CleverOleg

The NYC mayor's race is the most watched political race in the US right now, by a large margin too (I guess the second most is Prop 50 in CA? Either way that one is way behind). After Tuesday, Zohran's win will probably be the big story that normies IRL will be talking about here. "Socialism" will be a topic on top of everyone's minds.

And I think everyone here - even if you have major issues with Zohran specifically or electoralism in general - should be ready to speak to it among the people in your life.

Opportunities like this don't come around very often. Right now Americans are getting a ton of misinformation about what socialism is due to a demsoc running and very likely winning the job of mayor of the biggest city in the US. On top of that, this misinformation is transparently bad ("Zohran wants to sieze all the grocery stores in New York!") that if you simply point to what's actually being proposed, you will look pretty knowledgeable by comparison. This is all very low hanging fruit.

But you have to be prepared. Like literally, you should practice how you will respond to people who want to talk to you about Mamdani and socialism. The other day, AcidSmiley made a comment that I've been thinking about ever since: she said she had to deradicalize herself a bit from this site because she was having trouble interacting with normal people and not sounding like she was unhinged. I absolutely do this too. Whenever a topic tangential to socialism or imperialism comes up with people IRL, I end up overshooting. I scare people away even if they have a sense that I'm right. What I say sounds totally reasonable to us here, but to people who aren't engaged with stuff it doesn't matter how correct you are; if you can't meet them where you are they will tune you out.

So for me, today and tonight I'm gonna skim through Ha-Joon Chang's "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism". It's not straight Marxist analysis but it's written for the people I'll be talking to. I'm also going to try and brush up on my knowledge of Zohran's specific policies (like freezes on rent for rent controlled apartments, that seems to be one everyone brings up and I don't feel I know enough about it).

For those of you who are strongly against Zohran or electoralism.... do whatever you want ofc, but I'm just saying if a normie asks you about Zohran and you say "he's just a social fascist" and scoff, then that will be a missed opportunity. People will have no idea what you are talking about and frankly probably won't be interested in hearing more.

Of all the many awful Trump policies since 2017, this policy of limiting the number of refugees to around 7,000 next year and essentially only allowing in white South Africans, in some ways this one really stands out to me. Even if it’s not the most racist policy, it’s the most obviously racist policy he’s done yet. There can be no explanation for it other than blatant racism. There is an extreme humanitarian crisis going on in Sudan right now - to where anyone who believes in even a strict definition of what makes a “refugee” would agree that anyone coming from Sudan should be given refuge. And yet, they’re blocked and white South Africans are not?

What bugs me too is how NO ONE in the media and the supposed “opposition” is pushing back on this or highlighting how racist it is. Media is just reporting it and I have yet to see anyone go deeper, challenge it, or call it out for what it is. Totally shameful.

My wife mentioned that her aunt wanted to buy our kids some history books. Come to find out, it was the fucking Tuttle Twins take on US history. I shot that down pretty quick, but realized my kids have zero US history books on their shelf. Because it's honestly really hard to find history books that don't, for example, glaze the founding fathers, downplay genocide and slavery, or portray the USSR as the "bad guys" in the cold war.

So I'm trying to find what I can, and it's a bit challenging. Most actual leftist history books for kids are more for that older kid / pre-teen age group, and my kids are still little. Does anyone know of some good US history books for kids? While I'd love an actual Marxist, historical materialist perspective, afaik no one's written that for little kids yet. I would settle for a more "liberal / progressive" take on US history so long as it's largely factual and avoids the reactionary crap most US history books for kids fall into.

I did find this Honest History Magazine that seems interesting, if anyone's familiar with it. They have a book on economics that from the little information provided, includes a correct definition of capitalism and talks about a time before capitalism, so right there it seems more correct that most.

If you are part of an org in the US (PSL, DSA, FRSO et al), I think this is just the sort of thing you should be helping to organize for in your community.

Are any of you part of orgs or know orgs that are doing this work? If so can you mention them here?

It turns out my position is on track to be unionized. I’m honestly pretty excited about this - not just for the benefits, but for the possibility of doing agitation and doing whatever I can to develop class consciousness.

The only thing is, I don’t know where to even start. Does anyone here know of some good resources for how to agitate and organize within a union structure.

It’s the Teamsters so not exactly a radical group to begin with, and this is doubly so with my immediate co-workers who are in the Local that I will be a part of.

Any help is appreciated.

I get that there are three things this site will think I should be ashamed of:

1. Using Alexa
2. Using Spotify
3. Being a Collective Soul fan

I will accept criticism of the first two, but not the third. I’m a loud and proud Collective Soul fan, I’ve been to at least 10-12 of their concerts, they rock

We have an Amazon Echo. My wife got one and loves it as do my kids so I’m stuck with it. I hate Spotify as the CEO is a huge Zionist. I plan on migrating to Deezer or something once I get around to copying my playlists.

Anyway, since I was cooking I grudgingly decided to use Alexa to play some Collective Soul. Shouldn’t be a problem, they just had the most #1 Alterative Rock hits on Billboard during the 90s (not a typo) and over 3.8 million monthly users.

I said the precise statement into the Echo speaker:

“Alexa, plays songs by Collective Soul on Spotify”

The response was “playing songs by Machine Soul Collective”

I tried a few different variations of the same statement, and each time Alexa directed me to this Machine Soul Collective “band”.

Turns out it’s just AI generated slop “music” with only a few thousand monthly listeners.

So what gives here? Why is Alexa not playing music from a major band and instead directing me to AI slop? Is this intentional? Do they make more money by not paying royalties to an actual band? I don’t know but this is really bugging me.

It is one position that seems to cross ideological lines. It’s like literally everyone other than people who are very invested in the stock market (and even then) really want to see this thing crash and crash hard.

As someone who lived through and lost a job during the GFC, I think a bit of this is not realizing how bad an economic crash is even if you don’t think it will affect you much. It will. Some people think the residential real estate market will crash too and they can finally buy a house. But that’s hard to do when either you’ve lost your job or your job feels so precarious that you really don’t feel safe emptying your savings and taking out a mortgage. Or if you have a “safe” job, you think you can weather the storm. But in a depression, there are very few “safe” jobs.

But with that caveat aside, I think things are different now because so many people are struggling and barely getting by with their current employment situation. Life already feels so precarious, might as well throw a spanner into the works and see what happens. And that part feels very different than in the run up to the GFC. It affects everyone, regardless of political ideology.

Of course now I’m convinced that because it’s something everyone is expecting and wants to see happen, it will never actually happen. US will just limp along with high inflation, no job growth, and everyone getting slowly squeezed for years.

Last year the critters ate like all but one of the fruit. This year my tree finally exploded with fruit, I won’t be able to get it all off the tree. I’m gonna freeze a few pounds of arils and throw them into my smoothies all year.

Part of me feels the fact that EVERYONE is saying that there’s a huge AI bubble makes me wonder if there’s actually a possibility there isn’t an AI bubble. Because I was around for the dot com and GFC bubbles and no one (not really) saw those coming. Also, China is pretty much doing everything right these days, and they seem to believe in AI too.

And I’m not against AI in any and all forms. Like, I think there’s huge potential in translating foreign languages. I think it would be cool if people could talk in their native languages but have AI translate things perfectly - which I understand is something AI can do. There are some simple functions in my job (like searching through and summarizing things from our very massive list of policies). But even thinking about the absolute best case scenarios for AI, I can see how the current expectations are even close to what the reality can be.

So what is the argument that we’re not in a bubble, even if we don’t actually believe it?

I just think this is neat. I highly recommend turning on the music and setting it to full screen. Only works for US locations. But they recreated the 90s Weather Channel vibe perfectly.

I’m a fan of Marxist poster C_Plot on Reddit. I’ve gained a lot of good insights from them. Here, they talk about what fascism is/isn’t, but not in a way that excludes other angles on it imo. Link to Reddit in the post but I’m copying & pasting the whole comment here so you don’t have to go there to see it. Overall I agree but would love to hear your takes.

Fascism is not at all an ideology. Fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical class-rule. So fascism is not extreme capitalism. However, fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical capitalist class rule with a rise in the conscious of the oppressed classes. In feudalism, the ruling class rule by divine right. The bourgeois revolutions shattered that and promoted the view that “all are created equal”.

Republicanism (even in a stunted constitutional monarchy form), along with legislative supremacy, threatens the reign of the capitalist ruling class unless either the working class submits obsequiously to capitalist tyranny OR the franchise of the working class can be diverted into basal hatreds and bigotries through the tactic of fascism. If the working class remains steeped in obsequiousness, the capitalist tyrants can maintain the myth of rule of the People and republicanism. However as consciousness rises, even slightly, and the working class becomes conscious of themselves as an oppressed class, the ruling class panics and promotes hatreds and bigotries toward a cultivated out-group set and promises to smite the members of that out-group.

Those anti-Agápē hatreds and bigotries come to dominate what passes for civic discourse. Instead of government administering our common resources and addressing our common concerns, as civic discourse, the hatreds and bigotries of the out-group members and the hyper oppression of the out-group eclipses all genuine civic discourse. The fascist tactic allows the capitalist ruling class tyrants to maintain their rule while maintaining the semblance of a republic (though recently a return to divine right for tyrants is being promoted too).

Therefore capitalism cannot sustain itself without the docility of oppressed classes or instead the panic and pervasive deployment of the fascist tactic. That is not about societal decay but the decay of the tyrannical reign of the capitalist ruling class itself. So fascism is entirely about the capitalist counterrevolution reaction to the socialist call for advancing the bourgeois revolutions beyond capitalist tyranny.

We have been conditioned, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, to accept fascism as the very water in which we swim. Fascism was the result of the Great Depression, not because of the downturn in the economy itself but because of meager advances in working class consciousness. It’s just that the fascist tyrants demanded we never use the proper moniker to delineate what they had imposed upon us (rampant ridicule of those using the term “fascist” as if it is absurd to use the term when instead it is entirely appropriate).