The Last Paragraph Is The Worst Part. It's Chilling That Anyone Would Be Impressed By-and Offer A Job

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

Pretty sure that the massive industrialization experienced largely by the North, and the development of a complex state apparatus suited to the demands of the century is what allowed the US to become a world power. I doubt that agrarian landowners, many of whose activities actually disrupted peaceful economic and social reconstruction (such as the Klan and assassinating the president who had, all things considered, treated them with a decent amount of mercy) were in any way responsible for healing the divide post-Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the greatest US President because he led the nation through civil war, he’s the greatest because he lead the nation through civil war and then managed to completely prevent the numerous atrocities that oftentimes follow civil wars where the winning side proceeds to utterly annihilate the losers through systematic persecution/extermination.

Abraham Lincoln’s vision of unconditional forgiveness for the South (which admittedly took some time to enact and didn’t truly come to fruition until the Grant administration and the end of Reconstruction) is what enabled America to quickly recover from the war and go on to become a major world power by the turn of the century.

This feels the same as saying "why would a revolutionary oppose cutting welfare, this will just anger the proles and leave them with nothing left to lose!" People would probably react to mandatory service/conscription the same way they react to most hardship; with passivity and obedience rather than full revolt.

Many countries have mandatory service and it doesn't seem to have made them any more rebellious. Arguably the mandatory service of, for example, Israel and South Korea only serve to entrench their nationalist cultures (and in South Korea, it seems to play no small part in fueling a bitter and resentful mens' movement/backlash to feminism).

I think expecting a soldiers' revolt in today's world is to ignore that the best example we have (revolutionary Russia) only happened in the context of many millions of peasant soldiers being thrown into a horribly unpopular war for a government that many of them had never even heard of before. Many peasants did not even consider themselves Russians, and it still took tremendous slaughter before they began to seriously revolt in large numbers.

Finally, as an American I'm very loath to support any policy that would encourage anyone to join and support the military. Growing up in the War on Terror, a lot of people spoke positively about mandatory military service and I don't think that that program, if enacted, would have resulted in anything other than further suffering for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

i’ve made this post and argued about this before but i don’t get if you’re a revolutionary (of basically any stripe) why you would oppose mandatory military service—what could possibly be better than the state paying for training your future cadres and the people being just one seized armoury away from resembling an actual force—the point of all revolutionary movements is to start and win a civil war and somehow the volunteer service model is going to make that easier

also obviously conscripts are going to be easier to radicalise into defection than volunteers

Carol Cohn, 1987

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)

Humans : correct in making leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure : wealth ultimately is extension of desires, fluctuating with emotions and state of mind. Desires : when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved.

-Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"

7 Points of Green Accelerationism

this is maybe the most coherent political ideology I’ve ever had, I’m kind of excited: 1) Climate change is irreversible.  There is no way - other than an arbitrarily restrictive and probably needlessly difficult exercise in self-terraforming - we are going to return to anything resembling a “natural” Earth system.  If there are specific aspects of the current ecosystem we would wish to conserve - such as biodiversity, temperate weather, specific local equilibria - we must isolate them from any presumed set of “natural” interrelations and figure out how to influence new conditions to maintain and generate them in new ways.  2) Climate change is not a crisis based on scarcity or depletion of resources for consumption. It is quite literally a surplus of productive solar energy in the Earth system which its current structures are inadequate to use productively or expend, and which unused can only destroy.  Some proportion of solar energy must always be wasted (Bataille), and our current systems have little or no effective control of this waste; where they do, the forms it takes are not desirable. The “accursed share” must be decided on and disposed of collectively and rationally; the share that can be used productively can and should be maximized.  Climate change can and should be seen as a positive opportunity; attempts to simply “mitigate” instead of harnessing it are not only doomed but regressive. 3) In a non-orthogonal, unconditional sense, all of this (the Anthropocene, the formation of radically new systems of energy circulation) will inevitably happen regardless of our efforts.  The goals of “Green Accelerationist” praxis, therefore, should be understood in strictly political terms (and from my stake in this comes in, leftist ones: the capacity for productive energy use and the right to a say in destructive expenditure should be fairly distributed, not only among humans but, as far as possible, throughout the biosphere as a whole).  However the most effective methods for achieving those goals will likely be found as far from the “political” as currently understood as possible.  All present “political” institutions - states, activist organizations, - are as obsolete as the ecological ones, and will only drain any energy invested in them.  The “economic”, as a direct site of energy circulation, is a more useful site of contestation, and traditional working class tactics of organization and disruption will likely remain valuable tools for redirecting energy into more sustainable cycles.  However, the “technical” (including not only positive acts of production, but hacking and sabotage) will become a probably more important site of political contestation, as well as (to an extent identical) the “ecological” itself.  Different technologies will open radically different political and ecological prospects - and different social deployments of technologies conversely must be thought of as technically, not only politically, different.  Technology, ecology and politics are no longer feasibly separable: they are all concerned with directing energy circulation at a global scale. 4) Technical development as a form of praxis must not be allowed to be monopolized by existing institutions such as corporations, universities and governments, which determine its current “political” character.  We must not treat the control of technology by obsolete and reactionary forms as a politically neutral fact whose products are then to be harnessed and regulated by a separate “politics”, as in naive forms of “ecomodernism”.  Control of the means of research and development is as if not more important to political outcomes in the near term than control of existing means of production.  Making scientific research widely accessible is perhaps the most significant struggle currently being fought; it should be understood as the minimal precondition for almost any effective ecological praxis. 5) Green Accelerationism should be distinguished from naive ecomodernism, not only in its radical approach to the specific conditions of technical development, but in adopting a general critique of extractivism.  Extractivism is a specific, dangerous, ineffective and inherently reactionary technical, ecological and political formation that treats vast swathes of sophisticated circulatory infrastructure purely as sites of energy extraction for a small set of processes.  Extractivism should not be conflated with technology itself, whose role is now to design as many new mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships as possible. 6) Green Accelerationism should strive not only for interdependence but independence, not only for humans or an economic or national elite but for as many living beings as possible.  With a large energetic surplus and sophisticated, redundant social, political & ecological technologies permitting a wide multiplicity of sustainable relationships, the coercive dimension of ecological interrelation (understood by the Enlightenment as “nature”) can be minimized. Nor should we limit our sights to the “terrestrial”.  Access to the resources, energy and literal space of the rest of the universe would increase the flexibility and resilience of systems on Earth to change, as well as allowing greater individual independence for individuals.  Clean space travel is an ideal non-destructive outlet for excess energy that cannot be redirected into circulation on Earth. 7) The category of “ecology” resolves the antinomy of “praxis” and “anti-praxis” posed by the Unconditional Accelerationists.  No single element, including the human, within an ecological process can direct it, but ecological relationships are always reciprocal, even if unintentionally: struggling to adapt and struggling to influence are the same.  Green Accelerationism, however, emphatically rejects the claims that powerful nonlinear, nonhuman processes are incomprehensible - perhaps by humans, but the act of comprehension itself can be ecologically distributed - and that (extractive) “technocapital” is out of all of these inevitably the most powerful, except insofar as any combination of energy and intelligent organization is “technocapital”, a definition that obscures the territorialization of energy flows at present by a specific extractive class that is inadequate to the force it has unleashed.  Technocapital is not the genie, it is the bottle. The unharnessed share of solar energy increasingly exceeds that enclosed in existing “technocapital”.  Whoever or whatever controls this share controls the future.  

But prisons ARE a solution to interpersonal harm. The whole point of prisons is to give victims (and society at large) a choice between "murder" and "do nothing". There are some actually-existing prison systems that maximize the safety and welfare of prisoners while also accomplishing the basic purpose of prison- neutralizing the ability of its inhabitants to inflict suffering on other citizens without recourse. The US does not have one of these systems, sadly, but better prison systems are not just a fantasy. They could be achieved in a short time.

Also, "who decides who is an abuser? What about false accusations?" These questions can be answered by the court system and the rule of law. Again, very few countries (if any) have a truly fair and democratic justice system in practice, but it is possible to minimize false prosecution whilst ensuring that people who commit terrible crimes are disincentivized to do so again.

Prison abolition isn’t a solution to interpersonal harm. It’s meant to be a solution for the violence of prisons.

Laws against feeding the homeless remind me of a recent conversation I had about the "Nordic model" of prostitution where Johns/customers are arrested but the prostitutes are left unpenalized: it's breathtakingly hypocritical, and the moral contradictions within bourgeois liberalism are evident. Apparently lawmakers believe that a woman is not oppressed when she is forced by circumstance to sell herself on the street to pay for rent and groceries, but only when the proper individual oppressor (a man) buys her services. (What about woman who hire female prostitutes, or male-on-male sex work?) Similarly, a person is not oppressed by homelesness, exposure to the elements, or the likely accompanying drug addiction, mental illness, and despair, but God forbid we violate any hygiene laws while feeding them!

You know what makes me mad? I used to work at Pizza hut and everyday we would have to throw away perfectly good pizza or potato wedges or garlic bread in the bin because it was the wrong order or the customer had changed their mind. They made us bin the whole thing. We weren’t allowed to put it aside to eat from or take it home (we all earned minimum wage so it’s not like we culd afford pizza that expensive a lot). But what makes me even madder is that they could easily give that to the homeless or poor. Like, if a homeless person came into the store, we could have easily given him one of the 20 or so pizzas that we would be binning every single day anyway. Imagine all the pizza hut stores in the world. Imagine each and every one throwing away on average 20 pizzas a day. Imagine how many people that would feed. Fuck corporations man.

Economic competition has also intensified to the point where shitty work conditions can happen without any real interference or conscious directions from the higher ups; all you need is the misery that comes from trying to adjust to constant, rapid technological change, the pyschological pressures of marketing in the digital age, and managing customer satisfaction in an era of instant gratification. More than ever, your boss is probably just as miserable as you, if not even worse off, which leads to a perverse kind of vertical solidarity where people identify more with their superiors than with their counterparts in different industries.

This is a thing I’ve kinda danced around saying a lot, and when the time comes for me to give my full-ass explanation it’s probs gonna be pages long but for now I’m gonna see if I can give a smaller but more functional example.

a problem, I think, with some of the more sloganeering parts of communist talkin’ on here is the image of “the boss.” The image where anyone at your job who’s higher than the lowliest pleb and/or your current job status is a cigar-chomping, pocketwatch-wearing tycoon, with a schedule that just says “laugh + roll in money.”

Which boss? My supervisor? The guy doing the exact same work as I am when he isn’t busy taking calls? My other supervisor, the retirement-age woman working two jobs and 60+ hour weeks on her feet to cover living expenses? You’d have to go two or three steps up the chain of command before you got to what was basically a mediocre office job with decent pay, and is that really the face of the traitorous capitalist bourgeois class?

I mean make no mistake, the very top of the chain – the people who owned the business – were, for all intents and purposes, a hereditary monarchy, whose every interaction with us had a distinct air of “happy now, peasants?”  but “my boss” and “company CEO” are not synonyms.

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.