locals only

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When insurrections die - Gilles Dauvé

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I hadn’t listened to an episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast until a few days ago, for a variety of reasons. For those not in the know, Chapo Trap House is a popular podcast hosted by Will Menak…

I’m a CTH subscriber but this piece is a fantastic dismantling of the failure of their socdem politics. While it can be cathartic to hear people thoroughly tear apart odious neo-cons and pathetic liberals alike, lets not forget the class war.

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HRANA News Agency- Five independent labor organizations issued an statement declaring their support for people and added “The full text of this joint statement, which a copy has been made available to HRANA, is as follow: “It should be self-evident that ignoring the demands of workers and toiling people of Iran by resorting to demagoguery …

In regards to Iran and the emancipation of the working class. 

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[imp-deactivated20171219-deactiv]

Some mythical vegan movement that became large enough to cause a collapse in the meat industry through boycotts and accompanying sabotage would find itself in a dead end, having promoted a change in capitalism that would allow greater efficiency in world food production, a higher world population, and the destruction of ecosystems on a greater scale. The alienation from nature would reach its logical conclusion: most animals would be freed from their cages, but they’d be fucked all the same. Not only does veganism encourage an ignorance of market mechanisms, it also conflates consumption with agency and thus promotes a fundamental democratic myth. People are held responsible for what they buy and consume, and therefore the consumer arena is portrayed as one of free choice, rather than a violently imposed role. All the violence and domination of the capitalist system is ingrained in the role of the consumer, in every corner of a society based on the production, buying and selling of commodities. Except for the most skilled of evaders, and the inhabitants of a few remote jungle and mountain regions (all of whom base their antiauthoritarian subsistence strategies in part on hunting), it is impossible to opt out of capitalism. A vegan lifestyle in no way damages capitalism, ends ecocide or animal exploitation, or severs one’s material connections to even just the animal industry, given the interlaced nature of industrial society.

Peter Gelderloos, “Veganism: Why Not, an anarchist perspective” (via imp)

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Written by a refugee imprisoned on Nauru.

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And ledge of the abyss. O Holy Justice, Who could relate the agonies I saw! What guilt is man that he can come to this? Just as the surge Charybdis hurls to sea Crashes and breaks upon its countersurge, So these shades dance and crash eternally.

Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls, Far more than were above: they strained their chests Against enormous weights, and with mad howls Rolled them at one another. Then in haste They rolled them back, one party shouting out: “Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why do you waste?”

So back around that ring they puff and blow, Each faction to its course, until they reach Opposite sides, and screaming as they go The madmen turn and start their weights again To crash against the maniacs. And I, Watching, felt my heart contract with pain.

“Master,” I sad, “what people can these be? And all those tonsured ones there on our left – Is it possible they all were of the clergy?” And he: “In  the first life beneath the sun They were so skewed and squinteyed in their minds Their misering or extravagance mocked all reason.

The voice of each clamours its own excess When lust meets lust at the two points of the circle Where opposite guilts meet in their wretchedness. These tonsured wraiths of greed were priests indeed, And popes and cardinals, for it is in these The weed of avarice sows its rankest seed.”

And I to him: “Master, among this crew Surely I should be able to make out The fallen image of some soul I knew.” And he to me: “This is a lost ambition. In their sordid lives they laboured to be blind, And now their souls have dimmed past recognition.

All their eternity is to butt and bray: One crew will stand tight-fisted, the other stripped Of its very hair at the bar of Judgment Day. Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light And brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths. You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.

Now may you see the fleeting vanity Of the goods of Fortune for which men tear down All that they are, to build a mockery. Not all the gold that is or ever was Under the sky could buy for one of these Exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.”

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“What we in fact have here is a theory of a tendency towards relative impoverishment of the working class under capitalism in a double sense. Firstly, in the sense that productive workers tend to get a smaller part of the new value they produce: in other words there is a trend towards an increase in the rate of surplus-value. Secondly, in the sense that even when wages rise the needs of the workers as human beings are denied. This applies even to their additional consumer needs that grow out of the very increase in the productivity of labour which results from the accumulation of capital. One only has to think of the unfulfilled needs of workers in the fields of education, health, skill acquisition and differentiation, leisure, culture, housing, even in the richest capitalist countries of today, to see how this assumption remains accurate in spite of the so-called ‘consumer society’. But it applies much more to the needs of the worker as a producer and a citizen - his need to develop a full personality, to become a rich and creative human being, etc.; these needs are brutally crushed by the tyranny of meaningless, mechanical, parcellized work, alienation of productive capacities and alienation of real human wealth.”

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fist pumps to this as the the whole whatever of society collapses