zenosanalytic reblogged
slacker (1990)
zenosanalytic reblogged
politics is about doing things and what your actions lead to and not about the things you think are good or bad. & this distinction is one that i think causes a lot of very fundamental misunderstandings when people can't wrap their heads around it but is also like a straightforwardly sensible useful and productive way to think about politics so it is well worth holding to
that is probably the aspect of marxism that is most foundational to my politics, that politics should be concerned with material things that happen in the world and not ideas except inasmuch as (obviously) those ideas can help analyze, model, explain, predict and describe those things. i am a hardline materialist in this sense. if you are Right About Everything and don't do anything about it you are as inert as helium to me
Yeah. And, unfortunately cuz ALLOT of ppl don't get this, issues like racism, sexism, ethnic chauvinism(thinking one ppl are better or worse than others), colonial chauvinism(ie: Indian and Caribbean immigrants to England being mistreated specifically FOR being ~provincials~), all that sort of stuff ARE material issues, not theoretical.
Bigotries cost ppl jobs. They cost them housing. They make them travel further with less resources, which costs them more time and money. They make goods more expensive for them and more difficult to find. They make insults more common and friendship more dear, which increases stress which damages health. They make the home less safe, which psychologically scars any children the ppl facing it have for life. Political-Hatred IS a Material Issue, with Material Impacts on the Lives of those who Face it, and making Racism and its ilk a Hardline -something you will always oppose and never abide- IS Practical, Material Politics; NOT ~Frivolous Identity Politics~
zenosanalytic reblogged
I'm going to watch the Barbie movie while being Cognizant of its function as a spectacle of a commodity and enjoy the aesthetic but think the dialogue could use a little more polish from the writers and then I'm going to go home and make sweet tender love with Karl Marx who will have been sleeping in my bathtub all day. And afterwards he will kiss me so tenderly and say "I'm glad you enjoyed the movie. The masses deserve to have as much joy and art in whatever they can access in their every day. It is not through media or representation that we will find liberation but the self activity of the working class in the smashing if the capitalist state. Anyway can you review this fanfiction I wrote of Engels getting down silly style for me before I send it to him?"
zenosanalytic reblogged
The Leonard Cohen song Everybody Knows is mostly about an unfaithful partner I guess, but it's also about Marxism lol
The opening lyrics (I'm remembering not reading from somewhere don't @ me) are something like:
everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
everybody knows that the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost
everybody knows that the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich, that's the way it goes, everybody knows
And I just think that's a fantastic encapsulation of the Marxist description of ideology "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" - they don't know what they are doing, nonetheless they are doing it. I have a little wordplay on this to make it more accessible for myself: "Sie wissen dass es nichts ist, aber sie tun es" - they know that it is nothing, and still they do it. I say this because a lot of the time the most ripe and obvious outbursts of ideology are places where the participants are unaware, but I think they just as often also know how their ideology works, but view it as abstract and therefore harmless. They know that it is "nothing" but they still do it.
Jess Phillips saying that neoliberalism is a meaningless word is "sie wissen das nicht". People who consider the use of nuclear weapons abhorrent working on nuclear weapons systems is "sie wissen dass es nichts ist"
Everybody knows. That's how it goes
zenosanalytic reblogged
Anonymous asked:
what does it mean when people say stuff like individual morality or action is incompatible with class analysis or class struggle?
alright so like one of the key ideas about class analysis is the idea that classes (as a whole) have economic interests that affect all their members but don't extrapolate out to an individual analysis.
for example, let's say that you can't find a job, and somebody offers to pay you below the table for below minimum wage. it's in your individual interest to do this--it beats having no job! but as a member of the working class, once this practice becomes normalized, suddenly the standards of pay for everyone are lower because people know that they can just pay less than minimum wage under the table. competition between workers for jobs drives wages down for everyone, leaving them all in a worse situation overall even if each individual choice to scab, to accept lower pay, to resist unionization, etc, leaves the person who makes it better off. cf. karl marx on what happens when wages and working conditions deteriorate:
The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.
— Karl Marx, Wage Labour & Capital
similarly, any individual member of the working class is completely dispensable and replaceable by capital. if one person refuses to work unless they're paid a higher wage, they'll be fired and replaced with somebody who doesn't. the individual worker has no economic leverage whatsoever. but the working class has incredible economic leverage! and so does the intermediate stage between the working class and the individual--organized segments of the working class (e.g. trade unions) have economic leverage. if one person strikes, the capitalist can fire them. if 40,000 people strike, your industry is going to shut down.
so the reason why class analysis is compatible with individual action is that your incentives measurably change when you start organizing--it's in the interests of the individual to compete, but in the interests of the class to cooperate. and obviously you cannot just expect everyone to spontaneously coordinate! you, the individual, are disposable to capital! if you, personally, refuse to take the under-the-table offer, either on moral grounds or because you recognize your class interest, your neighbour's going to take it--unless you and her get together and agree that neither of you will take it. that's the only way that the guy making the offer is going to have to give in and offer the job for a living wage.
and this is what organization is--trade unions (although they have severe limitations!), communist parties, and other worker's organizations allow the working class to pursue their collective interest--which can only be pursued by collective action, because engaging in the strategies of collective action as an individual, without the cooperation of your peers, is high risk for no reward.
zenosanalytic reblogged
the thing about posts like this is, we have the actual theory that historical working class socialists employed to bring about the improved working conditions we benefit from today. here’s a 1920’s IWW pamphlet that was specifically compiled for agricultural workers:
and again, this was pre-8hr work day, which means they may have worked upwards of 12hr days, and still found time for meetings, strikes, news, and a healthy amount of theory. if you’re ever curious about what materials the historical working class read, there’s a good list here. so read it aloud. grab an audiobook. join a reading group. the theory is, and has always been, a crucial part of building class consciousness and movements for liberation.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Die hard AI users are like "AI should have Unequivocal Access to the Entirety of the Internet"
And then have the audacity to complain about the plague of pornbots and how they've become more of a problem
Like
No Way? Really? Are you saying they're more Intelligent than they used to be?
Almost..... Artificially...... Intelligent???
That's such a coincidence 😱😱😱
Then they'll put that they hate corporations in their other posts and be left leaning in their bios.
I'm like, you're absolutely right, no one owns ChatGPT, it's completely free range, just like Midjourney and Lense AI, no one is profiting off of it at all (this is sarcasm).
Mfs will then tell me to become a Marxist since machines should replace humans.... What they forget is that Marx wanted machinery to replace humans in labour, as a way of allowing us to satisfy our needs, through creative works. Works which should not be automated.
Literally just read theory, please. Even if it's summarised by a collection of other people's work, it's better than spouting falsehoods.
#arandomassortmentofbits#~AI~#Politics#Marxism#Creativity#Creative Work#Unalienated Labor#appreciative reblogs#I feel like the Alienation of Labor is a HUGE part of Marx's theory that just doesn't get the focus it deserves these days#like if you understand that ENDING Alienation is the goal then no way you can think these copybots would have a role in the revolution#cuz they're all about Getting the laborer's work without having to so much as credit them for it let alone pay them#minitagrants
zenosanalytic reblogged
being a marxist is so boring like there’s no mystery left. you’ll investigate a concerning issue affecting our society and you’re like ‘well it’s probably because the capitalists are underpaying and overworking their workers’ and then 9 times out of 10 the answer is the capitalists are underpaying and overworking their workers
zenosanalytic reblogged
“One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.”
—
Wallace Shawn, The Fever
(To understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.)
postmarxed
I saw Wallace Shawn at the end of this quote and thought surely it’s a different Wallace Shawn surely it’s not the fucking dinosaur from Toy Story this can’t be the fucking Sicilian from the Princess Bride but it is. It’s the same fucking guy I just read an explanation of commodity fetishism written by Mr. Incredible’s tiny boss at the insurance company
Why did he feel the need to specify that he was naked?
zenosanalytic reblogged
we will domesticate the shark. we will restructure society around shark ownership. this is basic fucking marxism people.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Contrapoints’ latest video acts not only as a response to Jordan Peterson, but also defines postmodernism and related terms, as well as a discussion of disagreements within leftist circles.
Source: youtube.com
zenosanalytic reblogged
There was a whole series of laws which enforced this parity. As those were relaxed, particularly after the 70s "stagflation"(which didn't really have anything to do with regulation but whatevs Volcker), "investors"(rentier-capitalists) increasingly clawed a larger percentage of profits into their own pockets.
The managerial class participated in this because they were “captured” by the investor-class for a variety of reasons.
To begin with, while most rentier-capitalists had little to do with business operations, there had long been a tradition of some playing a direct role, and in the US that tradition was more pronounced.
Secondly, the post-war Managerial class wasn’t really one class but two. Those at the top(CEOs, etc) were increasingly inducted during this period into the investor-class through everything from cultural osmosis(investors treated them as social equals or near-social equals, and allowed their children into investor cultural strongholds[Harvard, private primary education, private clubs, etc]) to the shift from salary-based to stock-based pay-packages which, beyond aligning their economic interest directly with the rentiers, also accelerated inequality as top-execs could be given insignificant salaries, huge stock-compensation, then pay the lower capital-gains rate on their compensation, unlike their salaried compatriots; this was more a later development though(post-Reagan). That we would come to call these people “Executives” and separate them from other managers implicitly recognizes their different class-position. Non-executives were also split: between so-called “Middle-managers” -corporate bureaucrats- and local entrepreneurs roped into the corporate system through, of all things, Branding and patents; the “Franchisee”. Franchisees came to identify themselves with the investor-class much like Executives did and for similar reasons(though they rarely rise beyond being local petty-gentry). Middle-Managers participated for more complicated reasons: part tribal identification(they’re management, I’m management, these are management dictates), part class(I’m in charge, I’m above them, they’re below me, they deserve what they get), part enforcement(they were subject to hierarchical compulsion and punishment as well), and part fantasy(Corporate’s not going to fleece me like they’re fleecing labor: I’ve got a college degree! I’m middle-class! They respect me!). There was also a financial aspect to this that I’ll touch on at the end which, not-so-coincidentally, also happened to enriched the rentier-capitalists in-itself.
And all of this, of course, operated inseparably from racism and sexism. Obviously because nearly all of the managerial class at any level was White, but also because this shift was a wider sociopolitical development accomplished through national, judicial, and state politics, and not merely an internal shift in corporate governance. Much of the policy shifts that allowed and then exacerbated this trend were sold to the (white)Middle-class and to (white)Labor by (white)politicians through appeals to racism and sexism. The very inclusion of women and non-whites in the labor market was used by Republicans(and conservative Democrats, though fewer and fewer as this period progressed and the parties became more ideologically uniform) to sell and justify the decoupling of performance from pay to the white middle-class, whether laborer or clerk. The same dynamic of racism and sexism being used as political crowbars to dismantle corporate oversight, public interest, and economic regulation played out across US politics: from worker-safety, to environmental protection, to health benefits, to pension, to credit, to labor solidarity(thus the “Reagan Democrats” of the 70s and 80s); the list goes on.
So the financial aspect. Alongside all of this and operating on labor as well, the expansion of easy credit throughout this period allowed much of the middle class to maintain their quality of life even as performance and pay were pried apart by investor rent-seeking. Again non-so-coincidentally, this largely excluding non-white USians through housing policy(redlining, home-loans, etc), and the racism so pervasive in day-to-day USian bank-operations that it has never not been a mainstay of African-American comedy. The GFC in 2006-7, of course, largely wiped out the middle class regardless of race or sex; and transferred a generation of wealth creation to the rentiers; on Top of the two generations-worth of interest and fees rentiers had been farming from middle-class retirement investments since WWII. And now rentiers want to cut their taxes and give themselves massive financial gifts out of the treasury while pushing that tax-burden onto everyone else(an impossibility since they hold 80% of all wealth in the US), federally invalidating state and local tax deductions(because Small Government), gutting the services available to us, stealing the lands we publicly own and the lands of native tribes by administrative diktat, and ballooning the very national debt they’ve been hyperventilating about for the last 8 years to undermine our national health-insurance system. Because “Enough” is never enough for the wealthy, apparently.
zenosanalytic reblogged
tumblr: we are a capitalist running dog and
dennys: your memes must be seized and redistributed to the people? on it.
tumblr: the rupture which denny's took care to interject in the middle of tumblr's meme should be seen for what it is - an elegant example of Marx's dialectic - but also for what it shows us in plain sight-- accidental commentary on the relationship between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Tumblr expended labor to produce something that satisfies a use-value: a meme using humor, irony, and a clever reversal to call into question the commodification of online culture by brands trying to put a quirkier appearance to increasingly unpopular business practices inherent in capitalism; in denny's most immediate case, ongoing racial discrimination lawsuits. The rupture in the chat marks the point where Denny's alienated the finished product (the meme) from the workers who made it (tumblr), and used that interruption to separate the political content the workers wanted the meme to relay (the racism and exploitation inherent in a capitalist enterprise like denny's), from the quirky apperance that Dennys depends on to increase the number of positive impressions for its brand (the language of the meme sounds archaic to capitalist ears, which a stunted capitalist outlook would deem 'novel' and memeworthy). After stealing the product and processing it so as to resell it as its brand, Denny's spat back at tumblr what it spits at its customers: a bland reproduction bereft of the flavor and humanity of the original, be it humor or food. Marx's General Formula for Capital can be seen in how memes (and culture as such) relate to the laborers who make it as much as it "applies" for the cook or the waitress, and especially the third world labor further down the supply chain, so it should surprise few of us that Denny's PR team would inadvertently reaffirm its bourgeois character in an attempt to negate attempts to characterize it as bourgeois by commodifying the product of someone's labor (the crux of the critique levied at denny's, and capitalism writ large); a different, less technical analysis would be that since, like fish, we are so submerged in capitalist ideology that we would sooner believe ourselves to be like fish for capital, itself as natural as the sea, than to venture beyond what we've been told are our natural limits. but that is still nothing novel. what's a surprise even to me is the dogged persistence of the fundamental law of dialectics - the unity of opposites - to assert itself even in Denny's, a quirky milennial brand occluding hyperexploitative business practices online; in reality, a racist greasemonger stealing from its employees and an audience it tries to convince it's one of them by stealing from them.
zenosanalytic reblogged
*hits the blunt* yugioh was propaganda because the season they opened the anime with in the US started by making you pity yugi for losing his exodia cards in like, the second episode i think it was. basically this fuck has a huge unfair advantage over everyone else in the world and is planning to use it to win a cash tournament. but you’re supposed to feel bad for him when he loses that advantage and ends up on an even playing field because the cards are “his property”. exodia is capital and yugi moto is the bourgeoisie
and kids are meant to think “wow id hate it if i had exodia and i lost it. i could have exodia someday so for some reason i empathize with that situation” it’s literally capital
Luke ur literally misreading this entire fucking thing cuz kaiba is literally a fucking CEO and he’s the villain. this show is anticapitalist…yugi losing the exodia cards is actually about how the proletariat loses the true value of their labor under the surplus theory of value
ok listen up though yugi literally gets possessed by the spirit of a pharaoh and inherited the exodia cards from his grandfather they are clearly a metaphor for the divine right of kings under feudalism and weevil is the bourgeois revolutionaries overthrowing feudalism. only joey wheeler, the true hero of the proletariat, can
zenosanalytic reblogged
williamshatspeare
i’m dying just say false consciousness you fucking commie
zenosanalytic reblogged
roofbeams-deactivated20180202
heres a cool idea: what if in 2017 tumblr commie kids gave up the creepy romanticization of the soviet union thing in favor of the aesthetics of american labor history–the haymarket riot, the pullman strike, the great railroad strike, emma goldman & yiddish socialism, woody guthrie, pete seeger, paul robeson, the iww and the 1912 textile workers’ strike, the ladies’ garment workers’ union, wpa murals, the american communist party, bread and roses, the union maid. that’s the Good Shit if yr looking for historical leftist culture imo
Seriously tho, kids.
The USSR was a blood-soaked mess. A racist, anti-semitic, sexist blood-soaked mess at that. Do not repeat the sins of the Left of the 60s/etc by ignoring that. (Same goes for Maoist China, etc.) To ignore that is to literally piss on a truly appalling number of graves As an allegory, Animal Farm’s inaccuracies were that it’s not grim and horrific enough. The most conservative and hesitant and “well we don’t want to be hysterical about this” count of Stalin’s death toll, not including famine-victims, is 4 million; the one which, after various amounts of research, I find most convincing is about 20 million. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed anywhere from 18 to 50 million, and we have literal footage of Tienamen, guys.
This is not the good example you are looking for. Do not romanticise them.
100% go back, as OP says, to the things that actually had good results (like a 40 hour work-week and basic human worker’s rights and shite) and did not do them over mountains of corpses. We have lots! They even included (gosh!) women! and queers! and people of colour/different ethnicities! They do all the things you want.
These are your models. Not those bloody handed bastards over there.
stardust-rain
honestly, now is more important than ever to remember the historical contributions that the working class has made for social movements, given how much the media have taken blaming them for the rise of fascism.
From Trump to Brexit, the narrative being spun has been that of “the working class were too poor and too dumb to know better” and how both Brexit and Trump spoke for them or to them, even though a majority of that demographic are non-white/immigrant/minorities who are severely affected by the political outcome. It’s a false narrative and it is both classist and racist and erases the fact that labour rights and worker’s rights and social rights in West Europe and Americas have come from and were heavily supported by the socialist left and working classes.
Just to start off, I was reading the other day about The 1936 Battle of Cable Street, which was a stand organised by the local working class comprising of Jewish locals, the Irish locals, Labour and Communist party members in a demonstration against a Nazi march that lead to confrontation with the police (Discworld fans, read the fuck up about this because you will find a lot of what Pratchett was referencing in Night Watch).
I’m sure there’s probably a lot more examples, and what OP mentioned definitely deserves more historical context and background. But the fact is that those historical contexts are either forgotten or ignored by the tumblr social justice commie kids scene because clueless privileged teenagers are more willing to worship dead genocidal dictators for cheap aesthetics than do actual fucking research.
There’s a difference between celebrating bloody totalitarian regimes and celebrating actual socialist and leftist movements that had a positive outcome, in all their complexities, struggles and conflicts. And that difference means research and looking at the contexts of historical and social political landscapes of the time, the sum of which unfortunately can’t be reduced to sickle-and-hammer on a pastel colour palette.
Ugh -_-’ There’s so much great history here in the U.S. without looking to something like the USSR. And a lot of it’s being forgotten. By everyone. If people on the left can’t even remember some of it then how is the rest of the country supposed to.
I swear, my Papaw and his generation stared down hell to get the unions into the mines during and after the coal wars. He was always proud of being in the UMWA and working in the CCC. He’d be rolling in his grave if he heard some of the family talk now and the rhetoric being pitched around.
People died in this country, just trying to get decent working conditions. We owe it to them to not ignore our own history.
I don’t think this is a result of privilege so much as education. Like, hardly ANY of this stuff is actually taught in the US, and when it is(like the Haymarket “Riots”) it’s taught without context and from an anti-labor slant that portrays them as ineffective and inexplicable(for instance, did you know about the severe Pinkerton violence against labor activists leading up to the march, or that the Haymarket “Riot” is where May Day comes from? These aren’t things widely taught in US schools). Hell, thanks to Republicans and ALEC, we have a handful of states across the US(including my own, Texas) where teachers can currently get in serious trouble for going in-depth about the social movements that the New Deal and Great Society reforms had their roots in; the best you’re likely to get is some nebulous talk about “Progressives”, and maybe a summary of the issues they were interested in(with a particular focus on Prohibition to paint them as moral prudes, because when has conservative propaganda ever had any damn consistency?). And the US media has, historically, cared far more about covering the music these movements produced, and particularly the personalities who inherited that musical tradition during the WWII and Post-War generations like Dylan and Guthrie, than the stuff they were actually protesting ABOUT, or the movements they were part of.
People can only work with the information they have, and they can only know to look up information about what they know exists, so if they’ve been taught that the only political force to successfully challenge the capitalist establishment is Bolshevik Communism(and they’re never taught outside of college that the Bolsheviks were a particular expression of Marxism which was a particular expression of Communism, that there were different types of Marxism, of Communism, and of Labor and Leftist activism), and they’re dissatisfied with the capitalist establishment, then they’re going to idolize what they know.
Though I will say this; Bolshevism(and Maoism, which is a particular sort of Bolshevism) and it’s “kill our way to Utopia” vision appeals to a frustrated feeling of powerlessness, hunger for grand millennarian resets, and a certain naive obsession with purity of morality, purpose, and action which appeals to younger activists. Most folks have their “burn it all down” phase, usually when they’re at a point in life where they have only limited control over their own, and while snarking about it is always gonna be a Thing for those of us not currently trying to manage that rage, because Snark is simply the 8est coping mech there is, I don’t think painting those still wrestling with it as our enemy, rather than as who we were in our teens, is terribly helpful.