I would appreciate it if people could help me get more federated on my new instance. Please boost this post if any of the following tags apply to you so I can follow!
Americanos are pissed that they can't have bananas year round if #degrowth/ #communism/ #anarchy happens. Banana availability has its roots in imperialism, destructive monocropping, and grueling agricultural labor/slavery.
We literally have a word for client states of #imperialism for the export of bananas: banana republic. Banana imports to the West is drenched in the blood of thousands massacred for your God damn commodities. In the #Philippines, companies told this instruction to banana worker syndicalists: “turn them into fertilizers for the bananas.”
On top of that is the steep ecological and carbon costs to actually shipping the damn things. Do you really need bananas year round?
There's also the problem of monocropping which destroys the biodiversity of forests to make way for plantations, even if we discount the slave labor. Monocropping has made Cavendish plantations at high risk of diseases. It could very well be that Cavendishes would become an endangered species just like the Gros Michel after nature erases its scourge. Maybe the extinction of the Cavendish is already a matter of time, rendering banana disocorse moot.
Americanos just don't understand that in a liberated world, maybe people won't be breaking their backs for some Americano to get their god damn banana. Of course degrowth/communism/anarchism means that relations to luxuries will change.
Besides, Cavendishes suck. They literally taste terrible. Y'all seriously live like this? Lakatan, Señorita, and Sabah tastes way better. Yeah, they can't be exported, boohoo. Not everything has to be a commodity, much less to please some Americano half a world away.
Poverty is a result of oppressive systems like capitalism. We should be fighting to dismantle those systems instead of blaming and punishing the poor. #communism#capitalism#anarchism#socialism#poverty
• Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
The Bay View massacre was the result of a strike held on May 4, 1886, by 7,000 building-trades workers and 5,000 Polish laborers who had organized at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to strike against their employers, demanding the enforcement of an eight-hour work day.
By Monday, May 3, the number of participants had increased to over 14,000 workers who gathered at the Milwaukee Iron Company rolling mill in Bay View. They were met by 250 National Guardsmen under order from Republican Governor Jeremiah M. Rusk. The strikers had shut down every business in the city except the North Chicago Rolling Mills in Bay View. The guardsmen's orders were that, if the strikers were to enter the Mills, they should shoot to kill. But when the captain received the order it had a different meaning: he ordered his men to pick out a man and shoot to kill when the order was given. Workers camped in the nearby fields and the Kosciuszko Militia arrived by May 4. Early the next day the crowd, which by this time contained children, approached the mill and were fired upon. Seven people died as a result, including a thirteen-year-old boy. Several more were injured during the protest. Several contradictory newspaper accounts described other possible casualties, but the count of seven deaths is substantiated by specific names (Frank Kunkel, Frank Nowarczyk, John Marsh, Robert Erdman, Johann Zazka, Martin Jankowiak, and Michael Ruchalski).
I was talking to a relative yesterday, a christian who was telling me how amazingly blessed they were because they had a need of something that was too expensive new and too difficult to find used and in good shape.
But God hooked them up with someone in their church community who had this thing, no longer needed it, was happy to give it to my relative for free.
They cited another example of being blessed like this when a friend noticed a need they had and found someone in the community who was willing to pay for it for them.
They became quite emotional describing how "blessed" they were.
I wanted so much to tell them:
That wasn't "God" at all, that's communism!
Or as anarchists would call it: Mutual Aid.
This is not God, this is something deeply, essentially, and definitively human.
Today is 87 years since Antonio Gramsci died at the hands of the Italian Fascists.
Gramsci, a founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party, was imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime in 1926. During his imprisonment he wrote extensively about history, politics and society.
His work on the role of culture, ideology, and the consent rulers obtain from those they rule has been influential in understanding how groups gain and maintain power.
Finding out there's a not insignificant amount of people think that a #15MinuteCity means creating little isolated island prisons is a whole new level of human idiocy that I wasn't expecting to ruin my day today.
Alright fuckers listen up. 15 minute cities are simply a city designed around the basic fucking principles of #urbanplanning and having actual walkable streets so that wherever you are in the city, or wherever your neighborhood is, you have all the basics necessities you need to go about your day within a 15 minute trip. This isn't isolated to singular neighborhoods or "zones". It's an interconnected network accross the entire city, in any place you are, in the city as a whole.
This isn't some new agenda, or just about #ClimateChange or the #environment, it's about designing our cities around human needs and #Community. It's how we used to have our cities before cars took over. If you need to go further, or prefer to go further, you can easily do so by #walking#publictransit or #biking. It's just going to take longer than 15 minutes. That's it. Shocking I know.
Why are people like this? Just take the train you fuckwits.
In capitalism, workers create value through their labor, but capitalists exploit this by paying workers less than the value they produce, resulting in an unjust distribution of wealth where workers are systematically undercompensated for their contributions while capitalists accumulate disproportionate profits. Abolish Capitalism!
Today in Labor History November 26, 1911: Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, died. Lafargue wrote “The Right to Be Lazy” in 1893 while in prison. Lafargue had Jewish, French, Indian, Creole and African ancestry. When IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he replied that he was proudest of his “negro” ancestry. In his youth, Lefargue participated in the International Students Congress in 1865. Consequently, the government banned him from all French universities. So, he moved to London, where he became a frequent visitor to Marx’s house, ultimately marrying his daughter, Laura. Lafargue was a member of the General Council of the First International. He also participated in the Paris Commune.
Today in Labor History October 8, 1965: The Indonesian military, led by future dictator Suharto, began torturing and massacring thousands of "suspected" Communists, leading ultimately to the overthrow of leftist President Sukarno. Other targets of the murders were members of the Gerwani women’s movement, trade unionists, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, teachers, students, and alleged leftists in general. The U.S. embassy provided the death squads with the names of suspected “communists.” Intelligence agencies from the U.S., U.K., and Australia provided anti-communist propaganda, as well as military and logistical aid. Overall, the genocide (1965-1966) led to 500,000 to 1.2 million civilian deaths and 1.5 million imprisoned. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 called the massacres "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s." Nevertheless, Western media either downplayed the events, or celebrated them. Suharto remained in power until 1998, continuing to imprison, torture and slaughter workers and civilians. He also presided over the East Timor Genocide of up to 300,000 people in the 1970’s.
Today in Labor History December 5, 1928: The Colombian military slaughtered up to 2,000 people in the Banana Massacre. Workers had been on strike against United Fruit Company since November 12. They were participating in a peaceful demonstration, with their wives and children. The Columbian troops set up machine guns on the rooftops near the demonstration and closed off the access streets so no one could escape. The soldiers threw the dead into mass graves or dumped them in the sea. U.S. officials in Colombia had portrayed the workers as communists and subversives and even threatened to invade if the Colombian government didn’t protect United Fruit’s interests. Gabriel García Márquez depicted the massacre in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his “La Casa Grande.”
United Fruit, which is now called Chiquita, controlled vast quantities of territory in Central America, and the Caribbean, maintained a near monopoly in many of the banana republics in which it operated (e.g., Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica). By 1930, it was the largest employer in Central America and the largest land owner. In 1952, the government of Jacobo Arbenz, in Guatemala, began giving away unused land, owned by United Fruit, to landless peasants. In 1954, the CIA deposed the Arbenz government, leading to decades of brutal dictatorship and genocide of Guatemala’s indigenous population. The head of the CIA at that time was former board member of United Fruit, Allen Dulles, who also oversaw the over throw of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the MK Ultra LSD mind control experiments.
Today in Labor History January 18, 1934: The anarchist General Confederation of Labor launched a General Strike in Portugal after the government banned unions, strikes and collective bargaining. The government put it down, killing 100, deporting 600 and outlawing of the labor union. Some members of the union blamed the strike’s failure on Communists, who they believe ratted out their plans to the government in advance, resulting in the arrest of several strike leaders the night before the strike took place.
Featured story: Our McHam investigative Reporting Fellow Josephine Lee went in search of the remains of Bettina, a failed Utopian community in the #Texas Hill Country, founded on the desire to build a society free of hierarchies, political oppression, and economic #inequality. https://www.texasobserver.org/castell-hill-country-utopia-german/
Today in Labor History March 9, 1902: Actor Will Geer was born. Best known for his role as Grandpa Walton in the long-running series, “The Waltons,” Geer also appeared in the groundbreaking film, “Salt of the Earth,” which portrayed the struggle of Mexican American workers at the Empire Zinc Mine. Because of his activism on labor and political issues, he was blacklisted in Hollywood for many years. In 1934, he became a member of the Communist Party. He also met LGBTQ activist Harry Hay that year and they became lovers. Together, they supported the 1934 San Francisco General Strike and demonstrated against fascism and for workers’ rights. Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first major gay rights group in the United States, and the Radical Faeries, an anarcho-pagan queer spiritual-political movement.
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.