WalterBongjammin

joined 4 years ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Did he sponsor it like people were doing in Ukraine?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is too accurate. It's wild that despite the massively strong competition, Germans might genuinely be the worst Europeans

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago

I bet you could get polling majorities the CRT is white genocide in several US states

[–] [email protected] 73 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

This is a good point. Like most boomers, my socdem Dad used to browse Hexbear as part of his morning routine. Unfortunately he came upon a post using the offending phrase and now just posts 'so much for the tolerant left' under any article about Joe Biden on the Washington Post's website. Y'all need to reflect on this. If not for the sake of this website, but for the democrats reelection chances in 2024

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

It's their loss tbh

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

They're just embarrassed Israel supporters and anti-Palestinian racists. As others have pointed out, the whole 'it's too complex' thing is a convenient excuse to continue the status quo. What goes unspoken in their line of thought is that we're already intervening but on the side of supporting the genocide. It's not inaction that they want, but the maintenance of current actions

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Ah okay, yeah, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying

[–] [email protected] 54 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Sex club membership/paying a sex worker is a way better (and less harmful) way to spend that money than like 60% of the things US taxes are likely to be spent on so got to support this tbh

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, that's fair, I don't have much of a grasp of the specifics of the case beyond the article. And I agree that tipping is worse than non-tipped waged work under sectoral collective bargaining and that we should have the latter as our goal as long as we remain within a capitalist framework. Indeed, from my experience, in a lot of places where tipping isn't customary and they do have sectoral bargaining waiters take it as something of an affront to be tipped. French waiters are often somewhat offended by attempts to tip them - precisely because it is perceived as an attack on their dignity as workers.

But I still think that we should be careful in uncritically supporting the abolition of tipping outside of circumstances in which a sector is sufficiently well-organised. We've seen so many examples in the last few decades in which often positive reforms, which were initially demanded by workers, have been co-opted by capital to undermine conditions and wages precisely because those reforms took place in a general context where workers haven't been well-organised enough to defend themselves against the attacks of capital. The demand for flexible working practices/hours in the 1970s and 80s is a good example of this process, where what should have been positive reforms have had extremely mixed results in that they've played a large role in creating conditions of casualisation and mass under-employment. In many sectors, 'flexible working' has meant flexibility to work sporadic hours whenever your boss decides with the knowledge that if you're not sufficiently flexible to their demands you'll stop being given work.

I also do think that the 'it divides the working class' argument is the weakest one, because what it really ends up expressing is a consoomer mindset that as communists/anarchists we should challenge rather than accept. While I'm sure that our comrades on here are arguing in good faith and have decent reasons for wanting to abolish tipping, this isn't representative of the debate overall. Most of the discourse I've encountered on the topic has been on reddit and is predictably treat-brained. The framing is almost always primarily 'tipping is too expensive!' with questions about the conditions/rights of workers relegated to a secondary position that often feels tacked on to cover that the primary demand is 'I want things to be cheaper even if that means workers are paid less'. You can say this is unfair, but the last 40 years of economic reform have shown us that people who identify more strongly with being a consumer than a worker will buy the cheaper commodity made by workers labouring under worse conditions and less pay 99 times out of 100

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Ayyy, no worries and I appreciate you acknowledging the mistake stalin-heart I don't really know enough about the issue to have a very strong opinion on it, I was mainly just annoyed that so few people in the thread seemed to have read the thing they were responding to, but I'm also guilty of that quite often on here! Do you know of anything I can read to get better informed?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

You're all over this thread calling the workers scabs when the article says they were asking for a pooled-tip structure. At least read the thing before hurling insults at people

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