#reserve army of labor

[voidami]

This article delves into the concept of the reserve army of labor, primarily focusing on the U.S., while recognizing that these dynamics are part of a broader international capitalist system. It examines how economic inequality and politics are entrenched through the marginalization of not only the unemployed but also the underemployed, precariously employed, incarcerated individuals, Migration and the homeless. In the U.S., over 50 million people fall into these categories, kept on the fringes to maintain low wages and worker exploitation. The article concludes that true solidarity across national and economic lines is essential to challenge the capitalist structures perpetuating this reserve army of labor.

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Farm to Win "Over There" by Library Company of Philadelphia Via Flickr: World War I-era poster places the image of a boy plowing over a battle in the background to recruit young men to join the U.S. Boys' Working Reserve, "the army behind the army." Published by the U.S. Department of Labor; artist: Adolph Treidler, ca. 1917-1919. Accession Number: P.2284.239 Click here to view the record of this poster on ImPAC, the Library Company's digital collections catalog.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

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

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[mesetacadre]

Something I'd consider to be a big step in any communist's theoretical and practical development is the true adoption of class politics, as the main vehicle of your discourse. There is no shame in not having done this, and I'd wager almost any communist had a period of time between consciously adopting marxist politics and this "true adoption" I'm referring to. Some never take this step as well.

Especially if you were already into politics, rejecting the political discourse of bourgeois democracy and substituting it for class politics is something that takes conscious effort. Take immigration as an example, this is a relevant subject of debate in the EU. The two main positions in normal (read: bourgeois) debate is to either make legal immigration harder and murder more migrants, or to relax controls and allow easier legal integration into whichever country they're in. Your intuition as a newer communist is probably to side with the second position, and that's understandable. But a consistently class conscious position is to first understand that those two broad sets of policies (hardening or relaxing the borders) both serve different factions of the same capitalist class at the same time:

Immigration, particularly from global south countries sacked by Europe, serves to increase the reserve army of labor that exerts a downwards pressure on wages, especially from these immigrants whose precarious situations force them to take the harshest jobs for miserable pay. So these two alternating policies of opening or closing up the border (but never closing it) serve to control the size of this reserve army when it's convenient, and once they're in Europe, to utilize this mass of low-wage workers. This is what is at the crux of the bourgeois debate over immigration in Europe, it's just coated in different paints, one nationalistic and one more "humanitarian". And this is what informs the actually marxist position in this particular debate; the rejection of any and all instrumentilzation of our fellow workers for the benefit of the capitalist class. There is no immigration policy within a capitalist framework that does not utilize the cheap labor brought by immigration.

If our goal as communists is to guide the working class to power, then we should be consequent in this and not lose ourselves in debates about which policy the managers of capitalism should adopt, it's to educate workers in our actual positions and utilize these debates as a jumping off point. This is what differentiates communists and opportunists who use workerist rethoric

[perestroika-hilton]

The labor reserve army (the unemployed) (tumblr) plays an important role in class struggle by mainly posting about who plays an important role in class struggle.

[bluecollarmcandtf]

Total Customer Service

My hotel famously caters to the whims of each and every guest, so I thought I'd highlight the insights of some of my staff. My "unique" recruitment process has helped me acquire an army of hard-working uniforms who are guaranteed to serve! Hopefully, this glimpse will make you want to book a visit...

(Josh) The Bellhop

I love this job, but sometimes it kills my back! Who would've thought that being a porter would wear down my body more than hard labor ever did? Don't get me wrong: I'll gladly work here forever, but most of my days aren't a walk in the park. Honestly, none of them are.

When I was a construction worker, I got paid to be outside and occasionally hammer in a nail or two. My crew was pretty notorious for just standing around all day. We were doing that when my current boss approached us. I don't remember exactly what he said, but before I knew it, we were dropping our tool belts and hardhats and following him back to the hotel!

He hired me as a bellboy, so now I offer any guest the service of lugging their suitcases up to their rooms. Since I'm just staff, I obviously can't use the elevators, (those are reserved for the guests) so I carry their things up the service stairs in the back of the building. The temperature in the stairwell is always hot as hell, so I rarely end a shift without sweating through the pits of my uniform jacket. It sucks, but the AC is saved for spaces that make guests more comfortable.

Most of the customers are pleased to see me working so hard anyway. I'm usually panting by the time I deliver their luggage to their rooms. I'll always offer to unpack their things: it's a part of the hotel's five-star service.

Then I wait and see if they need anything else from me. A lot of times, I'm the first employee the guests are able to interact with, so they're usually pretty excited to take advantage of the "all-inclusive" service our hotel is famous for.

Some of them are shy about it at first and some of them are demanding from the get-go, but I'm always happy to do whatever they ask. Even if I don't particularly like what I have to do: it's just a part of the job...I love this job...I love my boss...I love that this work is my life...

(Bill) The Housekeeper

Part of me cringes every time I get a look of myself in a mirror. Sure, I'm proud to be a housekeeper, but it's a real change of pace from back when I was a financial advisor. Part of me is nervous to think I could run into someone from my old life: a former colleague or an old customer perhaps. I'd still clean their room the same of course, but I can't help but wonder what they'd think of me while I did it.

I used to manage the hotel owner's finances. That's how we met. He persuaded me to grow his hotel as much as I could. It became an obsession of mine, and I'll have to admit that I tossed all my other customers to the side to focus on him. It was a bit out of character for me. I'm not really sure why I did that. Anyway, I was spending so much time at his hotel instead of my office that he offered me a job.

I can't recall his pitch, but it must have been a convincing one, because I dialed up my old former boss and quit. I just didn't want it anymore! It didn't even bother me that the only vacant position was in housekeeping!

I took it immediately.

I love cleaning up the messes our guests leave behind. Thinking about that is what gets me out of bed everyday, which is no easy feat since my shift starts at four in the morning. No matter how messy, gross, or bizarrely sticky a room is, I just love to get on my hands and knees and scrub every inch for them.

The best part is when a guest comes back to their room to find me making their bed or cleaning their shower. I can tell they're always pleasantly surprised to find me there.

I just keep my head lowered submissively like I'm supposed to and wait for them to take charge. They always do. Here at the hotel, us employees are completely at the customer's whim. I'll do anything they tell me to...I want to make them happy...I want to serve them...I want to obey.

(Donavon) The Waiter

Who knew waiting could create such awful migraines. I work in the hotel bar, and every day is a new storm of hungry and entitled mouths. Each table has someone who isn't happy with their meal, and they love to express their discontent in the most ridiculous ways. Sometimes it's a glass of water in my face. Sometimes it's a slap on the ass, but it's always followed by a roar of laughter!

Usually, every guest in the restaurant joins in like it's all one sick joke.

I'm not used to being treated this way. I used co-own a nearby gym, and I always made it my mission to foster a welcoming culture of respect and familiarity. I know "the customer is always right," but sometimes it is a hard fact to swallow.

The hotel's owner helped me learn that. He approached me one night at the gym and pulled out this weird swinging medallion...

I don't remember much of what he said, but I knew I had to abandon my gym. I left my wife too. We were happy, but I couldn't work here and have other commitments.

That's how I got started waiting tables. I'd never done it before, but it's not hard when I'm constantly being told what to do. Between the customers and the boss, I spend the entire day running around fulfilling orders; table six wants more wine, table nine wants their food cut for them, table twelve wants a foot rub... you get the picture.

It's all pretty typical stuff for a restaurant, I think. The customers get full control over me and the rest of the wait staff. However, it does make serving food a little difficult at times. Last night, we had to work overtime because this one guy kept making full use of us waiters. A good chunk of my evening was spent under his table, so I had to sprint afterwards to catch up on everyone's food.

It might stress me out, but I try not to let it bother me. I'll put up with their abuse and treat them with the utmost respect like a good waiter should. I don't mind being groped and fondled by virtually every customer as I pass. Part of our service is complete access to the staff. They can do whatever they want to me...they can have me do whatever they want...they deserve that treatment...I'm meant to give them that treatment...

(Ricardo) The Kitchen Staff

This job sucks. It's the truth, but I don't think I'll ever leave. The kitchens are so steamy and uncomfortable that I constantly think about walking out and getting a breath of fresh air. Still, my hands keep scrubbing countertops and chopping vegetables.

Sometimes I think of my life before I worked at this hotel, back when I was just an aimless twenty year old hanging out at the gas station. I had so much free time then. Now, I spend every waking moment in this sauna of a kitchen getting splashed with grease and oil.

Everything changed when that stranger came up to me and my buds one day. He talked really slow and dangled this weird necklace in front of our eyes. If I didn't know any better, I might think he was trying to hypnotize us!

Obviously, that's not what happened.

He was just offering us work. He made me realize how much I needed to work. I have to do this job! I need it! All my buddies agreed too. Some of them had jobs, but they didn't mind. It's been awhile since I saw them since I'm stuck down here in the kitchen. I think one of them might be a pool boy or something? I don't remember. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's more enjoyable than washing dishes down here.

The only break we get is when a customer comes in the kitchen.

One of them burst through the doors last night. We could all tell he'd had too much to drink, but that didn't change how we treated him. Like always, me and the rest of the staff stopped what we were doing and straightened our backs out of respect. He stumbled around, licking his lips as he looked us up and down. He wasn't afraid of groping us, which any guest is more than entitled to do.

Eventually, he got to me, burping in my face before covering my mouth with his slobbery lips. I'm not gay and he had a rank odor of beer on his breath, but I wasn't going to tell a customer no!

Before long, he was ordering me on the floor and crawling on top of me. The other chefs and kitchen staff got back to work, but I was left with the responsibility of keeping the guest entertained. I'd describe it as gross more than anything. I think he might've even pissed himself, but an order is an order.

His demands were the ridiculous kind only a drunk ass would make. Still, I did everything: no matter how uncomfortable, sick, or degrading they were. That's just the expectation for employees at this hotel...we are here to serve them... I'm here to serve them...I am at their whim.

...so now you understand.

My hotel is famous for its "uniquely unlimited" customer service. Stay here and you'll always be right. You'll always have someone to pick on, laugh at, play with, or use.

Get familiar with anyone that catches your eye. I can assure you that all of my employees are handsome and thoroughly conditioned. Order the waiter to pour your food over his head; tell the housekeeper to do a little dance; command the bellhop turn around and bend over. They'll do it all, and they'll thank you for it.

So what are you waiting for. Book your next vacation with us! I promise you'll enjoy meeting the rest of my staff...

[argumate]

Ukrainian forces have defended against Russia's full-scale invasion for 1,000 days and continue to demonstrate incredible resilience against Russian aggression. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 under the incorrect assumption that Ukraine would fail to defend itself and that Russian forces would be able to seize Kyiv City and install a pro-Russian proxy government in three days. One thousand days later, Ukrainian forces have successfully pushed Russian forces from their most forward points of advance in Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Poltava, and Mykolaiv oblasts and continue their daily fight to liberate occupied territory in Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Kherson oblasts and Crimea. Russian forces are currently advancing throughout eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainian officials have recently warned about the possibility of an imminent Russian offensive operation in Zaporizhia Oblast. Russian President Vladimir Putin is simultaneously waging an informational war against the West, Ukraine, and the Russian population aimed at convincing the world that Russian victory is inevitable, and that Ukraine stands no chance. This informational effort is born out of Putin's fear and understanding that sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic support for Ukraine will turn the tide of the war against Russia.

Russia has accumulated a significant amount of risk and a number of ever-increasing constraints on its warfighting capabilities over the last 1,000 days. Russia began the war with a poorly organized and understaffed military comprised of contract military personnel and limited number of conscripts due to his incorrect assumption that Ukraine would fold and fear that general mobilization could threaten the stability of his regime. Russia largely relied on a combination of volunteer contract servicemembers, mobilized personnel, and irregular formations (such as the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic Army Corps [DNR/LNR AC], the Wagner Group, and Russian Volunteer Corps) to wage Putin's war without general mobilization. This system has provided the Kremlin the manpower necessary to support operations so far, but there are mounting indicators that this system is beginning to teeter. Recent Western estimates of Russian manpower losses suggest that Russian forces are currently losing more troops per month than Russia’s ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts can sustain, and open-source evidence indicates that Russia may not be able to sustain its current rate of armored vehicle and tank losses in the medium term as Russia burns through its stockpiles of Soviet-era equipment. The upcoming 2025 year will only increase the manpower and materiel constraints on the Russian military if Russia attempts to sustain its current offensive tempo, and Putin continues to appear averse to such measures given Russian society's growing disinterest in fighting in Russia’s war, the Russian economy’s limitations including a significant labor deficit and high inflation, and continual aversion to bearing the burden of additional wartime costs. Russia cannot maintain its current tempo indefinitely. Putin will likely need to take disruptive and drastic measures - including another involuntary call up of the mobilization reserve - to overcome these growing limitations as the war protracts.

it's been a long and ruinously expensive war, I think something we've often underestimated is how both sides would keep adapting to the evolving conditions

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Jeanne Brousse

Jeanne Brousse was a Frenchwoman and devout Catholic who put her own life at risk to save Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of France.

Born in 1921, Jeanne grew up in a working-class family in Annecy, a charming town in the French Alps. Her mother worked as a maid, and her father, a cheesemaker, was a veteran of World War I who had been gassed by the Germans and suffered lifelong health problems as a result. After helping care for her injured father as a young girl, Jeanne decided to become a nurse and help other suffering patients. She moved to Paris at age 18, to train at a nursing school run by the French Red Cross, however war was declared and she was unable to enroll. Instead she returned to her hometown and became a civil servant in Annecy. In 1941 Jeanne joined the brand-new Refugee Service, an agency of the local government formed to help new arrivals to the region.

In her new position, Jeanne did much more than the job called for. Seeing an immediate need for French Jews to find a safe haven from encroaching Nazi persecution, Jeanne used her contacts in the government and the clergy to find out when deportations of Jews were scheduled so she could warn them and help them flee to safety in Switzerland. Incredibly, Jeanne had never met a single Jew before she decided to devote her life to saving them. She later said, “I felt horrified by the atrocious fate likely to befall all these innocent victims whose only ‘mistake’ was to be born Jewish. I was determined to find solutions so that the greatest number of those who came to me could be saved.”’

Word got out among the Jews of Annecy that Jeanne was an ally. In November 1942, a Jewish woman named Suzanne Aron approached Jeanne with a desperate request. Her husband, Francis Aron, was a reserve officer in the French army who was injured in 1940 and received the Legion of Honor, the highest award given by the French government. When he and his wife were ordered in 1941 to affix a yellow star prominently to their clothing, identifying them as Jews, Francis was furious. He was a decorated war hero who’d given everything to his country, and now he was being persecuted and humiliated by the government he’d sworn to protect and serve? Defiant, Francis refused to wear the yellow star and burnt his identity papers identifying him as Jewish. This impulsive act however did not provide freedom but rather increased danger. Francis’ wife Suzanne had heard about the woman at the Refugee Service who was helping Jews, and she went to Jeanne’s office and begged for help getting false identity papers.

Despite the danger not only to her career but her life, Jeanne immediately created new identity papers for the Arons, giving them the non-Jewish name of “Caron.” If the Nazi occupiers, or the collaborationist French police, discovered that Jeanne was creating fake documents, she would have been sent to a concentration camp, but her moral compass, inspired by her Catholic faith, was stronger than her fear.

Other desperate Jewish families approached Jeanne, and she started providing “survival kits” for each family, consisting of fake identity papers, clothes, food and ration cards. She tapped into her extensive network of friends and colleagues to find safe homes and jobs for the Jewish refugees. Prominent French Rabbi Henri Schilli and his three daughters were among those saved by Jeanne.

As the war dragged on, Jeanne’s rescue activities intensified. As a government employee, she was not subject to curfews and had a coveted “nightpass” which enabled her to move around freely at night. She used this opportunity to distribute anti-Nazi leaflets, and warn young local men who were on the government’s list to be drafted to work in Germany, helping the Nazis. Because of Jeanne’s actions, many young men avoided the labor draft and instead became resistance fighters.

Annecy and the surrounding region were liberated by Allied forces in 1944. Soon after, Jeanne married Jean Brousse, who had also worked with the French resistance. Jeanne had three children, and spent the next three decades focused on her family, not spending much time thinking or talking about her astonishing wartime heroism.

In 1973, Jeanne was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, partly because of the testimony of Rabbi Schilli. After that, Jeanne began speaking to schoolchildren and other groups about her experiences during the war. She said of herself, “I am not a hero, I am not a lecturer. I am, quite simply, an ordinary woman who lived through extraordinary times.”

Jeanne Brousse died in October 2017 at the age of 96.

For risking her life to save others, we honor Jeanne Brousse as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[blkdaddie]

Art by MpregPapa

Cyrus' commanders were taken aback when he arrived for annual Army Reserve physical training with a large, pregnant belly.

The soldier, determined to prove his worth, refused any special accommodations and pushed himself to complete all physical training alongside his fellow soldiers. His commanders watched in awe as he tackled each obstacle with determination, his large belly swaying with each movement.

Over two weeks, the Cyrus's belly grew even larger; His fellow soldiers whispered amongst themselves, wondering how he could endure such physical strain while carrying a child.

On the final day of boot camp, the soldier faced the most challenging obstacle course yet. With sweat pouring down his face, he tackled each hurdle with unyielding strength. As he crossed the finish line, his fellow soldiers cheered, but their applause was quickly silenced by a sudden, sharp cry.

Now doubled over in pain, Cyrus revealed that he was deep in labor. He was bundled into the back of the nearest officer vehicle and whisked off to give birth to a very large, very strong baby boy.

[whencyclopedia]

Pankration

Pankration is an ancient martial art which mixes wrestling and boxing. The sport can be traced as far back as the second millennium BCE in the territory of ancient Greece. Its name derives from the ancient Greek words pan (all) and kratos (strength, might, power) and literally means “all of the might.” In 648 BCE, the Pankration was introduced as a sporting event in the 33rd Olympic Games where it joined boxing and wrestling in a category called “heavy events.” That special group of sports was reserved for the best athletes with the greatest strength and stamina.

The Pankration event was the ancient crowd's favorite sport. It was believed that a military training based on this formerly unarmed combat system helped the Spartans to excel in hand-to-hand fighting. Soldiers trained in Pankration were highly appreciated in the famous Macedonian Phalanxes as Alexander the Great was said to have given them priority in the recruitment of his army.

The Pankration in Mythology

Ancient Greek mythology appoints illustrious mythological figures as the first pankratiasts. Theseus, the founder-king of Athens, allegedly used techniques from that martial art to defeat the Minotaur (the half-human half-bull creature locked in the Labyrinth of Minos). Hercules is said to have won in Pankration contest in Olympia, as well as in another event organized by the Argonauts (the heroes that went on a quest for the Golden Fleece in Colchis). He reputedly used Pankration skills in one of his twelve labors too. Many Greek vases depict images of the hero defeating the Nemean lion with a specific strong lock believed to be part of the Pankration fighting methods.

Continue reading...

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

[sam-keeper]

wait here I got a succinct way of putting it:

if you're a "leftist" ai booster the argument you're making is "the working class will have MORE collective power somehow if we just massively swell the ranks of the precariously employed or chronically un/under employed reserve army of labor"

[shituationist]

You're a weird political dissonant and I love that despite me having nooo understanding of your vibe. Quick! Opinions on rand paul and the peristroika?. I'm only partly trolling

Thanks. Rand Paul is a disappointment compared to his dad. Both represent an essentially petty bourgeois standpoint, but Ron Paul was a significantly more authentic libertarian than Rand. That might speak to consequences of the libertarian movement being swallowed up by the GOP in ~2010 with the Tea Party movement. I don't know.

"Democratization" in the USSR came too little too late, and liberal political mechanisms combined with the restoration of capitalist relations of production set the stage for post-Soviet Russia to become an aspirationally (if not actually) imperialist nation, the war in Ukraine being one consequence of that. With Yeltsin, pretty much exactly what the communist "hard-liners" feared would happen ended up happening. The population of the former Soviet Union was decimated as liberal reforms tanked living standards and sent millions fleeing to the West where they would serve as part of the industrial reserve army of labor, putting downward pressure on wages and shoring up the profitability of European capital. The US intervened politically to make sure Yeltsin would stay in power despite or because of the wreck he was making of the Russian economy. This story culminates in Putin and United Russia coming to power, who stabilize the Russian economy (mostly) under a kind of plutocratic-kleptocratic dirigisme and enter Russia into Great Power competition with the US.

[fatehbaz]

Sheetal Chhabria sets her finger on the core of a shared problem that her book Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, Yahia Shawkat’s Egypt’s Housing Crisis: Shaping the Urban Space and my own Possessing the City: Property and Politics in Delhi 1911-1947 are outlining. The settings and periods are diverse and the particular histories diverge. But, in each of our work, we point to both the commodification of shelter and the paradoxical histories of efforts to oppose or mitigate that commodification. The Housing Question – how to provide decent and dignified shelter to every human – seems to be hummed to a drearily repetitive tune (with a few varying notes) in the Global South. Indeed, many of the same problems are reproduced in the Global North as well.

The stubbornness with which mass housing initiatives are reinserted into commodity circuits is a key lesson in all three works. This despite a related phenomenon that Chhabria points to the sheer variety of ways in which housing has been used by the state to ‘manage populations’. Chhabria and Shawkat both refer, for instance, to moments in which housing has been utilized as a tool to ensure the immobilization of working populations. Much like in a prison, to use housing as a way to prevent or restrict the mobility of working people.

---

Part of the reason for this is that Chhabria’s work on Bombay culminates at a point of unique labor mobility: the migration away from the city of much of Bombay’s mill labor force in the wake of the late nineteenth century plague epidemic. [...] But it was also a project of housing in which luring workers back to the city and holding them there was an essential component. The Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT), whose trajectory from inception to failure Chhabria meticulously chronicles, bears the marks of exactly such an origin point. The BIT was in the final reckoning a mix of welfarism, state-subsidy for financial speculation, attempts to signal a more sanitary city and immobilising labour. [...] However, this limited decommodification of shelter was a mere sub-theme among the other agenda of the BIT.

Crucially, Chhabria points out, Indian elites and the colonial state joined in their appreciation of the opportunities for profit-making and governing on the cheap, while solving labor supply problems through the BIT’s housing initiatives.

In Shawkat’s Egypt too, both in the late nineteenth century and in the present, the ‘izba recurs as a form of housing designed to immobilize labor – converting peasants more fully into workers. [...]

---

The slum must also [...] be an active source of a reserve army of labor. [...] Here the establishment of a Delhi Improvement Trust (in 1937, nearly 40 years after the BIT) was initiated by a piece of bad press. [...] The DIT’s major success was in [...] (something that Chhabria points out happened in Bombay too) participating in a round of speculative development in the Delhi countryside. [...] These and myriad other pathways have tended to return housing – even housing built at subsidized rates for the city’s working poor – to circuits of accumulation and profit.

---

Shawkat [...] is clear-sighted about the terminal point – decommodified housing. Any intermediate position, he argues, would prove unstable and return housing to the circuits of capital circulation. [...] As I have been pointing out, each of our three works provides templates by which waves of partial decommodification are clawed back into circuits of profit and loss.

How, then, could a more permanent extrication of shelter from commodification be achieved? The unsuccessful efforts to decommodify housing in colonial Delhi illustrate some potential pitfalls. [...] The weakness of struggles to decommodify housing in Delhi meant that even housing for Partition refugees would become the launchpad for what is today India’s largest private real estate firm -- Delhi Land and Finance. [...]

---

The Housing Question, cannot be separated from the much broader question of power. Mobilizations from below which are committed to a vision of broad human emancipation are the only viable way forward. Neither a brilliant urban plan nor the temporarily persuaded ear of a state official can achieve the decommodification of shelter that Shawkat calls for. [...] Stubbornly enough, [...] at the heart of it tends to lie a nexus between industrialists, richer traders, real estate speculators, and the state. Yes, temporary relief might be won [...]. But, as the history of the return of housing to circuits of commodity demonstrates, [...] the battle to provide shelter as a right is first about building [...] [movements] that can fight and win a broad decommodification of everyday life.

---

Text by: Anish Vanaik. “Shelter as Capital: Housing and Commodification: Lessons from the Global South.” Borderlines [open-access site mentored by editors of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East]. Published online: 18 February 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[good-old-gossip]

Free Haiti from U.S. Interference and Imperialism!!!

On July 28, 1915, the US invaded Haiti, starting a brutal 19-year occupation of the country. Conducted for selfish economic reasons and racist motives, the US waged two brutal wars against the native population, murdering thousands.

The invasion led to a 19-year US occupation, with 15,000 Haitians being killed and 50,000 peasants losing their land.

US Marines imposed martial law, seized homes, stole gold that was sent to Wall Street, and rewrote the constitution to give foreigners land rights. Haitians had originally fought alongside Americans in the American Revolutionary War in the 18th century.

However, a slave revolt in 1791, which eventually led to the successful 1804 Haitian revolution, frightened slave owners in the south of the US.  

In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison sent the USS Philadelphia to Port-au-Prince, demanding that the Haitian government establish a naval base at Môle Saint-Nicolas.

Soon afterward, other ships with 100 guns and 2,000 men were sent, but the Haitians refused the request.

The US became Haiti’s main trade partner, and from 1910 to 1911, the Department of State supported investors, including New York banks, in acquiring a large stake in the Haitian National Bank. American businessmen argued that an occupation of Haiti was needed to safeguard US assets.

Amid fears that Haiti would default on its payments, US Marines confiscated the country’s gold reserves worth $500,000 in December 1914. In February 1915, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam became Haitian President and ordered the execution of political prisoners. Following the executions, the local population rebelled and lynched Sam.

The US saw the revolt as anti-American and became concerned about its business interests. When anti-American Rolsavo Bobo emerged as a potential president, they decided to invade. Wilson ordered the Marines to occupy Port-au-Prince, and they shot dead Pierre Sully, the first Haitian soldier to resist the invasion.

The US also installed a puppet, President Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, and gave the State Department and the Navy the right to run the country. When Haitian lawmakers refused to change the constitution, soldiers marched into the National Assembly and dissolved it at gunpoint. Haitians who rebelled against forced labor were bound by rope, and rebel leader Charlemagne Péralte was shot while his corpse was tied to a door.

To satisfy their selfish economic and racist agenda, US forces treated Haitians terribly.

They fought two wars against rebels known as cacos, killing thousands in brutal mass killings that included lynchings as well as burning and burying civilians alive.

[zerogate]

In the first century A.D., highborn citizens of the Roman Empire were obsessed with ambition. Many drove themselves night and day to win honors in the eyes of their countrymen and to rise in the hierarchy of the state. They entered what was called the cursus honororum—the racecourse of honors.

The system was simple: If you were just starting out, you competed with other young men to win a government position reserved for neophytes. Once you landed the prized new post, you were able to work your tail off and clamber to the next position up the ladder. You showed your worthiness for advancement through a variety of means—diligence, splendid speeches in the Forum, donations of warships and monuments to the state, and presentations (at your own expense) of massive public spectacles. If the crowds and those in power liked what you had done, you moved step-by-step upward on the stairway of honors.

And, finally, if you had labored long and hard enough, you might attain the ultimate prize, becoming one of the two consuls, the highest officers in the land and the supreme commanders of the army. The cursus honororum was a splendid motivator. It impelled Rome’s best and brightest to dedicate nearly all their energies to the betterment of their society.

-- Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History