anarcho_blinkenist
And it’s written in buzzfeed listicle format! Engels truly ahead of his time.
That’s the cool part about the struggle against capitalism: Workers’ labor and consciousness of how it is used and and withheld is the single most powerful tool within this locus of control, as said labor is the very foundation of the economic system. And the most cost-and-time-effective and reliable acts within this locus to reasonably change circumstances such as better pay and conditions are also the most effective ways of challenging capital itself, like unionizing and organizing direct action with a wider group to support you and together shoulder the burden and the associated risks of daring to raise your head against your masters.
It works double as a prime tool for furthering class-consciousness and class-solidarity (which capitalists already have with each other when push comes to shove). Which then makes continuance of this, and the spreading of this knowledge, capability, inspiration to other shops even easier. From experience, this costs much less time, effort, and spirit, and is much better at solidifying and maintaining better conditions (and not just for yourself but for everyone), than hurling yourself individually into the carousel-blender of endless additional gig work while everyone else is also made to do that individually, forever, in isolation from each other and utter hope-death, which helps this all perpetuate itself.
I’ve seen it happen where just the mere fact of a union vote being filed and date set results in an instant pay raise among discussion from bosses of “We’re a family though! This will put others between us and things won’t stay friendly! MUH OPEN-DOOR POLICY!! BUT WHAT ABOUT UNION DUES!?!” Granted, I’ve also seen it where bosses just close down that shop-branch and reopen elsewhere (sometimes under a new name to avoid legal ramifications for blatant union-busting) because they’re so disgustingly rich and so scared of other branches catching wind and joining in, that it is deemed less costly than simply recognizing the will of their workers. So there is risk to be considered, hence the need to build awareness and solidarity among a wider organized group and in your community (and definitely also other branches/departments of your company, but with the care that it’s harder to know who to trust in the early stages than among direct coworkers. Punishment for union-advocacy may be illegal, that doesn’t mean the bosses won’t try to find ways to do it if they don’t think you’ve the support to make them pay for it).
But the defeatist and false, purely bourgeois-implanted notion that the only thing within one’s locus of control as a worker is to sell yourself HARDER and make capitalists RICHER in the race-to-the-bottom death-spiral of moribund capitalism is exactly how things get this bad and continue to for working people and oneself. Workers are in reality much more powerful (and more numerous) than the capitalists who require us. That is why they need us to think we have no other or better option, and poison the well to have us perpetuate our own and each others’ defeatism and compliance.
in short: Solidarity Forever
Towns and “communities” (don’t laugh!) which expend resources on stuff like this to actively marginalize, punish, degrade, and criminalize homeless and impoverished people further, in a country which already has way more vacant houses than homeless people, but require homelessness and require it being kept dangerous and wretched in order to keep the “housing market” ‘competitive’ and stable for landlords (similar to the “job market” under capitalism fundamentally requiring unemployment as the “Reserve Army of Labour”) deserve all of the used needles and wall-feces they get.
It is a deeply sick country which does this, for a sick economic system, which produces sick mindsets in its petty-bourgeois “have-mine’s”, represented in the fact that the first reaction at someone pointing out the absurdity and anti-social hypocrisy of painting hostile architecture ‘PrOgReSsIvE,’ is “but if we don’t occlude public space and dehumanize and force further into pits-out-of-sight the homeless, I might have to step over them on my way to get Fro-Yo!” Even those homeless who try to stay out of the way and consign themselves to busted tents in loud, toxic, dangerous places like under highways still regularly get smashed up and chased out and their stuff stolen by the pigs at the behest of some of the most reprehensible cowards in the country. I’ve lived and worked in places where I daily spent hours around or commuted on foot through multiple homeless encampments at all kinds of hours. I can’t imagine the lack of conscience and callous shallowness-of-soul that would drive people to rally systemic violence against them. I’ve had more problems caused to my life by small business tyrants and tourists and pigs in single cities in a year than from every homeless person I’ve interacted with in my life put together. I’ve also been meaningfully helped and advised by more homeless people than by any gentrifier or cop.
If you don’t want so many homeless people, take it to the landlords. Demand the end of (or at least mitigation regarding) the parasitic extortion of the need for shelter, where workers have to fork 1/2 of their paychecks over to some moneyed jagoff who didn’t even build the house (and half the time don’t even maintain it, and when they do they pay real workers to do it, with the money they parasitized through rent in the first place), and who evicts those who lose their job for ‘existing in a house while poor’, or who hikes their rent and evicts “low-value” tenants the second they smell better profits. Better yet or in addition, take it to the banks and real-estate tycoons foreign and domestic sitting on huge lots of vacant housing which are illegal to live in, all while new plots of land (including some of the last remaining nature) are ripped up and destroyed for more hideous condos and soulless developments that nobody can afford. Also demand the abolishing of criminal-record hiring discrimination for those who served their time which keeps them in the system and cycle.
Take it to your town doing this sick depraved stuff so they put these resources toward actual community efforts to address the causes of the problem, rather than toward additional fascist policing and morally and spiritually bankrupt dystopic projects like this, whose advocates and executors are infinitely more sociopathic and violent and disgusting than any of even the filthiest sketchiest and most aggressive homeless people I’ve spent time with, been threatened or hassled or scammed by, shared bottles or cigarettes with, given money or food to if I had some, whatever.
youre a good little mccarthyite aren’t you? J edgar would be proud of you.
The near-completeness of the degree to which you are primed to turn to fascism is apparent. Youre the same brand of liberal who pretends to care about the 1st amendment and pretends to care about minorities, using them as a political tool “we need to vote for democrats because think of human rights and democracy and the minorities which I care so much for!!” then immediately turning around and cheering their violent repression like you’re doing now. Then you say “Love me, love me, love me”
“Russia shill”??? “get what they deserve”? It would be psychotic if it weren’t so childish. I get secondhand embarrassment that you behave this way regarding people and movements who have been in the struggle longer than you’ve been alive. You’re no better than any other reactionary white supremacist to speak over the actual people and communities targeted in, and resisting against this fascistic COINTELPRO nonsense — and having the audacity to put your own ignorant projection and foul lies on their names in active support of their repression by the pigs. Names which are worth infinite more respect than you seem capable of comprehending. It would be more accurate to call you a “Fed shill” than the nonsense you’re spewing. You are a participant in and agent of COINTELPRO right now by doing this. Read their actual statements and think for a second about what you say in the actual context of the history in which we live, without your manufactured-consent kneejerk about “[ENEMY COUNTRY]” blocking all thought-and-vision other than stars and stripes and hate.
Ajamu Baraka, Chair of the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Coordinating Committee who will be an official observer of the trial states that:
"It is only in the imagination of white supremacists that African people would need smart white people from Russia to guide our people and movement to oppose the U.S./EU/NATO proxy war against Russia and analyze and comment on all aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Internationalism has always been a core principle of our movement from the Garvey Movement and anti-fascist struggles of Africans in America and in Spain in the form of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, as well as the International Friends of Ethiopia that opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, to our support for the liberation movements in Cuba, Haiti, Africa, Central America, and Vietnam.
Omali Yeshitela is an outstanding product and example of that tradition, which, among many other reasons, is why BAP gives its inexorable support to chairman Yeshitela, as well as to Penny Hess and to Jesse Nevel, who embody the highest example of revolutionary solidarity with African people. Hess and Nevel have stood with us, and we intend to stand with them against the criminal repression that the Uhuru 3 are targets of."
Every single person being targeted and named in the article, as well as every person within their organizations including the Uhuru movement themself have done and are doing more to help Black liberation and further the political consciousness and organization of their communities and furtherance of socialism in the US than you have ever done or will ever do, and have been doing it for DECADES, as continuations of movements doing it for EVEN LONGER. You’re participating as an active agent of white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism. And as a particularly dull-bulb agent at that. Read more and humble yourself.
his own dumb ass thinking it’s 1890 (or that he can make it 1890 again). I know it’s easy to forget in the 24-hour media circus and liberal hand-wringing over his sleazy and reactionary attitudes and him being an ‘existential threat to “democracy”’ or whatever, but he is in actuality a remarkably stupid man. A shining dunce. He probably just watched a documentary on the early history of the US steel industry while half-asleep and connected it with his impulsive half-knowledge of trade and currency politics in his very big very good brain (the best brain, maybe, a lot of people are saying it).
Based on other things he’s said he probably actually thinks this kind of ‘protectionist’ policy and talk is not only totally grounded in any kind of contemporary reality, but is a ‘win-win’. “either these countries get so scared of losing our valuable markets and ‘deals’ that they bend the knee, or I tariff everything which will definitely bring manufacturing back to the states and everyone gets jobs and america is great again! ART OF THE DEAL!”
maybe if the US abolished the myopic hyper-consumptive sterile mediocrity that is goddamn LAWNS this would happen less.
Also pretty psychopathically callous comments by the blue-maga liberals here. As if Texas is only petty-bourgeois MAGA-craka Qanon suburbanites rather than also having an equal amount of Latinos and a 10% Black population (3.5 million) and almost a hundred-thousand Indigenous. There are more of the minority-groups that liberals pretend to care about (while doing everything to support their oppressors) in Texas than probably anywhere in their yuppie yankee states. Never tell me that Liberals care about the working class.
your lack of awareness of how plea deals and intimidation and dishonesty around them are actively weaponized against accused, with disproportionate impacts on minorities, is apparent. In addition, the all-white jury is always worth mentioning, and hand-waiving of its particular importance to the outcome is screening for white supremacy. It is off the bat not a jury of his peers, and that it turned up like that regardless of the outcome is criminal. It almost never is a proportionally-representative jury of one’s peers when it is a black person charged with a crime. And there is a long, and deliberately-racist legacy and history why that is.
“ready to murder” is grotesque and malicious falsehood from the information provided. I didn’t see anything implying the people whose houses were broken into were caused any bodily harm nor that being the intent from the robbers least of all the 15 year old kid they threw the book at for his friend dying in a shootout. Most people who have weapons to rob are not intending to kill anyone, only intimidate for compliance, or be prepared if they are met with lethal force so they don’t end up dying themselves (while explicitly hoping that does not happen, because robbers/muggers are there to get money or jewels or electronics or whatever, not kill or die). If they intended to kill the people they robbed, which was a few houses broken into, those people robbed would be dead. Instead, the cops themselves got into a firefight with a friend of the 15 year old kid who they threw the book at, who himself didn’t shoot anyone and was cowering in a bush. There is a reason there are different crimes regarding armed robbery vs breaking and entering vs different homicide types and degrees, etc. Not that you seem to care much.
“What sort of man is he now?” what kind of chauvinist colonialist celebratory rhetoric is that? Gross. You sound indistinguishable from MAGA people about stuff like this.
The democrats and republicans have fundamentally different world views
Correction: the democrats and republicans have fundamentally different standards of decorum and of how close they can be to the stench of the consequences of their highly similar world views without turning away.