"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not whatâs important. Everybodyâs hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other peopleâs pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."
- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity
This is my first real desk job since I was maybe 14, and let me tell you, it's not so bad. Granted, I work very short shifts, and, this being the offseason, not much is asked of me. Answer the occasional phone call, stock and survey the food pantry, look busy at the desk and make them feel like they're not wasting their money by having me sit here. Not much action or excitement, but why would I wish for more work.. At work? By and far, this is the easiest money I have ever made- being paid to sit- to the point where it is making me rethink my previous conceptions about white collar 9 to 5 desk jobs.Â
Before this job, I worked in retail. And before that I worked in childcare, then hospitality, then animal care, and before that, food service. My last retail job broke me. I was 21, a child, and every one of my co-workers said so when they discovered my age. It was my first job working with people who were not my peers, not other teenage girls discussing prom dresses while making banana splits, not other college kids who needed some extra cash and didn't mind taking care of kids.Â
These were adults who had bills to pay, groceries to buy, and no parents to fall back on if they were short on rent or decided they were fed up with the ritual humiliation of retail. Some of them were, themselves, parents with responsibilities and obligations of their own. Some of them were sketchy local guys who stole from the store and had objectionable streams of income, the likes of whom I had never met before. And the customers were a demographic that I had never interacted with before- mainly Black and Latin, with no time for bullshit and arenât afraid to let you know. At this job, I was an outsider, a coddled college transplant, and a sensitive one at that. It didnât help that I was also Asian and queer, constantly mistaken for a girl in an environment that had neither the luxury of time nor tolerance for something so trivial as gender identity to be meaningfully addressed.Â
 I worked at a dispensary, where, in a shaky economy, we were expected to sell what was not really necessary to survive. Weed isnât rent, weed isnât groceries, and I was supposed to sell the promise of forgetting those former stressors, if only for a few hours. I had originally Of course, the systemic institutional racism within the medical and social welfare spheres has made weed one of the only readily accessible antidotes for this demographic, and thus, essential. Where you could once buy this miracle remedy on the street, the government has decided, just this once, to listen to the people, to do away with the performative DARE formalities and sell the cure back to the people with a 17 to 20% excise tax.Â
Anyway, Iâm talking about surveillance. At the dispensary, every square inch of that place was recorded. It wasn't at the forefront of my mind all the time, but I was passively aware, as we all were, that every action, maybe even every facial expression, depending on the quality of the cameras, was being recorded, collected, and achieved for later consultation, should anything unsavory arise. More often than not, though, the cameras were utilized by a hawkish assistant manager, bent on ensuring everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. We also carried portable radios- walkie talkies- so that people on the sales floor could radio up to the second floor for refills or to ask the manager a question. We were constantly- physically, visually, and auditorily- on demand, and this is with no customers. Add to that the impatience of a pothead who just needs some weed and a manager on your ass about sales goals, there was seldom a time where the senses could rest, where you were not being monitored or something expected of you. Even on break, you could go smoke, but it had to be at least three blocks away from the building- they would know if you werenât, there were cameras- and there was always that damn clock.Â
The clock, how could we forget. Assuming you weren't abysmal at completing the tasks on the job description or outright stealing, your job revolved around that clock. Donât forget to clock out for a break, and donât come back a minute late. Over five minutes late is a strike, call out is two strikes, six strikes is a written warning with coaching, and nine strikes; youâre out. That's if the company isn't looking to make some cuts, thin out the herd, optimize efficiency. If your company is looking to save some money, those strikes, along with your sales numbers, and your work persona are surveyed by the manager and HR, and the district manager, and the regional manager- people you have never met and who couldnât actually do your job if it came down to it- will evaluate whether or not you deserve to eat next week.Â
And I assume most blue collar jobs are like this. In most blue collar jobs, there is little time for the worker to be a person, where there is not something constantly demanded of you. That is not right, and there are whole swaths of literature that debate this. What I am interested in and becoming aware of is the stark contrast between the mechanisms that preside over blue collar and white collar work, why these mechanisms are in place, and if the less of two evils is truly less evil.
At this desk job I have more freedom over my entire body than I did even on break at my last job. There is no clocking in clocking outââ, no infantilizing surveillance apparatus ensuring that you are where you say you will be. In the world of office work, you submit a timesheet at the end of the week based on the honor system. Of course, someone is there to review the timesheets, and if there are any doubts, your work output will reflect where you have delegated your time. And maybe it helps that white collar work pays a salaried wage, so it doesn't matter if you lie about the hours worked anyway. The autonomy and freedom granted in white collar work is no coincidence, and that is the qualm plenty of people have with higher education leading to stratified forms of labor. Maybe a salary is only granted to those who can pay enormous college fees, thus showing that they have enough money to be trusted to manage their own time and complete company goals.Â
What are the goals for? Are they my goals? No. but you will have to lie in every interview anyway. The hiring manager knows you are lying, you know you are lying. What is this pantomime we have created for ourselves? The funny thing is, I don't even think the collective we were the ones who created this system of modern day, white collar work. The ancestors of our invisible present-day overlords created this modern processes of Work, and we must wade in it to get any semblance of what we actually want. It honestly probably also has to do with slavery and maintaining the social and economic structure of things.Â
Today is Friday in the middle of June. The school that I pay money to attend is paying most of the office that I work for to work remotely from home. My boss took a two hour lunch break and is currently taking another, I think.Â
The issue is that this is really easy work. I know that for me, desk work will be ultimately unfulfilling. I also know that I have a sizable amount of student loans that I am supposed to pay back at some point. How to survive. I don't want to do this forever, but I don't see a better alternative. I worked with grown adults who, at their big age, could only say that they were the manager of a dispensary. Maybe they even got their degree, and while salaried, still had to deal with the same shit I did.Â
The issue is I have objections to modern work in general, whether blue collar or white collar.Â
When i was 18 and wrestling with the moral obligations and implications of participating in higher education, my parents always said that I should just get a degree, and it will open up doors for me in the future. I think they meant that it would allow me to strive for blue collar jobs, even though that wasn't really what I wanted to do at all. My degree, should i ever get it, will ensure that i will not be limited to blue collar jobsÂ
I think I need to work somewhere that will allow me to pay off the debt and hone other skills. That has been the plan for a while, but I just don't know what is next. This job has taught me that maybe I can work an office job as a means to an end.Â
So what do i want?
I wanted security, I still do, but im not sure thats realistic at all.Â
Want to cause no harm while trying to earn paycheck
Without taking away from disability, this mirrors the adopted experience, especially within interracial adoption. Moreover, there is a considerable overlap between adopted children and disability, which only doubles the chance of people glossing over pain- physical or emotional.
In this context diagnosis is still âthe way outâ often referred to as coming out of the fog. Itâs more just being able to name reasons for our feelings of alienation fragmentation and abjection. therapy includes talking about it with people who understand and not people pleasing and working on feelings of obligation ..
A couple of years after that, I was a union delegate and was organising in my workplace. We were negotiating for a collective agreement to increase all of our wages and conditions, and little progress was getting made. Attempting to intimidate us, our employer gave us a âbest and final offerâ. We held a mass meeting of several dozen staff, voted unanimously to reject the offer and to prepare to take strike action, and conveyed this to the bosses. Taken aback, they immediately revised their final offer and added higher pay rises, costing the employer in total an extra $42,000 per year, every single year, forever.
These two stories fairly neatly illustrate the differences between a mobilising and an organising approach to activism, and the relative power of each of them. In one instance, we expended a huge amount of effort and time to win a fairly modest sum of money by mobilising already-sympathetic people on a self-selecting basis from scattered parts all across the city. And in another, we won a vastly greater amount of money with relatively little effort, through the power of taking a particular defined constituency of people and organising almost everyone in it, regardless of whether they were particularly inclined towards left-wing politics or not.
There seems to be an obvious lesson that can be drawn from this â organising is far more effective. But within left-wing political organisations in Australia, a shallow mobilising- and protest-based approach to activism is dominant. Large and small demonstrations occur with great frequency, yet with a few exceptions most of these campaigns win practically nothing. On the other hand, the amount of long-term organising work thatâs being undertaken has virtually collapsed. I think itâs therefore worth critically analysing the overwhelming focus on mobilisation in Australia today, and making the case for an emphasis instead on deep, long-term mass organising.
At this point though, itâs worth clarifying what I mean by mobilising and organising. At its most basic, a mobilising approach involves selecting a particular cause, then attempting to get as many people as possible who already agree with that cause to gather together in one place. It doesnât especially matter whether these people work together, attend class together, live near each other, or have any kind of connection at all â the point is just to get as many individuals from anywhere to come together to protest, demonstrate, or otherwise show their support for some kind of already-determined cause. In this way, those in power will see the level of support this cause has and the level of disruption that supporters of the cause can create, and then capitulate to the supportersâ demands. Protests are classic examples: people from all across the city attend as individuals or small groups, walk around and chant for a while, and then separately go home and revert back to being isolated individuals.
Organising, on the other hand, works very differently. An organising approach aims to take a particular constituency with clearly defined boundaries and then organise literally every single person in it to come together, act collectively, and take power into their own hands. A few of the obvious examples of this would be organising all of the workers in a particular workplace or industry, all of the tenants under a particular real estate agency or landlord, all of the unemployed at a particular job agency, or all of the residents in a working-class suburb affected by some kind of common grievance. Wherever it takes place, the point is to organise everybody on the basis of their shared location and their shared experience of exploitation and injustice, regardless of their pre-existing commitment to left-wing causes.
For anarchist communists, organising is by far the most powerful form of activity we can undertake, and it should be the focus of our efforts. At the most basic level, we aspire towards a society in which workplaces are run democratically by those who work in them, neighbourhoods are run democratically by those who live in them, and every single person has a right to all of the necessities of life. Only organising can build the structures in workplaces and communities through which ordinary working-class people can take power into their own hands to achieve this. Every workplace mass meeting, for example, contains the seeds of an organisation that could take control of the workplace, manage it democratically, and get rid of the bosses. Thus, every time we organise, weâre concretely bringing ourselves closer to a socialist society. Even the most enormous rallies and mobilisations of hundreds of thousands of people canât do this.
Even at a more day-to-day level, organising is far more effective at fighting for and winning immediate gains. A strike by every single person in a workplace â or even just a majority of workers â exerts a crushing level of power and can rapidly force an employer to capitulate to workersâ demands. This is even more pronounced at a larger scale: a strike by 100,000 workers in a few strategic industries can force all kinds of concessions from governments and employers that simple mobilisations of 100,000 unconnected individuals from scattered parts across a city can. The same goes for a similar organising approach in the other non-workplace settings.
Organising also has much greater potential to politicise and radicalise new layers of people. In my own experience as workplace union delegate, almost none of the more than 80 people who joined up to the union would have identified themselves as leftists, and the overwhelming majority had never even been to a rally or taken part in any kind of political activity before. Unlike a mobilising approach, however, it wasnât possible to just ignore these people and only focus on already-radical coworkers â every single worker needed to be drawn into activity, regardless of what ideas they happened to hold. This entailed an endless amount of talking to, persuading and listening to people who were completely different to me, both in politics and in their life circumstances more generally. The long-term results of this were quite spectacular though, as scores and scores of workers struck, rallied and took action for the first time in their lives, and changed themselves through their own self-activity. Had our industrial campaign never taken place, I very much doubt that any of these people would have responded to an isolated poster they happened to see in the street or a post they saw on social media promoting some kind of mobilising-style campaign or rally. Only organising has this kind of potential to draw into activity and engage mass numbers of people who arenât already pre-committed to a cause.
Moreover, the kind of politicisation that occurred as a result of my workplace organising was far deeper. Rather than the usual attendance at a rally followed by return to isolated and atomised daily life, which often inspires a sense of post-event powerlessness, coworkers took action and built power alongside people they spent every day with. Many coworkers told me that involvement in the union completely altered the way they saw their fellow workers, and it wasnât hard to start to feel quite powerful. In this context, and especially after weâd been on strike together, I think that ideas of socialism and workersâ control would have been relatively easy and normal to propagate, and I imagine that had we organised union meetings on topics like âWorkersâ control: what is it and could we do it?â they would have proven fairly popular, since our daily circumstances were already starting to point in that direction. As it was, people expressed embryonically anti-capitalist sentiments on their own, and a significant number of coworkers â often totally ordinary suburban parents in their 50s and 60s â made unprompted comments to me about not needing bosses.
None of this is to suggest that mobilising isnât important, useful, and necessary â it is. Rallies, petitions, counterprotests, blockades and other mobilisation-based forms of activity all have value and can win gains. Itâs just that compared to the sheer power of effective, long-term mass organising work, mobilisation alone is fairly ineffective and powerless. Mobilising simply cannot win the immediate gains, politicise large numbers of not-already-committed people, and build the organs of working-class power that can take power across society, in anything like the way that patient, committed, deep and long-term organising can.
Organising is hard. Itâs difficult, slow, unspectacular, often boring, and you have to work alongside people whoâre completely different to you. But itâs ultimately a vastly superior and vastly more powerful approach. Moreover, from my own personal experience itâs incredibly satisfying, meaningful, and fulfilling. It also has none of the weird, subcultural and generally unpleasant sectarian dynamics of protest- and mobilisation-based campaigns.
As anarchist communists we should be focused overwhelmingly on organising. It should be the top priority for all of the groups that weâre part of, and when in the coming year or two weâre able to create a national organisation, we should prioritise it across the country, with internal trainings, bulletins reflecting on the organising that members have been involved with, and one-on-one support for members undertaking new organising work. Rallies and mobilisations arenât in and of themselves bad things, but patient mass organising at the level of the workplace, the industry, the job centre and the neighbourhood is where we should be focused.
Again, if my experience is any lesson, itâs easily possible for a single militant to go into a particular, defined constituency, solidly focus on organising, and have a disproportionately large and influential impact within a short space of time, culminating in several days of strike action. All that we need is the ability to replicate this on a larger scale. Above all else, in other words, we need an organisation of organisers.
did you live an artful life? or are you trying to find aesthetic and meaning in something painful to give it meaning? Arent we all? but its fun and it feels good
Ireland is like Mecca for white leftists because theyâre too proud to openly like China and Latin American countries are too complex for them to fully understand or relate to.
i just got this wrong number text and was like âthat canât possibly be a real nameâ and i googled it and was led to bobbi babalooneyâs website which autoplays the single best and most ridiculous jingle i have ever heard and it drove me to actual tears please go listen to it and have your whole life changed by bobbi babalooneyâs hype man
Itâs not her real name, but sheâs an elementary school teacher so good at balloon animals she part-times as an entertainer and hired somebody to make a commercial and intro music to hype the heck out of that target audienceâI canât even call it a âjingleâ because that word means a light little bouncy tune, not this pounding masterpiece
i feel like succumbing.. so much of what i feel and how i am now is because of the violence embedded within the institution of international adoption.. anger issues impulsivity disconnectedness from others disconnectedness from myself and my own emotions, not knowing who i am or where i come from, no roots, no direction.. and everytime my behaviors or thoughts or words reflect this upbringing im ashamed all over again. i feel like succumbing to the shell they think i am. i dont want to continue. i dont want to die either but i want things to stop being so hard. for all of us
painting this on the ceiling above my bed so it's the first thing i see upon waking in the morning and the last thing i see before falling asleep at night
Ngl downplaying your needs and wants into oblivion is an easy way to farm people who only want you to be a mannequin with preprogrammed responses built in
literally insidious bc like well my dad does have anger issues and so do i but we are not genetically related so that means it was learned.. this does raise the question of how much credit we give "nature" as opposed to nurture (learned behaviors). I think a lot more of our behaviors are learned but it is within the best interest of like the state and apparatuses of power to say that they are inherited and innate and unavoidable
(cw: sexual assault)
the pedophile -as it is understood outside of academic circles- is a mythical creature. the idea that a complete stranger who kidnaps and sexually assaults kids is their biggest threat is absolutely insane; not one case of CSA (child sexual assault) in a hundred looks like that. CSA is committed almost uniformly by adults in a preestablished position of authority (such as family, family friends, clergy, or teachers) and in a way that a victim who doesn't know what sexual assault looks like will be left unsure what happened to them.
without knowing concretely how sex and sexuality works, would you be able to tell the difference between molestation and the various other forms of unwanted physical touch and abuse kids are regularly subjected to? would it even seem that different?
but parenthood and the submission of youth to adults as institutions are threatened by the reality of CSA. adults need to justify their ownership of children through an imagined outside threat constantly held at bay through their diligence. the truth - that putting yourself in such a position of authority over children directly enables abuse (including sexual abuse) - is thrown aside.
i donât know where the post this makes me think of is, but the general idea of it was that children arenât properly taught how consent works, because if they did have a functioning framework to understand all the ways in which theyâre exploited by adultsâand continue to be exploited as adults, in different ways!âit would pose a serious threat to the social order, which is, i think, highly relevant here
When my clients say âbut my mom hit me first!â and I have to say âlegally, sheâs allowed to.â As long as she doesnât leave bruises, my old judge used to say.
âMy dad made me give him my car. Thatâs mine, I bought it with money from my job.â And I have to say: âYouâre a minor. Under the law, you donât own property, your guardians do.â
When they say, âMy mom is watching everything I do, she takes my phone every night, she made her boyfriend take the door off my roomâ and I have to say, with gritted fucking teeth, âYou donât have a legal right to privacy from your parent.â
You can enter into contracts, but all of them are voidable under grounds of infancy â except student loans, for some fucking reason.
You canât leave. Your parents have the right to force you to come back.
This is not theoretical. I have seen every one of these things (except contract voiding) play out time and time again in a courtroom, with real life consequences: juvenile detention. Inpatient facilities. GPS ankle monitor. Community service. Kids are horrified to hear how little power and protection they have. And Iâve never gotten over my horror.
Student loans is not the only contract a child can enter but not void: Marriage is another.
My sister has worked in sex trafficking law for around 10 years and a the general pattern is "if they're an adult, they were trafficked by their partner. If they're a child, they were trafficked by their parent". And one of, if not THE biggest way children are trafficked(in the USA at least) is via forced marriage. Up and until 2019, this was legal in every state in the US. It still is in all but I think 8, as of 2025.
My sister drafted and fought for multiple bills to end child marriage in various US states and people fought TOOTH and NAIL against passing them. Because most states, while they allow child marriage, require the parents' consent. The child's isn't necessary, but the parents' is. The idea that parents will always have their child's best interests at heart and always have the last say in anything regarding the child's life is one that many people would not abandon in any way.
And, since a child cannot enter a legally binding agreement with a lawyer, they cannot file to get divorced, file for a restraining order, or go to a shelter for victims of domestic or sexual abuse. Running away from an abusive marriage makes them a runaway child that, legally, has to be returned to their legal guardian who, in the case of a child being married to an adult, is their abuser.
for the thesis can have a brief section that discusses childrenâs rights in general and the flawed idea of letting the parents be in charge of âbest interests of the childâ, children as an extension of the parents,
