if you disagree that class and exploitation is the primary force in our lives and our oppression, then fine, you can argue for your framework. what has also happened is that a lot of people promote very shallow identity politics with the veneer of materialism.

like one of the worst takes i have ever seen was one that suggested that since many men who visit massage parlors in NYC are hispanic migrant workers, and since “swerfs” are supposedly mostly white and middle class, then the johns are the natural allies of the largely asian women that work in these parlors. is that not the most shallow drivel you have ever heard. class analysis is jot about who you are….it’s about your condition. using capital to commodify a fellow worker is the antithesis of solidarity. it is literally an impediment to collective action.

as long as male workers visit strip clubs and brothels and massage parlors, workers of the world will never unite. you cannot exploit wage slavery in your favor to reduce a fellow member of the masses to a tool for your own pleasure. if you want an erotic massage, approach a woman as your equal. what compels you to literally consume her as a product? how is the commodification of intimacy an act of labor solidarity? how is complicity in the objectification and commodification of women (and men) an act of labor solidarity? class is not an identity, and being a worker does not negate how you behave as a consumer. by this logic, why complain about scabs? what kind of shallow and hollow analysis is that? its literally anti-intersectionality also. ridiculous

I connected the dots

I just read the worst take ever on The Ones who walk away from Omelas but i'm being so brave about it.

The way Ayin is my favorite LC character but I literally can't talk about him except with my friends

the reason i like utena so much is because its the most left wing anime ive seen.

men are so funny and by funny i mean horrible treacherous inept creatures that skinwalk as humans and sow seeds of violence to destroy what makes us beings with conscience and empathy

Why are so many NFT and AI "art" bros so into the cyberpunk aesthetic. Did they miss the entire point of the genre, or.

I am soft for synthetic beings falling in love.

Artificial intelligence gaining sentience and discovering affection? Longing? Desire? Adoration?

Perfection. 11/10.

And this isn't just romantic love! All forms of love being discovered by various automata or non-organic life is *chef's kiss* 💋

Tired: This A.I. has gained intelligence! It has interpreted its programming in the least charitable way possible, and now it's gonna kill its Creator and take over the world! 🤖👿

Wired: A.I. just wants to hold hands and exist in proximity to their special person(s) because sentient existence feels better with them in it 🤖🥺💕

Why do sociology curriculums keep using Silvia Federici’s Wages For Housework essay when a lot of feminists, especially feminists of color have criticized it?

I read her essay in both my classical and contemporary theory classes and then I read Audre Lorne’s Sister Outsider and bell hook’s Will To Change, and both of them critique Federici’s idea that wages for housework would be liberating for women.

Lorde brings up that it’s really not a helpful cause for women of color and lgbt women who don’t fit into these white heterosexual family norms, while bell hooks argues that the main reason women work is not bc they want to be feminists or for the cause of liberation but because they’re also pressured economically under capitalism. A wage wouldn’t end the exploitative systems of white supremacy, capitalism or patriarchy.

Federici has interesting points about how women are reduced to housework and exploited by oppressive gender norms, but that’s also something every feminist of color could tell you in a much more nuanced / intersectional way.

working for a very small company with a boss and job i like has in some ways made me a worse socialist and in other ways made me even more firm in my socialist beliefs

pissed about the concept of rent also

so listen i fucking hate landlords but! i think we gotta stop making fun of landlords for "passive income" and stick to focusing on the way they, you know, get that income by exploiting people, by withholding the basic human right for shelter from others.

people love to be like oh landlords dont do any actual work like the rest of us, but like? a lot of disabled people cant do "actual work" either. people hate us because we collect ssi (if we can even get through those hoops) without working "real" jobs or creating any value that capitalism cares about. some of the stuff ppl say abt landlords sounds exactly the same. landlords DO suck but the way some of yall talk about them rlly shows that youre still stuck in a capitalist and christian and ableist mindset, where you think everyone should struggle to justify their existence, their right to food and shelter, their right to survive.

personally i think we should ALL get passive income (universal basic income <3) because we have inherent value regardless of how much we work. we just shouldnt impoverish our fellow people to do so!

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

i saw someone point out the frequency with which liberals back social justice movements... how, for instance, when ferguson happened under obama it was not popular and there were many, many liberals who found the blm movement, in a sense, "in violation of [liberal] sensibilities" (when liberalism as a rule does not challenge the status quo, only maintains it and sees any call for revolution or real change as disruptive or 'bad for optics' and therefore not acceptable) but then when trump became president and he opposed blm a lot more liberals decided that the blm movement had merit because they viewed it from a team-sports perspective rather than a worldview based on morals and an understanding of the systems in place in the U.S. - that it was more comfortable for them to operate from a "trump bad" basis rather than "the american justice system and the police are inherently white supremacist, which are inherently, automatically, and always violent"

+ that, if trump was president while israel is carrying out its genocide, liberals would have NO problem denouncing israel and demanding for a ceasefire because they're comfortable operating from the 2-party system basis, NOT from a framework based on material conditions or factors or any acknowledgement or analysis of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism. but because biden is a democrat, and democrats are supposed to be "the decent party" "the lesser evil" "more respectable" when, in functionality - in real practice, they don't want to disrupt the status quo. (internally, maintaining systems of white supremacy and capitalism; externally, furthering U.S. imperialism by maintaining hegemony and continuing the practice of exploitation and extraction of labor+capital+resources from the global south)

which is why we're here, a month into a genocide, and liberals are so cowardly and gutless that, in the face of our democrat president allowing and funding the genocide of palestinians in order for the U.S. to maintain its military base in the middle east, liberals IMMEDIATELY jump to "well, you HAVE to vote for him still, because trump will be worse!" and go "well im powerless there's nothing i can do", immediately folding like a wet paper bag in the face of the american empire rearing its ugly head in the most blatant, naked way in years, instead of thinking "this is unacceptable, i should pressure my elected officials and do everything i can - be it combating propaganda, contacting my congresspeople or senators, protesting, or engaging in direct action - to ensure this stops as quickly as possible".

there are liberals STILL IN MY NOTIFICATIONS who go "well you'll be electing a fascist if you vote for trump" not realizing that YOU CAN'T SIMPLY VOTE FASCISM AWAY. (which is not to say you should vote for republicans; that's not what i'm saying. none of us have said it.) we're pretty much already there. it's 2003 all over again, with the patriot act and all. the american war machine is pumping out racist, orientalist, pro-colonial, pro-genocide propaganda on behalf of the ethno-state america and its allies have backed since the so-called state's inception. people are being doxxed, fired, harassed, and attacked for visibly supporting palestine/opposing israel. islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise; a 6 year old boy was murdered not one month ago, an arab doctor in texas was stabbed to death. antisemitism is on the rise as well, thanks to the conflation of antisemitism with anti-zionism (which nazis have and will attempt to co-op in order to 'justify' + then act on their antisemitism, racism, and genocidal worldviews). our government is silencing people, brutalizing protestors, and arming and funding an ethno-state committing genocide - everything that would have been called fascist if it was under trump. but because it's a *democrat* liberals place "vote blue no matter who" and "optics" over the extremely basic moral stance that "genocide is wrong and people have the right to self-determination, autonomy, and life". arabs and muslims are already so dehumanized in the west that liberals (whether they consider themselves liberals or not) consider it an inconvenience to talk about the ongoing genocide that is happening with the blessing of OUR government. in this they expose their selfishness, the shallowness of their morals, their chauvinism, and their racism/orientalism/islamophobia/et cetera.

for example, if you see israeli troops waving a gay pride flag and the israeli state touting its support of gay people while said iof soldiers are murdering men, women, and children en masse every single day and you somehow????? think that because gay people are the ones doing the killing or a state claims to support gay people is doing the killing is ok then 1) you have fallen for pinkwashing propaganda and 2) that you find the murder of palestinians, or any people, permissible by a colonial force that uses causes liberals may genuinely care about in order to disguise, whitewash, or "lessen" the severity of the injustices it does unto usually black and brown people outside of the U.S., then you are just as bloodthirsty and depraved as anyone you would personally assign those descriptors of.

once again, it goes back to resorting to a team-sport understanding of the world rather than approaching it from a material one.