#serving the interests of western capitalists

[the-nyanguard-party]

why would someone need a dictatorship to move away from captialism that makes no sense

marxists understand that all states are necessarily dictatorships of a given class. the word dictatorship here isn't about the particular constitution of the state but indicates that a given class exerts political power at the expense of another.

the state is an organ of class rule. it develops out of the antagonisms between different classes in society. under capitalism, the bourgeoisie necessarily exploits the proletariat, the two classes have interests that contradict each other. in order to stay in power, the bourgeoisie needs a state. if the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie, they need a state to stop them from trying to get back to power.

when we talk about dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, we are referring to states ruled by the bourgeoisie as a class. "western-style" liberal democracies are still dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, serving the interests of capitalism and oppressing the working class.

the counterpart to this is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is a state ruled by the proletariat as a class. as a rule socialist states are in fact organized as democracies with popular participation, where the interests of the working class actually translate to state policy, as opposed to bourgeois so-called democracies

under socialist states, the working class are freed from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and gain control of society. the state then is used to stop the capitalists from taking power away from the working class and restoring their exploitation by capitalism. if they don't try to restore capitalism they're mostly fine, they just don't get to freely exploit people as they please, and the means of production that are owned by them are taken by the state to serve the whole of society rather than private profit.

as socialism develops and eliminates the possibility for exploitation, the state becomes obsolete, it loses its function of exerting the domination of one class over another since separate classes no longer exist, and ceases to be a state. this is a long process that takes time and can only be achieved at a global scale

[blue-village]

4.11.2023

Striking Bangladesh garment workers clashed with police on Saturday near the capital as factories reopened in defiance of a protest campaign demanding a near-tripling of wages.

Bangladesh's 3,500 garment factories account for around 85% of the South Asian country's $55 billion annual exports, supplying many of the world's top names in fashion including Levi's, Zara and H&M.

But conditions are dire for many of the sector's four million workers, the vast majority of whom are women whose monthly wages start at 8,300 taka ($75).

Police said some 600 businesses shuttered over the week had reopened in areas worst-hit by the strike, which saw some factories ransacked and set alight.

But clashes broke out in the industrial town of Ashulia, west of the capital Dhaka, after around 10,000 workers attempted to prevent their colleagues from returning to their shifts.

"They hurled stones and bricks at officers and factories and tried to block roads," Ashulia police chief Mohammad Sarowar Alam told AFP.

"We dispersed them by firing tear gas," he said, adding that 1,500 security forces personnel had been deployed there and in nearby Savar to keep order.

A 35-year-old woman was critically injured when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at hundreds of protesters at Sreepur, some 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of Dhaka, police inspector Ibrahim Khalil told AFP.

Imran Khan, the woman's nephew, told AFP she had been struck by rubber bullets on the face three times.

[psychotrenny]

It’s fucking insane to me how normal Yankee Liberals are about Hawaii. As in like the way they just treat it as an unremarkable fact that their nation controls the island. Like the annexation of Hawaii wasn’t just any old example of Settler-Colonialism, the subjugation of a decentralised non-urbanised people that could be just dismissed as mere “tribes” or what have you. Not to say that such forms of “typical” Settler Colonialism are any less abhorrent or disgusting, just easier to justify from a Liberal point of view. Easier to claim that they weren’t *really* using the land properly or that they were an hopelessly and eternally backwards who only really benefitted from their conquest or that they were doomed and dying anyway and their fate was a mere tragic inevitability not worth dwelling on or… Point is all these arguments are all wrong and stupid and cruel but they can serve well enough to downplay or justify such atrocities in the eyes of Imperial Core Liberals.

But like with Hawaii you don’t have that. The Kingdom of Hawai’i was a sovereign state that was internationally recognised as such by the Great Powers of Europe even at the very height of Western Imperialism. Literacy rates were high and compulsory education was introduced in 1841 (pre-dating the US by 77 years), healthcare was given to all Hawai’ian subjects free of charge, Christianity was dominant (so even the most ardent Imperialist couldn’t claim that the people were in the thrall of some “barbaric superstition” that necessitated the “civilising influence” of empire) and it had a well-developed Capitalist economy dominated by Sugar production.  Like even if we take the Western model of statehood as the be all end all of what separates the civilised from the savage (to be clear hear you really fucking shouldn’t, but many people do so for a second that’s the frame of reference we’ll employ) then Hawai’i was very much unambiguously the former.  But that didn’t stop the US from shamelessly interfering it’s politics Indeed those aformentioned markers of Western-Style “civilisation” and “development” came with the price of allow US missionaries and investors to settler in the islands and become very wealthy and influential. For decades the US used the threat of force to influence the policy decisions of the kingdom, going as far as to regularly send warships in a classic display of “gunboat diplomacy”. In 1887 a US settler militia called the First Honolulu Rifles staged a coup where they forced Kalākaua to accept a new Constitution that heavily favoured the interests of USamerican settlers who had grown very wealthy through their investment in sugar production on the island.  It stripped the Monarchy of much of its power and introducing requirements for voting that heavily favoured US settlers; re-introducing wealth/property requirements that were now higher than even, allowing resident aliens to vote and just outright banning any Asian immigrants from voting (which at that point had as much to do with plain racial hatred as it did to any acting threat they might have posed). This wasn’t enough for the Yanks and 6 years later a group of 13 US settlers known as the “Committee of Safety” outright overthrew the newly crowned Queen Liliʻuokalani when she refused to co-operate. It existed briefly as an “Independent” USamerican dominated republic before the US government decided to official annex it in 1898 (similar to what you saw with Texas or California).

While incredibly controversial at the time due to both strategic concerns with the annexation of ultramarine territories and some level of outrage at the shameless take-over of a sovereign nation (hence the time gap between the coup and the actual annexation), nowadays Yanks enjoy their control over the island without the slightest care in the world. They even turned it into a tourist destination, a heavily romanticised one that not only receives many millions of visitors every year but is constantly mentioned in the popular culture the US then proceeds to export all over the world, literally revelling in their land that is by literally any definition (even the most nakedly pro-imperialist) stolen. The land itself is severely exploited to the point of significant ecological damage, the indigenous peoples too are exploited as many of them live in poverty while US investors grow wealthy from their land and labour. Even their very culture is stolen and monetised, the most marketable parts bastardised into cheap kitsch and the rest of it left to rot, only kept alive through over a century of continued resistance from the indigenous peoples. It’s a very common story of course, but I think it stands out with how utterly ghoulish it is even under the most Liberal of consistently applied worldviews. It would be like if in say 2007 someone set up Disneyland in Bagdad. And yet by the vast majority of the US (and by extension the vassals states whose view of the situation is filtered through the lens of US media and propaganda) it isn’t seen that way. Hawaii is just the 50th state, the only state outside North America and in the tropics (hahaha ain’t that a neat little fact. Geography is so fun J), an island paradise perfect to visit with the whole family and yet still as American as Apple Pie. Even many self-described “progressives” talk about it in this way, at most mentioning the plight of the indigenous Hawaiians with minimal though as to how this situation came about. Like while the story of Hawaii is far from unique; even in terms of the US doing colonialism to Westernised peoples you examples such as the ethnic cleansing of the Five Civilised Tribes from the Eastern USA, it still stands out to me with the sheer level of international recognition and Western-style development that the Kingdom of Hawai’i possessed. Like it’s just such an obvious example of the naked greed at the heart of the USamerican empire, and how utterly bullshit talk of a “civilising mission” and “spreading democracy” is. No matter what they may claim, no matter what excuses they may trot out, Imperialist rapacity has no limits.

[apas-95]

How did people's movements in China and Vietnam result in stable and prosperous nations despite almost every western democracy inevitably failing (and by fail I mean "be completely captured by bourgeoisie interests")?

bourgeois republics aren't 'captured by bourgeois interests', they're bourgeois class dictatorships, founded to further bourgeois interests - there was no time when these states didn't serve bourgeois interests, they are bourgeois states. they were created by the bourgeoisie in their revolutions against the feudal system and the aristocracy. the socialist states in china and vietnam were created by the proletariat in their revolutions against the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie.

[pumpacti0n]

We should always be aware that it isn't some innocent mistake that authoritarian "leftists" have constantly failed to acknowledge systems of power other than a vulgar "anti-capitalism" or "anti-imperialism", like they've carelessly left out an ingredient in a cake recipe.

"Whoops, we've acknowledged one abusive hierarchy, but the other ones slipped through our fingers, silly us!" Nope. The reason this analysis of power isn't included in their ideology and praxis is because they consider these hierarchies useful to their projects.

This is why they'll mock or ignore discourse related to youth liberation, disability justice, gender self-determination or anti-patriarchal struggle, for example, or engage in apologetics for capitalist regimes in other countries -- they want to "have their cake, and eat it too".

A key reason why "the left", as some might call it, is not as powerful as it could be isn't because of some lack of discipline (or "degeneracy"), but rather a lack of intersectionality, a criticism that many of those within the black radical tradition, (black feminists and transfeminists more specifically,) have been highlighting in one way or another for at least 50 years.

Authoritarian "leftists" don't want to sacrifice the power that these hierarchies afford them, which explains why they're largely not opposed to prisons, borders, police, the enforcement of gender roles and even capitalism itself, if it's under the purview of the "socialist" ("workers") state and its bureaucrats.

And this is why I keep putting "leftist" in quotes...We're not free until we're all free, so the implication that we should settle for addressing one or two systems of domination while allowing all the others to flourish until we address them in some vague point in the far future is a distortion of what truly radical liberatory politics should entail.

It's simply a myth that we can address capitalism while leaving racism, ableism and misogyny etc. intact, as if they aren't mutually reinforced by one another, as if fascists and reactionaries will forget that they exist once capital is abolished. This is a fantasy, a delusion.

Authcoms love to pose questions like "without a state to enforce class rule, how will the proletariat defend itself?" but a better question would be: "if we fail to acknowledge the hierarchies that atomize and disempower the masses, how could we ever be a threat to capitalists in the first place? how would abandoning the most vulnerable populations serve the interests of the "working class" and "anti-imperial" struggle?

For example, (cis) women make up approximately 50% of the world's population -- so if women are still subjugated by patriarchal rule and the gendered division of labor, how will we have the numbers to fight?

Similarly, a significant portion of the world's population are currently incarcerated. If we don't abolish prisons, allowing the State to continue extracting labor from prisoners and destabilizing untold millions of social relations in the process, how can we hope to match or exceed their powers?

If we do not challenge the capitalist, productivist logic of endless resource accumulation, with its constant pollution of the environment and the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples and non-human animals, there will be no habitable planet left for us during this "revolution", because we will have destroyed all of it in the name of profit...so what would be the point?

These aren't minor concerns that we can put off indefinitely, and it isn't some innocent mistake that they are left out of the discourse, but are instead deliberate attempts to co-opt liberation struggle for the sake of advancing counter-revolution and authoritarian projects.

It's no wonder then, that they are eager to dismiss any criticism of their projects the result of "western propaganda", as if these same critiques aren't leveraged by very people belonging to populations they constantly tokenize whenever it suits their agenda.

They'd much rather treat every marginalized community as some monolith or as primitive victims in need of saving and representation by a vanguard. This chauvinist, colonial, assimilationist, antisocial attitude is endemic in (often white,) authoritarian circles, because it forms the basis of their position towards racial and gender hierarchies, that they are a natural and inevitable factor of organization itself. They are wrong.

In this sense, they aren't meaningfully different from the capitalists they pretend to hate so much. In truth, they are just jealous and greedy for more cake.

[probablyasocialecologist]

To say Israel’s economy is built on war and oppression is no more an exaggeration than to say that Israel’s science, technology, and industrialization have been built for the primary purpose of safeguarding western interests in the region of the Middle-East and North Africa (conveniently cleaved in half by the Zionist entity) as well as globally. First, as a cost-saving measure, an Israel industrialized around its own arms industry reduces the quantity of the still astronomically high amount of direct military aid from the west, while also appeasing Israel’s neighbors. Second, Israel’s export of weapons and other oppressive techniques served to cover up the dirty work of the western ruling class. Israel is the world center of counter-insurgency training and weapons provision, from the former Rhodesia and Pinochet’s Chile, to Marcos’s Philippines and Modi’s India today—neocolonial regimes that welcome the west to plunder its peoples and lands. Third, an economically and technologically advanced Israel propagates the ideology of developmentalism. Just as victims of capitalist exploitation are blamed for their own failure to correctly apply the bootstraps, victims of imperialist plundering are shown to be essentially backward, i.e., “racially/culturally inferior,” further justifying their subjugation by the west and occupation by “an army with a state.” In effect, Israel is part and parcel of US imperialism, as “the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem.”

Erica Jung and Calvin Wu, A Mirror of Our Immediate Future: On Green Imperialism and Palestine

[dailyanarchistposts]

Re-enchanting Humanity

Beyond any shadow of doubt, we direly need an ecological sensibility — one that is marked by a sense of wonder for natural evolution and the splendor of the biosphere in its many varied forms. But nature is not a scenic window that overlooks the Pacific coastal mountains or the New England marshlands. Nature is above all a process — a wondrous process that can admired on its own terms, not by invoking deities that are simply crude anthropomorphic projections of ourselves — male or female — in a mystified, often irrational, and sometimes a highly hierarchical form — a procedure that has served hierarchical interests for many millenia by lulling the oppressed into a paralyzing quietism and sense of resignation.

A remarkable product of natural evolution are the human beings who people the planet — beings that are no less products of nature than grizzly bears and whales. And like bears and whales, the human species — for it is no less a species when seen from a biological standpoint than it is social from the standpoint of social ecology — has acquired a remarkable capacity called conceptual thought. In this respect, natural evolution has endowed this species with powers that are unmatched by other species: powers to form highly institutionalized communities called societies that, unlike the genetically programmed “social insects,” are capable of an evolutionary development of their own, however rooted they may be in nature.

The crucial question we face today — not only for ourselves as human beings but for the entire biosphere — is how social evolution will proceed and in what direction it will go. To deal with this question primarily as a matter of spiritual renewal, desirable as that may be. is not only evasive but socially disarming. Social evolution took a wrong turn ages ago when it shifted from egalitarian institutions and relations to hierarchical ones. It took an even worse turn a few centuries ago when it shifted from a relatively cooperative society to a highly competitive one. If we are to bring society and nature into accord with each other, we must develop a movement that fulfills the evolutionary potential of humanity and society, that is to say, turn the human world into a self-conscious agent of the natural world and enhance the evolutionary process — natural and social. All the eco-babble of Devall, Sessions, Naess, and their acolytes aside, if we do not intervene to act creatively on nature (indeed, to rescue it from itself at times), we will betray everything of a positive character that natural evolution itself endowed us with — our potentially unprecedented richness of mind, sympathy, and conscious capacity to care for nonhuman species. Given an ecological society, our technology can be placed as much in the service of natural evolution as it can be placed in the service of a rational social evolution.

To call for a “return to the Pleistocene,” as “Earth First!” has done, to degrade humanity as so many misanthropic “antihumanists” and “biocentrists” have done is not only atavistic but crudely reactionary. A degraded humanity will only yield a degraded nature as our capitalistic society and our hierarchical history have amply demonstrated. We are direly in need not only of “re-enchanting the world” and “nature” but also or re-enchanting humanity — of giving itself a sense of wonder over its own capacity as natural beings and a caring product of natural evolution. A Supernature, peopled by “earth-based” deities, must be replaced by a healthy naturalism in which, as a movement, we will re-establish our severed ties with nature by naturalistic means and heal our terribly wounded society by social means. For Greens, in particular, this means that we must formulate a new, independent, revolutionary politics, using this word in its broadest possible sense, not recycle old, shopworn, sedating deities — be they Eastern or Western, pagan or Christian, “earth-bound” or “heaven-bound”. We must learn to look reality directly in the face, not obscure it with irrational thinking and a fog of dense, obscurantist myths.

The Left Network of the Vermont Greens has already taken the all-important step of trying to formulate a truly radical program — “Toward a New Politics” — that sketches out the basic concepts of a Left Green ecological movement. It openly describes itself as an “ecological humanism” (to use this term in its best sense, not the perverted meaning given to the word “humanism” by “deep ecology.’” And it advances the basic principles of social ecology as they apply to American political life. Either ecology movements and the Greens will free themselves of subtly hierarchical “centricities” — “bio” or “anthropo” — and develop a clearly defined and coherent body of social principles based on ecological concepts or they will become a marginalized collection of privileged encounter groups — one that may learn to “think like a mountain,” as Devall recommends but one that will be justly ignored as another fad, a target of derision at worst or healthy ridicule at best.

[communistkenobi]

im an undergrad student who was thinking about specializing in studying fascist movements in North America for my masters and ive really enjoyed reading your book commentary - you connect things that I'm not always aware of in ways that are really comprehensive and appreciate

Do you know of any researchers who are moving things on the topic right now (most of the books ive read are around 20+ years old, unfortunately)?

(sorry if any of this is unclear/grammatically incorrect/weirdly worded - I'm super sick rn)

thank you! I'm really glad to hear that :)

For contemporary writing, I'm currently working through some of Alberto Toscano's work - he has a really interesting article from 2021 on fascism from a Black radical/Marxist perspective where he summarizes various historical analyses of fascism from Black (particularly US) thinkers and activists. One thing I especially appreciate is that he complicates Aime Cesaire's formulation of fascism (i.e., "european colonialism come home") as incomplete when applied to settler colonial contexts, especially the United States - one of Cesaire's articulations of fascism is that (to paraphrase) "one fine day, the prisons begin to fill up, the Gestapo gets busy" and so on, and Toscano, working through Angela Davis and George Jackson, responds with (again I'm paraphrasing) "the prisons are already full! The Gestapo is already here!" etc. Toscano also has a new book that just came out in 2023 called Late Fascism, which explicitly addresses the current moment. I only have a physical copy of that so I can't share a pdf unfortunately, and I still need to get around to reading it lol.

These are also a couple random articles I found insightful:

Carnut (2022). Marxist Critical Systematic Review on Neo-Fascism and International Capital: Diffuse Networks, Capitalist Decadence and Culture War - does what it says on the tin

Daggett (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - talks about car culture as a site of modern reactionary political movements, links climate denialism with (proto-)fascist movements

Parmigiani (2021). Magic and politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19 - this one does not mention fascism explicitly, but imo the intersection between new age spirituality, anti-vaccine sentiment, and qanon/q-adjacent conspiracies are pretty important to understanding contemporary fascist social movements, so I'd still recommend reading this

Finally, this isn't an article but I found this recorded lecture about the history of Qanon pretty interesting. I don't think the author gives particularly insightful answers on how to solve the problem of far right conspiracies in the Q&A portion but I found it to be a helpful summary

Otherwise I've been focusing a lot on decolonial scholarship more so than fascist scholarship - this is again guided by Cesaire's argument that Europe/The West broadly is inherently fascist. These works aren't contemporary, but you can look at this post for some of the readings I linked on decolonial scholarship if you want to go that route. Those are serving me more for theoretical frameworks to guide contemporary analysis, not analysis of contemporary events directly

also idk if I need to put this disclaimer, but just in case this leaves my blog: this isn't a full throated defense of/apology for everything in these articles, I'm not claiming they're sufficient to understanding the present moment, these are just some of the things I've been reading recently and have found helpful in some way or another. a lot of contemporary work I have read (much of which isn't linked here because I don't think its very good/do not have it on hand) focuses on populism and authoritarianism as central analytical terminology, which i think does a lot of work to exceptionalize and mystify fascism as a historical and political process/project originating from European colonialism & Western imperialism, but these terms are endemic to the field so you have to contend with them no matter what

good luck with your studies!

[cipheramnesia]

I know you talk about movies and TV shows on here a lot, so I'm not sure if you've already a secret this, but do you have any recommendations for things on canabalism? Or werewolves

The cannibalism genre is huge, and you could probably write a book on it. Obviously my favorites are The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (the originals, none of the remakes, reboots, whatever). They're two sides of the same strange coin with underlying themes of classism and the deep rot at the core of US nationalism. Along with Night of the Living Dead around six years prior, the original TCM was one of those movies that marked a paradigm shift in horror film.

But meanwhile, there was a huge lurid explosion of cannibalsploitation movies. I don't know most of them very well. Like, I've seen Motel Hell and Blood Diner, The Hills Have Eyes movies, but they didn't do a lot for me. Once you start getting to the end of the 80s, directors seemed to start getting an inkling of the satirical or symbolic value of the cannibal, and that's where some really interesting work happens, for example Parents (1989), the absolutely iconic People Under the Stairs (1991), and a left field one from me personally - Auntie Lee's Meat Pies (1992) - which feels almost accidentally anti-capitalist / anti-authoritarian.

One thing about this period is that for the most part there was an associate of cannibalism with being rural and poor (People Under The Stairs and Parents are notable and very interesting exceptions). A degree of the horror lies in humans eating humans, but in a modern lens these old exploitation films tap into other feelings, finding an undercurrent of anger which comes from the way it's so often poor and rural people literally consuming wealthy or privileged people. The cannibals of these movies were often dirty, or old, or fat, or horny. They were loud and obnoxious and tacky - and their victims were so clean and thin and pretty and wealthy. There's no doubt a lot of the exploitation movies in that whole late sixties to early nineties period weren't exactly made with pure intentions, but many of them hit that "eat the rich" sweet spot in a way more recent movies don't.

But anyway, also starting in the 1990s was the shift towards the idea of cannibalism as something transformative - human flesh went from a staple of the poor and disenfranchised, and started to be a luxury item, or something which marked those who consumed it as special or even elite, sort of kicked off by Silence of the Lambs. However, if you want a more interesting example, Ravenous is a fun watch, and has a lot to unpack going on - both for the good and for the bad. It's one of those movies where you'll find a degree of the mythologizing also start to appropriate first nations culture and in particular a figure which isn't meant to be spoken about just in general. Prior to this, there was already a habitual use of "native people" as "savage cannibals" in the exploitative way, but this was where it swung over to the other side of the horseshoe, to stereotype any sort of pre-colonial people's have having a unique and ritualized consumption of human flesh that separated them from white, western colonizers.

Anyway, that takes us up to recent stuff, which is probably too close to see a clear pattern. People are still making the same movies as before, but some of the more interesting modern approaches where cannibalism is in the context of things like coming of age, or finding a place in the world are Raw and Bones And All. These two takes merge some of the original models of cannibalism being a trait of the underprivileged, but having elements signifying it as a unique experience which allows it to serve as a stand-in for the feeling of transition to adulthood, or being someone who is socially othered in some way. A few others which I think have some interesting takes, but maybe not enough to get into detail, are Flesh, We Are What We Are, Feed Me, and Bloody Hell. Most recently, and probably the best new cannibal movie in ages, is Lowlife, which you can find on Tubi.

Anyway, uh, quick off the cuff werewolf take is that there's not really a perfect werewolf movie which in no particular order should have a bipedal werewolf with a wolf head (not human-like) and is queer. Some movies which are a mixed bag are An American Werewolf In London (great writing, terrible wolf design), The Howling series (cool werewolf design, terrible writing), Ginger Snaps 1+2 (should be queer, isn't), Wolf Cop 1+2 (okay writing, okay design, missing the queer), and Late Phases (good writing, so-so design).

Here are the three that you should watch: Dog Soldiers has peak werewolf design, a really interesting concept, and solid writing. Probably your best bang for the buck in terms of cool werewolf fighting time. Bloodthirsty is peak queer werewolf movie writing, with very little actual wolf. It's beautiful and meditative and I love it. And of course the all time greatest werewolf movie ever: Company of Wolves. More of a dreamscape painting than movie, what it lacks in wolf design it makes up in beauty and depth of psychosexual exploration.

[palmviolet]

true detective rewatch thoughts s1ep6: haunted houses (aka The Episode)

— this episode is all about marty's desire for misogynistic control, his longing for the past, and his conception of his own heroism. he has an overabundance of agency and he grapples with what to do with it, makes shitty choices, does not own up to them. meanwhile, rust's own lack of agency is becoming clearer by the day. laurie has disappeared from his life without context or explanation (save the deleted scene, which is a useful paratext but doesn't really count as canon); his attempts to pursue the yellow king case are constantly thwarted by the corrupt institution he serves; maggie uses him sexually to escape her marriage. this stands as a contrast (but not really) to his active violence as crash the episode prior. whatever agency he held there was an illusion, this episode tells us — he was only ever a tool serving the interests of the state and its actors, like billy lee tuttle and his governor cousin.

— this is interesting in the context of rust's relationship to accountability and consequence. twice, we see him tell interview subjects to accept their own culpability and its consequences — in ep4, telling charlie lange he's the reason dora was targeted, and in this episode, telling charmaine boudreaux she should kill herself if she 'gets the opportunity'. both of these occasions involve a person either indirectly or directly responsible for a killing — and, in charmaine's case, a person with whom rust is forced to identify to get a confession (taking her hand, telling her he lost a kid too). rust's grief was a great cosmic accident, a bend in the road, a driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, in which he had no hand and no agency. telling these people to own their guilt, therefore, involves almost some sense of envy, intertwined with disgust — that they had some choice in their lives and they used that choice to engender violence, where rust had no choice and violence was forced upon him anyway. (obviously his choices after sophia's death contain more nuance than that, with his choice to kill the crystal addict leading to a cycle of institutional violence beyond his choice, but sophia's death itself is the inciting factor and is beyond all rational reason.)

— contrast marty, who is a 'person without guilt'. beth tells him 'the universe forgives all' and that's all he needs to throw his marriage vows once again to the wind, collecting on the 'down payment' he made in an early episode. it's significant that it's beth because beth represents everything his rodeo buckle (which he's wearing when he meets her again) represents — past heroism, lost youth, a false western ideal — as someone he 'saved' in his paternalism.

— but, as this episode tells us, there is no altruistic paternalism. it opens with marty beating up the boys who'd had sex with audrey. “a man’s game charges a man’s price," he tells them, as he removes his jacket and rings (paralleling the end of the episode, when he does the same before his confrontation with rust). this line does two things: it equates sex and violence, as their 'man's game' was having sex with his daughter, and their 'man's price' is being beaten up by her cop father, not outside of the law but indulged by and regulated within it; it also invokes capitalist exchange. beth is no accident — beth reminds us of the bunny ranch, and the down payment, and marty's performed outrage at underage sex work. her presence in this episode serves as the key to marty's attack on audrey's lovers. this is the price of sex with audrey: that they must submit to her father's violence afterwards. the perverse implication of this line is that really, marty is pimping her out and reaping the benefit.

— this language of exchange extends to the threat of prison, too. he tells them to come forward and endure a beating or else he'll file the charges and send them to angola: he tells them, "you know what happens to pretty boys like you who go up to the farm on stat rape charges?" these rape threats are a reoccurring theme throughout the series. marty threatens the man lisa goes home with with prison rape; steve geraci threatens rust with prison rape in ep8. it emphasises the sexual violence inherent to the police system and once again it erodes the difference between depraved criminal and heroic cop. marty's righteous paternalism that his daughter has been 'taken advantage of' is entirely selfish and hypocritical; what he's really concerned about is the destabilisation of his possession of his women, and he uses it as an opportunity to perform his own 'cowboy' masculinity. this works neither with the boys (he throws up afterwards) nor with rust after maggie (as rust pulls his punches and he still nearly loses the fight).

— these two events are deliberately paralleled to further destabilise marty's position of control. he gets away with the audrey situation because he's technically correct, audrey was underage — he can keep her in the agency-lacking frame he's assigned to her, forever his sexless daughter. but maggie's seduction of rust is entirely her own deliberate act. of the two of them, it's maggie who's in control, while rust is drunk and reluctant and dubiously consenting to what she wants of him. in a homosocial world, as i discussed here, a love triangle in which two men compete for the same woman is not about the woman at all. only male-male dynamics are allowed complexity, and this is the reason maggie is so certain it cannot be a faceless man she sleeps with to destroy her marriage — only rust will do, because of the complexity of the bond between him and marty.

— and so marty interprets maggie's infidelity as an act that reflects on his relationship with rust. but it doesn't reflect on rust — hence their later conversation about consent and desire and blame — it only reflects on maggie. it's maggie's ultimate reclamation of her own agency in a misogynistic marriage, coming at the expense of rust's agency, and it works, as she knew it would, because marty is so absorbed in his misogynistic, homosocial worldview that he cannot recognise that reclamation of agency. he only sees it as rust — who had little choice in the matter — taking what was his.

— thus, by the end of the episode, neither rust nor marty have much agency left. rust has quit the police and relinquished what institutional power it gave him; marty has finally, deservedly, been outplayed and hung out to dry by his wife. it is this deconstruction of his power fantasies that prepares him to work with rust in the next episode, on an equal ground for perhaps the first time all series.

[makapatag]

ruminations while daydreaming of scenarios for THE KNIGHT VAGRANT: i've been enamored with the phrase "tyranny of the plot" recently. a lot of writing advice i get is squarely from western tradition. and there, plot and character are paramount. god forbid your plot has holes!

but looking at writing traditions from my side of the world: the repetitiveness of epics, the "simpleness" of the plot, the long winded, sometimes abrupt asides in the adventure solely for the sake of the adventure, like in the ramakien or florante at laura...

in modern writing perspectives these things serve to weaken the plot, to weaken the narrative being told. cut out chaff, make it tighter! "don't include things that don't advance the plot." this is my least favorite of the advices

but it makes sense, right? sometimes a fiction meanders too much, it doesn't do anything, it doesn't "push anything forward." but my favorite tales are those where the characters just fuck about. learn about something. find something new.

the sequence in which a story moves is plot. points along a thread that is the story. but plot has become a conformist tool. if it is not engaging (in the way we want it to be) then it is bad plot. if the plot is not understandable (in the way we want it to be) then its bad plot

"we" in this sense is, usually, modern readers of the anglosphere! because a lot of plot formation and dialectic is informed by capitalist structures. plot has to be strong and interesting for it to sell well.

intro -> rising action & climax -> conclusion. act 1, act 2, act 3. monomyth, etc. etc.

i think, recently, this is why i've been gravitating a lot to more nontraditional plot styles, such as the kishotenketsu, chinese xianxia styles (an endless stream of one person getting stronger), poetry, and non-fiction. i think i have to break out of this market plot to really burgeon in my prose

again ruminations brought about after watching this vid a few months ago

[ranticore]

I thought I'd post the sketched out map of the city before I take it in for redrawing (which will take a very long time and it's definitely a backburner project) in a decent resolution so that people can actually see what's going on. The full size version is 4800px wide so too big to actually have full res on tumblr anyway

Invergorken is your basic city built in the armpit of a bay. Although its original medieval castle still stands as the Sharps ranger barracks, the citadel north of the grand canal is where the palace sits. The main reason it was all built here, slammed up against the Ruad, an inhospitable forest, is because it was a trade hub for goods passing through the Ruad. If you look at the whole country map you can see that Invergorken is built right where the Ruad is narrowest from west to east, and also that the forest cuts off overland travel in a massive part of its range. Farmland to the north and south of the city serves it though the farms are more extensive in the west, both north and south of the bay.

Before the railways were built, goods were ferried through the forest overland (the grand canal & river on which it was built goes sharply north out of frame and does not connect with the lough). A huge amount of Invergorken's infrastructure was built to directly facilitate ease of travel between sea and lough; the canals connect major points of interest. with a pretty robust lock system, ships from the sea are able to travel right on through the city to the train station, the industrial areas, and the lumberyards lining the edge of the Ruad.

The four quarters (five if you count the citadel) are named for the ring roads that originally surrounded them, but over centuries the built-up area has expanded to all but bury their original shapes. The east ring is where most of the usual city business takes place, mixed housing and shops and markets and everything else you could imagine. It's the oldest part of the city outside the citadel. This includes the city's singular Suzette hospital which is inconveniently located as far from everyone as possible. the north ring is the heart of industry in Inver, with hundreds of smokestacks, brick yards, furnaces, and foundries all in relatively close range of their own dock system (not drawn.. i forgor). Although it's a greatly productive area, it's also the poorest; extremely crowded tenements, poor facilities, housing built rapidly and without much care to provide for the mainly immigrant workers at the factories. Although the buildings are newer than the average east ring tenement, they are not pleasant.

The south ring is the rich-but-not-noble district, it consists of relatively new buildings, as the new rich of Invergorken have only recently come about as a separate phenomenon to the gentry of the citadel. These capitalists are responsible for much of the north ring & its development. The buildings in the south ring are deceptive; they look old, built to ape the style of the ancient buildings in the citadel, as clout-chasing upper class citizens struggle to elevate themselves on the same level as the nobility. Here you will find the Stagsons' black market as well as the Barnyard opera house and its adjoining brothel. The businesses are relatively fancy and cater to upper class tastes, like the Fernery which is for anybody who wants to take in the healing properties of nature without actually having to go outside.

The west ring is another new area, mainly built up by slightly richer immigrants from the western duchy of Moya, as this is the area of Invergorken you must travel through to get to Moya in the west, as well as all of the west-coast towns. It has a new train station and the beginnings of a new railway, though no trains run on it yet. The majority of iron from the north ring foundries is transported here to facilitate the building of the railway, which stretches all the way to Aberharain.

The citadel (or, in common parlance, the Hound's Den) is where the king and nobility go. It consists of a hexagonal wall with watch towers at each point, with portcullis gates opening out to several main thoroughfares. Many of the canals in the city actually arise from the citadel; the limestone bedrock is riddled with underground caverns and rivers, and these emerge at the surface within the citadel. The citadel contains the townhouses of the nobility, to be used on a seasonal basis as the main family residences are usually far out in the countryside, as well as the largest of the monarchy's three palaces. The citadel palace tower is the tallest building in Invergorken (not counting the smokestacks). The palace has its own walls blocking it off from the rest of the citadel, and its grounds are divided into four gardens, one for each season. The citadel has every stupid luxury you could possibly imagine; marked on the map are the important family houses but also the dressage arena, north of which is an extensive golf course with an arboretum. Although the noble families often only live in their townhouses during seasonal events hosted by the king (solstice and equinox hunting events in particular), the citadel is mainly home to an army of staff year-round, vastly outnumbering the nobility but hidden away in back streets and purpose-built corridors. this gives the odd impression of a ghost town, servants making things perfect for absentee landlords, heating and lighting their empty houses.

[crystalis]

-

"Why does the Biden administration support the Israeli genocide and war crimes even in the face of virtually universal condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the rules-based international order? Why do it?

People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections etc, which is real but also doesn't capture the whole story. The truth is that US capitalism depends on it, and the US ruling class broadly understands this fact.

The key thing to understand is that capitalist growth and accumulation in the imperial core (the US, Britain, Germany etc) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap inputs and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery of the world economy (broadly, the global South). They need the South remain a subordinated supplier within global commodity chains.

In order to maintain this arrangement, it is imperative for them to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Because the "problem" with development is it means Southerners begin to produce for themselves and consume their own resources. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains consumption and profits.

Economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, and invested heavily in the Israeli arms industry, with the explicit intention of using Israel as a staging ground—a massive military base—for counter-revolutionary interventions against rising Arab socialist and national liberation struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in that region: liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it. Israel is not an "ally" in the conventional sense. It is a proxy.

They support Israel for the exact same reasons that they have backed assassinations or coups against liberation leaders across the global South: Mosaddegh, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Allende, Arbenz, Sukarno, Sankara...

Israel assassinates movement leaders in the Middle East and interferes in regional political processes, all in concert with the US, but it also constantly bombs the frontline states, destabilizing their societies and economies and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending rather than industrial development. The Zionist project is intolerable not only because it is murderously hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine, but because it creates chaos and instability across the whole region.

The core states used South Africa in the very same way. The key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa – against overwhelming international condemnation – was because it served as a highly militarized Western colonial outpost that was geared up to run counter-insurgency operations not only within South Africa, but also in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the DRC, etc., leaving immense violence and chaos in its wake.

The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are willing to back obscene violence in Gaza, and shred the liberal values they claim to believe in, because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony.

You cannot appeal to imperial power in moral terms. The only way the US will stop propping up the Zionist regime is when it becomes too costly for them to do so. This will come down to the strength of the resistance and regional political and military opposition, but also the extent to which people can coordinate boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and punitive measures under international law."

[psychotrenny]

I'm kinda sick of the Liberal obsession with trying to "gotcha" reactionaries with their apparent hypocrisies and ideological inconsistencies. The fact of the matter is that their ideology is very consistent and they usually behave well in accordance of it; the preservation or strengthening of Western Imperialist Capitalism and all it's attendant forms of oppression and exploitation (i.e. Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Homophobia etc.). They do this primarily out of their own self interest; even those who don't occupy a position near the top and have no illusions that this well ever change do derive a range of privileges from the existing hierarchies, especially from helping to actively enforce them. Many poor or otherwise marginalised reactionaries may very well be better off in the long run should these systems be abolished, but in the short term the benefits of collaboration are too large to simply be written off.

They employ a wide range of rhetoric to these ends. While much of it is actively contradictory this doesn't matter as the actual words themselves are unimportant; what's important is the values they convey. Likewise the actions they perform may not align with the rhetoric they speak but, as long as this does not conflict with their goal of self serving enrichment through loyal service to the existing order, you can hardly call it hypocrisy in the a meaningful sense. A US conservative proclaiming that he'll violently resist arms control one second before loudly professing is love of law enforcement the next isn't being inconsistent; both state and vigilante violence are important arms of the Capitalist White Supremacist order. There's a reason all these anti-gun control types turn a blind eye when it's non-white people being disarmed (just think of the Black Panthers in California). And a homophobic politician who secretly employs the services of gay prostitutes isn't a hypocrite in any consequential way; homophobia is a convenient tool for both short term political ends (marshaling votes and providing a convenient scapegoat) and longer term social ones (maintaining the absolute dominance of the heterosexual nuclear family for the purposes of labour reproduction, control and exploitation) and by keeping his activities as a shameful secret you can hardly say that he's advancing the cause of gay liberation. Your attempts to own reactionaries with facts and logic are meaningless when you refuse to recognise the logic they actually operate on

[apas-95]

Genuine question does ACAB include cops in socialist states?

Well, if you're asking if the police of socialist states have the same interests as the police in capitalist states - no, they do not.

A proper class analysis of the situation reveals that the capitalist police, as enforcers of a capitalist state, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, serve bourgeois interests and serve to repress and facilitate the exploitation of the proletariat. In contrast, the socialist police, as enforcers of a socialist state, which is a dictatorship of the proletariat, serve proletarian interests and serve to repress and prevent the counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie.

To a certain degree there are contradictions shared between them, in that they are both bodies of armed men - but it is disingenuous and apologetic to ascribe any significant portion of the issues of bourgeois policing to the tyranny of authority itself, when the purpose of the bourgeois police is to exploit and repress the lower classes. The capitalist police are enemies of the people, tasked with defending capital and the capitalist class from them. The socialist police are representatives of the people, tasked with defending them from the capitalist class. The issues with capitalist police are not accidents, they are the point. Socialist police have an entirely different purpose and function, just as revolutionary armies have a different character than imperialist armies.

Now, if you're asking if the slogan of 'ACAB' implies opposition to socialist police, that I cannot answer. Certainly, many people use it as such - the term derives from western, imperial core progressivism; which fails to carry out a class analysis and relies instead on perceptual, superficial understanding of policing based solely on experience with capitalist police forces. Certainly, many people using it are opposed to socialist states and revolution in general. 'ACAB' is not a political programme, it is not a meaningful analysis of police violence, it is a slogan some people say.

[whencyclopedia]

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

"Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories" is a sweeping and jarring work of how opium became an insidious capitalistic tool to generate wealth for the British Empire and other Western powers at the expense of an epidemic of addiction in China and the impoverishment of millions of farmers in India. The legacy of this “criminal enterprise,” as the author puts it, left lasting influences that reverberate across cultures and societies even today.

Written in engaging language, Smoke and Ashes is a scholarly follow-up to the author’s famous Ibis trilogy, a collection of fiction that uses the opium trade as its backdrop. In Smoke and Ashes, the author draws on his years-long research into opium supplemented by his family history, personal travels, cross-cultural experience, and expertise in works of historical verisimilitude. Composed over 18 chapters, the author delves into a diverse set of primary and secondary data, including Chinese sources. He also brings a multidimensional angle to the study by highlighting the opium trade's legacy in diverse areas such as art, architecture, horticulture, printmaking, and calligraphy. 23 pictorial illustrations serve as powerful eyewitness accounts to the discourse.

This book should interest students and scholars seeking historical analysis based on facts on the ground instead of colonial narratives. Readers will also find answers to how opium continues to play an outsize role in modern-day conflicts, addictions, corporate behavior, and globalism.

Amitav Ghosh’s research convincingly points out that while opium had always been used for recreational purposes across cultures, it was the Western powers such as the British, Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch that discovered its significant potential as a trading vehicle. Ghosh adds that colonial rulers, especially the British, often rationalized their actions by arguing that the Asian population was naturally predisposed to narcotics. However, it was British India that bested others in virtually monopolizing the market for the highly addictive Indian opium in China. Used as a currency to redress the East India Company (EIC)’s trade deficit with China, the opium trade by the 1890s generated about five million sterling a year for Britain. Meanwhile, as many as 40 million Chinese became addicted to opium.

Eastern India became the epicenter of British opium production. Workers in opium factories in Patna and Benares toiled under severe conditions, often earning less than the cost of production while their British managers lived in luxury. Ghosh asserts that opium farming permanently impoverished a region that was an economic powerhouse before the British arrived. Ghosh’s work echoes developmental economists such as Jonathan Lehne, who has documented opium-growing communities' lower literacy and economic progress compared to their neighbors.

Ghosh states that after Britain, “the country that benefited most from the opium trade” with China, was the United States. American traders skirted the British opium monopoly by sourcing from Turkey and Malwa in Western India. By 1818, American traders were smuggling about one-third of all the opium consumed in China. Many powerful families like the Astors, Coolidges, Forbes, Irvings, and Roosevelts built their fortunes from the opium trade. Much of this opium money, Ghosh shows, also financed banking, railroads, and Ivy League institutions. While Ghosh mentions that many of these families developed a huge collection of Chinese art, he could have also discussed that some of their holdings were most probably part of millions of Chinese cultural icons plundered by colonialists.

Ghosh ends the book by discussing how the EIC's predatory behaviors have been replicated by modern corporations, like Purdue Pharma, that are responsible for the opium-derived OxyContin addiction. He adds that fossil fuel companies such as BP have also reaped enormous profits at the expense of consumer health or environmental damage.

Perhaps one omission in this book is that the author does not hold Indian opium traders from Malwa, such as the Marwaris, Parsis, and Jews, under the same ethical scrutiny as he does to the British and the Americans. While various other works have covered the British Empire's involvement in the opium trade, most readers would find Ghosh's narrative of American involvement to be eye-opening. Likewise, his linkage of present-day eastern India's economic backwardness to opium is both revealing and insightful.

Winner of India's highest literary award Jnanpith and nominated author for the Man Booker Prize, Amitav Ghosh's works concern colonialism, identity, migration, environmentalism, and climate change. In this book, he provides an invaluable lesson for political and business leaders that abdication of ethics and social responsibility have lasting consequences impacting us all.

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