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apas-95 · 2 months

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How do you not realize your Marxist ideology is false when it says shit like a trans black woman small business owner is oppressing her cis white man employees?

I don't think you're, like, genuinely asking, or are curious, here, but I'll answer anyways, for everyone else who might be confused on issues like this: it's intersectionality.

You could make this argument about essentialy any axis of oppression - 'how do you not realise your LGBT ideology is false when it says shit like a cishet black person is oppressing their white trans gay employees', or, conversely, 'how do you not realise your racial ideology is false when it says shit like a white trans gay person is oppressing their cishet black employees'.

The point here isn't to have a rock-paper-scissors, Pokémon type-effectiveness ranking of which axes of oppression 'outrank' which others, it's to understand that each axis of oppression is an entirely distinct social system that overlaps with the other. A black business owner suffers from the social system of antiblackness, and benefits from the social system of capitalism. The specific overlap of their blackness and their class character also gives them an entirely unique character with regards to their segment of society. If they are USAmerican, for example, in their specific case the state and progress of the national liberation movement in the US means that they make up the rear of the revolutionary movement, despite being themselves petit-bourgeois. These systems of oppression are qualitatively different, and cannot be simply, quantitatively, summed up against each other.

With this in mind, it should be understood that the Marxist understanding of class as the principal contradiction does not mean that class is the most important, overruling factor, and that other axes should be ignored. Class is considered the principal contradiction because it is the contradiction that all other axes of oppression, genuine in their own rights, grew out of. Antiblackness was created by the slave trade (not vice-versa), and the slave trade was created by the growing European bourgeoisie's need to extract surplus-value, in the collapse of the Feudal economy. In the example you gave, the petit-bourgeois business owner exploits the labour of her workers, and is supported in doing so by an entire legal, political, and philosophical system based on the expropriation of the proletariat. She is also herself repressed and exploited on the basis of race, gender, and transness. These do not cancel each other out. However, given the ultimate source of racial, patriarchal, and cissexist oppress is political-economic class, her ability to genuinely fight for her interests in those fields will be hamstrung by her class position - just as her ability to attain and maintain that class position in the first place is itself hamstrung by her oppression in other fields.

Ultimately, there are no simple rules that society can be flattened down by. Each and every instance and scenario must be investigated in its own right. The idea that people are driven to Marxism because it provides an easy or simplified way of looking at the world is (perhaps unfortunately!) wrong, it actually means a lot more work!

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zvaigzdelasas · 7 months

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"it was made by a person" does not absolve the image of sin, because by that logic every piece of ai art is ok actually. because obviously the ai could never just make art, the people using it to generate book covers so they don't have to pay an artist are actually typing in the description for what they want the ai to make. so it's ok !! a human told the ai to make that ❤❤❤❤

I mean. Other than the moralizing ("absolve of sin", "so it's ok!" etc)...Yes? Of course AI art is made by people?

Do you think AIs have agency or something? Do they find their own data and train themselves without a human telling it to? How does the AI pay for electricity?

If AIs have agency why can't they be Artists?

You're undermining your own position and actually fundamentally agreeing w the silicon valley tech bros lmao

If someone pays a human on Fiverr $5 to make a book cover in order to avoid paying someone a more reasonable price....thats basically the same moral situation right. If that guy on Fiverr is just choosing between 10 different templates he already has (and maybe copied from the internet!) and just changing the text on it, he is "typing what they want to make". What's the difference to paying someone $5 on Fiverr to generate a book cover for you using AI. Where's the moral difference, what does the tool have to do with anything.

AI doesn't have any agency, people do. AI is a tool. AI being used to lower prices is an economic choice made by humans.

A useful analytical framework to understand why this is the natural result of competition is actually Historical Materialism, which understands the social world as fundamentally existing of Humans, Human action, and Human relationships. Instead of trying to act like things like AI - spectral reflections of human labor - are "creatures" themselves, and tilting at windmills. Historical Materialism teaches not only why this happens, but how to overcome that process entirely.

In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; [...]In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.[...]

In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to [the worker]; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.[...]

Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; ***i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form***; (2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time. It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine), or makes his labour shorter. Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here -- quite unintentionally -- reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

Marx [PDF link]

#other choice quotes in here but i figured thats enough #marx could easily explain ai

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transmutationisms · 5 months

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(If you're alrght with another poorly articulated question from an obnoxious high schooler) Do you have thoughts on academics and their position in a labor framework? I know some grad students and have never been quite sure where they fit because they don't always work with "capital" in a traditional sense. Professors are odd to me because they are under university contract, but rather than get paid by the university they often get their own funding from the government. Or graduate sudents, who are often unionized, but I know a paleontology student who studies shark fossils who says he doesnt really consider what he does "making surplus value."

ok well that last person is simply confused lol. graduate students exist because the university profits from having us; it is a capitalist institution. most directly we usually work as teaching assistants or research assistants (or else pay tuition) and more indirectly, graduate programs get funding and university support because their existence contributes to a university's rankings, prestige factor, &c, which is to say its (perceived) profitability. plenty of us study things that don't produce much directly lucrative research, but this does not mean the university keeps us around for shits and giggles or some kind of laudatory interest in knowledge for its own sake. it is a capitalist institution and acts in the financial interest of its owners / beneficiaries.

anyway wrt faculty members, they are also employed by the university because it profits from them (or hopes to, anyway). i think many people get confused by tenureship; tenure is indeed fairly cushy as far as employment contracts go, but it is is still an employment contract, and most faculty are not actually tenured anyway. academics are a classic example of the 'professional-managerial class', which is not a marxian term but is a useful one for identifying those 'upper-middle class' members differentiated by their professional qualifications and status; the prestige and perceived utility of academic knowledge production is partially what makes academics an attractive target for a lot of government and NGO funding. state funding of academic research ofc has numerous functions but, and not to put too fine a point on it, a capitalist state also invests money in things because it is hoping for some kind of return on investment, eg in the form of directly profitable inventions, soft power, &c.

there are distinctions here between different academic employment statuses. an adjunct or contingent hire is paid by the university solely to teach, making their labourer status fairly straightforward. with tenured or tenure-track positions, yes there may also be money coming from outside; however, this doesn't negate the fact that the university is trying to profit from its faculty (else it wouldn't hire them). the professional-managerial class has certain characteristics of both proletariat and bourgeoisie, and there is some variation between academics as a very select few do attain the kind of household name status that can turn them into basically a personal brand. again though: the university wants to extract value from the work (both teaching and research) of academics it hires, and so do outside sources of funding for research projects. knowledge production should not be mystified or abstracted in ways that obfuscate the financial interests of involved parties; though it attains a prestige that few other commodities do, this is still a process that is embedded within the overall operating logics of capitalism.

an additional consideration wrt internal academic class politics is that many faculty use graduate students, postdocs, and even undergrads to perform or assist with their research. these arrangements vary in structure (and between disciplines) but in general, this does mean that many academics produce papers, books, &c that depend upon the labour of many people and rarely compensate these people equally to themselves. this can take the form of a more overtly employer-employee relationship between a professor and their underlings (for example, some labs are run this way) or it can be the case that it's another party (a publisher, say) who is reaping most of the surplus value squeezed from grad / undergrad / postdoc labour. in any case it is important to keep in mind that professors can and often do take on employer (ie, small capitalist) roles in relation to other employees of the university, even though the professors themselves are there because the university and other institutions pay them and profit from their labour.

i hope this is a useful start; obviously there is lots else to be said about the economics of the university and knowledge production as a capitalist process. in general when you are trying to think through this my advice would be not to let the presentation of the university as some kind of cerebral place of enlightenment confuse a materialist analysis of the flows of capital. plenty of workers and capitalists deal with commodities that are immaterial in the sense that 'knowledge' is, or are imbued with similar social meaning and value; the university deals with knowledge production but this does not make it any less an employer (ie, a capitalist institution) than any other institution operating in a capitalist context.

#unionisation is another thing rly---university union politics are kind of atrocious generally lmfao #v rare to find solidarity between academics---even grad students---and other employees of the university like support staff or athletes #ofc many grad students consider themselves not employees but temporarily embarassed PMC. so #academia

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probablyasocialecologist · 2 years

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There is an assumption made, particularly reinforced by the media, that Long Covid is a temporary illness for most. There is no evidence to support this. Some improve and some show little or no sign of improvement, years later. Part of the confusion with Long Covid is definitional. It ranges from post-viral syndrome that clears up after a period of months to severe disability and serious health complications. Roulette is being played with the health of millions. It’s also a lonely experience that isolates you from loved ones and the rest of society, where you face persistent gaslighting and little medical support.

In the UK, 2,300,000 people have Long Covid with 514,000 people reporting Long Covid for more than two years, and 1,100,000 for more than a year, according to the latest ONS data. 438,000 people have developed Long Covid since Omicron so far, representing 24% of total Long Covid patients. Unsurprisingly, this is fuelling labour shortages. Currently around 32,000 children have had it for at least twelve months. In the US, since Omicron, infants are now being hospitalised at a higher rate than the over 75s. Globally, 144 million are conservatively expected to have Long Covid. This is a mass disabling event with multiple unknown long term consequences. These people are now deemed surplus, as so many disabled people are by capitalist society. As of June there were 10,000 NHS staff off sick with Long Covid for more than 3 months and many others burnt out. The NHS in England, Scotland and Wales has also recently decided to end indefinite sick pay for healthcare workers suffering from Long Covid. Healthcare workers with Long Covid have been abandoned.

Alex Heffron, Covid is dead! Long live Covid!

#coronavirus #covid19 #long covid #disability

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txttletale · 10 months

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Hi! I'd like to ask a question about the whole small business thing, I hope that's ok, I really only want to understand better! What I'm curious about is where you draw the line, between handmade jewelry maker who sells on etsy, jewelry maker who sells at a market stall, jewelry maker who has a rented store space, jewelry maker who makes everything themselves but a family member helps with packaging and logistics, jewelry maker whos spouse does all the non jewelry making work of the business, jewelry maker who hires someone to help them with the non jewelry making work of the business, jewelry maker who hires someone to help them make the jewelry... Is the line drawn when a person is hired with a salary instead of splitting profits? Is it them owning the physical space of the shop and workshop and tools? Is there some other distinction? Is a mom and pop taco stall a business if only mom and pop work there? If their child takes on a shift or two? I'm trying to figure out the underlying logic! Hope that's ok to ask!

so when i say 'a business' i am referring to an organization with employees. and to be clear and address this i am aware and was aware when i made my post that many people call their one-person commercial venture a 'small business' -- i'm saying that categorization is a misleading and unhelfpul one that's tied to petty-bourgeois aspirationalism and that leads people to delude themselves about their class incentives.

and to address your question--you are entirely correct that the line is when a waged labourer is hired. because at that point, even if you continue to work your ass off, there now exists an ownership relation--you are the 'business owner'--that entitles you under capitalism to the value the waged labourer is producing. if you pay someone to do somethign for your jewellery making stand, whatever it is, you are obviously expecting their work to make more revenue for you than you'll spend paying them. this discrepancy--surplus value--is the fundamental unit of capitalist exploitation.

this is why i disagree that people running a one-man-show are 'business owners' because what do they own? they are not profiting because they own a business, they are profiting from the work they themselves are doing. the ownership relation is not producing wealth for them--being a 'business owner' means owning something that generates wealth because you own it. your own hands and tools are not a business

#ask

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aelinschild · 6 months

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Worth the Wait

I forgot what is was like to hyperfixate on something, so enjoy the overflow of content while it happens! Here's a quick drabble from this morning.

SYNOPSIS: Rowan takes the drive home slowly, careful of the precious cargo in the backseat. WORDCOUNT: 857 WARNINGS: Kids, mentions of labour, Rowan being silly, Fluff

Main Masterlist

Rowan had never driven with such care.

Every corner was gentle, each stop had him slowing down far earlier. His eyes were everywhere, analyzing every car on the road. His grip on the steering wheel was tight, and his body tensed with the leftover adrenaline from the hospital. Nothing slipped his perception.

Especially the cooing in the backseat.

At an intersection, once he had rolled to a slow stop and deemed it safe enough to peer into the rear-view mirror, he took a look at his everything in the backseat.

Aelin was seated in the middle seat, glowing but tired. She was leaning over the newest addition to their small family. Their daughter. Buckled up as securely as possible, she had her mother's eyes watching her every move.

Aelin didn't move under Rowan’s watchful eyes, preferring to stare into her baby’s face. She was exceptionally uncomfortable in this position, her stomach a little sore, and generally feeling a little gross, but it didn't matter because she had this moment. Finally, after months of waiting, they were driving their daughter home with them.

Their beautiful little girl, Evie Rhylie Whitethorn Galathynius.

It was too early to tell, but when she let out the first shrill cry in the delivery room and opened her eyes to the world for the first time, she had light blue eyes. The doctor told them there was a chance that they would deepen to green, and Aelin saw Rowan’s smirk in the corner of her eye when their doctor said that.

It didn't matter to Aelin, as she gently brushed her hand over her daughter’s little tufts of blonde hair, whatever she looked like didn't matter, she’d love her unconditionally anyway.

“I'm so proud of you, fireheart,” Rowan whispered from up front, his voice full of awe.

“Thank you,” Aelin met Rowan’s cloudy eyes in the rear-view mirror and gave him a watery smile to match.

Rowan was out of the car immediately when he put it in park, rushing towards the front door to unlock it and push it open, then running back to the car to grab the hospital bag and the surplus of other things from the hospital. Running back to the house to drop those things off, then standing in the front entryway, pleased with himself for the organization.

“Uh, Rowan?” Came Aelin’s voice from outside. “You forgetting something?”

He was confused very briefly, the baby! “Shit. Coming!”

As he rushed back out to where his wife and daughter were in the back of the car, he could hear Aelin’s tired laugh. He felt a hot blush rise to his cheeks, whoops, he thought.

Opening the door, he was met with the tiny human that was his daughter, bundled up in a forest green onesie with a little bear hat, knitted by Auntie Lysandra. She was still fast asleep, tuckered out from all the crying and cuddling she had done earlier.

He unlatched the carrier from its spot in the car, with near-perfect form, having practiced this before the baby’s birth. Lifting Evie gently from the car, and setting the carrier down very gently on the drive, making sure it wasn't going anywhere, before turning back to Aelin in the backseat.

She was smiling brightly. “Sorry.” He mumbled shyly.

“Super-Dad already, don't worry it's very sexy.”

“Super-Dad who forgot his daughter and wife in the car, surefire turn on, huh?” He joked as he let Aelin grab onto his shoulders, grabbing onto her hips to gently help her out of the car. She let out a little ‘oof’ one she was standing, clearly in need of some recovery.

“Super,” Deep breath, “sexy.”

“Okay, enough of that, let's get you to bed.” He said, placing a heavy arm around her waist to stabilize her walk inside, then grabbing the carrier with a gentleness that broke and remade Aelin’s heart.

“Take a girl to dinner first.” Aelin joked as they walked inside.

Rowan snorted. “I think we are a little past that already.” And simultaneously they both looked down at little Evie, who had decided to wake up at that moment, making little gurgling noises and lifting her little arms.

Crossing over the entrance to their house, Rowan couldn't be happier. He was worn out, surviving on shitty hospital coffee and the leftovers of adrenaline from the birth a day and a half ago, but he was happy.

He was a father now. A father to his little Evie, and a husband to Aelin, and it was going to be a sleepless few months, and it was going to be hard, but he was so happy, it was overflowing. He set the carrier down again, let go of Aelin, and turned around to lock the car, then close and lock the front door, before sweeping Aelin into a – gentle – bear-hug, and dropping kisses all over her tired face.

She let out a tired giggle before hugging him back. “I love you, Ro”

“I love you far more, Fireheart.”

Evie, obviously feeling left out, let out a little cry, wanting Mom and Dad’s attention.

“We love you even more, Little Evie.”

Taglist: @backtobl4ck

Thank you for reading!! Likes, reblogs (Especially with your guy's comments :') oml) are extremely appreciated. Have a lovely day!!

#rowaelin #throne of glass #rowan whitethorn #rowaelin fanfiction #aelin galythinius #aelin x rowan #aelinschild #aelin ashryver galathynius #aelin galathynius #rowan x aelin #aelin fireheart #rowan

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rotenotes · 4 months

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Marx on surplus value (Οικονομικά Χειρόγραφα του 1857-58 [MECW, vol. 28, pp. 248-51])

Για την κατανόηση του καπιταλισμού απο τον Μαρξ σου στέλνω ένα απόσπασμα (στα αγγλικά και ελληνικά)^* από τα Οικονομικά Χειρόγραφα του 1857-58 (πρώτη εκδοχή του Κεφαλαίου) του Μαρξ που βρίσκεται στο MECW, vol. 28. Στο απόσπασμα αυτό ο Μαρξ παρουσιάζει την υπεραξία. Γύρω απο την υπεραξία–δηλαδή τον ορισμό της και την καταγωγή της–μπορούν να εκτεθούν οι διάφορες οικονομικές θεωρίες^** για τον…

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#capitalism #equivalent #forced labour #Karl Marx #labour capacity #labourer #objectified labour #origin #surplus labour #surplus value #unequal exchange #value of labour #vitality #worker

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dailyanarchistposts · 10 days

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A.2.3 Are anarchists in favour of organisation?

Yes. Without association, a truly human life is impossible. Liberty cannot exist without society and organisation. As George Barrett pointed out:

“To get the full meaning out of life we must co-operate, and to co-operate we must make agreements with our fellow-men. But to suppose that such agreements mean a limitation of freedom is surely an absurdity; on the contrary, they are the exercise of our freedom. “If we are going to invent a dogma that to make agreements is to damage freedom, then at once freedom becomes tyrannical, for it forbids men to take the most ordinary everyday pleasures. For example, I cannot go for a walk with my friend because it is against the principle of Liberty that I should agree to be at a certain place at a certain time to meet him. I cannot in the least extend my own power beyond myself, because to do so I must co-operate with someone else, and co-operation implies an agreement, and that is against Liberty. It will be seen at once that this argument is absurd. I do not limit my liberty, but simply exercise it, when I agree with my friend to go for a walk. “If, on the other hand, I decide from my superior knowledge that it is good for my friend to take exercise, and therefore I attempt to compel him to go for a walk, then I begin to limit freedom. This is the difference between free agreement and government.” [Objections to Anarchism, pp. 348–9]

As far as organisation goes, anarchists think that “far from creating authority, [it] is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.” [Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 86] Thus anarchists are well aware of the need to organise in a structured and open manner. As Carole Ehrlich points out, while anarchists “aren’t opposed to structure” and simply “want to abolish hierarchical structure” they are “almost always stereotyped as wanting no structure at all.” This is not the case, for “organisations that would build in accountability, diffusion of power among the maximum number of persons, task rotation, skill-sharing, and the spread of information and resources” are based on “good social anarchist principles of organisation!” [“Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism”, Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, p. 47 and p. 46]

The fact that anarchists are in favour of organisation may seem strange at first, but it is understandable. “For those with experience only of authoritarian organisation,” argue two British anarchists, “it appears that organisation can only be totalitarian or democratic, and that those who disbelieve in government must by that token disbelieve in organisation at all. That is not so.” [Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer, The Floodgates of Anarchy, p. 122] In other words, because we live in a society in which virtually all forms of organisation are authoritarian, this makes them appear to be the only kind possible. What is usually not recognised is that this mode of organisation is historically conditioned, arising within a specific kind of society — one whose motive principles are domination and exploitation. According to archaeologists and anthropologists, this kind of society has only existed for about 5,000 years, having appeared with the first primitive states based on conquest and slavery, in which the labour of slaves created a surplus which supported a ruling class.

Prior to that time, for hundreds of thousands of years, human and proto-human societies were what Murray Bookchin calls “organic,” that is, based on co-operative forms of economic activity involving mutual aid, free access to productive resources, and a sharing of the products of communal labour according to need. Although such societies probably had status rankings based on age, there were no hierarchies in the sense of institutionalised dominance-subordination relations enforced by coercive sanctions and resulting in class-stratification involving the economic exploitation of one class by another (see Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom).

It must be emphasised, however, that anarchists do not advocate going “back to the Stone Age.” We merely note that since the hierarchical-authoritarian mode of organisation is a relatively recent development in the course of human social evolution, there is no reason to suppose that it is somehow “fated” to be permanent. We do not think that human beings are genetically “programmed” for authoritarian, competitive, and aggressive behaviour, as there is no credible evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, such behaviour is socially conditioned, or learned, and as such, can be unlearned (see Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression). We are not fatalists or genetic determinists, but believe in free will, which means that people can change the way they do things, including the way they organise society.

And there is no doubt that society needs to be better organised, because presently most of its wealth — which is produced by the majority — and power gets distributed to a small, elite minority at the top of the social pyramid, causing deprivation and suffering for the rest, particularly for those at the bottom. Yet because this elite controls the means of coercion through its control of the state (see section B.2.3), it is able to suppress the majority and ignore its suffering — a phenomenon that occurs on a smaller scale within all hierarchies. Little wonder, then, that people within authoritarian and centralised structures come to hate them as a denial of their freedom. As Alexander Berkman puts it:

“Any one who tells you that Anarchists don’t believe in organisation is talking nonsense. Organisation is everything, and everything is organisation. The whole of life is organisation, conscious or unconscious … But there is organisation and organisation. Capitalist society is so badly organised that its various members suffer: just as when you have a pain in some part of you, your whole body aches and you are ill… , not a single member of the organisation or union may with impunity be discriminated against, suppressed or ignored. To do so would be the same as to ignore an aching tooth: you would be sick all over.” [Op. Cit., p. 198]

Yet this is precisely what happens in capitalist society, with the result that it is, indeed, “sick all over.”

For these reasons, anarchists reject authoritarian forms of organisation and instead support associations based on free agreement. Free agreement is important because, in Berkman’s words, ”[o]nly when each is a free and independent unit, co-operating with others from his own choice because of mutual interests, can the world work successfully and become powerful.” [Op. Cit., p. 199] As we discuss in section A.2.14, anarchists stress that free agreement has to be complemented by direct democracy (or, as it is usually called by anarchists, self-management) within the association itself otherwise “freedom” become little more than picking masters.

Anarchist organisation is based on a massive decentralisation of power back into the hands of the people, i.e. those who are directly affected by the decisions being made. To quote Proudhon:

“Unless democracy is a fraud and the sovereignty of the People a joke, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his [or her] industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory … should act directly and by itself in administering the interests which it includes, and should exercise full sovereignty in relation to them.” [The General Idea of the Revolution, p. 276]

It also implies a need for federalism to co-ordinate joint interests. For anarchism, federalism is the natural complement to self-management. With the abolition of the State, society “can, and must, organise itself in a different fashion, but not from top to bottom … The future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal. Then alone will be realised the true and life-giving order of freedom and the common good, that order which, far from denying, on the contrary affirms and brings into harmony the interests of individuals and of society.” [Bakunin, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 205–6] Because a “truly popular organisation begins … from below” and so “federalism becomes a political institution of Socialism, the free and spontaneous organisation of popular life.” Thus libertarian socialism “is federalistic in character.” [Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, pp. 273–4 and p. 272]

Therefore, anarchist organisation is based on direct democracy (or self-management) and federalism (or confederation). These are the expression and environment of liberty. Direct (or participatory) democracy is essential because liberty and equality imply the need for forums within which people can discuss and debate as equals and which allow for the free exercise of what Murray Bookchin calls “the creative role of dissent.” Federalism is necessary to ensure that common interests are discussed and joint activity organised in a way which reflects the wishes of all those affected by them. To ensure that decisions flow from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down by a few rulers.

Anarchist ideas on libertarian organisation and the need for direct democracy and confederation will be discussed further in sections A.2.9 and A.2.11.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Silicon Valley ideology is using private equity to buy a new marketplace, flood it with capital to flush out competitors, and use economic dominance to eviscerate working conditions and the cost of labour before jacking up the prices again, this time with the surplus all going to investors -Maria Farrell

#silicon valley ideology #crooked timber #maria farrell #labor #oligarchy #monopoly

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aronarchy · 3 months

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Anthropologists and philosophers have asked whether agriculture could have been the tipping point in the power balance between men and women. Agriculture needs a lot of physical strength. The dawn of farming was also when humans started to keep property such as cattle. As this theory goes, social elites emerged as some people built up more property than others, driving men to want to make sure their wealth would pass onto their legitimate children. So, they began to restrict women’s sexual freedom.

The problem with this is that women have always done agricultural work. In ancient Greek and Roman literature, for example, there are depictions of women reaping corn and stories of young women working as shepherds. United Nations data shows that, even today, women comprise almost half the world’s agricultural workforce and are nearly half of the world’s small-scale livestock managers in low-income countries. Working-class women and enslaved women across the world have always done heavy manual labour.

More importantly for the story of patriarchy, there was plant and animal domestication for a long time before the historical record shows obvious evidence of oppression based on gender. “The old idea that as soon as you get farming, you get property, and therefore you get control of women as property,” explains Hodder, “is wrong, clearly wrong.” The timelines don’t match up.

The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear much later, in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Around 5,000 years ago,��administrative tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia show those in charge taking great pains to draw up detailed lists of population and resources.

“Person power is the key to power in general,” explains political scientist and anthropologist James Scott at Yale University, whose research has focused on early agrarian states. The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state—even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight.

The most important thing for the state was that everybody played their part according to how they had been categorised: male or female. Individual talents, needs, or desires didn’t matter. A young man who didn’t want to go to war might be mocked as a failure; a young woman who didn’t want to have children or wasn’t motherly could be condemned as unnatural.

As documented by the American historian Gerda Lerner, written records from that time show women gradually disappearing from the public world of work and leadership, and being pushed into the domestic shadows to focus on motherhood and domestic labour. This combined with the practice of patrilocal marriage, in which daughters are expected to leave their childhood homes to live with their husbands’ families, marginalised women and made them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in their own homes. Over time, marriage turned into a rigid legal institution that treated women as property of their husbands, as were children and slaves.

Rather than beginning in the family, then, history points instead to patriarchy beginning with those in power in the first states. Demands from the top filtered down into the family, forcing ruptures in the most basic human relationships, even those between parents and their children. It sowed distrust between those whom people might otherwise turn to for love and support. No longer were people living for themselves and those closest to them. Now, they were living in the interests of the patriarchal state.

This is interesting.

#repost of someone else’s content #article #patriarchy #adultism #statism #feminism #anarchist #anarcha-feminist #history #historiography #anthropology

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thethirdromana · 2 years

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Some context for the 1890s

I thought it might be fun to look into the period when Dracula was written and set in a little more detail.

Key facts

In 1897, the population of the UK was just under 40m - so about 60% of what it is today. (By contrast the US population at the time was just 21% of what it is today). Only about 6m of them had the right to vote - about 40% of adult men.

With a population of 6m, London was the largest city in the world and would be for another 20 years.

Politics and imperialism

The British Empire wasn't yet at its peak, which would be at some point between 1913 and 1922 depending on whether you define it by land or population. This was the time of the Scramble for Africa - in the 1890s alone, Britain colonised the countries that are now Uganda, Zanzibar, Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, parts of Sudan and parts of South Africa. (Ish - matching 1890s borders to modern ones is tricky).

All the same, the sense of effortless British dominance was fading, because countries like Germany, France and the USA were starting to catch up. In 1896, the book 'Made in Germany' by Ernest Edwin Williams was a bestseller, bemoaning that cheaper German goods were crowding out British ones in shops. (It's available for free online; just google it if you're interested.) Here's 1890s Berlin:

Britain was only just emerging from what the Victorians called "The Great Depression" from the 1870s to early 1890s. The wealthiest and most powerful country in the world didn't always feel that way to the people living in it.

Alongside anxieties about Britain's place in the world, the other major political topic which dominated the 1890s was the question of Irish Home Rule - essentially whether Ireland should be allowed its own parliament and responsibility for domestic affairs while still remaining part of the UK. The Second Home Rule Bill passed the Commons in 1893 but was defeated in the Lords. Here's 1890s Dublin:

Society

Less than a percentage of the British population would have been people of colour. The 1921 census showed just 75,000 people born in India - 1897 wouldn't have been much different. All the same, the University of Oxford - i.e. one of the most elite institutions in the country - had its first black student as long ago as 1873.

This was a period of growing rights and freedoms in the UK (starting from a very low base). In 1891, children under 11 were banned from working in factories; in 1893, education was made free and compulsory for children up to age 11; in 1882, the Married Women's Property Act allowed married women to own and control property in their own right. Many socialist and trade unionist organisations were founded at this time, including a precursor to the Labour Party.

A social concern at this time were the "surplus women" - there was perceived to be a relative excess of women compared with men, prompting fears they wouldn't be able to marry and would have to work. Women were about 40% of the labour force.

If a man and a woman got engaged but the man then broke it off, the woman could sue him for "breach of promise" as this was considered a binding legal contract. The woman could break the engagement with no legal penalty. (You might recognise this as the basis for several Jeeves and Wooster plotlines).

The fertility rate was falling fast - from an average of nearly 5 children per woman in 1880 to 4 in 1895 (this would fall to 2 by 1930). Around 1 in 5 children died before the age of 5, and around 1 in 200 births resulted in the death of the mother.

Daily life and prices

There were only a handful of cars on British roads - so when Mina says she and Lucy "drove up to the house", she means by horse, not by car. But there were ~25,000km of railways in the UK, compared with about 17,000km today.

The rise of the railways and people actually getting days off meant that this was the golden age of trips to the British seaside. Train fares were a penny per mile, meaning that London to Whitby cost about 20s or a week's labour for a solicitor's clerk, with the purchasing power of £64 today.

As a full-blown solicitor, my guess (though it's only a guess) is that Jonathan is earning about twice that. A female teacher's salary was around £75 a year or 28s a week. A housemaid would earn just £10 a year, though she would get bed and board as well.

The first edition of a novel cost about a shilling and reprints cost even less - as little as a penny or two for the cheapest books. Literacy was nearly universal in the UK.

Also available for a penny were magazines like the hugely popular Tit-Bits, which was the first periodical to sell over a million copies in the UK. It consisted of short, mostly human interest snippets of information, as well as short stories. Lucy and Mina probably wouldn't read Tit-Bits, but Mr Swales might.

References, youtube links and a couple of bonuses for fanfiction writers on my original post here.

#dracula daily #dracula #historical context #historical reference #long post #a really really long post #apologies if i missed anything crucial #but it was already so long #reposting as i forgot about tumblr's external links thing #hope this works now

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