socially-necessary-labor-time

your birthright for a mess of pottage

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white guy :'(

"you have oppressed me by having feelings about things i have done"

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that was almost as good as

when mike davis told me that the only thing he hates more than a yuppie in an SUV is a yuppie on a bike. i was like "yeah that's what my dissertation is about."

[maarnayeri-blog]

Riding bikes everywhere? Using recyclable diapers? Carpooling? We’ve been doing that in Eritrea for decades. Where’s our reward for saving the Earth? Why aren’t we plastered all over Time magazine? If we lived in the same disgusting, gluttonous fashion that Americans lived, this planet would no longer be able to sustain the human race. But yet, they blame the world’s environmental ills on “overpopulation” (code: poor brown people existing) and then usurp our lifestyle habits, trademark it as their own and pat themselves on the back for doing the bare minimum. How convenient of such a narcissistic nation. -My uncle, upon learning about America’s “new Green Movement”. Obviously, he’s not impressed. (via eastafrodite)

this is the best. 

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[deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics]

In which I’m the worst person to converse with about anything, ever

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best.

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is the lumpencognitariat a thing? i have this weird feeling i might end up it.

[genericlatino-blog]

Interesting piece this Sunday morning over at The New York Times titled, The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent. It’s a piece that I disagree with on many points but the ending is worth highlighting,

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

Honestly I can’t recommend the rest of it.

Image courtesy of Meg

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yeah it was crap, with the toxic subtext that what we are seeing now is the perversion of the "real" creative energy of capitalism, not something inherent to capital accumulation. and somebody please show me an instance of a person using the phrase "crony capitalism" actually understanding what capitalism even is.

[piusxijinping-deactivated201408]

indielowercase replied to your post: children of men is like watching an old british…

i cried, but i was drunk and thinking about anarchists i know.

i will probably cry if i watch it again and then feel like a trot and

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i want to watch with john zerzan and see his head explode...

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"but seriously i was reading dolce and gabbana's anti oedipus and then i was drinking too much coffee and then i wanted to tell you something"

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"That is, even as [Thomas] Frank explains compellingly how the rich and powerful have exploited the disappointment and frustration of working- and middle-class America, this explanation hews to a model of objective interests on one side and ideological obfuscation and manipulation on the other. Thus it resurrects a certain political hopefulness through the worn figure of 'false consciousness' and eschews the more troubling possibility of an abject, unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation amongst a significant swathe of the American populace." - Wendy Brown, "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization"

isn't it even worse than this though? isn't the real issue that the "objective interests" of the white, suburban working class have been produced in the context of a perceived threat to the racial mode of accumulation that has delivered modest but real material gains to white workers on the basis of their whiteness? if, as hall says, in racially stratified social formations "race is the modality through which class is lived," then perhaps "kansans" (a metonym for this white suburban voting bloc) are being eerily consistent with their objective interests and voting to maintain the material basis of white supremacy--rhetorically filtered through "American values." this would mean collapsing our base and superstructure model and seeing the extraction of surplus value as always both economic--via the labor process--and extra-economic (in perry anderson's terms) or political--via the structuring of the sociospatial division of labor along racial lines.

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think how different "ideology and ideological state apparatuses" would have been if the policeman interpellated you with "you there?" instead of "you there!"

wait maybe not that different...

[jayaprada]

Then there is the other side of the story: Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent. College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled. So it should not be surprising that most Venezuelans would reelect a president who has improved their living standards. That’s what has happened with all of the leftist governments that now govern most of South America. This is despite the fact that they, like Chávez, have most of their countries’ media against them, and their opposition has most of the wealth and income of their respective countries.

Why Chávez Was Re-elected

I’m shocked that NYT would publish this.

(via basedbrezhnev)

wow, it's almost as though the new york times sought out someone who knew more than one fact about venezuela and asked them to write about the election. almost like a real newspaper would.

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eleven theses on jerry orbach.

[rhizombie]

For all their performative display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt now-extant urban-policy orthodoxies, based on inter local competition, place marketing, property- and market-led development, gentrification, and normalized sociospacial inequality. But more than this, creativity discourses provide an entrée into some of the (imagined and real) everyday spaces of neoliberalization. The much-celebrated hipster subjects of the creative class are not only self-absorbed but self-managing individuals, trading on innate talent in a world of cosmopolitan competitiveness. A far cry from the tweedy intellectuals who met at Mont Pelerin, they are new-age neoliberals, dressed in black.

Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason

lolllll hipsters as the vanguard of neoliberalism this is great

(via rhizombie)

haha my dissertation is basically this + bikes. also jamie peck is the best, one time i drove him to the airport at 5 am then erin and i ate waffles.

[deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics]

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.

great analysis, I’m rethinking my whole life b/c of this one passage, you really nailed me

plot twist: i’m sitting at a kitchen table

(via spookedonsemiotics)

haha wait this wasn't from a random word generator? i think the last time i heard capitalism "defamed" in the mainstream media it was the year nineteenthirtyNEVER...

[frightfulhobgoblin-deactivated2]

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haha if only this were the case, instead of a petty squabble over the window dressings of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie...