Funnier because its a beamer

Publish this everywhere to get musk dumped on day 1

As long as he absolutely gets to decide which speech is free and which is very very expensive

It’s a process. To be honest certain parts of it are pretty darn bleak. I strongly believe Marx showed us a way through, but the bar was higher, the number of possibilities were greater, than any could imagine. I have hope, but I also might die with nothing but

Anyway, thanks for clarifying what you meant

Well then once he has finished you can politely thank him for doing one of the only things he could do to make the world a better place: taking himself and his cronies out of it

I’m not sure where you’re coming from here, are you saying that you think it is pointless to try and refer to Marx, because the passages are too complicated for most workers? Because I know for a fact that isn’t universal. My gripe is this very assumption. Marx may be very hard, but (I’m repeating myself) he was writing for us. not the intelligentsia, or the ruling class intellectuals, or university administrators, or any of that. Which means once you get around the difficulty of the subject you realize that actually his writing is about our lives, and what we go through, but not only what but how it functions, from whence it came and where it is headed. It isn’t difficult it’s just a lot at first. I know literally hundreds of workers from all different ages, backgrounds, languages, who all better understand their revolutionary role opposing the capitalism system because they took to studying history using Marx’s scientific methods. I myself have little formal education, yet ive become educated. It may not come natural at first, because there’s so much distraction, but over time you gain knowledge and experience and it starts to click. And once it does, you wouldn’t want to live without the works of Marx. We read them over and over, we discuss them and how it applies to our lives.

Maybe that isn’t your experience, and that’s fine, but that isn’t universal. Maybe you aren’t convinced,and that’s fine, because maybe I don’t think I can convince you all at once, that it takes time and exposure and eventually it starts making sense.

I have as severe ADHD as anyone I’ve ever met, I have learned this stuff and it has helped me, like I’m much better off as a person since I’ve started studying like this. I don’t believe it is unnatural for workers, in fact I think it is a sign of our unnatural, alienated conditions that we are inclined not to.

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means had become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures. – KM, EPM 1844

Not trying to twist your comment into something you didn’t mean however, so if I misinterpreted your intent or meaning, please correct me :)

Karl Marx talked about this extensively, and he was writing for us workers. its always breathtaking to hear “why hasn’t anyone talked about this,” when everybody knows there were people who talked about this, made it their life’s scientific work, set the intellectual foundation for those of us who figured it out to go deeper with our inquiries and understanding, but because others who control the ideas of society have so successfully stigmatized these ideas and their proponents, we workers have internalized the hate for ourselves and our ideas that the ruling classes have for us.

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. – Economic and Philosophic manuscripts, 1844

And later in Capital:

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. - chapter 25 sec 4

What school did you go to that taught you anything about class war?

I think you might be making an interesting point but I can’t tell

There are a lot of good reasons to have murderous intent, but there’s never any need for rudeness

Seek out Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra. I’m about 1000 light years from a Maddow fan but its actually a really good piece of investigative work about the explicitly and powerfully pro-fascist America First movement during ww2 and after. It just never ceases to be true, that no matter how much you accept the closeness of American patriotism and genocidal dictatorial fascism, the reality is always that they’re a little closer than you thought.

Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.

Its gonna be a crazy ass decade

Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.

This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.

So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.

This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.

I really wanna read that book, maybe this year :) I almost stole it from my wife’s cousin at Thanksgiving this year

I don’t think what you’re saying contradicts me, I agree my explainer is one view, one which addresses political economies, and the GrabGrow view is another more anthropological view. Unfortunately Marx never finished his anthropological works although there are a lot of notes from the end of his life that are worth parsing.

Saying it’s this one thing, when it can be scientifically understood as either or both things, is more like orthodoxy which I try to avoid. Both views help to understand a complicated topic made of historically shifting dynamics and changing aspects.

What your explanation doesn’t address that mine does, is what is the “social power” that congeals into these forms? It takes different shapes throughout history, but can be understood coarsely as “wealth”, which is the accumulated value of human labor. My explanation better reflects the class character of the state. However if we are to try and actually affect the world for the better, as we should, we would be better equipped with both views (and likely a few others) with which to determine truth in the functioning of political economy, than one or the other alone.

Wealth is pinned to production and currency is pinned to wealth. You fundamentally misunderstand what wealth, money, and power are and how they function in society. Alienation from society and idealism distort the nature of these subjects. You’re right to question the way these things function, but you’ll not get much further than MMT or other idealist cul du sacs. If you want to understand how wealth operates as a basis for society, they you’ll need to start to study Marx

The state is formed by the historical mode of production, its like a contradiction that is the resolution to all of the other contradictions present in market social relations. In other words the state is based on how stuff gets made, and who accumulates the value inherent in the stuff, which is in essence the congealed work that went into making that stuff.

Politics and culture is always a factor in what shape the state takes, since politics and culture are social structures and sources of power themselves, but politics is downstream from production

You have to have an advanced degree, wealth and celebrity in order to publicly proclaim something that an introspective 12 year old would yell at his friends at 4 in the morning after completing a dare that he could gulp down a whole cup of sugar without coughing or puking

This is clearly a completely natural phenomenon, like the weather !

Idiotic coincidence theories are idiotic

I mean to be clear I’m from altoona and I’ve never seen pizza like this.

As a fellow musician, I’m not able to read