Karl Marx's Bath Water @kmbw - Tumblr Blog

About me

I am a communist worker from the post-Warsaw Pact space. I am an early 1990s boy. I work in IT. I am not doing well, mentally or financially. I like to think I am kind. I am optimistic about the future. I am vegan.

I am here primarily to collect my reading notes at @smiling-marx.

This page is reserved for any personal blogging I might partake in. You can reach me here or on Discord at @kmbw.

Gentle reminder to pace yourself and drink water. You are not alone.

Thank you.

dracula1992soundtrack

being online is so scary aren't you guys worried about the world wide spider

redfagdiver

It took 36 years for someone to make this joke and by god it was worth the wait

m0ose-idiot

I love this so much! Also it triggered a memory and I spent far longer than I want to admit trying to find this 2002(ish) pic from Aussie cartoonist Judy Horacek

anosci

i love this!

i did a bit of digging and found that some bloke named Simon Brooke used the OP's joke as his email signature at least as early as March 14th, 1995 according to this quoted text. it takes a while to find a preserved copy of something Simon said but here's an example from mid-96:

STEM students be like, "I'm just a researcher, I don't care about politics" (is clueless about the world affairs and how it affects STEM, where to look for new research and why).

Example from 1935:

Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong

diehellasrache

I think I'm going to remember this phrase every time I cook for the next five years

kmbw

ℹ️ Do not be obscene, but do not fail through your own gutlessness.

northstareclipse

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

He used to be a patriarch and now women point and laugh at him. 😔

Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong

nopizzaaftermidnight

June 26, 2014

What the heck! As of this reblog, this comic has 21 notes. Apparently a little reblog chain happened, but I don’t really remember noticing. Much higher numbers than my usual 0 or 1. My first taste of success, and I totally missed it!

nopizzaaftermidnight

honestly, if I had a comic take off I wouldn’t mind this one. I still like the joke.

smiling-marx

Aggregated wishes of all: decentralized co-ops coordinating on the scale of a continent

First, something funny. This part, superstitious peasants throwing stones at tractors, made me chuckle:

Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong

The monumental changes reminded me of these photos from China:

Source unknown

Some more specifics about national subsidies and debt relief:

In 1935, a congress of farmers adopted the following rules for collective farms, ratified by the soviet government:

This formally protected private quarters of farming families joining these farming co-ops.

And they were, essentially, private co-ops: in exchange for subsidized fertilizer and machinery which greatly increases productivity, the farm sells about 25% of its harvest to a national fund at a low price. The rest of the harvest they may divide and sell individually, or together as a collective. They may use the profits as they see fit.

A farm will have regular meetings and vote on business plans. Here's an example: a farm might plan to expand fields for more profits, improve living standards, erect new buildings, and so on:

Everyone can chip in and participate in fulfilling the common wishes. Every effort will be paid, too. Therefore, no unemployment.

Business plans of these farms get aggregated over regions and whole republics and get turned into "The Plan."

The plan is thus not imposed arbitrarily by an evil ruler but represents the coordinated wishes of all people, so that they may know and account for what others plan to do.

#marxism #communism #one of my personal favorites

unification

you can access a different mode by washing your hair

xylophonetangerine

syzygynephile

Me, trying to impress my date with a display of my boundless humility: I would like to order one single, solitary crumb.

Waitress taking my order: Such arrogance! Not only do you presume to boast under the guise of being humble, but your order employs the most decadent of linguistic excesses - the tautology!

My date, who until recently thought "tautology" referred to the study of tensile strengths and upon learning her mistake compensated by reading through its Wikipedia article: That would be more correctly identified as a "pleonasm".

The editor I hired to curate my posts who styles himself as a sort of scheming court advisor: My liege, this one is getting away from us. The punchline loses much of its impact when the rest of the joke is derailed by this increasingly self-indulgent meta humour. Were it up to me, your Grace, which of course it is not, I would cut the others and leave myself as the only supporting character. You need noone else, Your Majesty...

My card: Declines

They really did create a million ayatollahs.

frontmansdefender

RIP to the legend

deadelated

I'm part of a clandestine operation to have a good day

cherryfleischer-deactivated2026

I always thought these pictures were photoshopped but apparently a man in guangzhou china did indeed make a huge ass garden to cover up the fact he illegally added three more stories to his apartment