Tag: leftism

Comrades not Allies or Benefactors.

I don’t trust anyone whose interest in my liberation isn’t to some extent self interest. Charity is always from above. I trust men who want the liberation of women because patriarchy fucks everyone over, but women more, and they know they can’t achieve their own liberation in any meaningful sense without us. I trust those who do not seek to alleviate their sense of guilt for their superior social position but instead seek to demolish the structures that create it because they harm them too. I am opposed to racism within the white working class not simply because it is morally repugnant, but also because I know that the liberation of the working class cannot come when we fall prey to their divide and rule tactics, and that the group the ruling class have placed on top has to be the one to extend the olive branch, the ones who have to say “No, I will stand beside you, not above you” before we can have true solidarity. Demanding solidarity with your boot on someone’s throat is no way to be their comrade.

It is those who have power within the working class who keep it divided, not some recalcitrance on the part of the most oppressed

Exchange Is Irrational

Also like an exchange based system is just releasing humans to spray their irrational concepts of value all over eachother.  I mean I know I am an incredibly irrational actor.  I buy prestige brand cosmetic items I KNOW don’t work any better and own SO many different eyeshadow palettes with essentially the same colors.

I also keep buying tide laundry detergent even though I know it’s not functionally any different but I *feel* like it works better and I would stop refusing to buy better glass tupperware because I saw a really good price for it once and am waiting for a price on a par with that to crop up again.

I would stop buying expensive clothes on sale in weird colors that go with nothing I own because I feel like I’m getting a bargain and pay someone to repaint my bedroom instead of refusing to admit I’ll never do it myself.

Like we’re irrational.  Rationality is something we have to rationally consider and decide to do and is almost never an emergent phenomenon resulting from us just kinda… all making choices.

Also like exchange is us coming up with a terrible, disastrously bad system for distributing goods and services to where they need and attempting to compare the value of things not easily compared while ignoring all sorts of factors and UGH no exchange is terrible and we can come up with a better distribution system than that.

Classical Economic Theory Works So Beautifully if You Fail To Account For People Being People

Markets might sorta work if we were rational actors, but we’re not.  We just aren’t, the invisible hand of the market is guided by mass human irrationality which is why it keeps smearing shit all over the walls and putting tiny chefs hats on geese.  And like the thing is the system is so irrational that even if *you* are rational it forces you to act irrationally to survive within it.  

Like what we’ll pay for something or agree to be paid for shit has SO much more to do with prior experience, the lighting and a bunch of other bizarro factors than it does with laws of “supply and demand” and shit.

This is why behavioral economics is a crucially important field.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely covers this really well but his conclusions are really liberal (and wrong) but he lays out a bunch of studies that point out some interesting shit.

I Don’t Believe In Markets, I Don’t Believe In Exchange

One of the reasons I distrust systems where people doing “valuable” work get paid more (even under a supposedly socialist system) is that there are so many types of unpaid, unacknowledged forms of labor done by oppressed people that are vital to the functioning of society but are rarely if ever really acknowledged as valuable and like some of these are forms of labor some or many of us are cool with providing, but we just want them to be acknowledged as valuable skills that not everyone has, and like I just don’t trust society to start acknowledging them because we have a “socialist” system.

Like emotional labor, domestic labor, aesthetic and logistical labor to just make things “nice”, being the ones who think of shit like “oh people will want the stiffer paper plates for the sloppy joes” or whatever, like it doesn’t seem that necessary until you try to run anything without someone thinking about that shit and then your event and space is a mess and no one wants to be there or be involved.
The nice little touches, feminized stuff, aesthetic stuff, supposedly impractical shit about making spaces and experiences just a little more pleasant actually makes a world of difference.

Feminized labor is like the User Experience department of the entire world and you better fucking respect the UE department, but also like I think there are so many tiny little things we’ve never thought of as “real labor” that I don’t trust anyone to catch every little act that needs to be compensated and so you’ll still have the valorized fields getting paid extra and those of us who are just quietly expected to get the coffee dealing with everyone’s shit.

My May Day Speech

May Day became a labor holiday in 1886, when police opened fire on a peaceful picket line during a general strike for the 8 hour day. It became a labor holiday in memorial to the four anarchist labor leaders who were hung for their participation, for the one who killed himself with a dynamite blasting cap, for the countless more who spent years in prison all so that workers across the world would not have to sacrifice seeing their families in order to feed them.

On this day we commemorate all our martyrs, the lives and freedom lost in pursuit of a world free from exploitation and oppression, of a world where a worker’s value is more than merely what they produce, where humanity is valued more than productivity and where labor is entitled to all it creates.

But we are here 130 years after the Haymarket riots, not to commemorate a long dead past but to celebrate a living tradition of active resistance against the sovereignty of capital.

I am, as I believe many of us are, sick to death of passivity in the face of the tyranny of the wealthy few. I am not a student radical at a posh university looking towards a future in the democratic party or a cushy job managing an NGO. My politics will not soften with graduation. I am a highschool dropout, I am a sex worker. I am a rank and file union member. I am a simple woman and I am here with a simple message, it is time for us to organize and to fight back.

We are past the point where we can make nice with the powerful, as every right and protection won by the last great wave of the labor movement crumbles as a sand dune into the sea, we must admit that no election, no mild mannered wheedling, no woowoo good vibes bullshit will save us from the dire future we face. However in the face of these deteriorating conditions, a spark of hope remains, and that hope is the same hope that our predecessors knew in 1886. Working class rank and file organization is, as it always has been, our only hope and direct action our only possible weapon against the capitalist class who would grind us into dust if it would increase their margin of profit by a dime. So I ask you, fellow workers, to unite with me to kill what is killing us, not at some distant future “proper historical moment” but in the here and now.

Thank you.