#the bourgoisie

[jingerpi]

to be clear to my Marxist followers, while I stand by the quotes in my pinned, do not worry I am not out here judging people for if they have enough "love". correct understanding of the world comes first always, they're mostly there to calm the scared liberals and also express that despite not being concerned with bourgeois morality, Marxism is still an ideology that can be filled with love and wonderful things.

Marxism has a bit of a reputation for being the brutal man ideology (anti communism woo) and I want to fight against that a bit, because I do genuinely think it is deeply compatible with compassion and care, as one of it's central truths is the unity of our class in a collective struggle... its just not that compassion and care is what makes Marxism correct, and it's not bad (perhaps even good) if you're a Marxist because it makes scientific sense and you're not all lovecoded hippie posting, that's totally fine (Marxism primarily informs my love, not vice versa)

I'm a bit of a weird one with how I see emotions as informed by social positions and as such I see love as deeply related to solidarity and class struggle, but I do also understand emotions are fickle and may not correctly line up with class interests for everyone for example. I do actually think emotions can be correct or incorrect in a way, like pretty much anything else, it's just quite a bit more complex to understand them than other things, they function as guidelines and it's important to work to have those guidelines be actually helpful and correct, but that's a whole different conversation with a lot of difficulties and nuances, so I'll leave it here for now.

[galtzagorri-marrazki]

[silver-feather]

The crafting club that I'm a part of does a handmade gift exchange every year and I've always had a ton of fun making stuff, usually via sewing or embroidery. We drew the names for this year's exchange a few days ago though and I am struggling because this person has some of the BLANDEST INTERESTS and I think I have to draw something, which is not my forte 😔

[impybutt]

I literally used to lead a team of artists who are now training a specialty-built AI model to translate medical jargon into accessible infographics for patient care systems.

It's something I'm intensely proud to have been a part of. TechEnglish needs to keep the fuck up with the fact that all AI models are tools of innovation, some of which are being grossly misused to edge human creatives out of human jobs.

It's the Social Media argument again, which was the Internet argument before that. A thing gets invented, progress outstrips legislature, the thing invariably gets snapped up and abused by profiteering megacorps and capitalist oligarchs, then the regular old human beings who get swept up in the algorithm of Most Clicks Wins get blamed for being fed to a system designed to consume them.

Then the argument becomes "humanity was a mistake, Tabula Rasa, burn the orphanage down", probably also as a feature of the system. The rich are safe in their Elysium fields, the point is to let the animals cannibalise each other when the economy tanks. Corpses make for nourishing soil when it's time to sew fresh propaganda.

This got very 1984 and I'm not sorry, good morning

[cavegirlpoems]

Violet Core Approaches

So. My close friend and collaborator Sarah Carapace has been working on Violet Core - a ttrpg about dykey mecha pilots in space - for the past few years, and that work is approaching its fruition. It's about to get kickstarted pretty soon, and I got a preview copy of the game ahead of that. So, preview/review I shall.

Disclaimers: I'm close friends with Sarah, was involved in some of the early playtests, and might end up doing a stretch goal for the game. So, I am of course wildly biased in Sarah's favour. Still, even if I wasn't, I figure this'd be my jam.

TL,DR: This game is really really good, back the kickstarter. For more details, read on.

The Basics:

Violet Core is set in the Nemesis System, an alternate scifi version of the solar system. The game follows the lives of spacers cut off from their home planet, Cerulea, as they face an oncoming disaster as escalating waves of comet-storms hit the system and everything starts to come apart.

Our characters are mech pilots for one of three factions of spacers - The Reach, The Homebound, and The Cosmic Embrace - each with their own perspective on what to do about the looming disaster. It's generally agreed that they need to escape, but where to and how is a source of conflict.

All three factions and their approaches have their merits. Although the Reach are positioned as more heirarchical and organised than the other two, all three are clearly scrappy tenacious punk-ish survivors who've been rejected and exiled to space by the dickhead bourgoisie of their home planet, Cerulea.

Luckily, you get to pilot X-10s, giant personalised mechs powered by a mysterious psycho-active (psychic?) crysteline core. This lets you get up to all the various activities you just pictured when I said that.

Tonally, it's Sarah Carapace through-and-through. Everything is purple and blocky, with CRT monitors and snaking cables and spray-paint. Riot Grrl mashed up with retro scifi mashed up with cosmic weirdness.

On The Humble D4

The game uses the oddity of dice - the humble D4 - as its main dice, with D8s scattered in here and there. It's a choice I really like, giving the game a feel that's a little angular and off-centre. It's a simple choice, but it does a lot to set it apart. I can't sum this up better than Sarah does, so I'll just quote her:

d4s are the most cursed of all dice.

They are awkward to roll.

They are pointy and can/will stab you.

Femininity is pointy, painful and powerful and so are these odd little polyhedrons.

Also, There is no standardised style for d4s. When you roll them, the result is the number displayed upright, either on the top or bottom. It varies from die to die.

Which I think gives you a good sense of the tone of the whole game, y'know?

The game cares about dice as physical objects deeply. Players can use the emotional connections between their characters to donate bonus dice to another character's rolls: the game suggests that when you do, you should pass her your physical dice, and use the motion of how you do it (including potentially how your hand touches hers as you hand them over) as a way of expressing the connections between characters, which is a fucking genius bit of design.

Anyway. Who do you play as?

Some sort of dykey space-gal x-10 pilot. To define who you are, you pick three things: the faction you belong to, your pilot type, and the X-10 you pilot. I'll go over each in quick succession.

Your faction determines your political alliance and likely goals, and the culture you grew up in, and each faction has access to a different set of X-10s. You pick between:

The Reach: the most organised and strict faction, and the oldest. Strict, heirarchical, and high-tech. You play here if you want to have a good The Man to chafe against, or to be that The Man for somebody else. The Reach are working on engineering humanity to be able to survive the coming disaster and thrive in space, and building a vast engine - the Overlock - to enable this.

The Homebound: the most rough-and-ready faction. A large population of working-class gals, and with too few resources to go around. They're working on repairing a giant machine, The Sling, to transport their people to another star system and flee the coming disaster. Unfortunately, The Sling and The Overlock are both adaptations of the same machine...

The Cosmic Embrace: the weirdo faction. The smallest, most mystic, and overall hippy-est. Short on space, people, and resources, but not on idealism and enthusiasm. They're poking the weird shit of the setting, and getting results. A little culty. In the playtest I was in, I played Cosmic Embrace, obviously.

Notably, you can have PCs all be in the same faction, or be split between them. If split, there's lines of conflict, but also room for alliances and subterfuge. PCs can, and might well, switch faction in play.

As well as your faction, you pick your pilot type. There's three broad types of pilots you can be:

Genebuilt, artificially created super-pilots with custom genetics to make them good in space. Divided into two rough types; the Violet Kind (for if you were a successful project, and inhereted mysterious abilities) or the Rat Bitch (for if you... weren't, and mostly just inhereted emotional issues). There's some interesting space to play with the idea of nature vs nurture here, or with the pressure of expectation.

Baseliners, aka normal humans who haven't been genetically engineered or tinkered with. Again, divided into two types; the Shining Star (for if you're keeping up with the best through sheer talent and training) and the Baseline Breaker (for if you're a normal person getting by with determination and adaptability.

And then, lastly, the Returned. People who died - or nearly died - and were brought back. The character creation section only mentions one sort of Rebuilt - the Returned, who have been remade by the power of humans science - but hints that other sorts might exist. And indeed they do, tied to the mysteries of the setting.

I ended up playing a Rat Bitch, who'd seen her best buddy get horribly fucked up in a training exercise and gone awol. It was great fun.

Lastly, your X-10. Each faction has three models of X-10, divided by function: Warriors to be brutal front-line fighters, Rogues to be mobile scout-types, and Witches that do weird shit and fight at range. Out of these, each faction has its own version of each of these archetypes. Some X-10 models are pretty common and mass-produced (like the Ogress, the Reach's warrior-frame), and some are rare or even unique (like the Hag, the homebound's rare and experimental Witch type that can fuck with time and space).

Each X-10 has its own Violet Core, the psychoactive crystal that's at the heart of the mech and gives the game it's name. Thoughts from the violet core filter through to the pilot, and visa versa. If you pilot a Hag for long, you'll start thinking Haggish thoughts, and your own emotions will start to seep into the core. It can get real strange real fast.

Each type of X-10 feels and plays extremely differently, in a way I personally found made your choice of frame a reflection of your pilot's personality. My pilot ended up in a Mermaid - the Cosmic Embrace's version of a Witch frame - that had the ability to shift space around it (her?), and 'swim' out of the normal world into sub-space. Which brings me to...

The Spaces & The Mysteries

As well as the material, mundane world - what Violet Core terms 'top-space' - there are two other spaces that exist.

Sub-space is a serene, empty (is it?) realm that lies below top-space. You can dive into sub-space in the right X-10s, and explore. Time and space are wierd and fluid here. If you dive deeply, you find... things. If you dive too deep, you might not come back the same, or at all. There are mysteries down there. Remember I mentioned there are other types of Returned you might become? Yeah. Remember those Violet Cores that power your X-10s? They're made from something called 'the fingers' found deep down in sub-space. Who's fingers? You see where I'm going with this.

There's also The Violet Realm. This is the psycho-sphere, the realm of dreams and emotions and mystical experiences. The violet core of your X-10 links you to the Violet Realm. You can meditate to experience it, to commune with what's within...

This is a setting with mysteries. There are things to explore, forces and powers beneath the surface. I won't elaborate. Partly because I don't want to spoil the discovery for you, and partly because I don't want to read it all and spoil myself before I can play this again. What I will say is that the bits I did read ahead on give you a lot to explore, and are explained in a way that make how they tie into the wider setting and plot. It's all coming together into something impressive.

Personally, as a player of rpgs (larp and ttrpg) I really enjoy settings which present you with mysteries and mysticism, which let you explore the underlying nature of this universe in ways that are at times rational and at times intuitive or mystical. It's an itch few other ttrpgs have scratched for me. Lacuna and Orpheus were, until now, games that achieved what I wanted; now I get to add a third game to the list in Violet Core.

In case it wasn't clear, this is high praise. This is extremely high praise.

Mechanics

I'm going to assume you're already sold. If you aren't, let me make a statement:

I'm mad I didn't think of these game mechanics.

The core engine is pools of d4s, in a way I believe is drawn from forged in the dark. However, unlike FitD, I really like how VC handles its rolls. Particularly - as I mentioned above - the way players can pull on the connections between PCs to offer each other dice, and the way this affects the game.

The core is pretty simple but has nuance. There are PbtA-style moves - things like Negotiate, or Hurt, or Shield - that trigger when you do a particular thing. You roll, and get a codified result based on the result. When you roll, you get a number of dice depending on how you're going about it. In person, you use your talents; things like Making Out and Using Your Head. In your X-10, you use the X-10's talents, things like Synchronising and Drawing Near. An example: You're piloting a Mermaid, and you see your friend (piloting an Ogress) is about to be struck by spiraling comet shards. To save her, you dive across to pull her out of top-space and into sub-space with you, dipping out of the material world to avoid the hazard. Since pulling somebody into Sub-space with your X-10 is Draw Near, you roll as many d4s as your Draw Near pool, and count how many hits you get. Since you're trying to protect somebody, you take that result and look at the Shield move to see what happens.

It's a simple core that's then built on with more detail, giving it a lot of room for nuance and expression.

Further, there's a neat little system for tracking the emotional connections between PCs and how they escalate over time. As they escalate, you pick statements to describe how you feel, pinning down the nature of the relationship, that will get deeper and more intense the further in you get. And the further in you get, the more potent it is when you hand another player your dice to assist her PC.

In play its such a neat, deep, evocative system that it made me really mad I didn't think of it myself. It's basically perfect.

Sorties, in which our cosmic purple space robots punch each other

Up front. Although your in giant space-mechs with giant space-weapons, combat isn't meant to be lethal and horrid. It's intense, and gritty, and emotional raw, but in the way that a bloody-knuckled fist-fight is, not in the way that a shootout is.

Fights aren't war. They're personal.

There's a lot of dancing metaphors in how the fights are described. You might be sparring or actually seriously going after each other, but either way, a fight is an interplay between two characters at their most intense. That thing where a fight scene serves the same purpose as a musical number? Yeah, that.

So. Each fight between X-10s is a Sortie. A sortie is divided into a series of steps, and at each step you pick an option for how you're fighting;

Lead, to be agressive

Sway, to be fluid and fucky

Follow, to be evasive

Sway hits follow, Follow hits lead, Lead hits sway. Its a rock-paper-scissors cycle. (If you get two Leads, both hit, and if you get two follows or sways, both miss.)

When you hit, you can trigger one of the moves as a result. It can get ugly and painful. It could concievably get vulnerable and emotional.

Critically, you have a limited pool of lead/sway/follow actions (depending on your X-10), that get used up as you use them in steps. IE: if you're piloting a Witch, you can use Sway twice and Lead & Follow once. So, you can count what you're opponent's used up, and predict their moves based on what they've got left. In really long sorties, once you've only got one option left to you, it resets.

A sortie is a sort of dance as you maneuver for the advantageous position, use that to fuck with your oponent, and get your fists bruised.

Damage to your X-10 can bleed through to you. Contact between two X-10s can bleed through to their pilots. Things can get strange, particularly when there's Witch X-10s involved.

I'm gonna quote the book again here:

Not all pilots fight to win. Some pilots fight to hurt.

The Gay Bits

As you might have realised by now, it's a really fucking sapphic game. Not as a focus, but in the way where all our PCs are assumed to be some sort of dykey queer type because that's just the kinda tone we're going for.

To misquote Sarah's fellow aussie: "This is my book motherfucker, they'll walk be lesbians if I tell them to".

Pulling It All Together

Tonally, it's a fucking slam dunk. The world bleeds with a very specific atmosphere, a sort of dykey grungey weirdness that draws on old late-80s to early-90s mecha anime, and Heaven Will Be Mine, and weird scifi.

The writing has a really strong voice. Sarah doesn't write like a typical clinical dispassionate ttrpg text, she writes like Sarah. There's little witicisms, emotional bits, slang. It reads like somebody passionately explaining how to play in person.

There's a lot of snippets of in-character text - chat logs, reports, records, recordings - that give you a sense of the sort of people in this world.

The art is all fucking gorgeous. Mostly Sarah art, with some guest spots.

It is extremely purple, so purple its even in the name.

In conclusion:

Listen I am wildly biased because I've been friends with Sarah for yonks, but even if I wasn't I'd be incredibly enthusiastic about this game because:

a) it seems to have been carefully fine-tuned to hit my tastes.

b) it's really fucking good. Really fucking good.

It's an idiosyncratic personal work that also has a huge cosmic scope to it. It fucks around with the medium of dice-based ttrpgs in interesting ways. It's gorgeously written. It's got a setting that makes me want to dive in and explore it.

You should go back the kickstarter when it goes live, and tell your friends about it, and I am not kidding. If this game isn't a wild success there is something wrong with indie ttrpgs. The kickstarter is here, I believe it's due to go live in a couple of days.

If any bloggers are interested in getting a preview copy of their own, hit me up and I can hit up Sarah and we can sort things out.

[apas-95]

its so bad for us you don't understand. listen. the petit-bourgoisie are the most oppressed bourgeoisie in the entire world

[noneedtofearorhope]

you'd think that at this moment of history, when concurrent genocides are in the spotlight, that maybe, just maybe, leninists would cut it out with the class essentialist 'genocide the bourgoisie' rhetoric. but no. they've got no taste. like a plate of undercooked noodles.

[alientitty]

What are your thoughts on class the way it's seen OUTSIDE of the U.S.? In most countries, your class has to do with your surname/family (like a respectable European family name with a history of achievers), religion, social network, cultural capital, education etc. meaning for example, you can be a broke liberal arts student but because your grandfather was a successful buisness owner with a good surname and you have a good social and cultural capital, you are considered middle class even if you have 1$ to your name. And a rapper with a billion dollars or someone like Kylie Jenner or the Kardashains are still seen as trashy regardless of their income. Thoughts on that class system?

the dialectical materialist framework (developed by marx, foundational) can be used to analyze any society, so i'll try to do that here or at least point you in the right direction.

i've been specifying the us because i understand our liberal misconceptions the best, but defining class as your relationship to the means of production applies just as well in europe. one difference is that the ruling class there often still contains elements of the old feudal aristocracy. marx understood class (like everything else) as dynamic, always in the process of changing from one form to another. marx and engels actually start off the communist manifesto explaining this:

..in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs...almost all of these classes, [were arranged into] subordinate gradations...Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

basically, the old feudal classes find themselves increasingly becoming part of either the business-owning class or the workers. so the cultural attitude of someone having prestige from their family name is just the cultural reflection of this economic arrangement. perhaps their once-aristocratic family continued to be part of the ruling class by joining the bourgeoisie as it took power (ex.: that lord guy who writes downton abbey), or maybe this "family of achievers" refers to a bourgeois relative who invested smartly a couple hundred years ago and their descendants reap the benefits--in which case it's pretty much the same as being a kennedy in the usa.

in terms of the "broke liberal arts student" example, there's a couple things that could be going on here. one is the process of "proletarianization," where a person (or group) of a higher class like the bourgeoisie is pushed out of that class into the proletariat. however, what's much more common is a situation where someone bourgeois temporarily does not have enough of their assets in a liquid (spendable) form (and are experiencing for the first time what people in lower economic positions deal with all their lives...). you have $1 to your name today, but what other assets are available to you? if you hocked all of it or are disowned and cut off, and have no choice but to sell your labor for wages for the rest of your life, you've been proletarianized. if you still have access to the assets (which is what the terms "social and cultural capital" imply to me) then this is more a case of a bourgeois family mismanaging its funds. hardship or no, the amount of money in your checking account alone does not determine your class position. jeff bezos famously takes home a comparatively small salary because most of his net worth is in investments, but he is most certainly still part of the haute bourgoisie.

i don't know of any billionaire rappers, but i think it's good to break down celebrity here. first of all, europeans see rap as "trashy" mainly for the same reason as americans--racism. (the karjenner clan is also probably seen as "trashy" mainly because their brand is built from appropriating black american culture.) fame doesn't necessarily correlate to power over society--in fact, many say celebrity culture is a distraction from who's really pulling the strings. kylie jenner invests her capital (which she gets from her bourgeois family) into a business that generates more wealth for her, but that doesn't mean she has anywhere near the power and influence of someone like the koch family--who are actual billionaires. they are both bourgeois, both capitalists, and they share more interests with each other than with workers, but one is a much more powerful member of that class with much more capital. having disdain for the karjenner clan doesn't mean they're now proletarian wage laborers.

i don't necessarily think it's completely useless to think about society in terms of income tax brackets either, just that liberal analysis muddies the waters. the attitudes and prestige you're talking about are the result of underlying economic class relations, not the cause of them (technical term: base and superstructure). we need to get a handle on basic marxist concepts like class if we want to have useful conversations and accurate plans of attack.

some suggested readings to get a handle on things:

principles of communism by engels (brief summary, more direct than the manifesto). i also like wage labor & capital

marx for beginners (graphic/illustrated, from the 70s but gives a good overview)

curriculum of the basic principles of marxism-leninism, part 1 (translation of vietnamese gen ed college textbook, also available as a paperback. has wonderful in-depth footnotes and discussions on basic tenets of dialetical materialism--i'm still working through it all! the translator talked about some basics in her youtube vids as well)

introductory videos:

second thought actually has a video about "middle class" (his channel is 101-level and here he encourages the petty bourgeoisie to side with the proletariat)

for more rigor/book recs i like hakim

the marxist project has helped me understand some basic ideas as well

and of course david harvey is here to help you get through capital (one day i'll read it all, i swear...)

[aura-acolyte]

Sticking it to the Bourgoisie by stealing my best friend's credit card.

[13thpythagoras]

The Chinese call it Qi or Chi, the Hindu culture calls it Prana, ancient Egyptians called it Ka, Reich called it Orgone; today we know it scientifically as:

"Surface tension of electrified water decreases as the positive or negative charge increases"

The FDA has blood on their hands. Rather than do science, they do propaganda for monopolist-fascists to preserve the bourgoisie. Why won't the FDA test orally ingested cannabis extract for its potency against cancer? We have seen thousands of studies show that cannabis extract or tincture will cause cancer-apoptosis but the FDA refuses to test it. They are derelict of duty and are killing innocent lives every day. The FDA is a sham and they have blood all over their hands and they cover up facts like how this study basically proves the existence of chi, qi, prana, ka, orgone, and the life-energy discovered independently so many different times by various cultures.

"The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally found person to rediscover it, until some of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty"

[mygreenknittedsweater]

un avochat

The CATS of the Abaisse🐈

[shittheraidparadesays]

Chris: I have splattered that Elite. Kayden: Like the bourgoisie? Chris: No, with a car -1/12/2024

[nellie-the-toad]

of course i'm a people pleaser! who else do you want me to please? the bourgoisie?

[jakethesequel]

Help settle an argument I've been having

[13thpythagoras]

Watch petro-fascism flight and claw back our energy sovereignty, they know energy is abundant and they seek to monopolize it to insulate the bougies

Wind and solar power could significantly exceed Britain’s energy needs | University of Oxford

[apas-95]

really putting the cart before the horse, here - this wasn't a 'cause', it was a justification. the US wasn't 'convinced by Kuwaiti officials' to invade Iraq, it had clear economic and political reasons to do so, and ran a propaganda campaign before carrying it out in order to manufacture consent. the US government was not some naive victim of trickery, it was simply acting in the interests of the class it represents, the US bourgoisie, benefited by their imperial project. ideas arise from the material basis of society, not the other way around.