duderium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ovguv1BSA

It's also available as a podcast for those like me who hate youtube.

I'm maybe about halfway through this interview. Early on, Hudson (a Trotskyist), claims that the Soviets never understood or cared about Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, and that they weren't doing real socialism. He also says that this is behind the real estate crisis in China, but doesn't really elaborate as to why. Wolff sort of agrees with him because to him, it's not socialism unless there's democracy at work. He hasn't mentioned Mondragon yet, although I assume that this is what he means since he's talked about it before, even though Mondragon itself has issues of its own, notably that you have to "buy in" in order to work there. To me it seems more like a shitload of business partners rather than a socialist enterprise. (I think Destiny, forgive me for mentioning him, criticized Wolff regarding Mondragon because Mondragon itself also purchases its materials from capitalist enterprises.) I was also thinking that Wolff's democracy at work has actually been tried here and there. I feel like Orwell of all people describes this in his account of the Spanish Civil War. I felt a little frustrated as I was listening to this because if I had been present at the interview, I would have said that AES countries want to do democracy at work, but can't actually do it yet because they are constantly under siege. I was also thinking of how Chinese people consistently say that their government does a good job and they live in a democracy. Chinese workplaces are not paradise but I suspect that it's generally better to work for capitalists in China than in the USA.

Just some thoughts on this podcast that I wanted to share, in case anyone else wanted to comment.

I've been reading Capital off and on for months and this is a seemingly pretty important difference that I don't understand. Is there a difference between surplus labor and profit, and if so, what is it? Any explanations, links, or chapters in Capital I should check out are appreciated.

My money is on Harris supporters because all of the craziest Trump supporters were thrown in prison after January 6.

There will definitely be public tantrums, plus people doing pointless email campaigns to convince electors to change their votes. I do have to wonder if liberals will do their own Stop the Steal…

Good at losing lol gottem

Discovered this guy’s music a couple of weeks ago and have been listening nonstop ever since. This song is called “Bosat el Reeh” on streaming services. He wrote three hundred songs, sings beautifully, and is also a beast on the oud.

New hexbears be like: where’s the cool zone I miss it so much

Old hexbears be like: I bring the cool zone wherever I go

I’ve had people laugh. Others just stare. One or two people murmured some kind of critical response that I couldn’t hear. I find it strange and just wanted to know if this is an ordinary experience. It’s rare for someone to agree. I live in a rich white area.

Haha take that commies.

I was masked in a hardware store. A guy who looked like Tom Skerritt from thirty years ago but taller and thinner looked at me and started ranting about communism with his employee. Did you know that communists want to get everyone dependent on the government? That’s their plan!!

He also said that he had read Marxists and recommended that his employee do so.

This guy also wears some kind of uniform with an American flag on the shoulder every day. I always got bad vibes from him but never really heard him speak. Until now.

I didn’t say anything because I go to this place all the time for work and I see him there constantly and suspect that he may be the owner.

Biobot seems to have stopped publishing data and the CDC (really just the CD) is completely useless. Despite masking whenever I’m indoors in public with either n94s or n95s, I’m mildly sick, my kid is mildly sick, we had to cancel a small outdoor party because a guest’s parents are sick, and I heard of a local business recently temporarily shutting down because everyone there was sick. My kids are supposed to mask at school but I’m having trouble getting them to follow through with it since almost no one else is masking, so I probably got sick via one of my kids.

So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I've spent more than a few hours chatting with "the guys," and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I'm extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the "good" ones that provide their treats. (They're also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we "really needed" a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has "made some money" through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA's future (and climate change) and has said that he'll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It's wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that's a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.

What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from "collectivist" to "individualist." Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers' political views much easier to understand. They're individualists. They don't like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they're happy to be rich (at everyone else's expense) and to have the same police protect them.

As an aside, I've been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you'll see that I'm a communist, which means that it's impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I'm writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there's so much money in this field and I'd like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There's tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it's more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I'm interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.

Honestly seems too good to be true. Google didn’t really turn anything up and I don’t speak Russian, despite what internet liberals tell me.

The logo in the bottom right might be a clue.

I think the star is also in the wrong place.

The world has "fallen" to communism. The last liberals and fascists on Earth flee to Puerto Rico (sorry) and basically turn it into another Taiwan for a few months or years. The ruling class there maintains that it has suffered only temporary setbacks at worst and that victory is at hand. And besides, if you like communism so much, why don't you move to [the rest of the world]? And they aren't even real communists there anyway because they have not instantaneously transformed the planet into paradise. They're just befogging the masses, who are too stupid to understand that the best days of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy lie ahead!

I'm just thinking about this because of the Yankee cope I'm seeing all over the place. Ukraine just needs more weapons and European soldiers, then it's bound to prevail against Russia, which is collapsing anyway. China is a heartbeat from balkanizing. Haiti is just run by a bunch of cannibal criminal gangs. Palestine can't possibly win. Etc.