Angel (They/Them)

Philosophy & Politics Content || OC memes & writing || https://linktr.ee/queercoded_angel

[queercodedangel]

Since it's nonbinary awareness week here's a good reminder that the queer struggle against the gender binary should be understood as part of a broader anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle

[queercodedangel]

"But it seems to me that it’s not those who fail to conform to our society’s starkly dichotomous system of gender who are pathological, but rather those who can’t stomach the fraying of this system. If anything, I think that we should worry about the gender obsession disorder—which is what I, prompted by my friend Steph Gauchel, propose to call it—that rigidifies so many American minds: the fact that many Americans remain positively fanatical (the word fundamentalist comes to mind) about gender differences, about making sure that men and women remain recognizably male and female. That homophobia lurks behind this fanaticism is certain, for a clear gender distinction has traditionally been the foundation of heterosexuality."

- Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings"But it seems to me that it’s not those who fail to conform to our society’s starkly dichotomous system of gender who are pathological, but rather those who can’t stomach the fraying of this system. If anything, I think that we should worry about the gender obsession disorder—which is what I, prompted by my friend Steph Gauchel, propose to call it—that rigidifies so many American minds: the fact that many Americans remain positively fanatical (the word fundamentalist comes to mind) about gender differences, about making sure that men and women remain recognizably male and female. That homophobia lurks behind this fanaticism is certain, for a clear gender distinction has traditionally been the foundation of heterosexuality."

- Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

[queercodedangel]

“What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer."

- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

[queercodedangel]

Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) — moonshine!

"But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery."

- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I

[queercodedangel]

"The creation of large-scale modern industry would have been severely hampered had it not relied upon dependent countries, and had instead been built on a strictly national basis. Indeed, industrial development implies a great availability of agricultural goods, which allows part of society to specialize in specifically industrial activity.

In the case of European industrialization, recourse to merely domestic agricultural production would have curbed the maximized productive specialization made possible by large-scale industry. The rapid growth of the industrial working class and, in general, of the urban population employed in industry and services, which took place in the industrial countries in the last century, could not have taken place without relying on means of subsistence of farm origin that were provided in large measure by Latin American countries. This was what made possible a deepening of the division of labor and, for industrial countries, specialization as world producers of manufactured goods."

- Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency

[queercodedangel]

Some Cuba posting in light of the recent increase of imperial US hostility towards Cuba and the things it internationally stands for

[queercodedangel]

This is why you need a class based understanding of the economy rather than a nationalistic one. A bourgois economy is not "our economy", it's an economy by and for capitalists.

[queercodedangel]

"Indeed, the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism from 'women' whom feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary representation for a subject that it itself constructs has the ironic consequence that feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the constitutive powers of their own representational claims.

[...]

Obviously, the political task is not to refuse representational politics—as if we could. The juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices. As such, the critical point of departure is the historical present, as Marx put it. And the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize."

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

[queercodedangel]

The imperial boomerang is coming back

[queercodedangel]

"The Irish question is therefore not simply a question of nationality, but a question of land and existence. Ruin or revolution is the watchword; all the Irish are convinced that if anything is to happen at all it must happen quickly. The English should demand separation and leave it to the Irish themselves to decide the question of landownership. Everything else would be useless. If that does not happen soon the Irish emigration will lead to a war with America. The domination over Ireland at present amounts to collecting rent for the English aristocracy."

- Karl Marx, On the Irish Question

[queercodedangel]

That moment when the "natural" system actually requires constant social, legal and political force to constitute and maintain itself

🗣

[queercodedangel]

Sanctions make "free and fair elections" impossible by design, and that is precisely why imperial powers weaponize them.

[queercodedangel]

Cucking men who leave their partners to invade other countries is anti-imperialist praxis

[queercodedangel]

"The effect of unequal exchange is to exacerbate the desire for profit—to the extent that it places obstacles in the way of its full satisfaction—and thus to intensify the methods of extracting surplus labor.Having said that, the three mechanisms identified—the intensification of work, the extension of the working day, and the expropriation of part of the labor necessary for the worker to replenish his labor power—give rise to a mode of production based exclusively on the greater exploitation of the worker, and not on the development of his productive capacity. This is consistent with the low level of development of the productive forces in the Latin American economy, but also with the kinds of activities that are carried out there.

[...]

It is also important to note that, in the three mechanisms considered, the essential feature is that the worker is denied the conditions necessary to replenish his labor power that has been worn away: in the first two cases, this is because the worker is forced to expend more labor power than he would normally provide, leading to his premature exhaustion; in the last case, it is because even the possibility of consuming what is strictly necessary to maintain his labor power in a normal state is taken away. In capitalist terms, these mechanisms (which, moreover, can and usually do occur in combination) mean that labor [power] is remunerated below its value, and thus amount to a super-exploitation of labor."

- Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency

[queercodedangel]

"Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical."

- Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky

[queercodedangel]

"The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.

The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realize have nothing, in themselves, of socialist; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle. But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government."

- Rosa Luxemburg, The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case

[queercodedangel]

The way the way word "authoritarianism" is used in mainstream discourse is about as hypocritical as it can get