#this is of course hand in hand with capitalistic exploitation everything in the world is the same

[iphigeniacomplex]

severance doesn’t know that it’s an antipsych masterpiece. but thankfully i do

[psychotrenny]

Hello, please forgive me if this ask is uncalled for, I just figured you would be a good person to ask. What exactly in theory do people in communist circles here mean when they besmirch 'idealists'? I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with most theroy I've read and generally align with most leftist beliefs. But I would still consider myself an idealist because at my core I believe everything I do because I believe in working towards an ideal world. It makes me a bit sad to see the term used so harshly. I do believe that material conditions matter more than ideals , but I still think my beliefs are based on ideals at their core, am I misattributing the label? Misunderstanding something? Thank you for taking the time to read this if you did, I don't want to use you as my personal tutor or anything, I just want to understand something and wasn't sure who to turn to. Have a nice day.

I'm going to share an extended excerpt from Philosophy and Class Struggle by an anonymous South African theoretician who went by the pen name "Dialego". The whole thing is a very good read and not super long, and while naturally it focuses most on the South African liberation struggle of the 1970s it communicates a lot of guidelines and principles that are useful for any modern revolutionary movement. In any case the below excerpt is taken from the second chapter What Is Dialectical Materialism? and I think it answers your question most thoroughly:

It is sometimes thought that a ���materialist” is a person who simply looks after his own selfish interests whereas an “idealist” is one who is prepared to sacrifice for a worthwhile cause. Yet, if this were so, it would be the conservatives of this world who are the “materialists” and the revolutionaries who are moved by “idealism"! In fact, of course, “materialism” and “idealism” do not refer to vague moral attitudes of this kind. They are terms used in philosophy to describe the only two basic interpretations of the world which can be consistently held. Everyone who studies the world around him has to find the origin of things. What causes things to move, or to act or to behave in the way they do? Are the forces spiritual in origin or are they produced by the material world? Some years ago a Calvinist minister ascribed earth tremors in the western Cape to the growing disquiet of the Almighty towards modern forms of music and dress! Whereas a materialist seeks to explain the world of society and nature according to the material conditions and processes at work, the idealist believes that events take place because of the existence of spiritual forces or “ideas”. An idealist might argue that apartheid in South Africa has been brought about by the “ill-will” or “evil intentions” of white people who don’t wish to face up to reality. For a materialist, on the other hand, this “ill-will” or “evil intention” still needs to be explained, and the real reason for apartheid is not to be found in people’s heads but in their pockets, in that material system of capitalist exploitation which makes apartheid highly profitable for financial investors, factory owners and the giant farms. It is here that the roots of the system lie. We often talk about the way in which for example “anti-communist ideas” weaken our movement by creating divisions in its ranks and this of course is true. But we must never forget that these anti-communist “ideas” don’t simply fall from the skies: they reflect and arise out of the material interests of monopoly capitalism and unless they are firmly rebuffed, they are likely to make an impact on those whose stake in society, however small, makes them vulnerable to anti-communist scare-mongering Thus we can say that whereas idealism looks for an explanation of the world in terms of the “ideas”, “intentions” or “will” of people, materialism considers that the source of all events and actions is to be found in material causes or, as they are sometimes called, “the laws of nature.” It is true that cruder forms of idealism ascribe things in the world to the “will of God” whereas more subtle forms of idealism put the cause down to the ideas which exist in the heads of individuals on earth, but in neither case do idealists seek an explanation in material reality. Whereas idealism believes that the ideas in people’s heads exist outside of and independently of the world of matter, materialism contends that people’s ideas, like all other aspects of their behaviour, are the product of material causes and can only be properly understood when these causes are discovered. Materialists in fact argue that man was neither created by God nor is his origin a sheer mystery. He developed out of the world of nature through a long process of evolution and his ideas are the product of the mental activity of his brain, itself a highly developed and complex form of matter. This does not mean that materialists are not concerned about people’s ideas. On the contrary, materialists are the only people in the world who are able to explain them properly. What materialism rejects are not ideas, or their immense importance in influencing the course of events. Rather it is the idealist theory of ideas which materialists challenge, because this treats ideas as mystical forces that somehow exist independently of material reality.

[maamiamtryingmybest]

Spoiler Warning ahead for Squid Game and Cyberpunk Edgerunners

When Gi-hun died, it felt empty. I was so puzzled about why it felt empty when in contrast to Cyberpunk, the ending felt so impactful. They both died because of some overarching oppressive capitalistic system but one feels deeper than the other. In Cyberpunk, David didn't really have much ambition of his own. He wanted to carry out Maine's role and make Lucy happy. He became one of the most powerful against the odds and died on the hands of Adam Smasher. Lucy got away and got her dream; only for that dream to be empty and unsatisfactory. In Squid Game, Gi-hun died because he wanted to save the baby. Because the game technically didn't start as yet and MG Coin didn't count, he died so both won't get executed. Gi-hun's goal was to save everyone but in a self-sacrifice he was able to save one person.

I think the difference is that the former made it clear that despite fighting against the oppressive nature of Night City, where the upper class has the ultimate advantage over everyone. There is something emphasised about the helplessness of it all; where at a moment's notice your life is instantly ruined and no one is there to help you because of how hard the corpos decided to make it for everyone. The main crew looked like they were rebelling against the status quo, only for there to be a line to say that "the corpos control everything". It just made one realise how no matter how one fight against it, it's a very hard to get out of the pure corporate control. It makes you feel like your dreams of becoming so impressive so meaningless in contrast to the real powers that could make you disappear if they feel like it. Which makes David all the more impressive because he managed to make it that far to become a legend of his own. David's death was always foreshadowed and it still hurt because we grew to like him throughout the season. Also, we still had a payoff of Lucy's ambition, only that her dream coming true felt hollow when she realised she was alone. With Squid Game, Gi-hun's death rang empty because I felt like it wasn't discussing the realities of how these oppressive systems came to fruition in the first place. Yes, we we saw how the rich was enjoying the games, but everything feels like, "well, that's how the world works" And I think a really major component is the idea of consent. It doesn't feel like they're giving a great understanding of how this misleading idea of consent work that arises through the voting system. Even though some people "chose" to be a part of Squid Games, that's because of how horrible the outside world was treating them like the upper classes that constantly exploits, while pouring money into ridiculous things such as watching poor people suffer for no reason. They didn't choose out of free will, they chose because they had to or else the children that needs medical treatment will die. They chose because they have debilitating debt. They chose because they're a part of a marginalised community that makes it difficult to be financially stable. I don't feel like there was an emphasis on how the rich was actively contributing to these factors such as in Cyberpunk where you saw that the Trauma Team was more ready to tend to rich persons than someone who could not pay for their service.

Gi-hun died by the rules of the game, not against them, the same rules that the frontman pretended was the natural state of the world, and not manufactured by rich sadists who could have easily provided help. While David died fighting against corpo's most powerful weapon against him. In that way, David had his own rebellion to his last breath. And him dying highlighted even more how the oppressive systems are hellishly difficult to confront. I think it's that Squid Games left out the part where it shows that reality that I just mentioned that makes it feel empty. Of course, Gi-hun would sacrifice himself to save the baby because he wants to show that he cares above all else, in contrast to the rest of the players and the rich guests who was overseeing everything. But something was missing there and I feel like it's that lack of acknowledgement of how badly exploitation is. We saw how the game worked as it does the first time where the rules are more or less abided by, so the game resuming as normal after the coup did not feel engaging as it should be because I was really looking forward to that deconstruction of Squid Games as itself. Gi-hun's last exclamation is that "We are not horses." But there is something about that horses analogy that could go even deeper than just that. Because if the contestants are just "horses in a race", then who put the horses there? Like I said, a lot of these people did not choose to be a part of the Squid Games freely. They chose because of how severely disadvantaged they are, and the VIPS knew that and enjoy their suffering. (As well as being the ones who contributed to them joining Squid Games in the first place.)

I would have really liked if Detective Hwang was able to bring something to fruition from two seasons of searching the island, maybe bring some more chaotic to the already unstable facility. We saw guards infighting and the last season just ended with a coup. I thought as the series nears its ends, the system that took disadvantage of so much people would implode because people will not take the abuse forever. It may be 5 years or 20, but it would not have gone forever and I think that even if the rich people made it out alive, there would be some impact that would happen that wouldn't be solely the Squid Games had to relocate.

There are other things I have in mind as well. The last game, sky squid game, lacked the dynamic part of the original squid game. We were connected to both Sang-woo and Gi-hun, and we saw how their friendship turned into rivalry. The emotional stakes were high as well as the physical and it really hurt seeing Sang-woo's end like that. However, in this version, it was initially just standing and arguing and the stakes did not feel as high. I did not care for most of the finalists here and I didn't feel anything for player 125's death. Most of them were really selfish and I know that it's typical for people in oppressed groups to think that it's better to sacrifice the ability to care in order to benefit them and their immediate circle(only for sooner or later, most of them end up being taken advantage of). But something about how the execution of the characters does not feel as right as it should have, maybe because since we see the players being more active in their greed than the VIPs who are passive enjoyers we don't attribute the responsibilty as equally. While the players are responsible are continuing the game and simply wanting to kill the child, the VIPs are just as or more responsible for creating the systems that led to this point and allowing people to kill each other when they have all the power to stop them. But I don't know that part came across for others. Also, I know Gi-hun's decision not to kill anyone in the beds was because he had a moral conscience but I feel like it didn't really amount to anything when he helped to kill most of them anyway. MG Coin's final reveal that he was a villain did not feel as earned as it should have. I noticed that we saw the rich people had more input in season 3 than in season 1 and I would've liked it if having more screentime had much more impact on the story. Even the idea of the other VIPs being more involved in the game as guards feels like it has more potential than one short scene of them revealing their faces.

All in all, Gi-hun's self-sacrifice made sense but it didn't feel satisfactory, most likely because it didn't do enough introspection as to why these forces are in place which led to his sacrifice, as well as how Squid Games formed as a whole in response to rich people's taste for violence. While David's death felt impactful because while it showed how inescapable the abusive nature of corporate control is where it does not downplay the cruelties the upper class tend to display.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you really hate this county? Or were you just ranting?

Sigh. I debated whether or not to answer this, since I usually keep the real-life/politics/depressing current events to a relative minimum on this blog, except when I really can't avoid ranting about it. But I have some things to get off my chest, it seems, and you did ask. So.

The thing is, any American with a single modicum of genuine historical consciousness knows that despite all the triumphalist mythology about Pulling Up By Our Bootstraps and the American Dream and etc, this country was founded and built on the massive and systematic exploitation and extermination of Black and Indigenous people. And now, when we are barely (400 years later!!!) getting to a point of acknowledging that in a widespread way, oh my god the screaming. I'm so sick of the American right wing I could spit for so many reasons, not least of which is the increasingly reductive and reactive attempts to put the genie back in the bottle and set up hysterical boogeymen about how Teaching Your Children Critical Race Theory is the end of all things. They have forfeited all pretense of being a real governing party; remember how their only platform at the 2020 RNC was "support whatever Trump says?" They have devolved to the point where the cruelty IS the point, to everyone who doesn't fit the nakedly white supremacist mold. They don't have anything to do aside from attempt to usher in actual, literal, dictionary-definition-of-fascism and sponsor armed revolts against the peaceful transfer of power.

That is fucking exhausting to be aware of all the time, especially with the knowledge that if we miss a single election cycle -- which is exceptionally easy to do with the way the Democratic electorate needs to be wooed and courted and herded like cats every single time, rather than just getting their asses to the polls and voting to keep Nazis out of office -- they will be right back in power again. If Manchin and Sinema don't get over their poseur pearl-clutching and either nuke the filibuster or carve out an exception for voting rights, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is never going to get passed, no matter how many boilerplate appeals the Democratic leadership makes on Twitter. In which case, the 2022 midterms are going to give us Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House (I threw up in my mouth a little typing that) and right back to the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Power Hour in the Senate. The Online Left (TM) will then blame the Democrats for not doing more to stop them. These are, of course, the same people who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton out of precious moral purity reasons in 2016, handed the election to Trump, and now like to complain when the Trump-stacked Supreme Court reliably churns out terrible decisions. Gee, it's almost like elections have consequences!!

Aside from my exasperation with the death-cult right-wing fascists and the Online Left (TM), I am sick and tired of how forty years of "trickle-down" Reaganomics has created a world where billionaires can just fly to space for the fun of it, while the rest of America (and the world) is even more sick, poor, overheated, economically deprived, and unable to survive the biggest public health crisis in a century, even if half the elected leadership wasn't actively trying to sabotage it. Did you know that half of American workers can't even afford a one-bedroom apartment? Plus the obvious scandal that is race relations, health care, paid leave, the education system (or lack thereof), etc etc. I'm so tired of this America Is The Greatest Country in the World mindless jingoistic catchphrasing. We are an empire in the late stages of collapse and it's not going to be pretty for anyone. We have been poisoned on sociopathic-libertarian-selfishness-disguised-as-Freedom ideology for so long that that's all there is left. We have become a country of idiots who believe everything their idiot friends post on social media, but in a very real sense, it's not directly those individuals' fault. How could they, when they have been very deliberately cultivated into that mindset and stripped of critical thinking skills, to serve a noxious combination of money, power, and ideology?

I am tired of the fact that I have become so drained of empathy that when I see news about more people who refused to get the vaccine predictably dying of COVID, my reaction is "eh, whatever, they kind of deserved it." I KNOW that is not a good mindset to have, and I am doing my best to maintain my personal attempts to be kind to those I meet and to do my small part to make the world better. I know these are human beings who believed what they were told by people that they (for whatever reason) thought knew better than them, and that they are part of someone's family, they had loved ones, etc. But I just can't summon up the will to give a single damn about them (I'm keeping a bingo card of right-wing anti-vax radio hosts who die of COVID and every time it's like, "Alexa, play Another One Bites The Dust.") The course that the pandemic took in 21st-century America was not preordained or inevitable. It was (and continues to be) drastically mismanaged for cynical political reasons, and the legacy of the Former Guy continues to poison any attempts to bring it under control or convince people to get a goddamn vaccine. We now have over 100,000 patients hospitalized with COVID across the country -- more than last summer, when the vaccines weren't available.

I have been open about my fury about the devaluation of the humanities and other critical thinking skills, about the fact that as an academic in this field, my chances of getting a full-time job for which I have trained extensively and acquired a specialist PhD are... very low. I am tired of the fact that Americans have been encouraged to believe whatever bullshit they fucking please, regardless of whether it is remotely true, and told that any attempt to correct them is "anti-freedom." I am tired of how little the education system functions in a useful way at all -- not necessarily due to the fault of teachers, who have to work with what they're given, and who are basically heroes struggling stubbornly along in a profession that actively hates them, but because of relentless under-funding, political interference, and furious attempts, as discussed above, to keep white America safely in the dark about its actual history. I am tired of the fact that grade school education basically relies on passing the right standardized tests, the end. I am tired of the implication that the truth is too scary or "un-American" to handle. I am tired. Tired.

I know as well that "America" is not synonymous in all cases with "capitalist imperialist white-supremacist corporate death cult." This is still the most diverse country in the world. "America" is not just rich white middle-aged Republicans. "America" involves a ton of people of color, women, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Christians of good will (I have a whole other rant on how American Christianity as a whole has yielded all pretense of being any sort of a principled moral opposition), white allies, etc etc. all trying to make a better world. The blue, highly vaccinated, Biden-winning states and counties are leading the economic recovery and enacting all kinds of progressive-wishlist dream policies. We DID get rid of the Orange One via the electoral process and avert fascism at the ballot box, which is almost unheard-of, historically speaking. But because, as also discussed above, certain elements of the Democratic electorate need to fall in love with a candidate every single time or threaten to withhold their vote to punish the rest of the country for not being Progressive Enough, these gains are constantly fragile and at risk of being undone in the next electoral cycle. Yes, the existing system is a crock of shit. But it's what we've got right now, and the other alternative is open fascism, which we all got a terrifying taste of over the last four years. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to go back.

So... I don't know. I don't know if that stacks up to hate. I do hate almost everything about what this country currently is, structurally speaking, but I recognize that is not identical with the many people who still live here and are trying to do their best, including my friends, family, and myself. I am exhausted by the fact that as an older millennial, I am expected to survive multiple cataclysmic economic crashes, a planet that is literally boiling alive, a barely functional political system run on black cash, lies, and xenophobia, a total lack of critical thinking skills, renewed assaults on women/queer people/POC/etc, and somehow feel like I'm confident or prepared for the future. Not all these problems are only America's fault alone. The West as a whole bears huge responsibility for the current clusterfuck that the world is in, for many reasons, and so do some non-Western countries. But there is no denying that many of these problems have ultimate American roots. See how the ongoing fad for right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world has them modeling themselves openly on Trump (like Brazil's lunatic president, Jair Bolsonaro, who talks all the time about how Trump is his political role model). See what's going on in Afghanistan right now. Etc. etc.

Anyway. I am very, very tired. There you have it.

[zen-garden-gnome]

Long post about whiteness

I’m seeing a lot of false-start questions based on a narrow understanding of whiteness. Whiteness (and recovery from whiteness) can be tricky to unpack because it has a lot of layers that have been added over the years. So you’ll run into a layer and may be tempted to stop there, but it goes deeper.

1) Racial identity was a vague belief before it was officially named, but it’s not as old as many think it is. Prior to European Expansionism, travelers and merchants and militaries alike have generally referred to people based on their place of origin or their language. The idea of vaguely lumping hundreds of ethnicities together based on a handful of physical attributes started to kick up when Portugal began capturing and enslaving huge numbers of sub-Saharan Africans in the mid-1400s. As slave traders and “explorers” brought shiploads of captured, multi-ethnic Africans to Portuguese auction blocks to be traded all over Europe, what set these enslaved people apart from anyone else there (including other enslaved people) was a) the fact that they were to some degree darker than the Portuguese despite displaying a wide range of skin tones, b) were from Africa at the time, and c) were enslaved. When Christian militant and royal biographer Gomes de Zurara was hired in 1453 to write about the life and “accomplishments” of Portugal’s most famous slave trader, Infante Henrique aka Prince Henry the Navigator, he officiated, in writing, the idea that all these newly enslaved people were their own class of people with no differentiation between them. Here, race is a burgeoning social narrative invented to praise European slave traders, and this racial concept is defined in relation to slavery, African origins, and skin tone. Racial concepts appeared in tandem with racist concepts, because races began to be envisioned in order to excuse the abuse of others. The ideas of whiteness and blackness were birthed simultaneously, specifically around slavery, and they became deeply entrenched beliefs before they were ever officially named.

2. “Negro” became the first major racial term before “white” was widely used, binding the development of racial concepts even more securely with the practice of European slavery. In fact, race and racism became encoded in colonial-American law in 1640, when African servant John Punch ran away from his European buyers along with two European servants. He was eventually recaptured, as were his Dutch and Scottish companions. However, the colonial judicial system sentenced Punch to a lifetime of slavery, while the two Europeans had an extra year added to their initial servitude. This marks the first record of a Euro/American legal precedence for lifetime sentencing of enslavement based openly on race. John Punch’s African lineage and the other servants’ European lineage were the differences between their sentencing. Here, European origin was what freed a person from being of the “negro race” and therefore severely reduced one’s likelihood to enslavement. It was also the requirement for incoming settlers who wanted to be able to buy land. Only white people were allowed to develop inter-generational wealth, at a time when this continent was being carved up by land speculators for massive profits.

3. The concept of whiteness was officially named by Carl Linnaeus in order to rank Europeans as superior among other conceptual categories of people. It involved grouping hundreds of ethnic groups together to form white, yellow, red, and black races in he text “System Naturale" (1735). While primarily an introduction to our current taxonomy system, it included these racial categories. It was highly regarded by Europeans eager to cast themselves as superior because it a) created a popular “scientific” framework for excusing the most obscene (and profitable) crimes against humanity, b) officially outlined/invented the white race and identified it with everything good and the black race as everything bad, and then c) clearly defined Europeans as the basis of whiteness, “Homo sapiens europaeus.” Here, whiteness is coined to describe European ancestry, particularly in relation to “grotesque” non-whites.

4. An individual’s personal ideas of whiteness fluctuates with time and circumstances. As governments, social institutions, literature, etc all work to redefine history and clean up their image, people have different/less information to work with, but the effects are the same. The popular spoken definition of whiteness is often simply a reference to a relatively pale skin tone caused by European ancestry. Obviously there are pale people in other places around the world who aren’t European and weren’t related to the slavery of European Expansionism, so pale skin isn’t enough. The relation to Europe’s capitalistic global expansion is key. But what about European countries who didn’t go expanding this way, or whose involvement is harder to pinpoint? After all, most of the trading of enslaved indigenous peoples from Africa and North & South America were carried out by the Portuguese, Genoese, Dutch, French, British, Spanish, and Americans. Well, the rapid enrichment and development of the rest of Europe for centuries to come was specifically made possible by all the labor, resources, and capital brought in by this period of the European slave trade. European ancestry links every white person to privileges and developments born on the backs of black and indigenous enslaved peoples. Furthermore, simply being white makes one safer from these kinds of exploits, and today it also makes one safer from the effects of generations of racial prejudices and resource extraction on the global scene. Which brings me to...

5. Whiteness tends to involve one’s relative freedom. Freedom of movement, both physical and social, without immediate threat of policing. Freedom to explore one’s ancestral history without being blocked by 500 years of forced removal, renaming, forced childbirth, etc. Freedom to exist without having to actually know or respond to one’s racial identity. This one’s really important. Whiteness involves not having to think about being white, usually in relation to living in a country/region whose laws and norms are defined and enforced almost exclusively by other white people. Since whiteness and blackness arose mutually around the European slave trade, blackness is inherently tied to a lack of rights/freedoms and whiteness is inherently tied to an abundance of them. That doesn’t mean that every white person experiences these equally, and there will always be exceptions to the rule. But the exceptions don’t make the rule, and after centuries of globalized white supremacy, whiteness has become a subconscious signifier of power for people all over the place.

The big take-away is this: whiteness is inherently toxic. There is nothing positive to defend in whiteness. It was born out of ugliness and it is ugly to its core. That’s why it feels so bad. It’s why “white pride” is always ugly. However, the solution is not to disconnect from our ancestry. All that does is leave us trapped here, in an ugly set of circumstances, with no concept of who we are except what we’re living in, now. The real work to be done is to connect with our ancestry before whiteness, with the ancestors who related to the land as a living entity, before the land was limited in social memory to a source of private capital, servitude, and empire-building. This land, this Earth, is the backdrop against which all our relativity is measured. From this place of relative security, understanding, and development of the spirit, we can withstand the reality of our more recent ancestors, and finally heal from the last 1000 to 2000 years of trauma.

I know I’ve said this before, but now that I have this huge post, I’ll repeat it: Dr. Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine is a really helpful book and/or course for this whole process. It’s not the end-all be-all resource, but it’s a great start! I’m also always down to talk about this stuff. Hit me up. I need to be able to talk about it, too.

(I should add, while blackness was created by white people and therefore was born out of the racism of whiteness, blackness was forced on people, while whiteness was claimed by the takers. It’s no white person’s place to have an opinion about "black identity.” White people started race, so white people are responsible for deconstructing our own race--no one else’s. We cannot be “post-racial” while everyone else is still living the violent reality of racism.)

[goongiveusnothing]

I don't get how you can stan Louis even after everything he's done, using slurs, being friends with homophobes, bullying people for being gay as a teenager, the hate he incited against that radio producer...

I'm not a Louis stan, I just respect him more as an artist and as a person. I don't know if that bullying someone for being gay is real or not, but I mean he would've been a child. There's room for growth there. I don't think he's homophobic now.

And the thing about other things Louis has done is that yes, they're out there and people know about them. I think most of his fans accept that he's done things he shouldn't have done, that they've disagreed with, people who were hurt have moved on and stopped being a fan of his. Which is good. Don't support people you don't agree with. You can decide maybe he's grown from it, maybe he has good qualities you feel counter things.

But that's the difference between Louis and Harry. You can dislike who Louis actually is and things he's actually done and move on from it.

With Harry, everything he's actually done, the fans deny that he's done. Try and bring up his Zionism, waving a hammer as Israel bombed Palestine, his BLM issues, his exploitation of George Floyd's death, his queerbaiting for profit, his homophobic ideas about gay movies and gay sex onscreen, his capitalist corporate greedy ways, his incredibly dubious and suspiciously terrible friendships and romances, his womanizing ways with women, his misogynistic lyrics, his glamorization of cocaine and drug use, how he steals all his songs from other people, how he's been handed his career off the back of others, how empty headed he is, how completely uncharitable he actually is, how completely apolitical and neutral on serious issues he is, how he's not who he sells himself to be to his fans...

And the fans will deny it all and claim none of these things ever happened. He donated to the UN charity which works with numerous refugees from around the world which includes Palestinians of course which proves he actually loves Palestinians, in the way that if you wave about an Israeli hammer as Israel bombs Palestine doesn't prove you hate them because they seem to think one connection is more obvious than the other. He's secretly gay and he's screeaaaming about it. None of his relationships with women are even real. His management team force him to be greedy and to make millions and millions from his fans, it's so fucking rude you'd hold his management abusing him to make him rich against him. How dare you! All his friendships are fake, his real friendships are secret and all of them are incredible people!

The thing that's bringing Harry down is the deception. If you dislike who he is, you've been duped into thinking he was something else. Louis never pretends to be anything than what he is. So the fans feel betrayed and lied and conned by Harry. They feel manipulated at some point. They realize he saw them all as easy marks. That will hurt Harry more than if fans just didn't like who he was and unstanned years ago. Because they feel he's lied to them, that the fandom has lied to them, and that stuff is harder to shake off, because now the fans wonder, what else has he been lying about, who is this man really? You can't take anything he does at face value anymore, and everything he does at face value he does for a profit. There's nothing about his fans he doesn't see in a financial way.

[blackwoolncrown]

Hmmm I guess my end point on veganism is this:

It’s run its course IMO. That’s good! The point of any social movement towards justice should be to become no longer needed- having fulfilled its purpose, it should aim to become superfluous. Its end point is not a world where it is needed, but a world that surpasses the one that birthed it.

I say this because at THIS point, almost everything veganism wants to achieve as a movement would be better served by applying that energy towards Black & Indigenous sovereignty. Why?

Because none of the things veganism is fighting actually existed before indigenous people were separated from their land by colonial force. It was in that severance of the people from the land and of the relationship they had that colonizers began a consumptive campaign against the earth and its inhabitants.

There are other things that veganism wants to achieve that literally don’t need to be achieved and that follow racist notions, which is the other reason why I feel that veganism (as a movement, not as a lifestyle per se) is past its time- for instance it’s a fact that there’s contention about mainstream settler vegan rhetoric and how it’s harmful and offensive to groups that eat meat responsibly. Issues around how veganism tends to rely on shock value and trauma porn and often correlates enslaved Black people with factory farmed animals.

More concisely, I think that veganism as a mainstream movement has not only run its course in terms of the fact that it needs to hand the baton to Black/Indigenous people (whose mistreatment BEGAT the violence veganism is poised against) but in that it is now degrading into the thing it fought.

Veganism decays very easily into capitalist marketing. Veganism considers it a win if grocery shelves are lined with vegan meat instead of animal meat- whether or not the land is sovereign. Veganism cheers at vegan burger chains and lauds vegan celebrities and is fine with capitalist industry and consumption as long as it is vegan. Veganism thinks wool and leather- materials that biodegrade and have been used responsibly by indigenous cultures for thousands upon thousands of years- are violent but vinyl is not.

At the end of the day I know ppl can do and be more than one thing and usually are. But it’s also true that time is finite and energy works where it is focused. And I honestly feel that any time someone is willing to spend convincing others to be vegan is much better spent convincing them to listen to, learn from and support Black/Indigenous sovereignty.

Because our mistreatment paved the way for capitalism and consumption and factories and industry and we’re still suffering from and fighting that. And I notice the places where veganism as a movement and vegans as people fail to really be able to reconcile that reality within their narratives about fair treatment and food as violence. Veganism as a non-human animal rights campaign cannot and will not address our sovereignty because it excludes human animals from its care and sees killing for food as the enemy instead of exploitation. It makes no distinction.

So this is where I find it as a notion to be obsolete long term. It willingly allows itself to be co-opted by capitalism because it ignores the root cause of the problem it fights, and in doing so chooses relevance over redundancy.

[acti-veg]

Hello, I have a question. Let's call me Nirvana. This is part 1. veganism is about doing everything you can to avoid harm, yes? I'll give you a scenario, a person is baking vegan cupcakes with sugar bought from the store. A nonvegan such as myself walks up to them and asks, what veganism is about. They say to reduce harm as much as possible. I'm like okay. Education is key and all that for making good choices. but what about the people or animal bones used to pick/process that cane sugar.

Nirvana part 2. They can point to my shirt and say Do you know if that shirt was made in a sweatshop? I say, Of course not. And they say "okay well is it okay then to say fuck all and run over a bunch of people?" I say nope. Appeal to futility fallacy or Nirvana fallacy I get it. They say "We do what we can, it's about harm reduction. If this product harms humans and animals, but this product does not, or has human rights issues that can be fixed. That's okay. Because Veganism

Nirvana 3. "Is all about adapting. If you can't find an alternative now, we wait for one to come up or avoid the animal product entirely until it does" I'm like okay. "So you don't know if that cane sugar had human or animal lives attached to it, and I fully agree with what you're saying. But you're still in the dark about that sugar's origins. Wouldn't you avoid it until a sustainable cruelty free option pops up?" I don't see them avoiding baking cookies anytime soon yeah?

Nirvana 4. So isn't that hypocrisy because they're still eating mysterious sugar, despite this vow of harm reduction? Is it not choosing some exploitation of humans and animals as okay but other exploitation of humans and animals as not okay? In her defense, idk if there's any organic, fair trade powdered sugar in a small Arkansas grocery store. But you can just not eat sugar at all, if you don't need it yeah? I'm already transitioning to veganism, but I already know ppl like me will sniff that

Nirvana 5. In me or us from a mile away. Even if they're doing absolutely nothing, we're all still eating these cupcakes without a care in the world yeah? Because we'd be long dead before giving up that sugar mate. So how'd you avoid becoming the laughing stock of a whole non-vegan crowd at a bake sale by not following you're own "find an alternative or avoid animal products full stop until u find one that aligns with veganism" values? 

This sort of finger-pointing is unfortunately absolutely rampant. The first thing I’d point out, is that ethically sourcing things like sugar is not as difficult as you might assume. It’s hard to know for sure with pre-prepared products of course, but you can quite easily obtain ethical sugar that isn’t filtered using bone char, even in the US, which is really the only place that this is a problem. 

I think that the key thing to emphasise is that it’s about being realistic. I can easily give up all animal products, and I can probably give up sugar too, if there really was no ethical alternative. But can I give up all crops I can’t trace directly to farm? Can I give up all electronics? Can I avoid driving, public transport, banks, tech companies, supermarkets, big oil, energy companies, supporting any company owned by an unethical parent company? There is a limit to one person can reasonably be expected to do, while still existing and trying to survive in a consumer-driven, capitalist society.

That said, take those objections seriously. Think: Could I find ethical sugar? If the answer is yes, then you should try to. But otherwise, you need to really turn this around on the other person, since, if they’re interrogating you about your consumption, they should be able to defend their own. You’re not perfect by any means, nor am I, but at least you’re going vegan. Are they? Why not? Also keep in mind that even if you were a complete hypocrite, that wouldn’t have any bearing at all on whether or not going vegan is the right thing to do.

We all need to do our best, what our best looks like is different for everyone, not only in terms of accessibility but in terms of the energy needed to track and trace all of our products. But the key thing to remember is that this obection is almost always used to put down people for doing something, by people who are doing absolutely nothing. It’s okay to hold your hands up and say ‘yeah I could be doing better’, we all could, but at least we’re actually trying, so don’t let people who aren’t even doing that make you feel bad because you can’t be perfect.

[technologicalombudsman]

-23

This is a journal on technology, politics, and everything in between. It contains musings on a variety of topics that we hope will enlighten the reader as much as it has enriched us. Through this journal, we want to make the world a better place not just by understanding it, but by changing it.

We start the series by examining the ideas of Byung Chul Han, whose works critique the neo-liberal economic system that undergirds modern life. It is an essential starting point of the series.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you would probably have heard of or used Facebook, Twitter, or even Tumblr. These technologies driving the current information age have globalized and liberated information. The impact, both good and bad, has been wide-ranging and deep, cutting into the fabric of society. The dwindling of traditional institutions of information (e.g., the news, radio, and television) has given way to an intoxicating medley of Instagram posts, Twitter feeds, and TikTok dances. In its wake, these technologies have transformed society into one that worships materialism, overconsumption, and self-surveillance. With every like or share, information is converted into value for the aforementioned technology companies, which have the unquestioned writ and power to dictate its use.

Han is a critic of this new world order, and his views precede current criticism in the vogue (Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capatilism, for example, is very similar, or The Social Dilemma on Netflix). His criticism, however, is not of technology itself, but rather the neo-liberal world order that has enabled such technology to evolve into a Leviathan with tentacles reaching into the deepest crevices of our private lives.

The catch here is that we are fully complicit and agreeable with this exploitation of our psyche.

The neo-liberal world order

The communist system of governance fell from grace with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The number of communist regimes in the world can now be counted on the fingers of one’s hand. In its philosophical demise, communism gave the idea of capitalism and with it, the concept of a neo-liberal world order, the ammunition it required to reign hegemon. And it has. Since 1989, the world has largely been guided by the trade policy of the Anglo-Saxon alliance (the US and Europe), which has championed neo-liberal values of individualism, democratic rights, and capitalist free-market policies. The Washington consensus has underwritten the invisible architecture of global trade in today’s world.

Yet Han’s critique is that the current system is a perversion of these values. Excessive freedom has transformed into self-surveillance, self-censorship, and ironically, the destruction of the individual. Man, as the sole proprietor of his own freedom, has walked down the path of self-exploitation in the misguided belief that he and only he is the master of his own fate. As Kafka once said, the slave has stolen the whip from the master and begun whipping himself.

Self-exploitation and the evolution of discipline

Economic systems are driven by supply and demand; that is the iron law of economics (if there can be any to be said in existence). Han postulates that the disciplinary society of Foucault has been replaced by an achievement society. It is no longer one that uses negative control (i.e., whippings, beatings) but conversely relies on positive control (i.e., achievement) to control its subjects. It is epitomized in Obama’s feel-good campaign: “Yes We Can!”

The unconscious transition from “should to can” has transformed the exploitation of labor. In the past, we were instructed. But now, we are inspired. We are self-empowered to keep exploiting ourselves for the betterment of capitalism. We go on LinkedIn and post photos of our achievements. We learn new courses with Coursera to find a better job. We boast about our achievements - but they are, in effect, our punishments. Trapped in this self-inflicted cycle of punishment, humans develop neuroses, as they would to any form of pain, psychological or otherwise. These psychological sores have manifested in the growing numbers of mental illnesses and psychological problems plaguing our societies.

As a society, we are in pain because of this punishment. Yet we are blind as to the source of the whip and the identity of the oppressor. We continue to yearn for more and more and more achievement, and in the process, become more depressed, more unfulfilled, and increasingly psychotic. The problems of modern day issues originate from this source of oppression.

Reflections

As much that I have written, I have not even touched the surface of The Burnout Society with this report. Han’s criticism of the current world order - the liberal world order - is devastating.

Personally, it has enlightened me.

[missabnormal]

Alright, so I watched Wonder Woman 1984...

[MAJOR SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT]

So, in no particular order:

1) I get where Jenkins and the writers are coming from: they needed a lot of time to develop the characters--establish their stories and their personal lives, especially where they are at emotionally. I just think they needed to find a better balance between the action and that development. That is to say, I think the movie suffers from the 2014 Godzilla movie problem, in which it took a hell of a long time to get to the action parts in a movie that was marketed as showcasing a lot of action. 

It’s... agh, I’m conflicted, but I’m leaning towards there should have been more action. It just needed better balance of it all, even when Diana doesn’t have her powers. After the first movie had a (mostly) nice balance of action and development (for plot and characters)--and frankly better action--it’s hard to then see this movie and not see... less.

I also feel like the movie thought because it was taking place in the 1980s, it needed the nostalgic tone to it; that is, it’s weird for Diana to be, at her final scene with Max to be talking about how beautiful the world already was without the lies that the wishes create, but I feel like she would know that the world wasn’t... that. We’re at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, racism is still rampant, the President (not sure if he was supposed to be Reagan or an analogy to him) in real-world history was defunding a lot of things including mental health treatment, and so on. The movie definitely establishes the Cold War, the conflicts in the Middle East, and at least anti-Irish sentiment from the English, but it all feels... not quite surface-level, but also not quite explored in depth. I don’t know, did Jenkins/the writers just not want to explore the same themes as the first movie? Maybe they thought it would be too similar? It could be, but... there could have been better ways of handling it, you know?

Of course, there was also the topic of racism with Max. Let me tell you, Max’s arc in this movie was so far and beyond what I expected. I thought, from the interviews from the cast and crew, that the movie was going to go full on Max-as-Trump-analogy. To show him as a Latin American immigrant who suffered from racism and poverty is a lot to adjust to. I like JLI Max Lord, but he was also the epitome of born-wealthy white man corporate capitalist privilege--he just had the opportunity to be fully developed by DeMatteis and Griffin as a character and not just be left as a cardboard cutout and personification of 1980s corporate America. 

Also, Max’s development is reminiscent to who he was in the very early days of the JLI, in terms of goals and--at the end of the day--care for like... not destroying the world and all that. The difference is that instead of an alien computer manipulating him (to an extent), the movie had Max use a wishing-stone. Also, he has a son for whom he cares about which, again, I was not expecting.

2) It feels bizarre and so wrong that neither Diana nor Steve asked themselves 1) why Steve reappeared in some random 1980s guy’s body instead of appearing as himself, 2) the moral/ethical questions of Steve inhabiting random guy’s body without consent and just doing whatever with it (especially after it’s implied that Diana and Steve had sex, which HELLO??? That’s not his body???). Like, it’s the kind of plot point that would probably happen in an actual ‘80s movie, no questions asked, but just because the movie is taking place in the 1980s doesn’t mean it should have the same values as the ‘80s. Like, it feels like the “trick” of the wish should have been Steve taking this random guy’s body and life and not just Diana’s powers. 

Anyway, how the movie handled this particular aspect of the plot is all kinds of wrong and baffling to see it coming from a Wonder Woman movie in the year 2020.

3) Flying aircraft from the 1910s would be drastically different from aircraft from the 1940s and on. Pretty hard to believe that Steve would just know how to fly a future military airplane without even a few pointers. 

4) The movie has a tendency of randomly showing objects or characters when it’s convenient instead of actually establishing them in a cohesive manner within the narrative. For example, the Eagle Armor appears just when its convenient to talk about it. The movie could have established sometime in the first act of the movie; i.e. it could have, say, had used the dinner scene to show Barbara asking Diana something like “What made you pursue anthropology?” and Diana answering with a “Oh, I wanted to explore my Greek ancestry” and then shown a brief moment when Diana is at her apartment of her checking the monitors and a brief panning over the ~mysterious~ object under the sheets. 

Another example is Diana using invisibility powers on the jet. I could have lived without an invisible jet in the movie, but if it was gun-to-the-head-there-MUST-be-an-invisible-jet, then I would have tried to also establish those powers before hand. For example, the movie could have shown Diana casually practicing using her powers on random objects once or twice before having her use them on the jet. That way, viewers could have understood that this power is a thing that actually exists within the movie and not just something that comes up when its convenient. 

5) It feels like Diana didn’t get as much development in this movie as in the last one. If anything, it feels like a lot of it was given to Max and Barbara, which on one hand I understand because they are new characters within the DCEU; but on the other hand, it’s supposed to be a Wonder Woman movie with the central character being Diana. She and Steve did have many scenes together, but the Max and Barbara scenes outshone theirs. 

6) Barbara... well, she borderline falls into the “powerful woman becomes evil” trope that is saved from falling into it full-on by the wishes having traps to them. However, things get complicated, narrative-wise, after Diana makes her speech about the world already being beautiful and all that. Sure, in terms of Barbara herself, she was already a kind, if awkward woman; but her coworkers and random men were shitty to her. They treated her like she barely existed, taunted her or attempted to assault her. Barbara became power-hungry, sure, but are the other people who had been shitty to her not wrong, too? There’s something fundamentally wrong with how society treats certain people (like how white Americans treated young Max Lord, or how that English woman treated the Irish man) and the movie can’t show it and then not address it in-depth, especially when the suffering that people have gone through is what lead many of them to make rash wishes (although, to be fair, the grand majority of them didn’t know what the wishes actually entailed). 

The movie doesn’t say if after everyone renounced their wishes everything became better or just went back to how things were. Although this movie is vaguely within the DCEU, it is still in it, to it’s fair to say that the world didn’t become better after people realized the destruction they were bringing upon the world with their wishes. However, to then say that everything went back to how things were is not a good ending, either. Does Barbara have to suffer through people’s indifference to her, if not outright assault, again? Is the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear apocalypse still going to continue? Are Irish people going to continue to suffer through discriminatory English sentiments towards them? Is unchecked exploitative corporate America just going to continue existing, especially those that deal with oil? Are people just going to continue to be racist? Because here’s the thing: Max may have said “life is good, but it can be better” but of course things weren’t great and the movie taps into that; yet, it’s just that, tapping into it. It presents the problems, but it doesn’t present the solution. If it’s not wishes, then what? Because going back to how things were is, you know, not great. 

Any story that presents the existence of complex conflicts has the responsibility of dealing with those in a satisfying way, and I’ve seen many stories that want to be complex, but don’t want to give it a complex solution. No story, or movie, is perfect (and none will ever be), but WW84 could have at least tried a bit more. 

7) I don’t mind Diana grieving so much over Steve, but her reluctance to renounce her wish to regain her powers could have been better handled, along with her grief. The movie briefly established that pretty much everyone she met in the first movie (except maybe Chief?) is dead. Yet, it’s so brief compared to the rest of the movie. To truly understand the depth of Diana’s desperation to keep Steve alive, the movie could have emphasized how pretty much everyone she ever cared about--on an interpersonal level--is dead or on an island that she can never return to. She’s not only alone in terms of romance, she’s alone in almost every emotionally conceivable way. And as time passes, she will remain young, but all the people she meets will grow old and die around her. The movie could have emphasized how Diana is emotionally clinging to those people she met when she first arrived in Man’s World and she can’t take being emotionally close to others again because she fears it will be too painful to see these new people die around her. It’s doubly hard when Diana also loves humanity: she wants to help them in any way she can, but that also means she can never separate herself from them. It’s love and pain interwoven, but the truth is that’s life. You lose people and doors close on you, but others open and new people come through. Everyone wishes to have everything they ever wanted, but part of being human is learning what that “everything” actually means to one’s personal life. 

The movie could have tried of uniting these ideas: Diana’s grief over Steve, Diana’s loneliness, Diana’s love for the world, the state of the world in the 1980s, human desire and fallacy, what it means to truly love and be loved, and what is it that we can do with our lives, and that of others, in an imperfect world. I can almost see some of these ideas floating on air throughout the movie, but they’re just that: floating, not quite coming together in a cohesive manner; a draft that never got that final and needed revision. 

*I might have missed a few things to talk about, but this is what comes to mind for now. 

[fairycosmos]

3. I know i have to 'get out there' but it's hard when you've felt your whole life that nobody likes you. i literally only have one friend. i just feel really hopeless... i feel like im not meant for this kind of life, everything feels wrong and like im waiting for something's never gonna come, some kinda magic. i want of life of adventure and paint and write but instead i have to study because i'd feel like a loser w/o an education. i dont mind working i just dont want to study.

hey love, i'm really sorry to hear that. i think it's totally normal to be disappointed and even more so to be unsure about your future - it's not an indicator of failure, it's a natural part of growing up and finding your place in the world. i'm probably ignorant and don't know what it's like to actually be in your shoes, so i apologize if i come across as frustrating at some points. this is just my perspective. but i'm wondering if maybe taking more time away is an option for you? maybe working somewhere, focusing on your mental health for a while.... because the thing is your level of education has nothing to do with your worth as a person, and even more than that, there's no set time scale for this sort of thing. you could go back to college at 35, and it wouldn't matter. your life doesn't have to follow that stereotypical linear trajectory we're all forced to chase, in order for you to find happiness and success. and you don't have to justify your own personal choices to anyone, least of all to yourself. i just think it's important to try to focus on the factors of living that are in your control, that will bring you a sense of stability and peace. i know it's hard to let go of the internalised capitalistic idea of having to prove yourself through academia and getting a 'good job', but it's always useful to remind yourself of just how exploitative and made up that entire construct is. you're here and you're experiencing the world and with that you are fulfilling your point, you are doing enough. you are enough. everything else is background noise, that we're forced to muddle through, but background noise nonetheless. you don't need anyone's permission to prioritize your own needs and wants.

however, if you're dead set on studying this topic you don't like (which, i totally understand why you'd make that choice bc i know it's not that simple), then i reckon it's alright to just let yourself feel shitty for a while. any sadness, anger, disappointment, pain you feel about it is to be expected - and even though it fuckin sucks to have to carry it, its intensity definitely won't last. one way or another, you will adapt and so will your ability to cope. just don't use those emotions as an excuse to engage in self destructive behaviour, cause that'll only perpetuate the cycle and keep you in a dark place. having to force ourselves to do shit we hate is always going to feel like an everlasting burden we're never going to escape from, even if that's not the case in reality. and i had a lot of experience with that in school too - the main tactic i can remember making a difference, was like you said, finding little things to make the weight of it more bearable. i think that often starts first and foremost with our own mental health before anything else, because it controls the filter through which we see the world. if you don't like it in yourself you won't like it anywhere. when it comes to your social anxiety, are you receiving any support/would you be open to that? i think consistently seeing someone while you're in school - whether that's a counselor, a therapist, attending a support group or even just calling a hotline to begin with - could really help you manage the stress you're so afraid is waiting for you. having someone to talk to and learning why you are the way you are, and what tools could help you specifically in terms of coping mechanisms and finding a support network can honestly do wonders for your self esteem and the way you approach others. and of course it takes time, maybe that brand of self care is a lifelong process, but it's still important to engage with it. so balancing school with prioritizing your own wellbeing might be something that lightens the weight of the experience. anxiety tends to have us anticipating worst case scenarios and drawing on old insecurities to convince us we'll be alone and in pain forever, but what you've been through is truly not a mirror image of where you're going. making friends especially as an adult is fuckin hard, and struggling with it doesn't mean there's something irreparably wrong with you. just means it's hard to get to know ppl, but that's not a personal failing on your part. it's just a fact. most of them are too worried about their own 'flaws' to take note of yours. but that doesn't mean there aren't ppl out there you haven't met yet who will love you, even if that's hard to believe rn. also a side note, it could be a good idea to build up a routine where you're engaging in something that actively makes you happy at least a few times a week. can literally just be watching netflix, or taking up a hobby, meditating, going for a walk - i know college is v busy and it may not always be possible, but having small pockets of deliberate down time to look forward to is crucial. im not saying it'll cure everything or anything, just that it might make it all feel less overwhelming. but lastly, i want to say that it's ok if you give it a go and then decide you can't do it. that's an option, too. it doesn't have to be black and white. don't fault yourself for not wanting to spend 3 years doing something you hate, but also know that it's possible to get through it if it's a means to an end for you, especially if you seek the help you need. and whichever choice you go with, neither of them are 'wrong.' it's just your path.

anyway, i'm sorry this got super long. i think discussing it with someone you trust might be a good move, just to know that they have your back whether you work through uni or not. you're honestly doing so much better than you realize and i'm proud of you for continuing to try and strive despite how painful it all is. but i really hope that you can catch yourself when your brain is being unnecessarily unkind to you, and that you can then make the conscious choice to change the narrative and approach it from a place of patience and self appreciation. i think your life is still worth living even if it doesn't match up to where you think you should be, which is something i've been trying to accept lately too. that so much is beyond our control and we can literally only focus on the silver linings of the factors that are in our hands. that we can still be okay, living like that. and none of this is permanent, not the way it often seems like it is, but especially not the confusion. it just takes time to live the answers to all the existential questions you have. take it a day at a time. ANYWAY im rooting for you with all my heart and if you want to talk about this properly feel free to message me!! my overarching point is that you're not as alone as you feel. and you won't be in college, and you won't be if you look for work instead. so many of us understand where you're coming from. much love to you, take care 💗💗

[sparksinthenight]

Kindness

selflessness

connection

equality

responsibility

hope

mercy

justice

compassion

open-heartedness

spontaneity

understanding

community

ecological protection

valuing human life

peace

cooperation

true, spiritual freedom

None of these things are actually valued by capitalism. Quite the opposite. Capitalism actively bulldozes all these values in order to press forwards it's agenda of making everyone selfishly only persue material things for their little small exclusive groups. Capitalism does not care about the lives of people or their happiness. Not about camaraderie or equality or connection or anything. Capitalism kills, it destroys the earth, it rips apart families, it encourages materialism and selfishness, it isolates people, it exploits and controls people, it causes so much pain, so much grief. It does. We're all slaves under it. Well not all of us. Not all of us. Some of us are owners, some of us are overseers. But most of us. Capitalism is a fucking mess and it causes so much bullshit.

Like y'all know what the cause of all the ecological destruction that's going on is right? It's not fossil fuels but the thing that causes all the fossil fuels to be burned, all the habitat destruction, the habitat fragmentation, the pollution, the commercial hunting, the overfishing, etc. It's capitalism. Capitalism did that.  

Y'all know about sweatshops, about the inhuman, dangerous, unhealthy, and physically and psychologically torturous working conditions, about how people are forced to either work or starve to death.

Y'all know sbout child labour.

About forced migration because of all the bullshit going on with ... everything.

Y'all know about how many people, living in extreme poverty and non-extreme poverty, die because they can't afford what they need.

Y'all know about the lack of access to education. The lack of access to decent quality education. The lack of access to post-secondary. To any type of education at all even, for many people.

About how hard capitalism makes it for domestic abuse victims - often financially dependent on their abuser - to escape. This last point literally isn't talked about nearly enough by the way. I have so often thought about how if running away from home wasn't a guarantee of homelessness I would've actually done it long ago. But no. My shitty minimum wage job, which is the best I can hope for right now and literally exploits me though not nearly as much as people in the Global South are exploited, is fucking not enough to pay for rent and bills and groceries. If I left I'd be homeless. And I might just leave anyways because maybe it's worth it.

But anyways back to the labour abuse. Do you really think ten-year-old children should be fucking working in collapsing mines? Should they be handling mercury, a highly toxic poison that causes a slew of health effects? Should they be sewing three sleeve seams per second for hours? Should they be separated from their families and working in an abusive stranger's house? Should they be subjecting themselves to dangerous pesticides while picking avocados under the hot sun? Should they be carrying heavy bricks? No? You're right. They FUCKING SHOULDN'T. But they goddamn are. They are.

And what about the military industrial complex? What about all the weapons companies that want to keep selling weapons and have their grubby little hands all over world governments?

And when the planet dies so will everyone. Literally everyone. The capitalists straight up need to realize that everyone needs the environment. But they won't. They won't realize that and we're having to rely on a little girl to save us. Not that Greta isn't more than capable, she is. But she has too much responsibility on her shoulders for a kid that young. She deserves a childhood.

And then there’s the stuff I can't even mention because of how liberal propaganda has so programmed us to see ourselves and each other as commodities.

There’s the fact that the legacy of colonialism and slavery and stuff will always live on under capitalism because of generational wealth. The fact that unless we are committed to equality and don’t leave people and peoples to fend for themselves, previously colonized people will remain cripplingly poor. Because wealth builds wealth and they did not start off with wealth. And that’s not fair.

There’s the fact that homelessness exists. And it’s torture to not have decent shelter or anywhere to be. It’s torture to not have anywhere to be, anywhere to be wanted, anywhere to belong. It’s torture to be out all fucking day in the freezing cold or the burning heat. It’s not okay. There’s the fact that even in a country as comparatively prosperous as Canada, there are homeless fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. What the hell? In America there are children who are in elementary school who are homeless.

There’s the fact that there are children sleeping on the ground outside in the cold weather all over the Global South and even occasionally in the Global North. The fact that there are emaciated children begging on street corners. There are children forced into joining gangs because they have no other source of income and they want their loved ones to survive. There are police officers, politicians, and rich people that blame and judge those kids for wanting their loved ones to survive.

Rich people would rather see children die than redistribute their wealth. They created a world where despite the best efforts of desperate family and community members, children die.  

There are children who have lost their parents in climate change-induced natural disasters.

There are of course trust fund kids that grow up in mansions and inherit multimillion dollar empires. And I hate them.

Listen. I’ve grown up in the Canadian left. And the Canadian left has no place for this bullshit. It’s a lot of different things but it is in no way pro-rich people. Like, at all.

Everything is so wrong.

So like, how do we fight this?

Empty promises of communism that have no actual substance behind them don’t bring any change at all. Look at Vietnam. They say they’re communist but all their social policies are literally more capitalist than America. Look at China. They say they’re communist but they are a state capitalism and even their roads are privatized. We can’t just say we’re communist. The communism has to be real. Has to be democratic. Has to be backed by real, good values.

So what values am I talking about? Tbh the list goes on but more or less community, unity, cooperation, kindness, compassion, responsibility, true freedom, equality, people power, and love and protection for the Land are the bedrock of a functional society.

These values are exactly the values that capitalist status quo power structures want to crush. Want to get rid of. Wants us to forget.

But without them, without the forces of love and connection that connect all of us, what’s left? What can we fight with? What can we use to make us strong? What can we use to bring us together? Because we need to fight for something. We need to fight for each other. We need to fight for human dignity. And human dignity is built on universal love. On recognizing that we’re all from the same source and made of the same stuff.

So anyways I completely forget where I was going with all this.

But like, hold on to your heart, ultimately.

And fuck corrupt governments, fuck rich people, fuck billionaires, fuck large companies, fuck racists, fuck classists and homophobes and all that shit. We are going to come together and save the earth and free everyone and fix everything.

[woman-loving]

(Early feminist and socialist efforts in Japan: excerpt from A History of Japan, 2nd ed., by Conrad Totman, 2005)

On the surface of the land, meanwhile, the burgeoning textile industry was heavily staffed by the teenage daughters of hard-pressed rural families, the girls commonly being lured to mill work by recruiters who misrepresented both wage arrangements and workplace conditions. One angry young silk worker wrote in 1888:

“Silk thread manufacturers, using contracts as a shield, treat us abominably. They think we are like slaves, like dirt. We think the silk-thread bosses are vipers, are our bitter enemies.”[8]

As factory lighting was installed during the eighties, thread mills became notorious for their long hours and use of child labor. One elderly woman, recalling her years as a girl in the silk mills during the nineties, wrote:

“In the lamplit factory we worked from morning darkness to about ten o'clock at night. By the time we had finished work we could hardly stand on our feet.”

Unsurprisingly the workers protested occasionally and absconded frequently, the majority breaking contract and fleeing their jobs within six months of recruitment. They did so, moreover, despite "barbed wire, high walls, guarantee deposits, and company regulations," and despite the hardship that doing so might cause their families, whose ability to repay debts often depended on daughterly income.[9]

ACTIVIST WOMEN

In Japan, as elsewhere, industrialization generated pollution, gave rise to urban labor problems, complicated rural life, and in due course radically diminished village influence on society at large. At the same time, however, it was broadening the general public's intellectual vistas, creating new career alternatives, and to an unprecedented degree institutionalizing the separation of household and work place. These trends affected women as well as men, and as a result questions about their roles and rights began to acquire greater visibility than in the past, foreshadowing an even more heightened presence in later years.

When architects of the Meiji state undertook to define social and political roles in the years around 1890, it will be recalled, they utilized principles and practices of both indigenous and alien provenance to forge a centralized, paternalistic regime that would, they hoped, build a rich and strong Japan, a "modern" society, a Great Power. How best to situate women in this new order was a question that evoked much comment. Some men and women advocated expanded roles for women, especially during the 1870s when everything seemed in flux. Kishida Toshiko, the daughter of an established Kyoto merchant, was well versed in progressive European thought, and she became one of the day's most eloquent proponents of women's rights. She spoke widely and effectively on behalf of education and opportunity for women, declaring in 1883, at age twenty:

“Equality, independence, respect, and a monogamous relationship are the hallmarks of relationships between men and women in a civilized society.”[19]

A handful of men echoed this view, but as national affairs stabilized during the later 1880s, a counter-argument came to prevail, one that reflected the growing separateness of home and work place and that was grounded in both foreign and domestic precedents. It defined woman's proper role as that of responsible operative of the household, dedicated homemaker, "good wife; wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo).

In 1899, when the Education Ministry was prodding prefectural authorities to establish more high schools for women, a Ministry official explained the government's reasoning this way:

“Since the family is the root of the nation, it is the vocation of women who become housewives to be good wives and wise mothers, and girls' high schools are necessary to provide appropriate education enabling girls from middle- and upper-middle-class families to carry out this vocation.”

Viewing the proper role of women in these terms, Meiji leaders encouraged them to pursue appropriate education. They also argued, however, that women should be excluded from politics lest such involvement endanger their morals, conduce to social disorder, and compromise their role as wife and mother. Accordingly Article 5 of the Police Security Regulations of 1890, reaffirmed in 1900, barred women from joining political organizations, participating in political meetings, voting, or standing for office.

This official posture failed to satisfy the growing number of women who wished to pursue other careers or expand their range of life choices.[20] Nor did it address social issues that affected women in general, notably concubinage, prostitution, and male drunkenness, but also harsh conditions of the working poor, such as those in the textile mills. Indeed, the situation of the working poor seems to have been as far beyond the mental horizon of the Meiji elite as of elites elsewhere. Worst of all, perhaps, were the lives of the earlier-mentioned women coal miners. Recalled one observer:

“The life of the female coal-miner was appalling. Returning black and grimy from a day's work in the pits with their husbands, they immediately had to start preparing meals. In those days there were no nursery facilities, so infants were placed in the care of others. Mothers returned from the mines to nurse their babies. Men would return from their work to bathe and sit back and relax, displaying their tattoos and drinking sake. This was the accepted behaviour of these lowly people, and no man would be found helping with what were designated as women's tasks. If a woman so much as protested, she would be beaten.”[21]

Precisely because mining was a dirty and dangerous occupation, however, mine operators had to pay wages that substantially exceeded those of surface jobs as a way to attract and retain workers. For women as well as men, the lure of better pay sufficed. Indeed, a few years later, when government reformers enacted legislation to prohibit women from working in the pits for reasons of public health, some women severely resented their exclusion from jobs that paid much better than what they could earn above ground.[22]

These women miners generally were mature and married. Younger, single rural girls commonly took jobs in the textile mills and as domestic servants, while poor urban women and girls held a wide range of jobs: as "lowgrade factory workers, used paper and junk collectors, . .. peddlers, papermakers, . . . fishmongers, and vegetable-sellers," working as day laborers, and engaging in "cart-pushing and itinerant tea-picking.”23

These working poor were nearly as invisible to activist women as they were to male leaders. Even among the women of privilege, moreover, differing needs, priorities, and interests led to the pursuit of differing agendas. In consequence it was exceedingly difficult for activists to form a united front and promote a shared program for change in women's circumstances.

One of those who confronted most thoughtfully the dilemma of a fragmented female populace was Fukuda Hideko of Okayama samurai ancestry. An admirer of Kishida, she spent some years as radical political activist and prison inmate before settling down to a life devoted to teaching and feminist socialist activism. In 1907 Fukuda established a magazine, Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), as a vehicle of feminist-socialist thought and information. In the editorial that launched her new venture, she declared,

“as far as women are concerned, virtually everything is coercive and oppressive, making it imperative that we women rise up and forcefully develop our own social movement.”[24]

Recognizing with particular clarity the social basis of the divisions that prevented women from developing a united front, she frequently pointed out that women labored under both gender and class discrimination. For that reason, she argued in another essay the same year, women should support socialism:

“While socialism prevents the exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, it also stops the arrogance of the male class against women. It gets rid of the rich and poor classes, and removes sexual discrimination.”[25]

In hopes of appealing to the broadest spectrum of women, Fukuda chose as a major goal of Sekai Fujin the repeal of the above-noted Article 5. But even that focus failed to elicit a unified women's movement. Harassed by authorities and unsympathetic to the sorts of paternalistic governmental measures that many less fortunate women welcomed, Fukuda was unable to build a broad movement. A few years later the women's movement drifted into desuetude in the wake of a plot to assassinate the emperor (noted below), in which the young and angry journalist-turned-anarchist Kanno Suga became deeply involved at the price of her life.

Not all women activists were so firmly opposed to the established order. For some the new influences sweeping across Meiji Japan seemed to offer rich opportunity, even as wife and mother. That view was evident in the journal Jogaku zasshi (Women's Education Magazine), which appeared in 526 issues during 1885-1904, until it failed financially.[26]

A number of women founded girls' schools where they instructed students in values and subjects that could accommodate the "good wife; wise mother" vision even while promoting a broader sense of women's possibilities (see figure 14.1). Most famously, in 1901 Tsuda Ume founded the Women's English School (Joshi Eigaku Juku), which grew into today's Tsuda Women's University. She urged her students not only to be ladylike but also to pursue practical schooling in marketable skills. As she observed in a speech of 1915, "Economic independence is the one thing that can save a woman from an unsuitable or distasteful marriage urged on her by relatives."[27] Educators such as she gave encouragement to the growing number of young women who pursued the study of medicine, training them to be licensed as nurses and after 1912 as doctors. And even larger numbers were trained as school teachers, especially for women's schools.

Among noted women of the day, the one who enjoyed the most success was Okumura Ioko, daughter of a Buddhist priest in Kyushu. An energetic participant in Restoration politics, she became a firm supporter of Meiji continental expansion, traveled about Northeast Asia, and in 1901 established the Patriotic Women's Society. Its main functions were to assist troops departing for war, aid those families of soldiers that were experiencing hardship, and console the bereaved. Because Okumura's organization so clearly contributed to government policy, she quickly won the backing of leaders and her organization grew with striking rapidity, counting 465,000 members by 1905 and a million or more by World War I, with branches in villages throughout the realm.

[...]

SOCIALIST INTELLECTUALS

One factor that spurred officials and pundits to counsel lowered expectations for the young, to favor movements such as Okumura' s Patriotic Women's Society, and to attempt to outflank or suppress the efforts of feminists, labor unionists, and other critics of the newly established Meiji order was their awareness of the growing attention intellectuals were giving to social problems and tensions of the day. During the 1890s some observers began to think about society's problems in terms of the recently articulated Marxist and other socialist analyses that they encountered through study abroad and the discussion of imported texts. In 1901 a group in Tokyo formed the Social Democratic Party, declaring as their goal:

“to abolish the gap between rich and poor and secure a victory for pacificism in the world by means of genuine socialism and democracy.”[31]

The newly formed government of Prime Minister Katsura Tarō responded to the group's manifesto by promptly seizing all copies of the document and ordering the party disbanded. The Minister of the Interior, who ordered the party's dissolution, explained the issue this way:

“Other countries all have their hands full with the socialist party and are doing their best to suppress it. We in Japan must likewise devote all our efforts to suppressing it.”[32]

That response notwithstanding, the handful of intellectuals who comprised this initial socialist movement continued their peaceful proselytizing over the next several years, and in early 1906 the government allowed them to form a new political party. During 1906-7, however, after wartime boom and patriotic zeal had given way to industrial slump and political anger, the country was racked by strikes and labor disputes involving both mine and surface workers. That turmoil, together with socialist editorializing (and especially socialist criticism of government action in suppressing the labor protest at Ashio), led to the new party's disbandment. By then Kōtoku Shūsui, a journalist, socialist party participant, and critic of the Ashio mine operation, was also denouncing the harsh government policy in Korea. He called for more radical revolutionary action at home, even as he and others were having run-ins with the police. Moreover, some of his associates were mounting a rhetorical attack on the imperial institution itself.

These developments led government leaders to see the socialists as a dangerous threat to their new constitutional order. Employing much the same "preventive" logic as in 1901, Prime Minister Katsura argued in 1908:

“Although socialists at the moment are said to constitute little more than a thin thread of smoke, if we overlook this thread of smoke, it will someday develop the force of a wildfire, and then it would be too late for anything but regrets.”[33]

Therefore, he argued, their meetings and publications must be controlled and their growth stymied. The government cracked down, using tight surveillence, jailings, suppression of the socialist press, and severe constraints on speakers.

Nevertheless, underground socialist activity continued. In the spring of 1910 authorities discovered a plot to mount a bomb attack against the emperor, presumably as part of an attempt at violent revolution that was inspired by recent anarchist actions in Russia. Viewed by the government and press as an utterly heinous crime - and as an opportunity to squelch socialism - that incident led to the arrest, trial, and eventual conviction and execution of Kōtoku, along with Kanno and ten others, on the charge of high treason.34

The government took other steps, as well, to forestall dissident activity. It moved to consolidate its control of Korea by replacing the existing Korean administration with a Japanese governor-generalship. At home it established a special police force, the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (Tokkō or Special Higher Police), to watch for "dangerous thought." And, as noted above, it gave formal approval to the creation of a locally-based, nationwide army reserve system. That reserve, its leaders hoped, would assure that the army's ideals of imperial loyalism, durable social order, and diligent national service came to pervade community life, thereby eliminating the threats of sedition, selfishness, and sloth.

The government employed carrots as well as sticks, most notably the aforementioned Factory Act of 1911. With those acts of repression and concession the socialist movement became inactive, not reviving until the Russian Revolution brought it a new surge of hope.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

[dist-the-rose]

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation1 Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems, manifest itself here practically in a struggle between them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother-country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country, to proclaim the theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale, &c., are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies2 , but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin3 attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.4 Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.”5 Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks: We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the 386 Chapter XXXIII immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law. “If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” 6 So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe, was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. “Mankind have adopted a... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the sole and final end of their existence: “they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour.... The division was the result of concert and combination.”7 In one word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the “accumulation of capital.” Now, one would think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the Colonies, where alone exist the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream to a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonization” be called in to replace its opposite, spontaneous, unregulated colonization? But - but - “In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.”8 Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England – the Swan River Settlement – where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.” 9 We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this – that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.10 This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice – opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.”11 As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. 387 Chapter XXXIII Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.”12 With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists? The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in production to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mothercountry, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer remain indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is always not only small but uncertain.”13 “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”14 The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.”15 Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers – for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the labourer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”16 What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. 17 The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined 388 Chapter XXXIII labour. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” labourers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”18 After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labour with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural labourer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” 19 But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people. How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also – the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant.20 The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labour must be constant and regular, because, first, as no labourer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labour to the colony.” 21The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” – i.e., so high “as to prevent the labourers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.”22 This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the labourer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage labour market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more labourers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labour market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist. It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised this method of “primitive accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was, of course, as complete as that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only diverted from the English colonies to the Untied States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalistic production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government pressure, has rendered Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, 389 Chapter XXXIII year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the Government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has produced, especially in Australia23 , in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes even to the smallest artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,” so that almost every mail brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly as in the London Haymarket. However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of selfearned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer. End of Book I

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Alienation

Alienation – the result of individuals and, through them, societies 'becoming alien' (i.e distant, disengaged, even uncomprehending) to the results of their own activity, the environment in which that activity occurs, from the people who share that environment and activity, and from themselves. Alienation is marked in those of us living out systems of social relationships which thus redirect our energy from living on our own terms in a manner we ourselves can choose and assert, and into simply reproducing and reinforcing that social system in order to attain the means for survival. Individuals with the means (intellectual, ecological, social) to create lives they freely desire are difficult to base top-down authoritarian systems upon without the draining use of constant force. Alienation makes it possible to relatively smoothly maintain the centralisation of wealth, knowledge and power, separated from us yet raised by ourselves and many like us.

A well-used example of alienation was deployed to describe private property and the economic exploitation of capitalism, by which the worker is separated from what they produce: their 'power to' do whatever it might be is sold as labour power, transforming it into an owner's 'power over' them and thereby alienating human beings from their capacity to create. However it would be a mistake to simply stop there, as Marxists mostly do for instance. (In the 20th century what became known as 'the Fordist compromise' began to allow producers a limited amount of access to the commodities they produce; without however changing the course of alienation, now even more marked in the 'post-industrial' consumer classes.)

We believe that the problem runs much deeper and older than wage relations, in both the 'external' world of habitual interactions and their ramifications and in the psyche. While alienation can be and is implemented through many institutions (religion, for one) with a far longer history, a more holistic example of how alienation begins to sink its deeper roots would be the dispiriting result on untold numbers of land-based cultures from assimilation into conquering empires, and the industrial revolution that forced a mechanical division between individuals and their livelihoods, their tools, their communities, their lands; the separation between production and knowledge itself. Let's take a step back to a more fundamental appraisal of what it might mean to be a potentially-free being on a living planet.

What do you know about the trees outside the window? What keeps them healthy? What about the other animals that live close to you; do you recognise their calls or tracks? What they do, what they prefer? What do you know about the lives of human animals that go on over the other side of the wall next-door, or the masses you pass on the street? What do they know about you? How does that make you feel?

What do you really know about where the food you eat comes from? Or about what has to happen for our homes to be lit, heated, or built? How many of your survival necessities or subsistence skills are truly in your own hands or those of your relations?

What proportion of your conversations still enjoy the depth of face to face interaction? How much of your daily environment can you navigate on foot, walking, climbing, swimming, being helped by a companion, or how much of it is it necessary to depend on regulated means of transportation through? How much of your immediate surrounding area are you physically, socially or legally barred from exploring? Why?

How much of your daily activity is to suit your own needs? Aside from within the symbolic order of the wage economy, that is. How much of it do you even really see or understand the repercussions of? Would we live in this manner if we could directly see and touch the impacts that are hidden from most, in ghettos, toxic dumps, slaughter-houses, hospitals, cemeteries, refugee camps, battlefields and felled rainforest in distant lands, youth jails, oceanic garbage-gyres? Or have we become so distanced from other lives by the allotment of everything into categories of utility, so justifying their and our exploitation, that we cannot empathise with parallel lives that become mere resources for our own, as rulers living off us cannot empathise with ours?

Does the concept of diversity have much relation to your life beyond the array of brands at the supermarket, or inter-relatedness have a meaning beyond message boards? We are tricked and trick ourselves into believing that the damming of a river or disappearance of wildlife doesn't really affect us, burying ourselves in air-conditioned coffins as a society to separate ourselves from the world we were born in.

Do you even remember how to enact and express your joy as you may have in your early years? What actually gives you deep satisfaction; or fails to, even though it may be what advertising and marketing, your parents, school, politicians or your peers tell you should do? How in touch are you with your own desires, multi-sensousness, thoughts and feelings? Might they be directed by social constructions of gender roles, 'human nature', class positions, urban desensitisation...? Might any tendencies which don't fit those constructions be smothered daily, in this world we endure? Do you ever feel like something is missing?

What about your own body; are your familiar with its cycles and drives, or are they an abstraction in a textbook or something that simply comes upon us from the blue? Is health just something obscure that a technical industry exists for and which we're objects to? Isn't the direction of our culture one directly away from the immediacy of human sensations, evidenced by inflating reliance on machine-readings of our 'vital statistics' and symptom-numbing drugs, shifting value from group play or physical activity in general into the spectacle of online games and, at best, exercising isolated with the iPod, or the generational proportion of Japanese society with a disinterest or even phobia of partner sex?

Do you find that you float from one hobby, job, friendship group or city to another, but never seem to be able to feel at home in yourself? Have you ever felt, like a comrade wrote, that the only revolutionary thing about your life is its relentless circularity? What systematically seems to push people into these directions, and aren't reflected in all histories and cultures, which suffer less of the loss of personality, loss of place, loss of purpose? What does it mean to be brought up and inherit not an intimate wealth of folklore to help us navigate a living landscape with reverence, but to be left grasping for a handle on an impersonal life that always gets away from us; as it did our immediate predecessors for multiple generations in the West, with little understanding or influence, our ancestral capabilities, skills and memories expropriated or sterilised? What does it tell us about the trajectory of this system when depression is a main cause of death in the 'developed' world?

It's this 'developed' world that we imagine most of our readers will be accustomed to: with the alienations of wage-labour, claustrophobic built-up areas, an endless routine repeated day after day to attain the means to go on surviving in the way we're used to, navigating the artefacts, mass media representations and bureaucracies of this civilisation, however irrelevant to our own thoughts and wishes. A while ago, Michele Vignodelli characterised the deeply meaningful interactions with a living Earth, as the cornerstone of existence, as having been replaced by “over-stimulation by artificial, coarse, mechanical inputs, through fashions, revivals, disco music, roaring toys, cult actors, events... a whole flamboyant, uproarious and desperately hollow world. A rising wave of fleeting inputs, a multitude of fake interests and fake needs where our emotional energies are swept away, drowning us in nothingness[...] This sumptuous parade seems to consist substantially in the stream of toxic, hidden grudges that flows beneath the surface of politeness, in the corridors of industrial hives; it consists in the snarling defence of one's own niche, to protect 'freedoms' and 'rights' that are sanctioned by law, in a deep loneliness which is increasingly hidden in mass rituals, in a universal inauthenticity of relationships and experiences.”

We're awash with communication technologies, and yet more often living alone, with fewer off-screen friends and little real-world social solidarity. In replacement we are given the imagined community of the market, the nation, or the virtual. What was once lived directly, becomes mere representation.

Alienation results in sensations including (but not limited to) powerlessness, shame, despair, delusions, hostility, social withdrawal, feeling constantly threatened or self-destructive, which are all pandemic within industrial civilisation. Its outward manifestations are on the rise everywhere that industry and 'development' have become the social norm, not just in the capitalist 'Old World' but now China, India, Africa. Alienation is needed for how our bodies are currently regulated in ways both great and small by being enmeshed within norms and expectations that “determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the space of possibility and imaginative transformation where peoples' lives begin to exceed and escape [the system's] use for them” (Susan Stryker). It forms a society of individuals largely isolated and dissociated from each other and themselves, despite the crowded cities, depressed, apathetic or filled with violent and directionless anger; and we identify it in how the dominant social mode pushes us further into this estrangement. It's the anguish of the living subjected to a deathly regime, and a condition that must be struggled against to overturn the whole social order – which we are demanded to adapt ourselves to fit. To adapt ourselves to ever-more limited and virtually superfluous roles, at any time liable to be replaced like a faulty cog. Beneath the surface of modern life, we live in what can only be described as a state of captivity, and the neurotic way we internalise this reality to cope with it seeps out and permeates our every interaction. The loss of perspective that the overwhelming totality of the current system engenders, casting a shadow over all past ways of life, makes it easier to be fooled when we're told that it is us who are maladjusted, malfunctioning, and when the system's guardians tell us they have just the cure for the mysterious undermining of life.

Yet in spite of generations of 'naturalisation', psychological immiseration tells us we are not at home in the world of social media, council estates, gated communities, artificial parks, billboards, office blocks, traffic jams, cash machines, asylums, factory farms, call centres and other prisons, stuck in a flaccid cycle of work, nuclear families and programmed entertainment. This is the environment our pre-determined interactions, which we all go through every day, has created; yet it is created against us and our own self-determination. Our health (inseparable from that of our landbase), solidarity, spontaneity, and indeed in the era of vast climate changes even our continued existence itself is jeopardised by our own alienated activity. The blackmail of the market keeps our habits and relationships, more often than not, not just delaying but actually antagonistic to the fullness of autonomous creativity. Mass social organisation is the separate power that stands apart from us as individuals, regulating and imposing on us, as the truly human-scale in life is dwarfed by an unending cycle of representations, bureaucracy, requirements, regurgitating what is; and what cannot fail to oppress us. The conditions of life forced upon us by the economy, the State and technological society have become powers that rule over and direct us, not tools to use as we see fit. The segregation from a multitude of lifeforms displaced by the city not just unfamiliarises us with our planet, but makes it much easier to participate in the industrial structure devouring everything.

Ignore these facts we may, they continue to come back to haunt us in the unarticulated precarity of our helpless dependence, the interpersonal violence, the deadly sadness. Self-medication doesn't cut it. Reality TV can't mask it. The chatter of the crowd won't drown it out. We are under mental and physical occupation by the capitalist-industrial system, leaving the firm but false impression of there being no outside, no choice, no escape. Is this really what we could call living?