cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/tankiejerk/p/635809/i-can-excuse-transphobia-and-covid-denial-but-i-draw-the-line-at-anti-communism-and-criticis
- Ever faithful Cowbee will tolerate transphobic admins because they're communist >
- PieFed is worse than transphobia because it's anti-communist >
- Nutomic will stop being transphobic by 2050.
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
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Largely unrelated, but how do you personally feel about Pride Month? Particularly, the corporate side of it, the rainbow filters on the brands that historically prosecuted queer identity.
Myself personally I find them turning queer identity into products to consume and collect rather disgusting.
Pride Month is super important for the community. It's both a moment of joy and a moment of open resistance for us. As for the corporate side of it, I take it as an indicator. Like, for example, no matter what, I will never tolerate brands or even fucking sponsorships at my local pride march. That is absolutely out of the question. But companies pandering to specific communities is nothing new. And it's not limited to the queer community.
Corporate pandering, to me, is like a canary in a coal mine.
When it's singing, the air is breathable. So when we have the rainbow logos or the Black Lives Matter corporate post or Black History Month colored logo or whatever, it is a sign that as a whole it would be perceived as, not only unacceptable in the current society to be openly against these things and communities, but is even perceived as marketable and profitable to be openly for these things.
When the canary stops singing, something is wrong with the air, and it's time to get out. So when companies stop doing these things, and instead don't mention them, it's a sign that the wind is turning. That posting open support is deemed risky. That at least a certain part of society is questioning the validity and value of these things
And finally, when the canary is dead, the miners are next. When companies start openly posting against these things, when it becomes marketable and profitable to be openly racist, to be openly transphobic, to be openly homophobic, it's a sign that society as a whole and not just the ruling class, is hostile to these ideals and people.
I hate that it is, and I want to change it, but we live in a capitalist society. Right now, it's the rules of the game. So I'm using capitalism as an indicator of society's acceptance of progressive ideals and hostility towards marginalized groups. Because at the end of the day, I would rather fight against capitalism in a capitalist hellhole where corporate people display their pronouns and say "black lives matter" rather than a capitalist hellhole where corporate people don't do these things.
The canary stopped singing.That's actually a really good point, I never considered that, it makes sense. Though I do fear a reactionary sort-of response to the corporate pandering, radicalising old joe who is okay with 'dem queers' but once they get into his chicken nugget combo deal, now he's against them. i wish i was exaggerating, but I know a bloke who ranted about this.
Do you write about other theory too?
We can't build our lives and our politics around the worries of reactionaries, because doing this is what allows right wingers to shift the narrative constantly. You will always have reactionary responses to these things. Instead we win by the strengths of our proposition, by winning them over despite these grievances.
This is where the Left has failed so many times, because they keep pandering to corporate society. At the end of the day, I strongly believe that — and I'm going to take the United States of America, as an example, because it is quite relevant right now, even though I'm not part of it — the average Joe cares much more about the fact that rent is taking 60% (pulling this number out of my ass) of their income, and that they have to work three jobs, to even pay that rent, rather than the fact that one trans person got one beer can sent to them by a company once.
The failure of the Democrats in the United States of America needs to be studied. Because they failed to appeal to people. Most people voted for them because the opposition was much scarier. But that's pretty much it. No one really believed in them because the Democrats never really believed in actually changing people's lives. They were too busy trying to not piss off their corporate interests too much and not appearing too socialist to the right.
They have once again put the interest of the nebulous economy — which, let me remind you, doesn't actually exist, the economy isn't a thing, we made it up — rather than the real actual needs of people who definitely are real and are definitely struggling right now. And because of that, you also end up with people who stop believing in politics because every time they voice actual grievances, like the fact that health care is too expensive or whatever, they are being told that their problem would be too expensive to fix. So no one is going to do anything about it.
People voted for Donald Trump not only out of hatred for marginalized groups and so on, even though that played a big part in it, but it's also because the dude run his mouth constantly. He is always saying some bullshit or whatever, but at least he made it seem like he was going to do something, going to change something, while the Democrats were just too busy sitting on their ass, worrying about what the average reactionary Joe is going to think about if they dare to make any proposition that would be somewhat radical. And they failed because of it.
They dug their head into the sand and screamed "la la la la" every time people questioned them on their bullshit. Their relentless support for Israel was a big one, notably. Just like this person above us, they allowed themselves to be controlled by the right wing which itself was controlling the narrative. They allowed them to do that instead of trying to take control of the narrative themselves. They tried to play a game rigged against them from the start and were surprised when they lost. And when they lost, instead of learning from their lessons because they're the Democrats, we wouldn't want that after all, they fucking tripled down and they blamed trans people, even though they never talked about them.
They're looking at the right wing, and they think we should do that, but our version of it. And they come up with shit like "We need a left-wing Joe Rogan." And you get Gavin Newsom doubling down on shitting on trans people, and so on.
Meanwhile, people are suffering. And the very people who are suffering from the current administrations are once again being left out of these people's plans.
Let's stop catering to the right wing fears. Let's stop catering to the reactionaries. Let's stop catering to the corporate interests. We don't need billionaires to live, not only we can do without them, everyone would benefit from them being gone. The economy is fake, I refuse to give a shit about how the stock market is doing, I don't care about inflation rising or whatever. All I'm hearing is that my life keeps getting worse and that there are more and more people making sure that it gets worse.
Capitalism is not the natural way of the world. It is young, and it is crumbling all around us, i'm not even 30 years old and I've been living my entire life going through what are supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis to once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis on and on and to the next. Water is coming through the cracks everywhere. The ship is breaking apart and we're still pretending that everything is fine because the musicians are still playing, so we can still fix it and move on and reach our destination, wherever the fuck that is.
The entire foundations of our societies are rotten, the economic system on which everything relies on is not only fake, but self imploding. It's way past time to abandon ship. But instead of doing that we are blaming the "clandestine" passengers who got on board in hope of a better life after their place of origin was completely destroyed and ravaged in the construction of this wonderful ship that we are all on. And while we're at it, this person is annoying us because they want us to respect their pronouns so everything else that is happening around us it's actually their fault. Don't worry, everything is fine.
Nothing else should ever matter than the well-being of this planet and all those who are living on it. People need to hear that the rules aren't there, that the game is rigged. Because it is. But instead, we keep telling them that, actually no. And it's just that some people are cheating and making it worse for everyone else. And these people are always those that are struggling the most, of course.
Anyway, did I tell you that I fucking hate capitalism and all of these self-proclaimed left-wing parties that keep catering to its every ask?
———
To answer your question, by the way, I don't really write about theory. I'm not a scholar. I'm just a random bunnygirl on the internet. 🐇
I largely agree, but with a few exceptions, particularly the comment that capitalism is not the natural order of the world. I'm assuming that by "natural," you mean the natural growth and change of society? It tends to get tricky when you refer to nature and animals for how human society should function, since the planet is so diverse, you'll find all manner of different societies among animals.
Anyway. Capitalism is young, yeah, but didn't suddenly appear. The rough timeline of societal growth is first with nomadic tribes with stone-age tools, and some slavery still existed during this time, such as leaders trading their daughters. Later, early agricultural settlements started to develop as these tribes learnt how to cultivate the land. Of course, you'll need more people to manage this land, so slavery was introduced, which in turn ended up with those who control all the agriculture being the top dogs. This is where feudalism develops: a lord reigns over everyone else, but as society grows larger, managing slaves becomes less efficient (it still exists), so the slaves are granted serfdom and some rights. As societies around the world developed, they began to interact, fostering a merchant economy. Now the merchants are taking power since they're the ones introducing all the new commodities, which means they control more products, and with more products, you can make more products, and by this point, who needs lords anymore, and thus capitalism was born. Of course, none of this development happened in a vacuum, and there are always exceptions and oversimplifications when you summarise the entire evolution of human civilisation in a lengthy paragraph. It's also important to note that all the changes are gradual, they don't all happen at select points in time, and one doesn't create the other. I mean, we still have slavery today.
I think I prefer capitalism over the past systems. I'm not defending it either, I was born into it, never experienced anything else. My main point is that capitalism didn't emerge out of nothing.
Though it is true that capitalism is failing and change is in the air, what will come next is still unclear. Social democracy, maybe? Liberalism and individualism are becoming an increasingly significant part of societal identity. Though, there is also the rise of authoritarianism. Technocracism perhaps? You can't live without technology anymore, it's forced into everything, and whoever controls those technological systems will have the most power. Corporatism? Who really knows? I guess that's up to us to decide.
At least in Europe, serfdom (which is basically slavery barring some minor distinctions) only came to an end due to the plague, which limited the supply of able bodied workers so drastically, other lords began to offer to actually pay another lord's slaves/serfs to work their land.
Slavery in the rest of the world ended for various reasons, but a big one was moral objection, not that managing slaves become less efficient (AFAIK, anyway. The Confederacy in the US only ceased slavery due to being psychically stopped from a more powerful adversary. They would've continued, and indeed would've expanded the slave trade to new territory as planned, had they not been stopped. Remember, those merchants taking power were also gleefully profiting off of the slave trade, which was one of their 'commodities').
But If anything, slavery has only ever increased, as there are now more people in US prisons alone than there were slaves before the Civil War, and they're often doing labor for pennies on the dollar. And since private prisons profit from having more prisoners, they've even sued the state when they aren't happy with how little prisoners they get.
From the archeological evidence presented in the book 'The Dawn of Everything' by David Graeber and David Wengrow; humans were able to sustain egalitarian societies as both hunter gatherer and after agriculture was discovered. It is only quite recently in our species existence that authoritarian hierarchies seemed to develop, and not necessarily due to an environmental need. There is no technical reason slavery had to develop, it was simply performed and enacted due to the benefit it gave the owning group.
There's examples of slave-owning hunter gatherers presented as well, with neighboring tribes finding that behavior disgusting and refusing to participate in it, even taking in escaped slaves from those slave owning tribes.
Highly recommend reading it if you have the time, it's quite a compelling book. (Alternatively one of the authors gave a very (very) condensed talk about it at a TED talk here, and a longer interview about it here at Novara Media).
But at least in my view, it's clear that the evidence we have at hand shows this mode of society we live in that's highly hierarchical, competitive, individually selfish to the extreme, and operates on artificial scarcity, is quite the aberration from the norm.
It's all very fascinating. I wouldn't mind being in a hunter-gatherer society, but I love my technology too much.
i wonder what the turning point was.
I think the crux of what Graeber and Wengrow get at, is that history shows us we can be an agricultural technological society without the unnecessary authoritarianism, hierarchy, or capitalism. This inherent but actively suppressed ability of humanity was demonstrated in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. It was the closest we ever got to getting out of the rut we somehow got ourselves into all those thousands of years ago.
This is deep. I have been looking for the words to say “I don’t want to politics, I just want the people and the planet to be okay” and here they are, written by some random bunnygirl on the internet. Bravo, this is incredible. Have a great day.