Barx [none/use name]

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • While appointing buffoons and neocons is compatible with saying, “look at the blatant incompetence and cruelty, this will degrade the state faster”, I think there is something to be said for the accelerationism of the Biden administration’s approach of career ghouls that know how to pull the levers of power and keep their constituencies docile.

    While Dems and the GOP should be understood as two factions in the same team, I think the most accelerationist policies are to stay the course on neoliberalism and to foment a split between the imperialist bloc and one led by China etc. Trump offers incoherence on the former while Biden offers pure commitment to neoliberalism. Trump offers ham-fisted attempts for the latter, which strengthens any anti-US bloc and makes them more comfortable earlier while Biden seeks to implement the plans of State Department ghouls, trying to build the split along a material basis, e.g. using Ukraine to peel off Europe, hightening actual mechanisms for war and direct confrontation.



  • Mutual aid is about helping each other in solidarity, to share alike among ourselves. It can look a lot like charity if you widen yiur definition of “us” to be everyone not of the ruling class, especially if those organizing it are noticeably from another community than those receiving it.

    Example: at lefty actions there are often mutual aid tents or carts. These tend to be paid for by the participants and the labor is donated by them. That’s more clearly a “by us for us” thing. On the other hand, I’ve seen lib white leftists start mutual aid groups that go to very poor black neighborhoods to provide food and clothes. It’s not a bad thing to get people what they need but it does have some odd vibes and it is edging towards a charity mindset.

    I would recommend making connections anywhere you are working so that you either expand your org in a way that authentically embeds in community or to join efforts with any similar orgs already in that community, or both. If you are very lucky you might even be able to merge groups. Rather than become inward-facing with current membership, you can make the current recipient communities, whatever they might be, less separate.






  • That is probably true, yeah. Most people don’t intrinsically see the value in organizing because they don’t understand the oppositional attitude of the employer and/or they are afraid of retribution (and retribution will happen if they organize, that part is true).

    You can agitate using those small actions I mentioned, though of course there are no guarantees. Asking some open-ended organizing questions (“if you could change something about this place, what would it be?”) over a few weeks’ time and taking notes might reveal that people are not hapoy about some things but just don’t think of them as things to complain about yet. If you take notes and some topics come up a lot, you can turn this into an (anonymous at first?) petition and watch it produce results. Also, try to make a list of who seems most receptive to this kind of discussion and allow the subject to change if a person doesn’t seem that interested. That list us a first draft for making an organizing committee and would identify those most likely to be agitated by the petition either working or failing.

    Basically, you can carefully do a test balloon and make an initial list to get a better sense for where people are at. It’s important to ask the kind of question I suggested. If you ask a workplace of seemingly happy coworkers if there is anything about the workplace that is bothering them, most will say no. Ask them to name something they would change and most of the time they will suddenly they have tons of complaints and are willing to go off about them. And taking notes of responses will let you chart out the workplace to ask yourself questions about how to proceed.

    Oh, and if you spread out the conversations and ask the question(s) casually from receptive-seeming people then they may not even know it is you who then compiles the survey. They may not even realize their own answers to your questions had anything to do with it! Also this is all much easier if you can identify one other person that would be ride-or-die by your side, as you can then distribute the tasks and therefore make them diffuse and harder to recognize.


  • This is the right idea!

    In my opinion the best thing, if it is an option for you, is to join a local left organization and develop yourself and the organization in terms of your theoretical understanding and practical efficacy, which basically to say reading and gaining expertise at taking action. And to be clear, when I say left, I mean something socialist.

    It can be difficult to recommend a specific org because I don’t know where you live and you shouldn’t tell me. But I can suggest some things to do to help guide you:

    • Pick a socialist one.
    • Pick it by attending an action that they organize and getting a sense for the people and their positions.
    • You can discover events by looking for posters in hotbed areas (college campuses, downtown) and social media.
    • A good rule of thumb is that if they are anti-imperialist and name the US as imperialism’s exemplification, their other positions will be better as well.
    • Avoid Trotskyists and anything associated with Avakian.
    • Once in an org, focus on building positive relationships with people, being dependable and active, and reading and then teaching once you feel confident enough.

    If you use these tips you should end up in a good enough org and can help build it. It’s okay if you end up leaving your first org. They are often just a way to get a sense for what exists locally and where energy and good practice are centered.




  • By constantly reminding myself that I’m looking to shape outcomes, not express myself. Not that it’s easy but for me at least it becomes more natural with practice.

    As another commenter mentioned, you can think of it like a hostile space you’re infiltrating. I also think of it in comparison to how I act at actions when there are people telling heinous things at left crowds, trying to disrupt, or with cops present. I want to yell things back and insult the cops. But I instead try to adopt a role that improves outcomes for the action and those participating, which means deescalation and avoiding talking to cops at all. If someone is being made uncomfortable, try to get attention on me instead but via distraction and conversation, not being aggro but smiling.

    Your power in workplace organizing comes from people liking and trusting you and being able to see the necessity of organizing. This is why the best first steps are often small and popular things like a little petition to keep coffee free or let people park in some lot or something. When management accedes, you are trusted as an organizer. When management balks, they start to see the necessity of organizing. Obviously there are ways this can be derailed and there’s more to it in terms of organizing conversations but this is what success ends up looking like.








  • Chuds are anti-vaxx because they have to be convinced to fight against their interests somehow and anti-vaxx conspiracies are part of how this is sold to them.

    The GOP and far right explicitly push an anti-worker agenda and an anti-social spending agwnda, things that are aligned with ruling class interests and against the interests of the vast majority of chuds.

    So to sell these ideas, which would otherwise be impossible, the American right has created a deep alternate reality universe of false consciousness for them to dive into. As another commenter said, the culture war. One of those pieces of lore is to be “anti-government”, which is where much of the anti-vaxx sentiment comes from, of saying there are various government conspiracies and it’s government backed so don’t trust it. Obviously this is selective reasoning because chuds also worship the US military. Keeping chuds locked into anti-government conspiracies keeps them docile and in line with the deconstruction of social spending, degulation, and lower corporate taxes / whatever capital wants to do.

    In terms of direct material reasons around COVID vaccines in particular, that’s a funny one because Trump was very pro-vaccine and this threw their cognitive dissonance into overdrive. They were more organized around anti-masking and anti-lockdowns. But they had already had this anti-vaxx contingent for years and years and so they kept trying to figure out how to square this with their knee-jerk support for Trump.

    The election of Biden made this easier, as you couldn’t call it “the Trump vaccine” despite him pushing for it and wanting all of the credit. Trump supporters could just refuse to take Biden’s vaccine, they don’t trust him or the government, don’t put that poison and microchips in my veins. These are people who refused to mask, already had COVID twice and didn’t die, and were saying it was just the flu.

    So, more proximally to COVID, I will also confirm what others have said and tie this to capital’s interest in forcing people back to work and in nirmslizing COVID, which ends up with a hilarious and morbid contradiction, which is that the main push and tool for normalization was vaccine-based, the vaccine was meant to get people “back to work” and cut benefits, but the overall push to normalize had vaccination as a casualty, as people were able to slot it back into their previous anti-vaxx theories.


  • Neoliberalism beginning in the 70s had capital looking to export industry to increase profit margins. Imperial core domestic policy still tried to keep technological advantage (which is one angle of looking at the purpose industry served) through IP and high tech but of course we can see that there was no discipline there, profit-seeking won out. This was the basic gamble of some Dengist policies and they were correct that capitalists would just straight-up give you their industrial base so long as you allowed your population to be exploited and required tech transfer agreements.

    As another commenter mentioned this also allowed US companies to crush unions. But I think it is more about increasing profits and companies just used threats of offshoring to discipline labor. Given how much cheaper labor was in China, it already made fiscal sense to offshore, they just needed to build up to their preferred inflection point, have PR ready to go, and get their ducks in a row for how they would close entire factories and not get sued or murdered.

    One of the sadder things is that if the USSR could’ve held on for two more decades it would have had an industrial base while the imperialists did not. And imagine a Sino-Soviet reunion driven by the factors that led to BRICS.