Welcome again to everybody. Take a seat make yourself at home, we are out of tea though. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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As a vegan, sober, auty communist I do sometimes feel like I’ve placed myself outside of society a bit lol
The other day my manager asked my how I managed to stay in good shape and I said: I work out three times a week, walk to the office, currently train for a half marathon, eat healthy and don’t drink. And he looked at me as if I insulated his mother. Like, what answer do you want? Lol. I don’t get it.
Ngl finding out Marat had a healthy relationship with his family makes him more unrelatable than him being a doctor or from the 18th century
Edit: genuinely just can’t stand them. I guess they’re not the worst people but…idk, i can’t take it for some reason they make me so goddamn sad and angry and…ugh
I dont really understand why Marxism is so stagnant tbh.
I mean…look, i know I’m “different.” But…what else is there? Do people really want another flavour of liberalism or nationalism or whatever? I’m not saying one day i suddenly became a fully fledged ideologically consistent socialist, obviously.
What i mean is just look at the UK. The country is going to shit, and the best there is the greens? I don’t understand how you can go through 20 years of this and then go “well obviously we just need a different type of capitalism.”
It’s not easy, I get that, but i mean in that case you’d think you’d get more Eurocommunists than anything.
But even looking at the global south. The fact that places like Indonesia and Thailand literally don’t have communist parties anymore, or how Argentina is constantly falling down rapidly and people are still worried about Peronists vs Millei-ists. There’s an answer right there, outside of all of that.
This isn’t some criticism of people. I just thought Marxism was easy to understand, and sometimes i wonder if maybe its not. Idk. This isn’t doom posting either. I think I’ll just invent a time machine to kill Friedrich Ebert and Albert Noske. That should fix things
There are a lot of factors that go into the lack of traction for Marxist ideals.
Propaganda is one thing, fear that trying to upset the status quo could backfire, just pessimism about the feasibility of another system, and it doesn’t help that Marxists are often bad at explaining our positions by using too much jargon.
I think it’s good to keep in mind that a lot of communists were purged. I mean look at Jakarta in the 60s, Nazi Germany, all the military dictatorships of LatAm.
Justin Podur’s history Podcast just did an episode about Reza Shah Pahlavi if you want a briefer on how fucking horrible he really was.
we smokeen good thess days (´ー`)y-~~
I just wanted to post this somewhere, but It feels so weird now that my dad is gone, and weird that both my parents are now gone. I think the main thing I noticed is I’m no longer constantly fretting over my dad and his drinking anymore or living in that kind of environment, and I’m realizing how much living in that kind of space took away from me. It really wasn’t a good environment, how could it ever be.
That is some healthy introspection. Sounds like you are doing well. :)
Red Horizons: The New Scholarly Journal By Iskra Books
From Iskra Books: Iskra Books is excited to launch our new journal project - Red Horizons!
This scholarly, radical journal will be in the service of global liberation movements—a site for cutting-edge theory, translations, art, and poetry.
We’re accepting submissions until end of May, and publishing in September of this year. This journal will be published twice yearly. For more details, see https://www.iskrabooks.org/journal.
Send contributions to submissions@iskrabooks.org for review. Procedures and details: https://www.iskrabooks.org/submissions.
I wonder if there’s a more casual term for “labor aristocracy” than the “aristocracy” part. My understanding is it (tends to refer to) the position that the working class of the empire tends to be in, but it’s one of those words that’s a bit obscure. Maybe a casual way would be “the comfortable working class” or something - referring to those who, despite being working class, have enough financial padding and material comforts that doubting the system, much less thoughts of revolt, may never even occur to them.
What about westoid? Lol
Treatlerite
👆
I was more thinking of a descriptive term that would help people understand the context of it at a glance rather than an insult, but that is funny.
Since everyone in the west is Disney-brained, maybe something like storm-labour or storm-worker a-la storm trooper. Pawns of the empire.
For the heck of it, I asked an LLM to see what it could come up with. Here are its suggestions:
- The Laptop Class This is a very strong contender that has gained significant traction in recent years. It perfectly captures the modern reality of this group: their work is often non-manual, done remotely on a computer, and they enjoy a level of flexibility and cultural capital that sets them apart from traditional blue-collar or service workers. It implies a professional, often white-collar, identity that feels distinct from both the “boss” and the “worker on the factory floor.” It feels very current and immediately understandable.
- Yuppie This is a classic term from the 1980s (“Young Urban Professional”) that has endured. It focuses on the consumerist and aspirational aspects of the labor aristocracy. A “yuppie” is defined by their lifestyle—gym memberships, expensive coffee, organic food, travel—and their career focus. While it doesn’t explicitly mention a betrayal of the working class, it strongly implies a self-interested, upwardly mobile individual who is more concerned with personal success than collective action. It’s a bit dated but still widely recognized and has a casual, slightly critical edge.
- The Comfortably Numb This is a more cynical and highly descriptive phrase. It gets to the heart of the political function of the labor aristocracy. Their comfort—good salary, benefits, job security—makes them “numb” to the anxieties and struggles of the working poor and the precariat. It suggests a lack of urgency and a disconnection from the systemic issues affecting others. It’s less of a label for a person and more of a description of their state of being, making it a powerful, if slightly less casual, term.
- The C-Suite’s Pets This is a much more direct and confrontational term, borrowing from the original’s political sharpness. It’s provocative and frames the relationship in explicitly subservient terms. It implies that this group’s loyalty has been bought by corporate perks (high salaries, stock options, good healthcare) and that they act as a loyal, domesticated force for the interests of the “C-Suite” (executives). It’s great for a more radical or critical discussion but might be too aggressive for casual use.
The Laptop Class has a nice ring to it, I feel, but could be taken too literally by people. C-Suite’s Pets has me 💀
Edit: Wait, nah, I skimmed the article a bit, it seems iffy, removing it (Laptop Class seems to have some reactionary roots so ew).
Edit2: I prompted it about issues of reactionary connotations and it gave me a few more, one that I like: the gentrifier class.
some brain rot
Please switch the star of David with the Israeli flag. Otherwise it looks like a NazBol meme.
The 6 pointed star has nothing to do with Judaism. It is not anywhere in the scriptures. It is just a artistic motif that is common in many cultures. It first became a Jewish political symbol in the 1300s when Charles IV let the Jewish community of Prague have their own flag.
In fact the first commandment explicitly forbids the creation of symbols to represent the faith. The 6 pointed star is a idol and as such use of it as a symbol of the faith is directly counter to Judaism.
📠 #talmudic #wisdom
however the message of the original comic is clearly not informed by theology
lmao good catch i uploaded the unedited, also, “israel controls the uda” is ron pwulslop i just find it rodiculisu
je vous souhaite à tous une belle et agréable semaine .
et n’oubliez jamais ; le communisme va gagner ! ✊🏼
Autism Acceptance month. Please make sure you are accepted by a person with autism or suffer the consequences.
Am I allowed to accept myself?
That’s even more important
As a white man in the netherlands, it feels weird knowing that me feeling worse means that the resistance is doing well and the world is getting closer to being better.
I am especially worried because i simply don’t know how to prepare my GF and I for an economic crisis like this and i also don’t have the necessary analytical skills to not feel completely in the dark about the developments of geopolitics without relying on the analysis of the people posting on here.
A really weird mixture of hope towards someone sawing off the rotten branch that i am sitting on, while also not sure how to fall correctly so that i don’t hurt too much. Especially considering that i have exactly zero community here (my anhedonia makes it hard to make efforts towards friendships) and no one seems to have understood yet that there even is a crisis coming.
not sure how to fall correctly so that i don’t hurt too much.
Stockpile some dry foodstuffs. I wish I was joking but there’s a real potential for great depression type of food scarcity. 20% of the worlds fertilizer backed up in the strait and europe’s sanctions on Russia could make it a really rough situation in the near future.
The future might be uncertain comrade, but that means potential for change aswell. We’ll probably never see a Red Western Europe as long as our continent is built on the exploitation of other peoples. But through their emancipation we can eventually build a brighter future for proletarians in our part of the world too!
Yeah, just hard to imagine me being part of that world while being incapable of actually caring about and celebrating progress due to my anhedonic issues. The world getting better will not make me feel better. This completely eliminates motivation from my equation and leaves me with cold hard logic, discipline and grit. Those things will only carry me so far and without my GF, i likely genuinely would not care about anything in this world and would have perished already.
Got an exam back today. I technically did about 15 points better than the average (out of 100). But I still feel bad because lI feel like i could’ve done better. Idk. Honestly my brain is so out of wack for exams. For some reason i don’t feel stressed when I feel like i should. I have another tomorrow and I just don’t have motivation for some reason. It’s not that i dislike the subjects either. So idk
Edit: the subject is supposed to be hard but our professor is really chill so idk if me getting what i did was good or bad.
I think that’s something I really dislike about college is that class difficulties are really up to the professor but that isn’t accounted for on your GPA or anything. I could have taken much easier professors and be on the deans list or i could take harder professors and fail classes. Idk, just a pet peeve I’m starting to have
You got thjs
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Had sort of an ego check thought I guess you might call it: If it was easy for me to change the world, it’d also be easy for it to fall apart. Which got me thinking more about what it means to create a legacy of lasting change. And in the dialectical view, I’d say that means a change in base most of all; superstructure too to go along with it, but if you only chip away at the superstructure and never challenge the base, then you get the kind of situation the US is in, where it had some mild reforms at points and some of that is losing ground over time.
