T34

IMO the chaos is the point.

If Europe and Asia are allowed to integrate economically, if Chinese tech and Russian fuel can easily reach Western Europe by land, then the US is finished as a superpower. Its naval superiority no longer will let it choke off the most important global trade. Its location turns from an oasis into a backwater. It became a superpower in the first place during the century of most intense fighting in Europe and Asia, and it needs the violence to continue.

IIRC this guy is an anti-feminist crypto-bro and firm ally of US imperialism. If reddit were a person...

upside-down vs. underground

I see what happened as a flaw in anarchism itself that reminded me of the essay Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman:

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

r/antiwork users saw it as not just a place to chat but a movement, though a structureless one. It turns out that there was structure all along, dictated not by the users but the corporation, enabling whoever created the subreddit to ban users, censor speech, and act as spokesperson.

The solution is to have an actual IRL party with a formal structure and democratic centralism. If the party wants a web site with user comments, it can make one and appoint moderators who can be recalled by party members. The key is that a real movement must be led by a party, not a structureless crowd on a web site.

One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls.

The problem is there's no IRL party. The "community" is whoever posts here. If lemmy ever takes off, what's to keep cops, marketers, right-wing trolls, etc. from voting in the election?

AOC with VP vaush.

IMO that's super optimistic. More likely Dems will nominate Liz Cheney after she changes parties.

This "stop helping favored industries with subsidies" demand by the bourgeoisie is silly.

Wasn't the US's founding genocide a subsidy to capital by government? Weren't all the genocides making up primitive accumulation subsidies? Wasn't government enforcement of slavery a subsidy? Isn't the Iraq War, and all other imperialistic wars, coups, and blockades?

It's subsidies all the way down. Now the biggest thieves in world history, the white supremacist capitalists, are accusing their victims of subsidy.

It seems to me that the bourgeoisie is dismantling the class-collaborationist labor-aristocratic unions of the 20th century. Now that the world wars and the cold war are won, and the declining rate of profit is making bribery of the labor aristocracy more difficult, the ruling class is no longer willing to work with these unions.

In the short term this will be painful. But in the long term it will free workers from the need for bourgeois, bureaucratic permission for strikes and organizing. Imagine labor organizing on an encrypted chat with your pseudonym only known to a few workers in your web of trust. You'd be able to organize a strike before management could figure out who you were.

Fort Bliss

Buffalo Soldier Gate

They literally named it after segregated regiments that waged genocidal war against Indigenous peoples. No shame whatsoever.

As far as I can tell from this article from a liberal source, the whole Colombian bourgeoisie is violently anti-labor.

Robin Kirk, who monitors abuses in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation's leading paramilitary grouping, and the Colombian military. "The Colombian military and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anticommunist since the 1950s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives--as a very real and potential threat."

The Coca-Cola plant manager had personal connections with the death squad:

But the suit charges that plant manager Ariosto Milán Mosquera claimed that "he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task of destroying the union." Workers believed him because he had a history of partying with the paramilitaries.

Coca-Cola directly benefited:

"The company never negotiated with the union after that. Twenty-seven workers in 12 departments left the plant and the area. All the workers had to quit the union to save their own lives, and the union was completely destroyed. For two months, the paramilitaries camped just outside the plant gate. Coca-Cola never complained to the authorities." The experienced workers who left the plant, who'd been earning between $380 and $400 a month, were replaced by new employees at minimum wage--$130 a month.

The violence goes well beyond Coca-Cola:

The Colombian government views union activity as a threat because it challenges its basic economic policies. The administration of President Andrés Pastrana is under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut its public-sector budget, in part through privatizing public services. Union leaders who oppose privatization have also been targeted for extinction. After leading a fight to maintain public service in the city of Calí, Carlos Elíecer Prado, a public-sector union leader, was murdered in May.

When you're so white you need white stickers on white paint...

Marx. It's Capital Vol. 1.

"The wretched half-starved parents think of nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children. The latter, as soon as they are grown up, do not care a farthing, and naturally so, for their parents, and leave them."