Janaina Medeiros
dirt enthusiast
art blog(derogatory)
JVL
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Keni
Not today Justin
Show & Tell
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
wallacepolsom
RMH
Origami Around
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Peter Solarz
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Love Begins
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
AnasAbdin
will byers stan first human second
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@autonomisery
holy shit i just learned about the “proxy strike” tactic in france in which radicals blockade or occupy a workplace, allowing workers to strike without losing their wages. that’s brilliant, wow
How does that work, exactly?
if you and your coworkers say “we’re striking” and occupy your workplace, your boss won’t pay you, but if your friends and your coworkers’ friends occupy it for you, you say “sorry boss shit’s occupied” and you still get paid because you’re not the ones striking
[N]eutrality is impossible. There is no negative attitude that does not imply a positive counterpart. The adolescent girl often thinks that she can simply scorn convention; but even there she is engaged in public agitation; she is creating a new situation entailing consequences she must assume. When one fails to adhere to an accepted code, one becomes an insurgent. A woman who dresses in an outlandish manner lies when she affirms with an air of simplicity that she dresses to suit herself, nothing more. She knows perfectly well that to suit herself is to be outlandish.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
friendly reminder that unemployment does not measure how many people are unemployed, it measures how many are unemployed and still considered part of the economy (i.e. actively looking for a job). unemployment is indeed at the lowest it has been (4.1 percent) since it peaked in october 2009 (10 percent), but the labor force participation rate, a more accurate measurement, is at the lowest it has been (62.7 percent) since the crisis began (at 66 percent), and, in fact, since the last recession in the seventies. this means that while 2 million or so jobs were “created” in 2017, approximately 8.5 million people have “left the economy,” in other words, given up on trying to find a job, since the beginning of the crisis. those 8.5 million people are a larger unemployed population than that counted in the unemployment rate, which is made up of 6.6 million people. together, the actual unemployment rate is roughly 9.4 percent, in other words, barely better than it was at the peak of the crisis in october 2009. this is what’s meant by a “jobless recovery”
Perhaps the true society would become bored with development, and would out of freedom leave possibilities unused, instead of storming alien stars under a confused compulsion. What would begin to dawn on a humanity, which no longer knew urgent necessity [Not: necessity, privation], is just how delusory and futile all the arrangements hitherto created to escape privation [Not] have been – arrangements which used wealth to reproduce privation [Not] on an expanded scale. Enjoyment itself would be touched by this, just as its contemporary schema cannot be separated from industriousness, planning, imposing one’s will, subjugation. Rien faire comme une bête [French: Doing nothing, like an animal], lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, “being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment” might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling, and so truly deliver the promise of dialectical logic, of culminating in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to the fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Onlookers of progress such as Maupassant and Sternheim have helped to express this intention, shyly, in the only manner the fragility of the latter permits.
Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia 100: Sur l’eau (via imaginary-partisan)
literal chills
fifty year anniversary march with the last line in the original german: “ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein!”
Theses on the Paris Commune; by Debord, Kotanyi & Vaneigem
(5) The Commune had no leaders. And this at a time when the idea of the necessity of leaders was universally accepted in the workers movement. This is the first reason for its paradoxical successes and failures. The official organizers of the Commune were incompetent (compared with Marx or Lenin, or even Blanqui). But on the other hand, the various “irresponsible” acts of that moment are precisely what is needed for the continuation of the revolutionary movement of our own time (even if the circumstances restricted almost all those acts to the purely destructive level — the most famous example being the rebel who, when a suspect bourgeois insisted that he had never had anything to do with politics, replied, “That’s precisely why I’m going to kill you”).
(7) The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to date — attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some “lumpenproletarian nihilism,” some “irresponsibility of the pétroleuses,”(2) should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything). “All space is already occupied by the enemy… . Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics”
(8) The Paris Commune succumbed less to the force of arms than to the force of habit. The most scandalous practical example was the refusal to use the cannons to seize the French National Bank when money was so desperately needed. During the entire existence of the Commune the bank remained a Versaillese enclave in Paris, defended by nothing more than a few rifles and the mystique of property and theft. The other ideological habits proved in every respect equally disastrous (the resurrection of Jacobinism, the defeatist strategy of barricades in memory of 1848, etc.).
in addition to Orwell’s actions such as his work as his work as an informant for British intelligence services (again, just as how 1984 was not actually Orwell condemning “big government” in a general sense just a certain form of it, it was not a condemnation of state-surveillance in a general sense just a certain application of it) one of the objectionable things he has to say in his non-fictional works is his utter faith in the necessity English “patriotism”. Orwell has a stupid distinction between “patriotism” (good) and “nationalism” (bad) which he doesnt really argue for really well and if you look at his Notes on Nationalism there is definitely a slant towards singling out “anti-English” ideologies (its interesting how there can be benevolent “English patriotism” and malignant “English nationalism” but it seems to be that with the “Celtic nations” of Ireland, Wales and Scotland there exists only malignant “nationalism”)
Incidentally since Ive been going over his stuff a lot recently Tosaka Jun actually provides a nice critique of that mentality in the Japanese Ideology. When Tosaka critiques “Japanism” he does not only limit himself to militaristic ultranationalists but also critiques supposedly more ‘progressive’ forms of volksgeist ideology. That translation doesnt make note of it but the ‘Ito Shoshin’ whom Tosaka critiques is an example of someone whom Orwell might approve of as being closer to a “patriot” than a “nationalist” (Ito was a pacifist which Orwell doesnt like but he may have forgiving that given Ito’s context. The more essential thing wouldve been whether or not Ito made a big fuss about Britain). For those that dont know Ito Shoshin as a Japanese activist who was staunchly anti-militaristic and anti-imperialistic and criticized the contemporary militaristic regime for, among other things, actually being a betrayal of the ‘true’ Japanese spirit which is actually founded on “selfless love” and is supposed to lead to a peaceful and egalitarian society. For Tosaka however the fact that Ito believes the “essence of Japan” consists of selfless-love is still a form of nationalistic chauvinism because that only makes sense to say if you believe that such qualities make Japan special and distinct compared to other nations. And since Ito believes that such a spirit of selfless-love shouldnt be exclusive to Japan but ought to be spread to other nations, Tosaka points out that hidden behind Ito’s superficial anti-imperialism is in fact a call to imperialism because if the Japanese people have a special advantage at selfless-love because it is the “Japanese essence” (even if Ito objected to the then-present regimes corruption of this) and it would be good if ‘foreigners’ also adopted a similar spirit then it logically stands that a consistent application of Ito’s seemingly progressive and gentle patriotism would in fact consist of Japanese domination of the non-Japanese. A similar criticism can be made of Orwell by exchanging ‘Japanese’ for ‘English’ along with a few other adjustments
Fun fact: the police can get away with anything if there’s no pushback. That’s what they’re supposed to do: maintain the applicability of the law – and the law will go to any length to ensure its applicability. So what all the pigs and their front groups say is true: the Law only exists by virtue of the police (that is, by its capacity to be enforced). But for “our team”, this is precisely the problem.
Legalistic concerns and issues about the conduct of police come only _after_ the “moment of decision” that the police (individual or collective) that the police carry out (usually in a deadly manner). This is because the police exists in the space of the “norms of the realization of the law” (C. Schmitt) – the very ability for the law to correspond with fact – whereas stuff like body camera mandates and mandatory sensitivity training initiatives exist in the space of “the norms of the law” (C. Schmitt) – which is the space of self-referential, mutually-intelligible, mutually-reinforcing acts and signs that only make sense and have effect _after_ the “norms of realization” have been established in the first place. And this establishment of the norms of realization is necessarily arbitrary – the law cannot describe its own legitimacy or existence on the basis of its internal logic, for the simple reason that it cannot categorize what is by definition outside of or resistant to its categories.
So the police exists because the Law must encompass and describe everything (we are all told that no-one is exempt from the Law except in death) and at the same time cannot, factually, do so – so it is the job of the police to arbitrate this noncoincidence: by “leading with the strongest hand, justifying the most violent” (Pindar) and welding fact with norm through all the force of sovereignty – creating the Legal and the Just through the most illegal and unjust means.
‘Male Fantasies’ examined the inner lives of German fascists and reached a horrifying conclusion
Misogyny is integral to fascism.
When Erich Muhsam wrote about the counter revolution that crushed the Bavarian Council Republic in 1918, he said that a common belief among the right wing soldiers was that communists planned to “nationalize the women”, and this was a major source of their anger.
Male Fantasies PDF
for reading recommendations in general most things i would recommend reading are listed here but obvs if u want any more specific pointers always feel free to ask
Im an ancom writing a paper abt the ethics of organ donations from prisoners for a class abt death. Obvi I want to keep it mostly on the topic of the donation part, but I was wondering what u had to say abt/if u had any reading recs on the ethics of prisons, coercion in prisons, bodily autonomy, etc. thx
no sorry
trans dykes have always been a part of radical feminism, and the reactionaries who ousted us (i.e. put pressure on the groups we were a part of so we had to leave in order for those groups to continue to be functional and accomplish their important activism) have done everything they can to erase that history and make sure that radical feminism and trans women are incompatible. They never have been and we can not let that narrative win.
from ‘There Is No Unmarked Woman’ by Deborah Tannen [x]
[I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.
There is no woman’s hairstyle that can be called standard, that says nothing about her. The range of women’s hairstyles is staggering, but a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her from many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some.
Women must choose between attractive shoes and comfortable shoes. When our group made an unexpected trek, the woman who wore fiat, laced shoes arrived first. Last to arrive was the woman in spike heels, shoes in hand and a handful of men around her.
If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message—an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been. There are thousands of cosmetic products from which women can choose and myriad ways of applying them. Yet no makeup at all is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them.
Women can’t even fill out a form without telling stories about themselves. Most forms give four titles to choose from. “Mr.” carries no meaning other than that the respondent is male. But a woman who checks “Mrs.” or “Miss” communicates not only whether she has been married but also whether she has conservative tastes in forms of address—and probably other conservative values as well. Checking “Ms.” declines to let on about marriage (checking “Mr.” declines nothing since nothing was asked), but it also marks her as either liberated or rebellious, depending on the observer’s attitudes and assumptions.]
[N]o doubt it is more comfortable to submit to a blind enslavement than to work for liberation: the dead, for that matter, are better adapted to the earth than the living. In all respects a return to the past is no more possible than it is desirable.
Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
Common language and religion appear to be corollaries of nationhood, but only because of an optical illusion. As welding materials, languages and religions were used when they served their purpose, discarded when they did not. Neither multi-lingual Switzerland nor multi-religious Yugoslavia were banned from the family of nations. The shapes of noses and the color of hair could also have been used to mobilize patriots — and later were. The shared heritages, roots and commonalities had to satisfy only one criterion, the criterion of American-style pragmatic reason: did they work? Whatever worked was used. The shared traits were important, not because of their cultural, historical or philosophical content, but because they were useful for organizing a police to protect the national property and for mobilizing an army to plunder the colonies. Once a nation was constituted, human beings who lived on the national territory but did not possess the national traits could be transformed into internal colonies, namely into sources of preliminary capital. Without preliminary capital, no nation could become a great nation, and nations that aspired to greatness but lacked adequate overseas colonies could resort to plundering, exterminating and expropriating those of their countrymen who did not possess the national traits.
Fredy Perlman - The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (via sabalpalms)
The whole point of class analysis (materialist analysis) is that it destabilize notions of destiny and stability. The proletariate is not a group defined biologically or through some innate aspect of the body itself but through their position within a given historical moment and contradiction. As materialists, its obvious to us that any attempt to inscribe the identity of the proletariat as natural is ideology. Whether its claims of being less intelligent, being more lazy, whatever, it is all a means of naturalizing the class position to render it destiny. All such justifications are means for reinforcing the domination of the proletariat.
What Wittig tells us is that this is true of women as a class as well. An attempt to find a stable biological or bodily basis for answering the question “Who is a woman” is a means of naturalizing the class status of women. The entire point of shifting from thinking of women as a pregiven group to thinking of women as a class is to shift our thought in such a way that we can challenge naturalizing ideologies of womanhood which are attempts to justify the domination of women. Any debate that starts by asking “who counts as a woman in class analysis” misses the entire point of using materialist class analysis in the first place. We seek to displace and destroy gender and the coresponding class positions of man and woman. We won’t do that by endless arguing over definitions which themselves ideologically reinforce the divide.
To be a materialist, to define women as a class, is to deny the logic of “okay but who counts as a woman” in the first place
it’s difficult to get the radical, messianic, almost apocalytic mood of most bolsheviks across, but
for the few months after the october revolution bolshevik militants were crisscrossing the vast, barren russian steppe on motorcycles in these long leather jackets & fighting this war against tsarist generals who are executing communists en masse & slaughtering jews & inching closer every day
at the same time though they felt they were the vanguard of the russian proletarians, who were themselves the vanguard of a global proletariat. they felt that within a matter of weeks, at most months, the revolution would erupt throughout europe & then the world, ushering in an eternal epoch of messianic communism
and although they were mostly atheists, almost every one of them was raised learning the bible or torah, and the concept of a vanguard carried for them the echo of numbers/bamidbar 32:17, when the “vanguard” of “armed shock troops” led the israelites (russians, proles, humanity in general), recently liberated from pharaoh (tsar), in conquering the promised land (a communist new world)
they were basically mad max characters, riding through barren wasteland between the handful of revolutionary metropolises on motorcycles in leather jackets, living on the edge of a volcano (as they often described it), planning on either the messianic age or the apocalypse kicking off in the next couple of weeks, depending on what decisions they make
this is why soviet history is in many ways tragic. they roused millions of hungry, tired people into action & beat the counterrevolution, preventing the apocalypse
but as they prevented apocalypse, the messiah (so to speak) was murdered by death squads in berlin, bremen, munich, budapest, milan & turin
and thus these shock troops of the future were forced to settle in to the bleak reality of how to slowly transform their vast peasant empire into the kingdom of heaven without the messiah
