Julie Carmine

dripped out tribune of the plebs 🚩 communist organizer 🏴 class war veteran 🍉

[juliecarmine]

"all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround us and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives." —Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus

[juliecarmine]

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ALOK VAID-MENON Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness 1x03 (2022)

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Alok’s book report of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller

[juliecarmine]

[juliecarmine]

What do social media companies produce?

Not posts—all moral rights for a post belong to the author. Musk does not PRODUCE his users’ posts.

Social media companies produce MATERIAL SOCIAL RELATIONS—followerships, “friendships”, online “communities”.

True, the individuals related themselves produce what happens within those relations: the events, the durée.

But the individuals’ social adjacency is a solely a product of technology. It’s literally a spreadsheet of zeros and ones: an “acquaintanceship graph”, mathematically—0 if two persons are not related, otherwise 1.

We produce a REAL friendship within the space opened up by the digital association called “Facebook Friends”. We create REAL communities within the virtual homesteads of online “communities”.

Usus, fructus, abusus, the rights of property-owners in Rome—the social media company OWNS the virtual territory; it owns the virtual social relations PRODUCED; Nature = humans produce non-virtual, real communities the company is free to DISPOSE OF.

[juliecarmine]

Property in Land Prior to Original Accumulation (Grundrisse)

Property in land prior to original accumulation Notes on an excerpt from Marx’s Grundrisse Text: Marx, “Forms Preceding Capitalist Productio

[juliecarmine]

An anarchist’s take on what’s at stake for the American Left in the current iteration of the student Palestine movement:

“students and their allies, comrades, friends fighting against the administration create new spaces for political encounter […]

and […] new commitments to one another about what it means to keep each other safe, what it means to struggle together—

and in that process they start forming sometimes actual political groups, sometimes affinity groups, sometimes friend circles—

but they create commitments to one another to allow them to learn and think and strategize together […]

To me that seems to be what’s actually important in terms of our position in the United States:

the formation of new layers of people who are able to think and concretely strategize together in order to achieve goals.”

(The Antifada, ep. 251)

[juliecarmine]

I was born here. In the fucking 1970s. Who would want to become what this place makes most people? So many American kids have seen that for forever, have seen what a crock of shit this whole fake country is—there are too many youth countercultures historically to list.

But how could I escape from this place? I’ve never physically been off this rock, North America. How could I _get out,_ if not through ideas?

The world of ideas has maybe been the only thing that’s kept me from losing my mind completely these past 5 decades (ish). Growing up in this country you have to infer the existence of collectivist ways of living and being, of being human, from shadows on the wall.

We all long for it; that’s just human, you can’t stamp that out. We go to church maybe. Some Canadians write songs about it. And we could maybe change it all for the better, if we would just talk about what it means to be human—to be *of the community*—and what it means to live accordingly. It’s very sad.

“Among the Germanic peoples [… t]he commune […] exists […] merely by virtue of […] periodic gatherings […] and not as a unity. In fact, the community therefore does not exist as a STATE SYSTEM […]”

[juliecarmine]

“We are exhausted by the daily continuous killing.”

[juliecarmine]

The world tells me every day I am grotesque.

But that’s not ALL it tells me. It also tells me I am worthy of kindness.

The hardest and richest lesson life teaches is acceptance.

“No one has ever died from contradictions.”

BUT…

[juliecarmine]

It’s what’s most beautiful

in collectivism:

when one person steps forward,

if they are in sync with others,

the movement makes them strong

without granting

any one person dominion.

“The purpose is to be equals” /ly

[juliecarmine]

Maybe we should lean into the line, “Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.” It strikes liberals where they are most susceptible to influence: their guilt.

That “the Man has a branch office in each of our heads”, as Pynchon put it—that inside us is not so much an inner child who must be lavished with self-love and self-attention, but an inner fascist with a settler colonizer mindset who needs to be constantly cross-examined—this is the sort of self-criticism liberals are most likely to respond to, because every liberal feels the guilt of knowing it to be so.

Every white person has heard white people talk about Black people when Black people are not around. Every cisgender person possesses in themselves the collective social knowledge of how to mock a trans person for being trans. Every person without disabilities can recall having at minimum failed to consider the needs of a person with a disability, and probably can recall having socially excluded such a person on the basis of their mobility, etc., inadvertently or not.

It takes real work to unlearn racism, homophobia, ableism and all the rest of it. Conservatives disdain that work. Liberals know they have not done enough of it.

Socialists do that work collectively—in the real world, through collective action, not just in the world of ideas.

A liberal is someone sustained by the fantasy that they are not a fascist. (See 2024’s Civil War.) But the liberal’s complicity with all varieties of fascism in the real world manifests as a symptom: liberal guilt.

Let’s stick the knife in right there. Let’s keep calling genocide what it is. Let’s call out co-aggressors and enablers by name.

How _can_ I vote for Biden on the grounds that he’d be better for trans people, or for the labor movement? I voted no confidence in the presidential primary—or as near as we could get to a vote of no confidence here in Georgia—and since then I’ve only gotten more horrified by the growing magnitude of the mass murder in Gaza that the Biden administration continues to fund and defend.

We cannot be slaves to Duverger’s Law (“in a winner-take-all electoral system, any vote other than for the two leading candidates is wasted”).

We do not have political freedom in a system that allows us only to choose our next chief executive to be either Joe Biden or Donald fucking Trump.

We _must_ work toward _emancipation_ from this system. (Cf. “light and air” for the workers movement.)

And we can’t forsake our socialist principles every time there’s a serious election, if we want to keep calling ourselves socialists.

The only position that makes sense to me is to ruthlessly criticize the two-party system—and if a candidate can’t win office _while_ doing that, they are doing something else terribly wrong!

The people are certainly united in their hatred of the two-party system. And I think the people are smart enough to elect a person who declares a pox on both houses of the current bipartisan consensus—the consensus that keeps us apologizing for Israel’s mass crimes against humanity, that keeps us paying insurance corporations and student loan corporations for our healthcare and education, that keeps us renting and not owning property, and that keeps us ensnared in the bear-trap of “work or starve” for decades of the best years of our lives.

[juliecarmine]

"On Kyriarchy: Non-Identity Politics”

“ON KYRIARCHY: NON-IDENTITY POLITICS” (Feb. 19, 2024) What are the necessary conditions for a revolutionary movement? A revolution is by de

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[juliecarmine]

When a comrade misgenders me, it hurts. But it doesn’t make it weird for me. I’ve misgendered people accidentally too. It’s an accident. It’s not weird. It happens all the time.

What makes it weird is when people avoid me, or avoid acknowledging I’m present, because they’re afraid to misgender me. If they don’t know me, they don’t know how I’ll react. In Leftist spaces, they’re especially unsure what reaction to expect.

Accidental misgendering is like stepping in shit. It happens. Don’t make it weird by avoiding acknowledging the person you’re afraid you might accidentally misgender. That amounts to the silent treatment.

If I can be brave enough to be out, you can be brave enough to risk stepping in shit.

[juliecarmine]

"A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group (groupe assujetti), even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production.

The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group:

the subordination to the socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus-value therefrom;

the effusion of anti-production and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal;

the phenomena of group 'superegoization', narcissism, and hierarchy—

the mechanisms for the repression of desire.

A subject-group (groupe-sujet), on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary.

[…]

And what revolution is not tempted to turn against its subject-groups, stigmatized as anarchistic or irresponsible, and liquidate them?

How do we combat the deadly inclination that makes a group pass from its revolutionary libidinal investments to revolutionary investments that are simply […] investments of interest, then to preconscious investments that are simply reformist?"

[juliecarmine]

Gender and Sexuality Justice

05:54 Policy Solutions: DSA's Demands08:31 Discussion questionsL i n k s :Tithi Bhattacharya, “How to Not Skip Class: Social Reproduction of