#kaimataara

[eelhound]

"As long as we treat death as something distant and abnormal, we fail to recognise what labour really is: the expenditure of a finite life. When we do not acknowledge this, production appears not as spent life, but as something independent, with a logic of its own. Through this illusion, the commodity becomes a ghost, and the labourer becomes invisible."

- Kaimataara, from "What does the reaper and the worker have in common?" Kaimataara Substack, 29 March 2026.

[eelhound]

"Children encounter the world as something still revealing itself. While adults have been taught to encounter it as already settled, there's a reason toddlers are always wide-eyed and surveying their entire surroundings with a sense of awe.

Children have not yet fully learned how to suppress contradiction in order to maintain social stability. They still experience dissonance directly.

This is why they question injustices at 'inappropriate times' like 'mummy, why do you tell us not to give homeless people money' in front of a supermarket cashier.

As Marx said 'it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.'

My parents were hardly on the level of the capitalist class, but nonetheless my, and many other children's 'inappropriately timed' questions were like a proto-praxis. Just like my experience with the [unexpectedly heavy] rock, it was not just 'innocence' but a direct and real encounter with contradiction, and that's why their replies of 'because I said so' or 'that's just how it is' left me deeply unsatisfied.

As a child, when confronted with contradiction I would learn. If I had dropped the rock I would have still learned. As an adult however until I discovered Marxism, when I was confronted with contradiction – when I would drop a rock, or my phone wasn't fast enough – I would get irritated, or even angry. I would blame the rock, I would blame the phone. The annoyance is almost defensive as the world failed to conform to my expectation.

Marxism un-blocks that defensive reflex I was taught as an adult. Because dialectical thinking expects contradiction, contradiction stops being a failure of reality and starts being the engine. My phone isn't 'supposed' to be fast, and the rock isn't 'supposed' to be light. 'Supposed' is what happens when you attempt to freeze the world in place so you stop meeting it afresh. Curiosity is not simply a mood. It is a material posture, it is a way of holding your categories loosely enough that reality can break them.

This is why Lenin's 'Left-Wing Communism an infantile disorder' title misses the mark. Lenin argues that Leftcoms are extremely dogmatic. Dogmatic is the exact opposite of what a child typically is, we spend our early years with wide eyes always surveying around us precisely because we are not dogmatic about the world. A child watches, they test, they poke, ask, imitate, fail, they try again, they experience contradiction in an honest way. But most importantly they approach the world experimentally precisely because they do not yet fully understand it.

To call dogmatism 'infantile' is to misunderstand both children and materialism."

- Kaimataara, from "Marxism is childish." Kaimataara Substack, 9 May 2026.

[eelhound]

"To rebel (re-bellare, to make war again) requires an opponent. I can claim to be as Marxist or anarchist or so on as I want. It means nothing if I am against the king (or the idea of a king) because the very act of being against the king legitimises their own self proclaimed authority as king — that is what keeps them as king. When the proper course of action would be close to the actions of the peasants on the Monty Python skit.

Arthur has a sword. He has an army. He has 'external legitimacy' (the Lady of the Lake). By every material measure, he should be king. But the peasants simply... do not accept the premise.

To be able to say 'dependence doesn't exist here, we don't need you, thus you have no authority over us', however does require changes in ones material surroundings. It is why I have the utmost respect for the strategy of prefiguration or building the new world in the shell of the old, because the people aren’t waiting for a vanguard party or anarchist militia to save them, they are already starting the revolution by doing things such as community gardens or community kitchens, all done by the community.

Some leftists turn their nose up at me when I suggest that these small acts are revolutionary, but they are revolutionary. Capitalism and authority relies on dependence. If I can fish and garden, I am not dependant. But if I can fish but am denied land, I must bargain. Bargaining power turns obligation into exchange. And when obligation turns into exchange it becomes value, value becomes mediated through the commodity which becomes capitalism. Community kitchens are revolutionary because they directly undo this separation, because they restore access to subsistence without exchange, and therefore interrupt the very conditions that produce commodity relations.

The community kitchen or garden has no enemy, it is not against capitalism. It is without capitalism. It does not need capitalism to exist in order to define itself and if capitalism vanished tomorrow, the garden and kitchen would continue.

A revolution that does not transform the material conditions of dependence (including the justification for its own existence) will inevitably reproduce authority and capitalism, regardless of its ideology. Community kitchens and similar forms are arguably the most revolutionary because they dissolve the conditions that make power necessary or even noticeable. Revolutions don’t go against capitalism, they go around capitalism."

- Kaimataara, from "Why I stopped rebelling." Kaimataara Substack, 4 April 2026.