#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

[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.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.

They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.

All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else. Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" – a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

That's why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.

But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.

Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?

If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.

What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"

At its root, enshittification is a theory about constraints. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part. Companies don't pursue unprofitable actions at all costs – they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.

When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys its competitors can treat its users far worse – invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc – without losing their business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/zuckerberg-its-better-to-buy-than-compete-is-facebook-a-monopoly-42243

Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).

As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.

But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified). IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy – the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads. Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.

Of course, many Facebook employees cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs – 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024. Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting – not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/

This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.

Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter – the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year. Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up – he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service. He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an unconstrained greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM until Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification – not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase profit. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is profits. If the fines – or criminal charges – Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.

To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.

This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers. Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.

Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition. These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights – but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.

I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.

Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two new systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto). The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.

That means that Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users away from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means that if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that the company's VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.

This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking some fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure – that is, independently standing up an alternative Bluesky server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival – why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative? Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.

I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse – it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet – and not just the Fediverse – then you should share this goal, too.

Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.

The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).

This is the strength of federated, federatable social media – it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.

Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.

The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet. Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.

SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.

The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.

There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.

Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free – but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it. Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to shatter those locks, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.

Audre Lorde is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it. You can be sure it'll have all the right screwdriver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.

Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is amazing, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.

But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks – the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

[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!

[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)

[soulmuppet]

Mad as Hell is SoulMuppet Publishing’s upcoming TTRPG of resistance, community and anti-capitalist demonhunting, coming to Kickstarter in May 2025.

The excesses and hidden violence of our current society create wounds in the world from which demons emerge that hunt the vulnerable. In Mad as Hell, you play as a Radical, individuals who have decided, with the backing of their Communities, to fight demons and make the world a better place.

The only way to kill demons is to understand what quiet violence created them in the first place, work out how to solve that problem, and turn it into a weapon. You might kill a demon of mouldy water with a purifier, or a demon of bigotry with a pride flag. Unless you address the root cause of the problem, the wound in the world will continue to fester, and the demon will be reborn, free to wreak havoc. To defeat the demon truly, you need to make meaningful social change in your communities and help those around you.

The game is intended to create a safe, lightly fictionalised environment for aspiring and current activists to become familiar with the methods used in community organisation and direct action. It helps provide a structure that mimics the real-world approaches to tackling injustice through a radical lens, and takes action against capitalism.

The world is dying, choking in heat and smoke and microplastics. And that's not an inevitable thing, an impossible to overcome thing, it's a choice being made. People with power, who have made pacts with the forces of horror in our world, have made an ideological decision. They have done it before, they will do it again. They'll do it every single time, unless we stop them.

It's time to get MAD AS HELL.

[elbiotipo]

https://www.tumblr.com/elbiotipo/772655239613595648

I don’t understand how these statements conflict. They’re both true.

Yes, billionaires (and millionaires) like Swift, Musk, Gates, and Bezos get that way through wealth accumulation.

And yes, they are bad because they can end world hunger (by off-loading their wealth) but choose not to.

How does one negate the other?

Because things like world hunger exist precisely because of capitalism and wealth accumulation. They are not problems created or solved by individuals but the result of systems.

Thought exercise: if Jeff Bezos tomorrow decided he would donate his fortune to end world hunger, his shareholders would say he's gone crazy and replace him with a CEO that works for their interests. If he somehow got the project off the ground, he, being a capitalist, would work towards maximizing his profit, because that's the only way a corporation (instead of, for example, a government by and for the people) can work. And so, it would end up in more exploitation and probably worsen the problem. Don't believe me? Take a look at agro-industries or pharmaceutics, where the problem (hunger, disease) is the source of profit in the first place.

Billionaries and millionaries are not bad just because. I'm willing to believe many of them are decent, even good people. Some rich people donate a lot to charity and are involved in good causes, and that's admirable. But when we are talking about corporations, especially people on top like Bezos or Musk, they make all their wealth on the exploitation of people. But the thing is that they're surprisingly disposable, after all, it's not themselves who work, but workers of their company, which are ruled by other executives, shareholders, etc. If a person gets in the way of profit, whatever it's the CEO or an office worker, they get them out of the way one way or the other. That's why no CEO can solve world hunger, or really anything.

Charity is a good, noble thing, but it cannot change systems.

[phantobats]

Batman is a reactionary in a world built on capitalism. Nothing Batman can do can change the world he lives in. Everything he does, even the "good things" are because in a world based on the exploitation of labor, there is no socialist movement to do the "good things" instead. Batman wouldn't need to build homeless shelters or whatever if homeless people weren't created via the exploitation system we live in.  

Batman is a comic book character who deeply reflects the moral systems that liberalism/capitalism is built off of. He represents the nihilist belief that systemic change is not actually possible, and it takes a hyper-competent moralist with billions of dollars to actually 'do good.' You consuming it without critical thought just continues to bind you to those moral systems.

While it’s true that Batman exists within a capitalist framework, many interpretations of the character (especially in modern comics) deliberately problematize his wealth, privilege, and the limits of his methods. Writers like Frank Miller, Scott Snyder, and Tom King have explored Batman's struggles with the moral contradictions of his mission. For example, Bruce Wayne’s wealth often alienates him from the very people he’s trying to help, showing the insufficiency of charity to solve systemic problems.

In The Dark Knight Returns (Miller), Batman is portrayed as a deeply flawed, almost authoritarian figure, making it easier for readers to question whether his methods are inherently virtuous.

In The Joker War (2020), Bruce Wayne loses his fortune, forcing him to operate without his usual resources. This challenges the idea that his power stems only from wealth and emphasizes his personal determination and relationships with others.

This way Batman’s stories might highlight the flaws of relying on wealthy individuals to address systemic issues, rather than celebrating it.

Anywho, Batman can be seen as more than just a literal billionaire fighting crime—he’s also a metaphor for resilience, trauma, and the moral struggle to do good in a complex world. While systemic critiques are valid, stories about individuals taking a stand against overwhelming forces can inspire people to take action in their own ways. Batman might not represent a socialist revolution, but his mythos still resonates with those who believe in fighting against injustice, even when the odds are impossible.

For example, Batman’s refusal to kill (in most versions) reflects a commitment to ethics even in a chaotic, violent world.

His mentorship of characters like Robin, Batgirl, and others shows the value of building community and empowering others to join the fight for justice.

This critique assumes that Batman is inherently a defender of capitalism and that consuming his stories passively reinforces capitalist ideologies. However, Comics are interpretive media: Readers and writers constantly reinterpret Batman’s stories, often through progressive or critical lenses. For example, many fans and creators have explored Batman’s stories as critiques of surveillance, unchecked power, or wealth inequality.

Not all media consumption is passive: Just because you enjoy Batman doesn’t mean you’re unaware of the problematic systems he represents. Many fans engage critically with the character, using him as a springboard to discuss systemic change rather than accepting the status quo.

Some might argue that Batman represents a kind of personal moral responsibility that is distinct from systemic critique. While systemic change is crucial, there’s value in stories that remind us of the importance of individual action. Batman doesn’t solve every problem, but he doesn’t ignore them either. His mission can be seen as a metaphor for personal accountability: even in a broken system, we have a duty to help others in whatever way we can.

This doesn’t mean abandoning systemic change—it means recognizing that systemic and personal actions aren’t mutually exclusive.

FInally, The beauty of Batman is his versatility. He’s been portrayed as everything from a campy detective (Adam West’s Batman) to a brooding antihero (The Dark Knight Trilogy). This adaptability allows writers and audiences to use him as a lens for exploring different moral, social, and political questions. While some versions of Batman reinforce capitalist ideals, others challenge them or exist outside that framework entirely. For example, some Elseworlds or alternate-universe stories imagine radically different takes on the character. Or, the recently debuted Batman Absolute version of the character, in which he is less wealthy and still continues with his crusade.

While the critique is insightful, it’s not the only way to view Batman. He can be seen as both a reflection of capitalist ideology and a vehicle for challenging it, depending on the interpretation. The real question might be: how can we engage with Batman’s stories in ways that spark critical thought and conversation, rather than passive acceptance of the systems they depict?

[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.

[apilgrimpassingby]

More Magic School Lore

Here's some more magic school lore, albeit a bit that doesn't directly relate to the schools, but to their wider context.

So, for a recap, there used to be magicians in the world, but the Divine Wisdom decided that they were oppressing the humans and causing stagnation, and so she locked them away in a pocket dimension. These days, however, she's started letting them out in small numbers.

The new lore is concerned with why. Thing is, humans created democracy, and in the world wars and the collapse of the USSR it triumphed ... and then the USA spent the 1990s partying, and we still haven't repented, inventing things like internet porn and AI rather than using our resources to solve world problems. Thus, the end of the age is coming; there will be a new dark era of politics where democracy and human rights die, tyranny, slavery and warmongering come back, as do plague and famine. The details of that, however, are malleable.

And this is where the magic schools come in. For now, their job is to fight off monsters and the occult in order to delay the end of the age, and this will function as a test; their moral conduct in this time will decide if they get let back in as part of the new dark ages, and their actions (though exactly how, only the Divine Wisdom knows) will determine which of the four possible dark futures come to pass:

The Silver World, where the forces of magic and the degradation of technology are both strong, and thus the mythology and folklore of each part of the world come alive, while the natural ecosystems and historical ways of life in each place gain in strength. For example, in Britain Arthur, Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, the faeries, all kinds of ghosts and so on all come into existence, forests grow back and different regions become Anglo-Saxon, Elizabethan, Regency, Victorian and so on.

The Concrete World, where the force of magic is strong but the force of the degradation of technology is weak. This world is divided into thousands upon thousands of city-states (with surrounding farmland), constantly at war with each other, and with hosts of spirits and monsters living in them - sometimes as citizens, sometimes as rulers, sometimes as an underclass - and ubiquitous magic.

The Ash World, where the force of magic is weak but the force of the degradation of technology is strong. This is a standard-issue post-apocalyptic setting - most cities are irradiated nuclear shells, most people are nomads, the Ice Age is encroaching, etc. - with the distinction that shamans, paganism and belief in spirits are ubiquitous.

The Iron World, where the forces of magic and the degradation of technology are both weak. This is a fairly standard dystopian setting; Britain is a fascist slave empire that controls much of northwest Europe, America is run by an authoritarian regime which specifically sets out to be as soulless as possible in order to crush the spirits of dissenters, large parts of China and India are ruined by nuclear war, Russia is being torn apart by militant Orthodox, militant neopagans and gangster capitalists... life sucks and most people are very religious (paganism particularly is very strong here).

[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.

[discussionswithgyetti]

Blog Post #3

Q1: Although social media is public, are there moral issues for the monopolization of spaces in which marginalized groups may go to cry and create change (especially while taking into account current government states)? 

In the revolution will be digitized, the authors discuss the role of the internet as a public sphere for activism for black activism, during a time in which there was a lack of safe, public spheres for social change. (Everett, 2011). This book was created in 2011, before the extreme monopolization of social media platforms. The use of unofficial forum websites have died down, and individuals often use these new platforms to elicit social movement and create eroding change. However, especially taking into account the current climate of politics, and the digital revenue based oligarchy that appears to be forming within the United States, I would like to question what the moral implications of these “public spheres”, when taking into account that the attention we provide, the adds we watch, and the data we give, all seems to line the pockets of capitalist oppressors. 

Q 2: The new jim code states “thus, even just deciding what problem needs solving requires a host of judgements; and yet we are expected to pay no attention to the man behind the screen”. In what ways do narratives and discussions around new technologies affirming the idea that new technologies are “unbiased”? 

Algorithms and data driven decision making is often seen as “out of the hands” of individual technicians and social media programers. As is stated in the race after technology, the new Jim Code article (Benjamin, 2020), a neoliberalism, colorblind view of technology has taken president. I reflected back on my own experiences prior to this class, as I also had lived under the assumption that algorithms were deemed as absolute. After taking into account my previous opinions on algorithms, and what this article states in regards to neoliberalism and productivity, I realized that production in “logic” has been moralized as being good, without further thought. Logic being different then empirical evidence, logic more so meaning a no nonsense, individualistic approach to the world. 

Q3: How does the exclusivity and gatekeeping of knowledge about algorithms contribute to its continued harm, as in regards for marginalized communities. 

In this week's Power of Algorithms chapter, the author states “It is impossible to know when and what influences proprietary algorithmic design, … except as we engage in critique and protest” (Noble, 2018). This statement made me question, how has the privatization of these public spaces prevented marginalized individuals from being a part of the conversation when it comes to their own algorithms, and what information they see? If updates and changes are made that change the info that people are exposed to, then why are consumers NOT more a part of the algorithm creation process? 

Q4: How might issues regarding online algorithms worsen as Artificial intelligence takes search engines by storm, now automatically generating simple consumable answers? 

This question stems from an ending remark made in the power of algorithms chapter (Noble, 2018), stating that there is a lack of human context in some types of algorithmically driven decisions.? Questions for me arise, such as, what results are used in the AI image generations? It can’t be all sources, are they the sources that pay money to be prioritized on google? The further distilling of responsibility (now AI being seen as absolute truth) may make it even harder for individuals to fight against algorithmic oppression, because it adds another “middle man”. 

References:

Benjamin, R. (2020). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 

Everett, A. (2011). “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Reimaging Africanity in Cyberspace.” Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, State University of New York Press, pp. 147–82. 

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.

[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

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.1.1 Why are social struggles important?

Social struggle is an expression of the class struggle, namely the struggle of working class people against their exploitation, oppression and alienation and for their liberty from capitalist and state. It is what happens when one group of people have hierarchical power over another: where there is oppression, there is resistance and where there is resistance to authority you will see anarchy in action. For this reason anarchists are in favour of, and are involved within, social struggles. Ultimately they are a sign of individuals asserting their autonomy and disgust at an unfair system. As Howard Zinn stresses:

“Both the source and the solution of our civil liberties problems are in the situations of every day: where we live, where we work, where we go to school, where we spend most of our hours. Our actual freedom is not determined by the Constitution or by [the Supreme] Court, but by the power the policeman has over us in the street or that of the local judge behind him; by the authority of our employers [if we are working]; by the power of teachers, principals, university president, and boards of trustees if we are students; by the welfare bureaucracy if we are poor [or unemployed]; by prison guards if we are in jail; by landlords if we are tenants; by the medical profession or hospital administration if we are physically or mentally ill. “Freedom and justice are local things, at hand, immediate. They are determined by power and money, whose authority over our daily lives is much less ambiguous than decisions of the Supreme Court. Whatever claim we … can make to liberty on the national level … on the local level we live at different times in different feudal fiefdoms where our subordination is clear.” [Failure to Quit, pp. 53–4]

These realities of wealth and power will remain unshaken unless counter-forces appear on the very ground our liberty is restricted — on the street, in workplaces, at home, at school, in hospitals and so on. For the “only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which people show themselves capable of opposing it.” [Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 196]

Social struggles for improvements are also important indications of the spirit of revolt and of people supporting each other in the continual assertion of their (and our) freedom. They show people standing up for what they consider right and just, building alternative organisations, creating their own solutions to their problems — and are a slap in the face of all the paternal authorities which dare govern us. Hence their importance to anarchists and all people interested in extending freedom.

In addition, social struggle helps break people from their hierarchical conditioning. Anarchists view people not as fixed objects to be classified and labelled, but as human beings engaged in making their own lives. We live, love, think, feel, hope, dream, and can change ourselves, our environment and social relationships. Social struggle is the way this is done collectively. Such struggle promotes attributes within people which are crushed by hierarchy (attributes such as imagination, organisational skills, self-assertion, self-management, critical thought, self-confidence and so on) as people come up against practical problems in their struggles and have to solve them themselves. This builds self-confidence and an awareness of individual and collective power. By seeing that their boss, the state and so on are against them they begin to realise that they live in a class ridden, hierarchical society that depends upon their submission to work. As such, social struggle is a politicising experience.

Struggle allows those involved to develop their abilities for self-rule through practice and so begins the process by which individuals assert their ability to control their own lives and to participate in social life directly. These are all key elements of anarchism and are required for an anarchist society to work (“Self-management of the struggle comes first, then comes self-management of work and society” [Alfredo Bonnano, “Self-Management”, pp. 35–37, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, no. 48, p. 35]). So self-activity is a key factor in self-liberation, self-education and the creating of anarchists. In a nutshell, people learn in struggle:

“In our opinion all action which is directed toward the destruction of economic and political oppression, which serves to raise the moral and intellectual level of the people; which gives them an awareness of their individual rights and their power, and persuades them themselves to act on their own behalf … brings us closer to our ends and is therefore a good thing. On the other hand all activity which tends to preserve the present state of affairs, that tends to sacrifice man against his will for the triumph of a principle, is bad because it is a denial of our ends. [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 69]

A confident working class is an essential factor in making successful and libertarian improvements within the current system and, ultimately, in making a revolution. Without that self-confidence people tend to just follow “leaders” and we end up changing rulers rather than changing society. So part of our job as anarchists is to encourage people to fight for whatever small reforms are possible at present, to improve our/their conditions, to give people confidence in their ability to start taking control of their lives, and to point out that there is a limit to whatever (sometimes temporary) gains capitalism will or can concede. Hence the need for a revolutionary change.

Only this can ensure that anarchist ideas are the most popular ones for if we think a movement is, all things considered, a positive or progressive one then we should not abstain but should seek to popularise anarchist ideas and strategies within it. In this way we create “schools of anarchy” within the current system and lay the foundations of something better. Revolutionary tendencies and movements, in other words, must create the organisations that contain, in embryo, the society of the future (see section H.1.6). These organisations, in turn, further the progress of radical change by providing social spaces for the transformation of individuals (via the use of direct action, practising self-management and solidarity, and so on). Therefore, social struggle aids the creation of a free society by accustoming people to govern themselves within self-managed organisations and empowering the (officially) disempowered via the use of direct action and mutual aid.

Hence the importance of social (or class) struggle for anarchists (which, we may add, goes on all the time and is a two-sided affair). Social struggle is the means of breaking the normality of capitalist and statist life, a means of developing the awareness for social change and the means of making life better under the current system. The moment that people refuse to bow to authority, its days are numbered. Social struggle indicates that some of the oppressed see that by using their power of disobedience they can challenge, perhaps eventually end, hierarchical power.

Ultimately, anarchy is not just something you believe in, it is not a cool label you affix to yourself, it is something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, anarchy crumbles. Social struggle is the means by which we ensure that anarchy becomes stronger and grows.