DFLP fighters aiding in gazan liberation 🇵🇸

Cannot stand seeing people on my dash celebrating the Pope's statement that "marxists and catholics have the same mission" because those people clearly have no idea about the historical cooption of class politics by the church.

this kind of bullshit goes back to 1891, when Pope Leo XIII published the Rerum Novarum encyclical, addressing the situation of the working class and what the church's stand should be on it. It is, essentially, a socialdemocratic text that defends unionization while denouncing socialists and "capitalism". It still defends private property and the right of capitalists to their profits. This encyclical really made the figure of a worker priest relevant, a low-level priest that's aware of workers' issues and "defends" them. What this figure accomplished was the promotion of class conciliation and therefore a rejection of workers' liberation.

And this is no different. The pope might not outright reject marxism, but in practice, by bringing it down to the level of the catholic church he dilutes marxism into nothing more than "can we pretty please raise the minimum wage according to inflation". The church is, at its core, nothing more than another institution used by capital to appease workers into non-violence and peaceful activism. The very same institution that coexisted with fascism in the 30s and later became a rabid anticommunist tool is now talking about marxists, give me a fucking break.

This is what I'm talking about. How anti-church can you really be if some "good opinions" makes you partial to them. It doesn't matter what the headlines say the pope thinks about trans or gay people if in their actual theology it's just forgiveness for who they think are astray. The church's compassion for any oppressed group does not come from principle, it comes from pity at people who reject the church's teachings. It's no better than the "as long as it's in private" kind of homophobia and transphobia.

oh, i am so enamored with the way the lesson of the velveteen rabbit rings true in our modern life. i love that we name our spaceships and write love poems to old buildings. i love that we all cried about the mars rover, that we made her so real that she was no longer a machine but a friend, a companion, a hero.

i love that we become attached to certain mugs, spoons, mason jars. that we develop a strange protective love-hate of our tablets, that we feel weirdly reverent about our new notebook. we name our cars silly things like the crab shack and call our favorite whisk attachment the one great destroyer.

there's a dog statue at my local park that has a golden back and golden head from how often people have pet it. at my college campus, people love an ugly little pointless sculpture we call bacon pants or bacon legs. we assign personalities to fountains, parks, laptops.

i love that our basic instinct is to include others in our community, even where there isn't a real community to speak of. that we love things, even when they cannot physically love us back - for us, the exchange isn't what's important. we give our heart to things so entirely that the thing begins to, in its own way, have its own heart.

the last transmission from the mars rover was not words; it was data. nevertheless, someone translated for her. my battery is low and it's getting dark. they made her last words a poem. they looked at data and saw a soul, a divine spark.

i keep thinking about the first AI born truly free-thinking. i keep thinking about the way scientists and artists talk about their work. how their eyes light up and their hands start moving, how even when they're flat broke and confused and the coding isn't working - there's this love of the thing. i keep thinking that whatever is being born into this new world will be born here on purpose, over a long time, with great energy. that when it arrives, the first thing it will know is most likely the hands of a creator delighted, overcome.

that we made it in our image. that the image we wrote was one of human compassion within ingenuity. that we couldn't make this thing without it being a labor of real-and-true: love.

Cuz it our show, and not yours

We all know trains are much more efficient and productive than cars, but if so, than why are cars the dominant mode of transportation in the us, a bourgeois state interested in maximizing production of surplus value?

it comes down to the system American bourgeoisie have for enforcing their competing policies through the state against other bourgeois, being lobbying, a system in which the capitalist with most capital gets to enforce their policy while the capitalist with less wealth does not. it is not "bribery" or "corruption", as that implies that the bourgeois state was not originally a bourgeois state.

oil and car lobbyists have high interests in protecting their field of industry, one which has historically produced extremely high rates of surplus value production, giving them the extra capital to protect their industry, and though trains as the dominant mode of transport would be much more efficient for the capitalist class across the board, it would weaken the oil and automobile industries, so they spend their capital to prevent that through their state.

writing the shittiest essay in the history of english for my ap lang final project💪💪we die like men

cons of going to a “good schoolTM”: insane workload, unbearable classmates, next to no support when you have any kind of extenuating circumstances Including literal hospitalization, etc

pros of going to a “good schoolTM”: the 9-5 lifestyle is genuinely a major improvement

i dont know why youtube keeps showing me online dating ads but its really funny that ive gotten pitched both autistic singles AND Serious Pretty Singles with Traditional Life Values, clearly im destined to start the worlds first autistic tradwife dating site

maybe in future we shouldn't let war criminals die peacefully at 100 years old surrounded by friends and family ?????

I've talked about this before but I have a deep dislike of sentiment like this within "leftist" circles, regarding unions. And it's practically always from USamericans, go figure.

(Before anyone interprets this post on bad faith, which is inevitable, I am not against being in a union and I am not telling people not to join a union, it's the most inmediate form of protection workers have and that is, in fact, good)

It's this overbearing insistence on joining unions, treating it like the best (and only) way of achieving workers' liberation, and I think that shows either a bad understanding of what unions are or a bad understanding of how capitalism works. Unions are bargaining bodies for workers, that's it. They aren't revolutionary, and they aren't going to kill your boss. And I want to really hammer in this point. They aren't revolutionary. Precisely because their role is to bargain, and to achieve better conditions within the system of salaried work.

You are never going to "liquidate the ownership class" by getting longer breaks, paid holidays and an excellent health plan. Keep in mind, bargaining with the capitalist is necessary, and that in itself isn't non-revolutionary, not necessarily. But the only purpose of a union is to bargain. I really don't think people get this. A union's only purpose is to bargain, it is to negotiate. Negotiations also necessarily imply compromises and unsatisfactory deals. Unions are not a magic key to not being exploited, and they especially are not the way to liberation.*

I think this is especially prevalent in the US because of two things:

Their labor movement is so fucked that any kind of opposition to capitalism is by default radical. And therefore some people feel it's enough to just tell people to join a union. However, this isn't unique to the US and many places have it much, much worse

Living in the imperial hegemon makes it very easy to ignore any other place outside of their little sphere. People can go years engaging in left-of-DNC circles but without ever leaving their USamerican community, they end up not knowing who James Baldwin is, to give a topical example. This affects the US labor movement by allowing them to ignore other places' struggles, so it's very easy to see anything they do as the horizon of political action. They only need to look to their own country for examples in action, and the truth is that the labor movement in the US has been largely very mild. In the cases when it has not been mild (notable exceptions include the Black Panthers), it's largely forgotten, demonized or revised in bigger circles.

So you get people who call themselves communists just for being unionists. But a communist is someone who identifies the core of exploitation to be the very structure of capitalism and work and attacks it. You are not a communist, however, for believing the core of exploitation is your shit boss who refuses to pay for dental.

And what's funny is that 90% of what people on here claim to be communist and anti-capitalist is just the norm on most of the world. People will hype up the DSA or VoteSocialist2024 as if they're breaking ground, and then you read their programs and they're just socialdemocrats. They are nothing more than reformists, just another manager of capitalism.

My father works for one of the biggest textile manufacturers and distributors in the world, and unionization is the norm, it's a "union job" but it's still shitty and exploitative. There are in fact 3 unions, and they engage in petty electoralism within the workplace, only sometimes actually protecting worker's rights, and that's a country-wide norm. This is what unions end up becoming when they become established, especially with a friendly government in place.

CCOO was a union created in the late fascist dictatorship in Spain, and they were genuinely fighting (with guns!) against the dictatorship. And the moment the dictatorship ended and they became the largest union in the country, they slowly became less and less radical, and more complacent. Last year they signed a labor reform that legalizes highly precarious and inconsistent forms of work contracts. That's not "liquidating the ownership class", that's just social-democracy when it doesn't need to be the opposition anymore

To wrap up, a note on syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Unions are by their very nature an organization that only operates within one aspect of the life of the working class, the workplace. Sure, it's the main one and the part that defines us as a class, but it isn't the only one. In order to actually "liquidate the ownership class", you have to take power by force, and that will have to involve intervening outside of the workplace. What syndicalists used to claim is that unions can be the base of a socialist society and organize the entire working class to destroy capitalism. However, at that point, you have created a party and called it a union. And not only a party, but a myriad of them, each with their own characteristics and desires. So a multi-party system. I will not get into the viability of multiple parties in socialism in this post, but they are not unions in anything by name.

Footnote under the cut:

*I know I'm repeating myself a lot these days on this topic, but if you live in an imperial core country, there is no way to have prosperity (as the example above puts it) without some of that wealth coming from imperialism. It does not matter if your particular country never had colonies, it does not matter if your country is stereotypically nice (fuck the Nordic countries). And no, the expoliated wealth does not only remain within the capitalist class, there is always at least some circulation of wealth from the capitalist to the workers within any welfare program. If your workplace can afford to have long breaks, that is at least in part because your capitalist is profiting from the exploitation of the third world, and because the entire economies of imperial core countries uses the wealth extracted to support their deficits and to stabilize their currencies.

It's not a hard concept. If you can understand that it's basically impossible to manufacture batteries for renewable energy without exercising violence on places like the Congo, it's not that hard to understand the same is true for most things.

love communists but you all are so boring god bless

I am not, to everyone's surprise, a Marxist, but I seem to collect Marxist ideas with me in academia and it's a bit funny

My first materialist analysis: the political economy of ancient Greece and its cultural development.

Culture, as defined by Oxford Languages as  “ the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group”, is a reflection of a people’s material reality, as demonstrated by part 1, chapter II of Political  economy, “Social Conceptions of the Primitive Epoch”

“He [primitive man] attributed spiritual existence to the forces of nature. This was the so-called animism (from the Latin anima-the spirit, soul). Primitive myths and primitive religion were born of these dim conceptions in men of their own nature and that around them. In them the primitive equality of the social structure was reproduced. Primitive man not knowing class division and property inequality in real life introduced no corresponding subordination in his imaginary world of spirits. He divided the spirits into his own and others’ friendly and hostile. Division of the spirits into higher and lower appeared only when the primitive community was breaking down.”

In this essay I will be focusing on one example of this, the greek god Hermes. 

The well known religion or mythos of ancient or classical era greece(i.e. The time when slave owning was most prosperous) was rich and replete with tradition and devotion, and the philosophical and political development was equally developed. The reason for this cultural, economic, and political development, was due to the slave-owning society. For example, labor in any form was seen as “unfit of the free man”, and (prominent, slave owning) historian and philosopher Herodotus’ book Utopia, which pictures a perfectly organized state, shows this perfect state being a slave owning one, and aristotle claimed that Nature made slaves for the free men. Page 32 of the soviet textbook Political Economy describes the state of states like greece.

“On the basis of slave labour the ancient world achieved considerable economic and cultural development. But the slave-owning system could not create the conditions for any further serious technical progress. Slave labour was distinguished by extremely low productivity. The slave was not at all interested in the results of his labour. The slaves hated their labour under the yoke. Frequently they expressed their protest and indignation by spoiling the implements of labour. Therefore the slaves were given only the crudest implements, which it was difficult to spoil.”

Hermes is one of the oldest olympian gods, with our first known appearance of him being inscribed tablets from the Bronze Age, dated to ~1100 BC, or the Greek Dark Ages. He was seen as the Herald of the Gods, and served other miscellaneous roles in greek society such being “the patron of gain”, a god of animal husbandry, which shows the prominence of husbandry in the reality of slave owning greece, whether that be small owning peasants, or slave laborers. He was also credited with invention of the lyre, dice, and more. He was characterized as being impish and curious, and treasure chanced upon was said to be a gift from him. 

As he appeared in Homer’s odyssey, an epic written during the “golden age” of ancient greece, at the height of technological progress under slavery and along with it the height of cultural development of the slave owning and free population, he was a messenger between the gods and a guide to humans.  He provided aid to odysseus numerous times, such as instructing him to eat a mysterious herb so he wouldn't be transformed into a pig like the rest of his men when he arrived at the island of the witch Circe, and telling Circe to release him and his men. In his infancy he is said to have breastfed from the goddess Hera without her knowing, and when she caught him, her milk splashed across the sky and created the galaxy we reside in, the Milky Way. He is said to have wandered out of his mother’s cave when he was one day old to see the world, then found a tortoise, killed it, and hollowed out its shell to make the lyre.

As demonstrated in this brief essay, hermes was very culturally significant on many layers, and shows how not only culture flourished with slave labour, but how culture is reflective of reality, not just a set of beliefs.

I am entirely open to criticism (actual criticism not what an anarchist thinks it is) so if you have any thoughts on this, please tell me!

She/her aemond truthing. We have GOT to get on this people

Two classes must be oppressed under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the old bourgeois, and male comedians

elite status, power, and privilege for me

(...)

context is that Devereaux's adjunct historian position is getting eliminated in the next academic year

I feel bad for him, and he was clearly a great professor if his blog is anything to go by. But the hypocrisy here is pretty stark, accusing the field of "progressivism for thee, but elite status, power and privilege for me" attitudes when that is exactly what he's after when he wants to cut the supply of future PhDs.

Which I'm not against for some fields, while others (STEM, history of actually important topics) should go way up. Bret actually has a relatively soft landing with his patreon generating ~$45,000 yearly thanks to him writing about a field that a substantial chunk of readers actually care about. It's worse for the hordes of historians of, eg. gender, which probably are driving the decline of history/classics/medieval studies/etc anyways. Universities should have to be more frank about the employability of most degrees (zero) but the history PhD is already infamous for its brutal job market, so this excuse doesn't apply.