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#class society
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End wage slavery 🔪
Graphic by KRIME
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bubblyevilconjurer · 6 months
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People at the top of labor aristocracy in the US — I don’t mean servers who make 40K, I mean people living in $100K+ households, taking regular luxurious vacations — really are an interesting case study because many seem oblivious to the fact they’re living a lifestyle that is quite literally unobtainable to 75% of the US and 99% of the world.
In my experience those among them who say “I’m not rich” don’t have any friends who have less money than them and like… that’s most Americans.
Do a little reflecting. The majority of Americans (and vast majority of the world) live in households under 50K. If most of your friend group is comfortably above that, consider investigating what caused that and unlearning whatever it is.
And for fuck’s sake, stop acting like you’re barely scraping by. Yes you are labor and exploited. No you won’t die if the trip to Italy has to wait a year and frankly it’s a slap in the face to the people you could feed for a year with that money.
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aronarchy · 1 month
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from The Dawn of Everything
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perestroika-hilton · 2 months
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redshift-13 · 1 year
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In The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, Clara E. Mattei brings us back to the dawn of modern austerity politics, just after the First World War. In both liberal Great Britain and fascist Italy, she argues, austerity imposed steep costs in the short term but in the long term proved beneficial to capital. By forcing the working class to rely on the private labor market for survival, austerity ensured the survival of the wage relationship at a moment of anti-capitalist upheaval.
In our current moment, as policymakers are once again entertaining monetary tightening as a means to impose necessary hardship and discipline on working people, The Capital Order is a potent reminder of the cruel rationality of austerity: maintaining stable class relations is worth the price of the economic pain austerity causes.
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if-you-fan-a-fire · 4 months
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"For Wells is a petit bourgeois, and of all the products of capitalism, none is more unlovely than this class. Whoever does not escape from it is certainly damned. It is necessarily a class whose whole existence is based on a lie. Functionally it is exploited, but because it is allowed to share in some of the crumbs of exploitation that fall from the rich bourgeois table, it identifies itself with the bourgeois system on which, whether as bank manager, small shopkeeper or upper household servant, it seems to depend. It has only one value in life, that of bettering itself, of getting a step nearer the good bourgeois things so far above it. It has only one horror, that of falling from respectability into the proletarian abyss which, because it is so near, seems so much more dangerous. It is rootless, individualist, lonely, and perpetually facing, with its hackles up, an antagonistic world. It can never know the security of the rich bourgeoisie or the companionship of the worker. It can never rest on anything, for it is always struggling to better itself. It is the most deluded class, for it has not the cynicism of the worker with practical proof of bourgeois fictions, or the cynicism of the intelligent bourgeois who even while he maintains them for his own purposes sees through the illusions of religion, royalty, patriotism and capitalist ‘industry’ and ‘foresight’. It has no traditions of its own and it does not adopt those of the workers, which it hates, but those of the bourgeois, which are without virtue for it, since it did not help to create them. This world, described so well in Experiment in Autobiography, is like a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, and without even the saving grace of tragedy.
Everyone seeks to escape from this marsh. It is a world whose whole motive force is simply this, to escape from what it was born to, upwards, to be rich, secure, a boss. And the development of capitalism increases the depth of this world, makes wealth, security, and freedom more and more difficult, and thus adds to its horror. More and more the petty bourgeois expression is that of a face lined with petty, futile, bewildered discontent. Life with its perplexities and muddles seems to baffle and betray them at every turn. They are frustrated, beaten; things are too much for them. Almost all Wells’s characters from Kipps to Clissold are psychologically of this typical petit bourgeois frustrated class. They can never understand why everything is so puzzling, why man is so unreasonable, why life is so difficult, precisely because it is they who are so unreasonable. They are born of the irresponsibility and anachronism of capital expressed in its acutest form. And they do not understand this.
The ways of escape from the petit bourgeois world are many. One way is to shed one’s false bourgeois illusions and relapse into the proletarian hell one has always dreaded. Then one finds a life hard and laborious enough but with clear values, derived from the functional part one plays in society. The peculiarly dreadful flavour of petit bourgeois bitterness is gone, for now the social forces that produce unhappiness – unemployment, poverty and privation – come quite clearly from above, from outside, from an alien world. One encounters them as members of a class, as companions in misfortune, and this generates both the sympathy and the organisation that makes them easier to be sustained. ‘It’s the poor what helps the poor.’ The proletariat are called upon to hate, not each other but impersonal things like wars and slumps and booms, or classes outside themselves – the bosses, the rich.
It is the peculiar suffering of the petit bourgeoisie that they are called upon to hate each other. It is not impersonal things or outside classes that hurt them and inflict on them suffering and poverty, but it appears to be other members of their own class. It is the shopkeeper across the road, the rival small trader, the family next door, with whom they are actively competing. Every success of one petit bourgeois is a sword in another’s heart. Every failure of one’s own is the result of another’s activity. No companionship, or solidarity, is possible. One’s hatred extends from the workers below that abyss always waiting for one, to the successful petit bourgeois just above one whom one envies and hates.
The development of capitalism increases both trends, the solidarity of the workers and the dissension and bitterness of the petit bourgeoisie.
It is also possible to escape upwards. Many are called. All who do not sink into the proletariat strive upwards. Only a few are chosen. Only a few struggle into the ranks of the rich bourgeoisie. Wells was one of those few. The story of this sharp, fierce struggle and its ultimate success in terms of his bank passbook is recorded in Wells’s Autobiography.
Some try to escape into the world of art or pure thought. But this escape becomes increasingly difficult. Take the case of the artist in the young Wells’s position. A dominating interest in art will come to him perhaps as an interest in poetry, in the short story, in new novelist’s technique. Painful and unproductive at first, his study of his craft will also be uneconomic. It will not pay. But how is he to live? Is he to proletarianise himself? Is he to starve in a garret on poor relief? But starvation in a garret as an outcast despised member of the community will necessarily condition his whole outlook as an artist. He will write reacting with or against proletarianisation, or as an unsuccessful petty bourgeois, or as an enforced member of the lumpen-proletariat, and all society will seem compulsive, rotten and inimical to him. Moreover, art itself in that era, being the aggregate of art produced by these and their like antecedent conditions, will be more and more outcast, turned in on itself, non-functional, and subjective, it will be the sincere, decadent, anarchistic art of a Picasso or Joyce.
It was impossible for Wells, imbued with this burning desire, to escape from the petty bourgeois hell, to accept art as an avocation, a social rôle, and be driven in on himself as an outcast from bourgeois values. He could only accept it as a means to success and the best road to cash. His autobiography reveals the early stages of his struggles in the literary market to attain five-figure sales and a five-figure income." - Christopher Caudwell, “H. G. Wells: A Study in Utopianism,” in Studies in a Dying Culture. First published posthumously by Bodley Head in 1938.
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renegade-hierophant · 5 months
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No matter what kind of socioeconomic system you put in place, eventually introverts will hoard all the resources in order to build barriers between themselves and the extroverts.
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ikiprian · 1 month
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Mr. Fenton is a competent teacher. Almost too competent.
If Mr. Daniel Fenton had any more than a BS (with a minor in education), Tim would’ve flagged his profile as a potential Rogue. That’s the way of most charismatic academics, at least in Gotham. (Got a PhD? Instant watchlist.) Instead, he’s Gotham Academy’s newest celebrity, as a young, passionate, out-of-towner substitute while the chemistry teacher’s on maternity leave.
Tim gets the hype. Fenton seems to genuinely love teaching, and is invested in the welfare of the student body. He hands out bananas during exam week, hosts a “study habits seminar” each month to coach effective learning strategies, and the third time Tim falls asleep in his class, he even pulls Tim aside to ask if he’s doing okay. With all the late work he accepts and the protein bars he sneaks Tim, he’s every teen vigilante’s dream teacher. He could’ve been Tim’s favorite.
In fact, Mr. Fenton was Tim’s favorite. Up until Tim walks into Mr. Fenton’s chemistry classroom for a forgotten textbook, an hour after the final bell.
On the board where tallied scores for today’s review game had been kept, “THE CHEMISTRY BEHIND DR. CRANE’S FEAR GAS: ANXIOGENICS, NERI’S, & YOU,” is now scrawled. A detailed diagram of the human endocrine system projects in front of a small crowd of adoring and attentive students.
Fenton is wrist-deep in the skull cavity of an anatomical model. A short tug, and out pops the brain.
It’s plastic. It’s fake.
Tim identifies the nearest emergency exit.
Fenton turns to the door, and in the dark classroom with the projector illuminating half his face, his eyes almost seem to flash red. “What’s up, Tim?” he asks. His friendly grin is too big for his face. “I didn’t know you wanted to join the Just Science League!”
[OR: Danny’s a science teacher at Tim’s school. Gotham’s a pretty wild place, even for someone who grew up a superhero in a ghost-infested town, so he takes it upon himself to start a club teaching kids how to manage themselves in the event of a crisis. These Gothamites are pretty hardy, but a little extra training never hurt anybody! And he suspects one of his students might be a teen vigilante, like he’d been, back in the day. As a senior super, it's Danny’s duty look out for him! Surely, this is the subtlest and most appropriate way to give the kid pointers.]
[Tim immediately assumes supervillain.]
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yesterdaysprint · 7 months
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A Manual of Etiquette with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding, 1868
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queerism1969 · 1 year
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"Nobody wants to w̶o̶r̶k̶ be fucking exploited anymore"
Graphic by @nickq
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bubblyevilconjurer · 3 months
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I think the “cis men are the root of evil” stuff would die down if more of us accepted that yeah, we all probably know or have known at least one heterosexual woman who’s stayed with a horrible guy. And that the reason it’s somewhat common isn’t because men have an evil chemical or women have a be stupid chemical, it’s because the economic structure of our society is horrible to women and forgiving to shit tier men.
Like this is why you need class analysis and Marx. This stuff makes more sense when you view it that way, and it resolves so many of these contradictions that crop up when you try to be as reductive as “liking men is bad” or “being a cis man is bad”.
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Lori Harvey is living life to the fullest 🥂
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communistkenobi · 5 months
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It’s so funny when liberals lecture communists about not knowing how anything works, that we need to grow up and face the real world etc, while publicly demonstrating that their political imagination is so deeply impoverished that they genuinely believe the only thing the leader of the most powerful country on the planet in all of human history can do is block a slightly more fascist guy from taking his place every four years
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welcometogrouchland · 3 months
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I understand that literature nerd Jason Todd is kind of overblown in fanon compared to it's actual presence in canon (a few issues during his pre (and post?)crisis Robin tenure that highlight it) BUT consider that I think it's hilarious if the unhinged gun toting criminal has strong opinions on poetry
#ramblings of a lunatic#dc comics#Jason Todd#batfamily#it's just a fun quirk! it's a fun lil detail and I simply cannot slight ppl for enjoying and incorporating it into works#like obviously jason isn't the only one. I'm a big believer in the batfam having over lapping interests they refuse to bond over#i know dick canonically used the robin hood stories (which are pretty flowery in their language far as i can tell) as inspo for Robin#and i know babs was a librarian and even tho her area of nerddom is characterized as more computery she probably knows quite a lot-#-about literature as well#duke is a hobbyist writer i believe? i saw a fan mention that- which if so is great and I hope he's also a nerd#(i mean he is canonically. i remember him being a puzzle nerd in his introduction. but i mean specifically a lit nerd)#damian called Shakespeare boring but also took acting classes so i think he's more of a theatre kid.#Tim's a dropout and i don't think he's ever shown distinct interest in english lit and i can't remember for Steph?#I'm ngl my brain hyperfocused on musician Steph i forget some of her other interests I'm sorry (minus softball and gymnastics!)#and then Cass had her whole (non linear but it's whatevs) arc about literacy and learning to read#went from struggling to read in batgirl 00 to memorizing Shakespeare in 'tec and is now an avid read in batgirls!#she's shown reading edgar allen poe but we don't know if it's his short stories or his poems#point to all of the above being: i know Jason's not the only lit nerd in the batfam#but also i do need him to be writing poetry in his spare time and reading and reviewing it#jason at the next dead robins society meeting: evening folks today I'll be assigning all of us poems based on laika the space dog#damian and steph who have been kidnapped and brought to jasons warehouse to hangout: LET US GO BITCH#speaking of^ random poem i think jason would like: space dog by alan shapiro#wake up one morning in an unfamiliar more mature body with a profound sense of abandonment. the last four lines. mmm tasty
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