus create the conditions for rape.

Pedohysteria is constantly used to justify the expansion of state power. Here in European Union we have had a legislative push to ban end-to-end encryption and make all online communication accessible to law enforcement, total online surveillance. And the reasoning is because otherwise pedophiles can use e2e communication to secretly send child porn to each other without the police being able to do anything, which is of course true, that does and will happen, but doesn’t justify killing all online privacy. This “chat control” act is literally called “regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse.”

The pedohysteria also justifies vigilantism, which tumblr callout culture is part of and is also a deeply reactionary and even fascist phenomenon. Vigilantism rests on the idea that what the police do is right, but they are not doing it well enough, because they are too reigned in by liberal ideas such as laws and regulations and the courts. So random people should take on the role of police to punish “criminals”, like pedophiles. And this goes through tumblr callout culture. A subtext running through pedojacketing callouts of transfems is the idea that transmisogyny does not exist and does not lead to transfems being disproportionately punished, but instead transfems are using their minority status to get away with sex crimes.

This standard conservative rhetoric about how liberals often literally let minorities get away with murder justifies their reactionary vigilantism. Of course in reality, transfems are far less likely to commit sexual abuse of children than other groups of people, because we are systematically excluded from the very institutions where such abuse happens, such as parenthood/the family or schools, because of the transmisogynist stereotype that we are all perverted child rapists. And the callouts of transfems as sex predators are in themselves abusive and protect actual abusers, just like how police and prisons are.

So no, I will continue to not give a fuck if you call someone a pedophile.

[anim-ttrpgs]

something I don’t get about the disability metaphor is that for eureka monsters obviously it harms another person to eat them. the help a disabled person needs doesn’t actively harm or kill another person. Maybe it’s a difference in perspectives that cannot be resolved

(What I’m about to write could potentially sound very fucked up at first so I’m going to need to trust everyone to read the whole thing before forming an opinion.)

Also this message and response references these two posts.

Eureka’s stance on disabled people is that they (including myself writing this) are, or at least can often be, burdens.

Disabled people often require more resources to live than they are able to “give back,” which, in our capitalist and artificial-scarcity-based economy, is just about the worst thing a person can do.

Anti-ableism sentiment often focuses on the idea that “disabled people aren’t burdens, that they’re just as good and capable as everyone else,” but if they were, they wouldn’t be “disabled” would they? When you say stuff like that, you’re conceding that a person’s worth is determined by how capable they are at doing work, and then having to bend over backwards to justify thinking that a person without arms is just as valuable as a person with arms. Eureka is asking you to decouple a person’s value from how much net resources they can produce.

Often times also, the resources that real disabled people consume are human resources, and those human resources are very much capable of suffering for it. Nurses are overworked, around-the-clock care is absolutely physically and mentally exhausting, people who have to care for their elderly or otherwise disabled relatives on top of their regular jobs don’t get to have social lives or hobbies, etc.

To this end, we wrote the monsters in Eureka to be unquestionably people who “cause damage” to society by literally eating up human resources, because they have to to live, they have no other choice unless they want to just die. Your friend is gone from your life because he has to spend all his free time caring for his comatose wife after a freak car accident. Your friend is gone from your life because a vampire randomly ate him. Providing a metaphor isn't all the monsters are doing, they just work well through that lens.

And then Eureka forces you to look at these people as people, and make up your mind as to whether they have value and a right to prologue their own existence. We can’t force you to agree that they do, but if you think they don’t, then you’ll have to make that argument looking at an intelligent person with a life rather than a pure hypothetical or statistics on a chart.

There are some monsters in Eureka where, if the economy or societal structures were changed, they would stop being such severe drains on resources and could exist harmlessly within society, and there are some monsters where no imaginable amount of societal change would solve the problems they cause. This is true of disabled people IRL as well. Some of them would require no further assistance with living if certain things about society changed, and others would still require a massive amount of human resources.

And even when it’s not necessarily human resources, the extra resources that disabled people need also cause huge energy expenditure and create huge amounts of plastic waste, which are things that contribute to global warming and pollution, which do have significant harmful effects on everyone’s lives. Despite this, they are still “worth it” to keep around.

As for actively causing harm, that happens too. I randomly scrolled past this post after we got this message and saved it so I could link it here.

This person and their family had to cause a big stink in a restaurant just to get an accommodation that they needed, and to us reading it from their perspective, we’re obviously on their side, but I can assure you that the overworked staff at that restaurant didn’t see it that way. They saw the disabled person as an aggressive Karen whom they would never in a million years want to have to provide customer service to. The disabled person & family had to get aggressive, and ruin the staff’s day, to get what they needed. That’s actively causing harm - harm we all agreed was justified to cause - but harm nonetheless.

Plastic straws aren’t that big of a deal for global pollution, but even if they were, the point is that this person still would have needed a straw. It doesn’t line up one-to-one, because metaphors rarely do, but a vampire asking if they can drink someone’s blood, and being told No, may find themselves in much the same position. (And if you bring up that some people find vampires really sexy, you’re missing the point. “I would give them a straw if they had sex with me.” is not actually a great thing to announce about yourself.)

I can also come up with an example from my own life. I personally am very sensitive to noise and noise pollution. If there’s music playing at a public space, I usually can’t handle it. (Earplugs don’t work for other reasons I won’t get into - plus, if I just deafen myself to all sound, how can I socialize with anyone in this public space?)

If I want to exist in this space, I will have to actively cause harm to everyone there, or else stop existing in that space. I will have to go up to whoever is responsible and ask them to turn off the music, actively taking it away from everyone else who was enjoying it. I have to take action to ruin their good time if I want to exist in that space at all, and they might, very understandably, be pissed off at me for doing that. Because, like I said in this other post, the people that monsters eat do have a right to prevent themselves from being eaten by monsters. We aren't proposing that the solution is everyone has to line up to be mauled to death by monsters or else they're a bad person.

Who has a greater right to enjoy themselves in that space? That’s the kind of question that Eureka poses, and makes you consider both sides as human being rather than denoting one as just an ontologically evil villain to be destroyed.

We actually don't know of perfect solutions to all the problems presented by the existance of monsters in Eureka, we just know that "exterminate all people who are parasites and burdens to society" ain't it.

[fat-fuck-hairy-belly]

Sociology should be a mandatory course for all STEM students. The amount of people that think we just need "technology” to solve all our problems is frankly scary. Take basically any problem we face today and the root cause is always societal. You could create some magical new technology that creates 100% free and clean electricity with no cost to operate it or to distribute it, and the capitalists will still find a way to monopolize and monetize it. You could make a miracle machine that builds houses out of thin air at no cost and we'd still have a housing crisis. You can completely automate the production of absolutely everything and people will still have to spend 90% of their life working for pennies to survive. Every time we've developed some new technology that's meant to make our lives better the capitalists just used it to further consolidate their power. Advancement in technology without appropriate societal changes don't make things better. You can go back to 100AD and give Romans all the modern weapons and medicine and fertilizer and shit, and the Roman empire will still fall, because they'll just continue killing each other in constant civil wars and resulting famines and plagues, except now they'll do it with F16s.

[gamer-goo]

I think while we make jokes and such abt the disco elysium like “are women bourgeois” understanding of things that some “baby leftists” or “anti capitalists” as it were have, and believe me I have more than my fair share of problems with those descriptors they’re just useful shorthand, but it’s important to recognize that the idea of “human rights” comes from a uniquely liberal legal framework, and to focus too much on the enshrinement of them within legal systems is to miss the forest for the trees. That the systems of Capital and Empire and Hegemony(but I repeat myself) have the capacity to violate these rights is proof enough that they are threats that can’t be solved by just Making Badism Illegal. Obviously it’s a useful framework because Of its familiarity to general audiences but we should always be working to escape it. That’s why you don’t really see like a crystallized “lgbt community” in places like China in the same ways you do in the west. The PRC, through Marxist Leninism and the CCP’s expansions on it, created a landscape where the Legal and Economic subjugation of these minorities is very difficult if not outright impossible.

Simply put, don’t play the game and you don’t get trapped by its rules.

[evillinuxuser]

Dear American leftist.

So you want to make the world better. Please here me out.

You recognize that your parties are ultimately just capitalist racists/sexists/lgbt-phobes and capitalist collaborators/copagandists/war criminals. You want to tear this system to the ground (understandably), just have a revolution and build a new one, a democratic-socialist utopia.

That's not gonna happen yet.

Most Americans want to make the world better. But they will not agree with you on the means or even the end goal.

And you *can't have a revolution* without widespread support (or at least most people not being outright hostile to your end goal - the dirty word socialism). Your current representative system is going to remain for some time still. Your president will have power and they will have the largest and most dangerous power over minorities and marginalized people.

It is important who gets to wield this power.

It is important who gets to appoint the next Supreme Court justices. Even if Democrats don't really care about abortion rights and are just using it as a talking point - their appontees consistently rule in favor of women. This applies equally to race and LGBT issues, and to the legislative and executive branches.

On Palestine and lesser evils

I feel like the most important or one of the most important reasons for leftists who do not vote is the situation in Gaza and independence for Palestine and the lack of action on part of the Dems.

I will not actually talk policy here because even if you think both will do equally bad things for Palestine, you just cannot reason that this means both parties are equal or equally bad. Let me draw you a table (tumblr doesn't have tables?):

How the fuck is there no lesser evil here?

If you do not vote for Dems for the sake of your conscience, you are either a coward who is too immature to make hard decisions or you plain *do not care* for LGBT people, women, PoC, or immigrants.

(Footnote: Dems wont solve your existing racism problems. But people will suffer due to government inaction rather than government WANTING them to suffer and actively using its resources to create more suffering)

You're the guy in the trolley problem NOT pulling the lever to save four lives. Sure, it would be PREFERRABLE if there were no PEOPLE TIED TO THE TRACKS. But they are right now and the state of being tied to a track is called marginalization.

Voting third party does not help.

Your system is rigged against you to allow only two parties.

See this video for explanation.

By not voting, or voting third party, you are saving no one (except your own conscience, selfishly). Vote and then do some more actually useful stuff.

How the fuck does voting impact your ability to organize politically in other ways? Do you think low voter turnout will somehow convince both Reps and Dems that actually, they're both illegitimate and willing to give way to a new system now? Obviously not?!

So you want to make the world better. This is not what US elections are for. They are for slowing down the world getting worse. Thanks for reading all of that. Sincerely, and in a deep worry tumblr user evillinuxuser (Not an American)

[dailyanarchistposts]

From September 20 to 27, tens of thousands will take to the streets to denounce the causes of climate change and call on governments to address what may be the most drastic crisis facing humanity in the 21st century. These mass actions will showcase the growing anger of a new generation that has known nothing but crisis, war, and the threat of environmental collapse. We have prepared the following text as a flier encouraging climate activists to consider how to interrupt the causes of climate change via direct action rather than petitioning the state to solve the problem for us. Please print these out and distribute them at climate protests and everywhere else you can.

Finally, people are filling the streets to call on governments to address the climate crisis, the most serious threat facing humanity in the 21st century. This is long overdue. But what good will it do to petition the same sector of society that created this problem? Time and again, we have learned that the state does not exist to serve our needs but to protect those who are profiting on the causes of this crisis.

The most effective way to pressure politicians and executives to address the climate crisis is to show that whatever they fail to do, we will do ourselves. This means moving beyond symbolic displays of “non-violence” to build the capacity to shut down the fossil fuel economy ourselves. No amount of media attention or progressive rhetoric can substitute for this. If we fail to build this capacity, we can be sure that the timeline for the transition to less destructive technologies will be set by those who profit on the fossil fuel economy.

Several examples from recent social movements show that we have the power to shut down the economy ourselves.

In 2011–2012, the Occupy Movement demonstrated that tens of thousands of people could make decisions without top-down organization, meeting their needs collectively and carrying out massive demonstrations. On one day of action, participants shut down ports up and down the West Coast, confirming that coordinated blockades can disrupt the global supply chain of energy and commodities.

In 2016, people converged to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline, a corporate project threatening Native land and water. Tens of thousands established a network of camps to block construction, demonstrating a new way to live and fight together. The Obama administration canceled the pipeline, causing many occupiers to go home, but the Trump administration reinstated it—confirming that we must never count on the government to do anything for us.

In France, occupiers blocked the construction of a new airport at la ZAD, the “Zone to Defend.” Farmers teamed up with anarchists and environmentalists, establishing an autonomous village that provided infrastructure for the struggle. After years of struggle, the French government gave up and canceled the airport.

We have seen train blockades in a variety of struggles. In Olympia, Washington, anarchists blocked trains carrying fracking proppants in 2016 and in 2017, forcing the company to stop transporting the commodity. In Harlan County, Kentucky, coal miners have blocked a coal-carrying train after the Black Jewel company refused to pay wages they owed to workers. It only takes a few dozen people to shut down a key node in the supply chains of the global fossil fuel economy. Imagine what we could do on a bigger scale!

Governments serve to protect the economy from those it exploits. The state exists to evict, to police, to wage war, to oppress, and above all to defend the property of the wealthy few. The perils of climate change have been known for years, but governments have done little in response, focusing instead on fighting wars for oil, militarizing their borders to keep out climate refugees, and attacking the social movements that could bring about the sort of systemic change that is our only hope of survival.

The capitalist economy is literally killing us. Let’s begin the process of shutting it down.

Another end of the world is possible!

[txttletale]

genuine question: how do you reconcile police abolition with marxism-leninism? isn't having police a notable feature of marxist leninist regimes? this isn't a gotcha I'm just curious about how you reconcile this or what flaws exist in my conception of marxism-leninism

so there's an obvious theoretical answer to this, a more in-depth theoretical answer to this, and a practical answer that derives from the latter. the obvious theoretical answer is that my police abolitionist stance is based on the role of the bourgeois police force as enforcers of private property law--as the front line of class warfare against the working class. there is a material difference in the incentives and structures of a socialist police force operating on behalf of the working class as an organ of class warfare against the bourgeoisie.

but this isn't a complete and satisfying answer. i mean, obviously. the idea that the soviet militsiya and nkvd were in any way worse than the tsarist police and secret poice that came before them--or, for that matter, meaningfully worse than contemporary capitalist police forces, or the capitalist police forces in the post-soviet bourgeois states--is an anticommunist fabrication. but the idea that the militsiya was without its problems, that ordinary citizens did not have to worry about effectively unaccountable brutality in their interactions with these bodies, is also pretty detached from material reality. i think we can safely establish that the existence of a proletarian state alone isn't enough to solve the problems of a police force.

so what's the more complex theoretical approach? well, in a little number called state & revolution, v.i. lenin talks about 'special bodies of armed men' as opposed to 'self-acting armed organisations'--essentially drawing the conclusion that the former (police & military) were essentially removed from accountability--by virtue of their unique position and special privileges afforded to them by their uniforms, they're able to act as if and consider themselves as external to society, and so they're invariably doomed to be detached from the working class even if they are operating in their ostensible interest. meanwhile, the 'self-acting armed organization' is more like a militia, in the traditional sense of being fundamentally made up of ordinary people. this was why the militsiya was named that, because although it did ultimately develop into a 'special body of armed men' it began life as a revolutionary milita.

& i want to be clear that the importance of the self-acting armed organization is not an embrace of 'community justice' or whatever thinly veiled mob justice in a nice hat that anarchists like to sing the praises of. these militias should still be organized and structured, so that they can be accountable. but the importance of them being self-acting organizations instead of special bodies of armed men is that they are not removed from society. lenin discussed at length the example of the paris commune, and how civil servants within the commune were paid exactly the same as anyone else--and discussed how the advancement of both technology and education could create a world in which any citizen could (and therefore, indeed, would) take up a role in the administration of their society.

i think it therefore follows from what lenin wrote that the theoretical model of policing as self-acting armed organizations should result in a socialist state in which nobody is professionally, as a career, a 'police officer'. the work that constitutes 'policing' in a post-revolutionary society should be simple enough that anybody can and does do it--not on pure self-initiative but in a mobilized and organized fashion. this prevents the elevation of police to a body 'above society' and therefore capable of and even inclined to performi mass violence against that society.

and of course, the eternal question for marxists, what does this look like in practice: i think there have been succesful and interesting experiments in this sort of thing in socialist projects across the globe. most notably, i think that the cuban committees for the defense of the revolution are a good place to start, & so are mao's eight points of attention and three rules of discipline & the processes (not always succesful) to create accountability to the masses among the red guards and red army during and after the chinese civil war.

& of course, once there are no more classes, there will be no need for a state, or an apparatus to suppress the bourgeoisie more generally, and so the police will wither away with the rest of it.

[the-bramble--patch]

I’ve been seeing a few posts on minimalism going around, one being @bisquitt’s post on sustainability and minimalism—how the two terms shouldn’t be conflated, and how real sustainability is about anti-capitalism in the forms of reuse, repair, and community interdependence. Another is @allstrangeandwonderful’s post on how Minimalism is an aesthetic based around coping in the "corporate hellscape" we live in—contemporary designers gravitate towards neutral colors as a respite from the warlike corporate use of color to catch the attention of a consumer (See Mina Le's video on this concept also. She offers up a few possible reasons for this trend towards "greige" interiors, one being the inundation from advertising we experience in our everyday lives).

I wanted to talk about these concepts and tie in some other things I’ve been seeing around.

Imo, minimalism is anti-consumerist, but not anti-capitalist. The lifestyle and aesthetic is intended to address the systemic problem of living in a consumerist society on an individual level. Instead of ending the capitalist system that thrusts consumerism on us all, it suggests that minimalists create a safe space away from consumerism. It is not interested in changing the system, only the individual. What really drove this home for me was watching The Financial Diet on YouTube interview The Minimalists, the guys who kicked off the trend. She keeps trying to ask them about the underlying issues Minimalism acts as a band-aid for, and they keep dodging her questions.

The lifestyle choices bisquitt offers up as sustainable are typically lumped under the umbrella of Solarpunk: “fixing shit around your house. thrifting. patching clothes and handing them down. a community garden. potluck dinner parties. farmer’s markets. a barter system among friends and neighbors. kindness. love among community members.“ These things do not conform to the minimalist aesthetic tenets of order, function, and simplicity. They are often vibrant, mismatched, and chaotic, messy even (see my post on solarpunk aesthetics here). This is because solarpunk aims to solve the same issues minimalism does, but on a societal level. Solarpunk is working towards a utopian future of degrowth, where the forces that Minimalism is in opposition to will no longer exist. This allows for everyday people to reclaim vibrancy from corporations. That busyness is only desirable in a world where capitalism isn't such a burden. Solarpunk advocates for simplicity in all but design, instead of the other way around.

Another thing is the separation between meaning and function present in Minimalism. Minimalism is often associated with deriving pleasure from experiences, not things. The physical space is deprioritized (I know the movement is about changing the physical space, but the idea is that the physical space just makes your life more efficient) for a kind of zen outlook about mind over matter. Solarpunk is much more holistic in its recognition that inner peace comes from a play between the external and internal worlds—from connection and respect for people, things, and resources. Instead of removing meaning and beauty from a space to prioritize the mind, Solarpunk instills it, to elicit interaction with the world instead of a retreat from it. Thus, Solarpunk rolls meaning and function into one: a visibly mended shirt is both functional (the hole is gone), and meaningful (it says much more about the politics of the wearer than one mended invisibly). Another example is the bottle walls commonly used in Earthships: Making the bottles visible is beautiful, and it communicates that the builder is interested in using sustainable material.

In short, minimalism is individualist while Solarpunk is collectivist, and the aesthetics of each reflect that. Retreating from a broken society will not fix said society. Sustainability needs to be solved on a societal level, so minimalism as a solution to overconsumption just isn't gonna cut it.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

March 14, 1883: Death of Comrade Karl Marx, communist revolutionary and founder of scientific socialism.

Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx:

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep – but for ever.

An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated – and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially – in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.

Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.

For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm

[joy-haver]

In my experience, from what I’ve read, and from talking to older activists, left wing movements are only funded in a few ways;

1. ⁠Crime. And this is getting harder to do in most places.

2. ⁠Well paid professionals who happen to be leftists living below their means, and collectively supporting things. This is also getting harder as professionals are less well paid in many places than they used to be.

3. ⁠Those who are born into generational wealth using it to support the movement. This is hard because it comes with a lot of complicated power dynamics.

None of these are uncomplicated, or easy, or perfect. But, in our capitalist reality, every movement needs some money and resources to be able to do what it needs to do. Be efficacious with it, do what helps the most for the least harm, and put it into stuff that will continue to create a basis from which people can build the movement, even if they don’t get more money from somewhere in the future.

I’m not sure about what it’s like where you live, but where I live, the best way to spend money towards these causes would be to find people who are already very serious and interested in either: 1)agroecology/foodforrestry or 2) at cost collective housing - Help them to establish these services in ways that require as little financial upkeep possible over time, and provide free or at cost services to many people. The point isn’t to make a profit, but that also means there won’t be a big pool of money to fix problems if they come up, so you have to plan well, and people have to be committed to collective problem solving, and collectively putting away resources for long term maintenance, and to get through hard times.

The goal should be to severely decrease the cost of living for many people, so that they can then do things for free for the wider community, or so that they can save up more money for similar projects, or repairs on existing one, or emergency mutual aid.

It’s not something that’s easy, and you’ll need to think about it for a very long time. Lucky for you, most people who will be in a situation to put a large amount of funds to a project like this will have a while before this money gets to you, or until it is saved up enough to help.

You’ll have to find other people who are interested, and not taking advantage of you. At the same time, the hardest thing might be unlearning the desire to control. You have to come in with a plan and a vision, but you also can’t use your money like a weapon to make everyone listen to you. You will start with a plan. What actually happens will be the collective plan of many people, and look very different than what you came in with. This is good.

But there is a balance to be struck between doing something useful, and listening to everyone who shows up. Try to find people who really want to be involved, but Moreso, try to find people who really want to build the same future as you. Spend time together thinking, researching, imagining, and talking to others who are less directly benefiting, but also want the same collective future.

[mesetacadre]

In order to solve the second and most difficult part of the problem, the proletariat, after having defeated the bourgeoisie, must unswervingly conduct its policy towards the peasantry along the following fundamental lines. The proletariat must separate, demarcate the working peasant from the peasant owner, the peasant worker from the peasant huckster, the peasant who labours from the peasant who profiteers. In this demarcation lies the whole essence of socialism. And it is not surprising that the socialists who are socialists in word but petty-bourgeois democrats in deed (the Martovs, the Chernovs, the Kautskys and others) do not understand this essence of socialism. The demarcation we here refer to is an extremely difficult one, because in real life all the features of the “peasant”, however diverse they may be, however contradictory they may be, are fused into one whole. Nevertheless, demarcation is possible; and not only is it possible, it inevitably follows from the conditions of peasant farming and peasant life. The working peasant has for ages been oppressed by the landowners, the capitalists, the hucksters and profiteers and by their state, including even the most democratic bourgeois republics. Throughout the ages the working peasant has trained himself to hate and loathe these oppressors and exploiters, and this “training”, engendered by the conditions of life, compels the peasant to seek an alliance with the worker against the capitalist and against the profiteer and huckster. Yet at the same time, economic conditions, the conditions of commodity production, inevitably turn the peasant (not always, but in the vast majority of cases) into a huckster and profiteer. The statistics quoted above reveal a striking difference between the working peasant and the peasant profiteer. That peasant who during 1918-19 delivered to the hungry workers of the cities 40,000,000 poods of grain at fixed state prices, who delivered this grain to the state agencies despite all the shortcomings of the latter, shortcomings fully realised by the workers’ government, but which were unavoidable in the first period of the transition to socialism—that peasant is a working peasant, the comrade and equal of the socialist worker, his most faithful ally, his blood brother in the fight against the yoke of capital. Whereas that peasant who clandestinely sold 40,000,000 poods of grain at ten times the state price, taking advantage of the need and hunger of the city worker, deceiving the state, and everywhere increasing and creating deceit, robbery and fraud—that peasant is a profiteer, an ally of the capitalist, a class enemy of the worker, an exploiter. For whoever possesses surplus grain gathered from land belonging to the whole state with the help of implements in which in one way or another is embodied the labour not only of the peasant but also of the worker and so on— whoever possesses a surplus of grain and profiteers in that grain is an exploiter of the hungry worker. You are violators of freedom, equality, and democracy—they shout at us on all sides, pointing to the inequality of the worker and the peasant under our Constitution, to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, to the forcible confiscation of surplus grain, and so forth. We reply—never in the world has there been a state which has done so much to remove the actual inequality, the actual lack of freedom from which the working peasant has been suffering for centuries. But we shall never recognise equality with the peasant profiteer, just as we do not recognise “equality” between the exploiter and the exploited, between the sated and the hungry, nor the “freedom” for the former to rob the latter. And those educated people who refuse to recognise this difference we shall treat as whiteguards, even though they may call themselves democrats, socialists, internationalists, Kautskys, Chernovs, or Martovs.

Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, V. I. Lenin, 1919

[warsofasoiaf]

Harris' economic "plan" is populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-investor. "Price gouging" is just whining about corporate profits and keeping new housing from going to investors is openly Socialist. I can't and won't support the dissolution of capitalism and trust you won't either.

That's clearly bait and falling into the all-too-common progressive false dichotomy of "you either support my policies or you're just a tool of big business and thus safe to disregard," a fallacy that largely dominates progressive thinking and sadly inhibits proper debate. But that being said, Harris's recent proposed economic plans are actually quite stupid from an economics perspective. Sadly, Trump and Harris are both racing to see who can create the stupidest economic policy possible this electoral cycle: Trump seemingly trying to turbocharge inflation with removing the Fed's independence to increase market instability and slapping tariffs on everything to pander to the nativists versus Harris seemingly trying to create price controls, inevitably resulting in shortages, out of a desire to pander to progressives. Either way, it's crafting bad policy largely to suit their particular vibes.

The "price gouging" bill is questionably constitutional at the federal level. insofar as she appears to be pushing for executive power to enforce the edict via the FTC. This would be a vast expansion of the FTC's purview - which should alarm anyone actually slightly concerned by the idea of the vast expansion of presidential authority.

But even if you don't, price controls are a terrible idea. Historically speaking, there aren't any examples in the US where they work out in a positive fashion save one - the price control system during the Second World War, where wartime rationing completely altered aggregate consumer demand to the point where it's an ineffective analogue (and the uniting purpose of defeating the Axis powers to enforce compliance and reduce control evasion simply doesn't exist today). Neither do we see much success globally, they typically end up presiding over a high degree of shortages and don't have much of an effect on actual prices, economists are very much in lock-step on this particular point. But price controls do have one benefit: they're popular, of course, because it reduces any complexities to a simple binary state. Why are groceries expensive? Clearly it's because the EVIL grocery store is jacking up prices. That's what "greedflation" keeps telling us, despite it being provably wrong. The fact that profit margins in grocery stores are razor thin and barely moved during the pandemic and the periods of inflation is irrelevant. After all, it doesn't suit the vibes.

This is particularly hilarious because if you look at the data, we've actually largely conquered inflation from a food prices perspective. Here's the inflation index for food prices - they've been hovering at about zero percent for about 32 months now. And it gets even worse when you look at wages versus food prices - it's been climbing steadily upwards. There was a bad hit during the time of inflation back in 2021 and 2022, but has been on an upward trend ever since 2023. So this is a policy trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist in the way Harris has defined it and so won't actually effect a negative push on prices, but that simple fact is a mere technicality - it isn't congruent with the vibes.

But people still believe that grocery prices are too high because of price jumps in those years, which is primarily due to supply shocks and the unprecedented printing of new money under both the Trump and Biden administrations. There are plenty of policies we could propose or enact to address that. We could stop drastically expanding the money supply (which we have, sort of) or we could break out the policy toolkit to reduce prices. We could use industrial and tax policy to increase supplies, we could deregulate to cut the cost of production, we could reduce tariffs (or actually fix our dysfunctional ports) to increase competitive pressure. We could increase oil production to reduce the cost of fuel (and thus shipping) or work on developing ways to reduce the cost of energy by building more solar or nuclear (which is roundabout and minimally effective but also has a knock-on effect across the board). But that's boring! That doesn't make me out to be the scrappy underdog under assault from all sides by nefarious actors! I don't want logical answers derived from the data with coherent policy goals to address those issues designed by people who know what they're doing, I want to stick it to the people who I know are making me suffer! I want my pre-existing biases to be repeated back to me so that I can reassure myself of my inherent virtue. In short, I want vibes!

The number of houses that goes to investors is in the single-percentile range, which drops dramatically when you remove the small investor category (individual investors owning <=5 homes including their own residence - which also includes older and/or wealthier folks who may own a primary home and a vacation home and are not technically in the "housing investor class" per say), where now it's not even a single percentage point. Whereas building more houses and enacting deregulation on zoning to allow mixed-use zoning, single-staircase apartments, and other YIMBY pro-housing policies have such a dramatically more positive effect on homeowners (and reduces the price which makes housing a *less* attractive investment - which would actually reduce large-scale investor purchases of homes if someone actually cared about doing that). But no, let's set up a costly apparatus for minimal effect. It's not very effective, but at least there's a clear evil bad guy - some rich investor that the honest man can give the what-for! So in essence, vibes.

But hey, who cares how effective policy is? After all, who needs data when you have V I B E S.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[ofthenoseclan]

tell me about kanako pls

WHY BUT OF COURSE (sorry this took so long ^^;)

kanako is one of my absolute favourites in the cast because shes the character that to me brought what i like in the franchise into focus in full form. while there were hints of political satire in touhou starting around the tail end of the ninth game and its following spinoff literature, it wasnt until i reached the tenth mainline title that i really fell in love with touhou, and the driving force of that change was yasaka kanako.

kanako is such a fun character to me because her very concept is so compelling, and its delivered in an extremely satisfying way. she is a god who treats religion like running a business, and is pragmatic to every end. this is both one of her greatest strengths and a source of literally all of her issues. everything about kanako is a vignette that illustrates how her capitalistic drive for innovation creates the troubles she faces in advancing further toward her goals, and her misunderstanding of spirituality as an economic problem to be solved for efficiency creates roadblocks for her lifestyle that she is entirely, confidently blind to.

once again i have to stress, this does seem to work for her in some aspects! when she took over leadership of the suwa shrine, she did so by being calculating and planning ahead against anything suwako had up her arsenal, then sweetened the deal for both of them by offering a compromise (sharing residence as the local kami, with suwako acting as the native god and kanako being the face of the shrine who gets the worship). she made a judgment call by choosing to move the shrine from the outside world to gensoukyou when she realized that it was no longer feasible for her and her company to rely on worship from outside world humans. all of these things are demonstrably good business decisions made in the name of keeping her livelihood as a shinrei stable. however, after she moves into gensoukyou with her wife and daughter, she begins to get, well, greedy isnt the right word, but...

capitalism is a force that has to inherently grow, as that is what its entire existence encourages. so what happens when you introduce an individual whose skill is in her capitalistic business prowess into a society that has no knowledge of it? you get kanakos assumption that she needs to introduce it into their culture. she could always have more people worship her. so she tries outperforming her competing... shrines. what would make me a better god? what would prove im more fit to lead gensoukyous humans? these things start running through kanakos head very very quickly. and it isnt out of self-importance either (unlike certain other religious leaders in gensoukyou cough cough miko), she just sees it as the natural extension of running her shrine.

but of course, when you introduce capitalism into a culture, you Introduce Capitalism Into A Culture. in kanakos pursuit of refining her worshipers into customers, she makes it clear to others in her field that there is even a race for power at all. her insistence to assert her presence in gensoukyou through gaining human worshipers via the hakurei shrine alerts reimu to her as someone who is influencing the status quo in the first place. her arms race for nuclear fusion (of which she is the only participant) is directly responsible for the introduction of the myouren temple to gensoukyou, which in turn leads to the introduction of miko and her band of taoists. not to mention her many, many unnecessary entrepreneurial ideas she comes up with in the print works (although they seem much more respectable when shown side-by-side with the anarcho-capitalist schemes of the kappa). these things never would have threatened her position had she not attempted to expand her reach.

in one sense, this is a huge character flaw for her. however, the other side of this coin means that no matter the conflicts kanako brings about for herself, she always views it as inevitable; something that is bound to happen over time regardless, and just another stepping stone on her business ventures. this aspect of her is what i find most interesting—her complete inability to see the big picture in her endless strive for religious success is somehow her most reliable asset. its what makes kanako wonderful to me, and endlessly engaging even after almost two decades since her introduction.

[morlock-holmes]

It seems to me that computers and automation pose a real crisis for capitalism, at least as it exists today, and I kind of don't understand why other people don't feel the same way.

The cost of reproducing a piece of art has dropped so low that people will reproduce and distribute pieces of art simply out of charity, whether we're talking non-profits like Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg or just randos hosting files on Peer to Peer networks because their computer is on anyway so why not.

So we can, and in practice essentially do have all digitized art available for free to anybody with a computer and internet connection.

The problem with this is that the whole art market is based on selling reproductions, but with the supply of reproductions being essentially infinite the price would not stay high enough except for the fact that there is a legal regime dedicated to creating artificial scarcity in order to inflate the price.

This is, you know, bad.

And now similar things are starting to happen with physical objects thanks to 3d printing.

The other thing is automation of labor. I keep saying this but in a situation where laborers sell their labor on the market and the price at which they sell their labor is based on supply and demand, anything that makes it easier to supply labor is going to be seen as a detriment by the people in the existing labor pool.

I have a friend who complains every time we go to the grocery store about how those self-checkout kiosks are just there so that the grocery store can pay less for staff. Scanning groceries is a rather tedious process but those kiosks don't free former grocery store workers to engage in a life of leisure, they just mean that those workers don't get paid for a bit and then have to find a different job at which they will work just as hard.

And I guess I don't understand how or why market economies would solve either of these problems. Again, in the actually existing capitalist economies, the solution has been having the government impose artificial scarcities on art reproduction, and in labor terms the solution has been... no solution. If your labor suddenly sells for a lot less money you can eat shit, because that's your fault for not being in a market that was less susceptible to automation, which I think we can all agree is a personal moral failing that ought to be punished.

[cardboardhyperfix-games]

HELLO

MY dog has been on crate rest from a neck injury for SIX weeks. Today, he was freed from that crate. I've been vaugely miserable that whole time, and not been able to create as much as I would like.

The One Page TTRPG jam is coming up, and I need something to look forward to.

Also, we are half way through 2024. What the fuck.

Let's revisit the goals:

Update Nature/Town/Farm/Villagers - COMPLETE. I added more stuff! I got an amazing comment on the game!

This made me so happy! I think about it everyday!

2. Updated Gear Acquisition Syndrome - COMPLETE! Micro-districts! More tables! Multiplayer! Fun fun fun!

3. Updated Post Apo Calypse - NOT YET! I've made some note and I have ideas. My initial thoughts have expanded into something more and more. I am thinking the game as it stands might be phase 1 of 3? Lots to Consider!

4. TEENAGERS WITH ATTITUDE - HOLY FUCK I DID IT.

I have been working on that game for SIX years. SIX! SIIX! AHHHHHH. It still needs work, but I've played it and had fun! I did that. I made the thing and I put it out there. AHHHHHHHHHH!

So yeah, still some to do and still games to be made. Hope you haven't missed me. I still think about games every day all the time.