Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 100%

Ultras are a hoot, man

I just had one tell me Lenin was a liberal lmao. Like, sorry he prioritized moving out of semi-feudalism over ending currency and commodity production, I guess he should’ve just left life expectancy at 30 as long as everyone was equally poor, right?

chat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 95%

我非常爱吃红烧牛肉

我吃红烧牛肉的时候，我觉得我再在中国。你们最爱吃什么吃饭？你会说普通话吗？我只说一点点，虽然我觉得中文的语法很难但是我爱学习中文。

chapotraphouse Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 100%

Myth: The End of History (Hyper-Imperialism) w/ Mikaela Nhondo Erskog

blackmyths.libsyn.com

Another great podcast from the Black Myths Pod, this time on Hyper-Imperialism, global blocs, and development. If you don’t already follow these dudes, you should.

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 100%

Where do y'all get your books? What ya reading right now?

I stopped using Amazon a while back, but it was where I got all my books for a long time. I do thriftbooks mostly now, and try to buy directly from publishers when it’s a newer book, but I’m always interested in finding new spots to cop some sweet books.

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 96%

Lmao coming back to the us from China...

Is just such a shock from being in China. Just got harassed and essentially threatened for being a socialist. They searched my bags and commented on my China flag and my little red books and my copy of Blackshirts and Reds. Fucking police state. The security in China is strict, but they don’t give a fuck about your thoughts, whereas this guy was very aggressive about “consequences” for being a socialist.

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 98%

The East is Still Red, and I'm up at 4am because of jetlag

God damn I fucking love China. It is so nice here. Little things, like sidewalks being wider, make such a huge difference. Tomorrow I’m going to the tomb of the second Khan of the Jing Dynasty and first emperor of the Qing dynasty. It’s literally just chilling in a public park, and you pay like ¥5 to go inside and check it out. So much history just bursting at the seams, and yet it still feels so much more modern than my home state in many ways.

Antiwork Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 99%

eBay Deleted Support for Unions From Its Website After Its Workers Unionized

www.vice.com

They’ve also been sandbagging negotiations for the last 9 months, the union today is on a march, no strike action yet.

effort Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 100%

Reflections

From a discord discussion I had with a liberal friend. There is no -> arrow of progress to humanity, there’s no direction to it but what we make. It’s not inevitable that societies end up centralized and authoritarian and industrialized. The conception of savagery needs to be re-examined, because much of the sustainable knowledge of the earth was lost in the European drive to “civilize” and industrialize the world. As the Amazon is burning, we’re actually discovering entire civilizations, with roads, monumentalism, and technologies centered around balance with nature rather than profit or violence, in addition to having decentralized food production, that was capable of supporting vast networks of people spanning great distances. Technology can be a boon to humanity, but I believe under our current system, investment into sustainability and long term health of humanity and the ecosystem is untenable. As a capitalist enterprise, you have *no choice* but to do whatever you can to improve margins. If you do not, your competition will, and they will drive you out of business. This is an accepted law of economics, though most people don’t know that it comes from Das Kapital. To understand the current economic system and the driving forces behind it, only a materialist dialectical view encompasses enough nuance to have any chance of explaining things. So if we start with the Labor Theory of Value, which I can’t explain in a discord comment, but can at least summarize.. Starting with some terms: >Labor Power: Marx: “aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being” Labor: The work that adds value to raw material commodities. Labor is purchased by Capital for a wage based on time. It is *entirely necessary* that the wage does not meet the value produced by the labor, for if it did, there would be no profit. So there is inherently a *necessary* labor period in every wage workers day. This also means that there is necessarily a period where the worker produces excess value beyond what their wages entitle them to. This is known as Surplus Labor. Raw materials used up and energy inserted into a commodity do not create new value but simply transfer their value to the product. In the machines, and factories themselves, this value transfer is shown as wear and tear, and is expressed as depreciation. The only value added into the materials comes from the labor power itself. Even an “automated” production plant will eventually rust away without human intervention in the form of labor. So now that we know what surplus value is, we know also that the driving force behind capitalism is the production of surplus value. The creation of this surplus value comes in many ways, from speeding up machines, to creation of higher quotas, or extension of shifts, or by telling your warehouse workers to piss in bottles on your packaging floor, but no matter what, it comes from Labor Power. Since the surplus value is now located in the commodity, the capitalist must now sell that commodity to harvest both the necessary value to pay the workers, and the surplus value to pay himself. Now, we can get to “competition”, which, many would have you believe drives innovation, and they’re not totally wrong, but it drives innovation in methods of extracting value, not in sustainability nor ways that improve the health of the worker. Competition means that one *must* do that which lowers your costs to compete with the other capitalists who lower their costs, or one will not have a business any longer. This results in more and more exploitation of the working class and innovations in exploiting raw materials. In the dawn of the US, this necessitated the genocide of the natives to allow westward expansion, and the enshrinement of chattel slavery to ensure cheap labor power to create commodities. In the gilded age, this meant 12-16 hour days 6 days a week, debtors prisons, child labor exploitation, continued use of slave labor to build infrastructure. In the post modern age, this meant exporting as much labor as possible to nations who had not had labor revolutions. Today, it means making Amazon employees piss in bottles and FedEx drivers dying of heat stroke. All of the negative externalities of capitalism are inherent to the system. From the cyclical collapsing of the economy, to the continual erosion of labor rights, the expansionism and imperialism, and the hoarding of capital, they are not flaws in the system that can be reformed away, but inherent features. The collapsing of the economy allows for consolidation of capital by the elite(we’re seeing this happen in real time, right now), the erosion of labor rights allows for further surplus value creation, expansionism and imperialism allow for further exploitation of raw materials and labor and for the creation of new markets to sell their commodities. That’s before we even get to the conception of private property and land ownership, which inherently contains within it the Roman right to jus utendi et abutendi — The right to use *or abuse*, giving carte Blanche for atrocities to the environment all around the world for hundreds of years now. Then we can get to Mutual Aid, which is the driving force in humanity, and is directly what has allowed us to achieve such great things. Things like Salk refusing to patent Insulin, like radical resistance to the institution of slavery didn’t happen because of capitalism, but in spite of it. Humans are generally good, but when your system incentivizes sociopathy and individualism, it’s no wonder why our structures are breaking down. Infrastructure is declining not because we didn’t invest into it, but because the system *cannot* invest into it. Because the only times it has done so in the past were either for military purposes as the interstate system was(it was also purposefully targeted through minority communities) or to stave off revolution as was done in the new deal, where FDR explicitly told Capitalists they could either support the New Deal or they’d be facing the Bolsheviks within the decade. The few bits of infrastructure we get are poorly made, poorly maintained, and privatized to ensure continued profit extraction from the workers. Cars are still prioritized because they generate so much capital. Trains are more efficient, significantly faster, and can be made entirely sustainable outside of periodic battery replacements. Hundreds of millions of electric individual passenger vehicles is not efficient, not sustainable, still runs on rubber wheels, still relies on mass fossil fuel burning to cover peak charging, and does nothing to address the urban heat Island effect created by pavement roads taking up roughly 60% of cities. So now what are they pushing? Car sharing. Because we’ve progressed to the point of capitalism where the only way to ensure rising margins is to create “as a service” style scams that extract wealth in perpetuity for little to no investment. We’ve reached a point where there is no longer even a proletariat class in the United States. There is the Precariat, precariously perched one sick month from homelessness and suffering, that precariousness constantly serving as a reminder of what will happen should you choose not to conform.

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 92%

Why so war-brained, my fellow americans?

It’s so frustrating trying to talk to Americans about foreign policy. Most recently, we have all these stories about China stopping western warplanes from entering Chinese territory being spun as Chinese aggression. As if flying armed jets less than 100 miles off the coast of a country you threaten on a near-daily basis isn’t threatening them. No one even questions why these jets are flying so near Chinese airspace. What business does a Canadian jet have off the coast of China, other than to threaten and intimidate? I mean, the most recent one was literally *on a mission to intimidate North Korea*. Fucking frustrating.

youtu.be

I just found this band and I am in love with every song they do. It’s so elegant, and the composition is really on point.

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 97%

God this dude is just so damn articulate

Was going through my notes and came across this quote I saved from somewhere, might have been here honestly. Funny how we’re still dealing with this same conversation one and three quarters centuries later. Excerpt of *Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845* from the section titled "The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat" >Let no one believe, however, that the "cultivated" Englishman openly brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. But let us hear the English bourgeoisie's own words. It is not yet a year since I read in the Manchester Guardian the following letter to the editor, which was published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing: > >>"MR. EDITOR,– For some time past our main streets are haunted by swarms of beggars, who try to awaken the pity of the passers-by in a most shameless and annoying manner, by exposing their tattered clothing, sickly aspect, and disgusting wounds and deformities. I should think that when one not only pays the poor-rate, but also contributes largely to the charitable institutions, one had done enough to earn a right to be spared such disagreeable and impertinent molestations. And why else do we pay such high rates for the maintenance of the municipal police, if they do not even protect us so far as to make it possible to go to or out of town in peace? I hope the publication of these lines in your widely- circulated paper may induce the authorities to remove this nuisance; and I remain,– Your obedient servant, "A Lady." > >There you have it! The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!" It is infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois! And so writes "A Lady"; she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to call herself a woman! But if the "Ladies" are such as this, what must the "Gentlemen" be? It will be said that this is a single case; but no, the foregoing letter expresses the temper of the great majority of the English bourgeoisie, or the editor would not have accepted it, and some reply would have been made to it, which I watched for in vain in the succeeding numbers. And as to the efficiency of this philanthropy, Canon Parkinson himself says that the poor are relieved much more by the poor than by the bourgeoisie; and such relief given by an honest proletarian who knows himself what it is to be hungry, for whom sharing his scanty meal is really a sacrifice, but a sacrifice borne with pleasure, such help has a wholly different ring to it from the carelessly-tossed alms of the luxurious bourgeois. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 80%

Any comrades who speak chinese here? 这里有人说汉语吗

I’m learning Chinese, and would love to have some people to chat with. I’m not good, for sure, but I really enjoy it a lot! 你好叫我BartsBigBugBag！我是美国人，我是社会主义者。我明年希望去中国陆游。我是学生的汉语。你说汉语吗？你怎么样？你现在做什么？你明白我的汉语吗？谢谢你！

Comradeship // Freechat Bartsbigbugbag • Now • 97%

Random Parenti Quote I transcribed at work while listening to the Michael Parenti collection podcast

…I think that reveals something about the hidden class dimensions of our public policy; our grocery bills are determined, the policies, determined by people, who themselves never go to supermarkets. Our health policy is written out y people who never have to sit for 2 hours in a clinic or an hour in a doctors office. Our transportation policy is made by people who never have to wait for a bus or look for a parking space, they’ve got helicopters and linos to hurry them away. Our education policy is made by people who never have to send their children to public school, they send them to private schools(cough polis cough). Our daycare system, or lack of, determined by people who use private governesses and Nannies, and then go off to Smith College as Barbara Bush did, and lectured to the students there about not being so concerned about accomplishing in your careers and understand that the real joy and satisfaction is in the working and nurturing of children… … occupational safety laws are made by people who never have to work in a factory or mine. The Supreme Court has ruled that wildcat strikes are illegal, a “violation of contract.” In coal mines , wildcat strikes are the workers only defense against occupational hazards that can be disastrous in a day. You’re going down a mine and you see a foreman detach an alarm wire, that rings the alarm if there’s too much smoke buildup, because he’s got a quota to meet that day and he doesn’t want to stop for smoke buildup, so you stop and go on wildcat strike. Well, the Supreme Court, none of whom have been NEAR a factory in their lives, or NEAR a mine, and wouldn’t know one end of a mine from another, legislate and say, “as long as there’s a grievance procedure (grievances take a week, two weeks, a month….)That wildcat actions are a “violation of contract and the union must be fined.” You see? The policy is being made by people who don’t experience *the thing*. -Michael Parenti, transcribed by hand from a random speech