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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2020

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  • Nothing major politically happens because an individual does something. We have to get together with other people that think like us and build that organization until it can take substantiative action, possibly in coalition with other organizations.

    As an individual, that looks like joining an org and improving it. Improving it is you gaining skills, teaching those skills, doing logistics and planning, facilitating actions, interfacing with other orgs, and recruiting. I’m lumping in knowledge with skills - reading and knowing theory and history is also a skill.

    Doing this is work, particularly emotional labor. Most socialist organizations retain heavy doses of liberalism both officially and among members. Many people and meetings will be exhausting. But this is how you learn the most valuable skill: navigating conversations to organize other people, including those who just said the must absurd thing you’ve ever heard. Building our movement means socially building a big series of conveyor belts to loop people into action and development so that we have a growing core of dedicated revolutionaries as well as a larger mass of sympathizers who can take action when called upon.

    There is no other mode by which we can be said to have done anything substantial politically. The rest of what we can do as individuals is basically charity and making those around us a little less reactionary. Those are good things, but highly limited, and not up to the task of taking on the number 1 sponsored genocidal apartheid settler colony of capitalist empire.







  • We are all bathed in propaganda and distraction and false consciousness, so many things that should be obvious in a better world would actually be shocking and rejected out of hand by most people if you just told them the conclusive facts. Liberals invested in the voting system already conflate it with democracy and repeat propaganda against “enemy” states when they deviate from this model, calling them undemocratic. Those same liberals are unhappy with their governments and do not feel represented (correct!) but simultaneously justify and entrench their own systems as great and buy the propaganda that the real problems are things like those who vote wrong or immigrants, etc.

    Underneath this propaganda is the greater mover of white supremacy and the colonizer mindset. A false sense of superiority salves the wound.




  • Most of the Roman low and medium skill artisans were slaves, actually.

    But capitalism is best recognized by the proliferation of commodities, as it is made up of various wage labor capitalist enterprises producing large quantities of fungible goods for market. A chair is a chair is a chair and you can buy 50 varieties of basically the same thing at the furniture store. Under capitalism, all economic life is governed by this: you work a wage labor job and you buy everything else (commodities made by other wage laborers).

    Rome did not have such a system. A vastly larger proportion of goods were made at home by oneself or by servants or by slaves. When goods were purchased they would have mostly been produced by slaves or petty bourgeois artisans or apprentices. Wage laborers still existed, but they were not typical.

    An important part of Marxist analysis is to focus on the shift from quantitative to qualitative in social development. The high proportion of wage laborers is something that typefies capitalism, but wage laborers have existed for a long time. At some point there was a watershed moment - or watershed many decades - where the material forces that increased this proportion crossed various thresholds to create a new ruling class that became dominant and started throwing their weight around (capitalists). The capitalist class was in no way dominant in Rome.


  • Capitalism is not about individuals being greedy. Calling capitalists greedy is like calling fish greedy for needing water. The capitalist system requires constant profit maximization to prevent firms from crumbling, the capitalists are tasked with ensuring this, generally by (at first) maximizing exchange value of their product and minimizing costs (usually labor), then later using monopoly position to charge economic rent. In the heart of empire, financialization has meant trying to skip the first step via large financial investment up front, like with tech monopolies. The system itself forces exploitation, dispossession, colonialism, and ultimately crisis and war.

    Historical empires conquered for reasons we often don’t really know specifically, as the accounts we have are written by victors with limited access and understanding. But ancient peoples were just as sophisticated as us and subject to material forces as us, so it was certainly not just being greedy. The economic base can force hands, for example. The Roman slave and debt system was unsustainable and required debt jubilees and war and invasions to be maintained, for example. For the ruling class of Rome, was maintaining the empire only greed or was it what they were taught to do as the moral and right thing?


  • The mode of production is never human nature. Human nature is a factor, but the mode of production is something that is socially constructed and subject to material constraints, like tools and the environment in which people live.

    But socializing and sharing empathy is virtually universal, and the impetus to share food or shelter or community is something that capitalist society teaches us to avoid. So one of the things we strive for through the abolition of capitalism is the restoration of human connections and care that are currently robbed from us. So I can totally see where you are coming from re: the extent to which the communism we want to build constitutes a return. But it is even more a step forward, a transformation into the future constructed from the bones of the present.

    Re: what Marx called “primitive communism”, which we might better call egalitarian societies based on hunting and gathering and sometimes agriculture, such societies have actually existed everywhere people have lived. You can find clear historical examples of such societies in the Americas and Australia, yes, but also in the Middle East, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ethiopia, Pakistan/India, China, etc. As you mention, any of these societies did not have written records or they were lost, but we can understand how they lived based on their homes, food, tools, dress, cohabitation, and spatial distribution of all these things.




  • “International law” is really just treaties and bureaucracy. For it to have consistent effect it would need to be materially backed by interests ensuring such an institution. It does not. So, instead, it reflects actual geopolitical power imbalances and inconsustent application.

    But, and this is the most important part, oppressing countries not only still participate in it, but try to prop up the farce that it is a legitimate deliberative institution. The UN is maintained for PR value, it is a fig leaf. If you can use it to claim your genocidal war is legal, you can put that in your internal propaganda apparatus. When you can’t, well, then you see alternative PR terms being invented to give the same impression lije, “rules-based international order”, which is something that sounds like a reference to international law, but isn’t and can’t be, because the people using the term are actively breaking the relevant international law agreements.

    European countries largely do nothing because they are fellow white supremacist US lapdogs feeding from the same teet of global exploitation creared through US-dominated imperialism. And “Israel” is a key player in that domination in the MENA region, helping to destabilize any sovereign action that doesn’t submit to US interests. Supposed European liberal ideals have never been consistently applied, they have been applied on colonial and racial lines since they went the colonial path hundreds of years ago.


  • Iirc it would be more accurate to say the crowd apprehended Jackson. He nearly beat the guy to death with his cane and the crowd had to stop him.

    Nope. Jackson was old and feeble and required someone to walk him to and from the funeral. The crowd, including Davey Crockett, restrained the assassin, who was found not guilty because he had incredible delusions. Jackson himself, old and confused, immediately claimed it was the political opposition come to get him and waved his walking stick around trying to hit the already-subdued man.

    Jackson was a cruel racist settler colonist who only punched down. He was not personally particularly physically threatening and most of his “deeds” were done after age 45. The idea that Jackson was at all physically imposing is just Americans making things up because they have no respectable history. And those myths became rumors and common knowledge and then get repeated with veneration - e.g. I would suspect your knowledge of the cheese wheel comes, in some way or another, from a West Wing episode.




  • Some of what people like critics enjoy comes from just consuming a lot of it. They get more of a sense for what they like and can also start noticing tropes and laziness and bad ideas and work that is too derivative because of this familiarity.

    For example, television shows follow various formulas. Part of this is because they’re known to create engagement and television is about ad revenue/subscriptions. So of course formulas are followed. Critics don’t dislike the existence of formulas in shows, accordingly - but they still use “formulaic” as a dismissive epithet. They notice when a show lacks anything really interesting and is just the money grab or lazy or made purely of old tropes. But if a person had not been exposed to those tropes over and over, they might not notice. They may enjoy the show more than the critic. It might be their favorite - for a while. They aren’t wrong to enjoy something like that. But when someone that sees the references and sources borrowed from analyzes it, they appreciate it differently.

    An important aspect of this is the extent to which art is unoriginal. Most artists are riffing on what they’ve learned from others, from other artists they appreciate, from their societies’ kitsch, from their political (mis)understanding, from their own lives that are not actually that unique. Often this is in order to make money through familiarity and formulas, but it is also unconscious or because their art culture demands it. This tendency makes art an exercise in derivation, and so to “understand” it you have to get their references. Sometimes they’re not obvious and sometimes a reference seems obvious but wasn’t intended. That’s part of the “game” of art.

    Also don’t forget that a lot of this is still just capitalism and not as deep as it pretends to be. Many of the references are half understood things presented misleadingly or are homages to actual crap that is built on literally nothing but hype. Or mediocrity that is nothing but hype - not bad, but not appreciated for its inherent aesthetics or meaning. For example, the Mona Lisa was not particularly famous for its quality or meaning, these were properties assigned after it became famous for being stolen. This also applies yo the market value of art, though that is even more tangled, as art can also be a money laundering / financialized asset racket.

    Anyways you don’t under any circumstances have to “enjoy” art any differently than you already do, but to “appreciate” what some others see all you need to do is consume a lot of it abd learn the history and context.