The Petit-Bourgeoisie are like a smattering of small identity groups that have almost nothing in common with each other besides being excluded from power by the big Bourgeoisie, and trying to cobble them together is in order to oppose the big Bourgeoisie, or “trillionaires” or “billionaires” is going to end up having the exact same flaws as trying to create some kind of grand coalition of minorities. The proletariat by contrast can rule in its own right as a majority that can compose the entirety of society as opposed to just being a coalition of the excluded.

Some lament that their narrowly constructed idea of the proletariat are a minority due to deindustrialization, unlike some prior “golden era” where they would have composed the majority.

The thing is though that majorities are socially constructed as the leading group of society that in its self-conception is what makes up and can make up that society, with minorities just being whoever is “other” to the majority. Majorities can be constructed by having people join it based on common factors, and can be deconstructed by having people peeled off.

Proletariat-To-Be

The narrow definition of the proletariat need not be over 51% of the population and only then can it take over. For one thing the proletariat was not the majority in Russia, the peasantry were, but the majority of the proletariat were former Peasants who assimilated themselves into the Russian proletariat even though that previously did not exist. What were they assimilating into? That the proletariat was new when the Russian Revolution occurred didn’t not negate that the Russian Proletariat knew that they had once been peasants, and because of that the peasants could become them.

Arguably it was because they were new as a class that this idea came much more naturally to them. While the Peasants were the majority of Russian society it was easy for the Proletariat to imagine the Peasantry as Proletariat-To-Be, and thus through industrialization and urbanization and yes, collectivization despite the hiccups involved in that, they set out to transform society along their lines and they rapidly created a Proletarian Majority.

Proletarianization is often a traumatic process of the bourgeoisie enclosing upon the peasantry, but it is also sometimes just a matter of someone moving from their plot of land to look for work in the city. Oftentimes the Russian Proletariat still had some kind of land that they owned in some way as part of a village, it just often wasn’t productive enough to support an entire person. Their labour power was better used earning a wage in part of the year rather than working the less than the necessary amount of land needed to support them. That they were not “purely” a proletariat did not stop them from constructing a new majority of wage workers who focused on that novel aspect of themselves as opposed to focusing exclusively on their relation to that plot of land.

This new majority of wage workers was not yet a majority strictly speaking, but they believed they could be precisely because they themselves knew they had been once peasants and adapted to the new reality. And if peasants could become proletariat, why not bourgeoisie, or even nobles? Why accommodate those who could so readily become them instead?

What is the Third Estate?

Being a majority is less important than believing that one can constitute the majority. The bourgeoisie famously declared the third estate to be “everyone” on the basis that it was 98% of the population even as the majority of the third estate remained “passive citizens” without political rights.

The First and Second Estates were right to think it made no sense for the Third Estate to demand more votes than both of them combined considering that if the Bourgeoisie could claim to be able to vote on behalf of the “passive citizens” who worked for them, why the hell couldn’t Clergymen vote on behalf of their congregations, or nobles their subjects? The Third Estate countered by saying that because the Bourgeoisie had once been commoners within the peasantry but then rose to the rank of active citizen, that the passive citizens could be represented by them because they could all be conceived as being “bourgeois-to-be”, or at the very least it was technically possible for any commoner to be bourgeois while it was not possible to become a noble.

It was possible to become a clergyman though so that throws a wrench in the whole idea, but much focus was placed on the impossibility of commoners become nobles (even though you absolutely could buy your way into the nobility so even this distinction wasn’t impermeable). However what mattered is that the Bourgeoisie conceived of the Third Estate as a ready population that could become them and thus they, or those that would surely become them in time as the revolution progressed constituted a majority of 98% of the population, and while they were at it, why couldn’t a Clergyman or a Noble not just become like a bourgeois commoner too? All men were created equally after all.

Today we find ourselves in a situation where a whole bunch of people are not quite proletariat. Are we supposed to just adapt to that and figure out what the real majority is? Homeowners? People with mortgages? Service workers who make tips? This are all “kind of” petit-bourgeoisie, but also kind of proletariat. The problem is that even if we wanted to accommodate these smatterings of petit-bourgeoisie, how could we? They all have differing interests due to having differing relations to property in a system based on property. The proletariat, even if greatly diminished, has a near identical relation to property and therefore a near identical interest within a system based on property. Also much like the Russian Peasantry turned Proletariat for part of the year, they are at least close enough to the proletariat to understand what those interests are given they spend part of their time as a proletariat.

The key is simply assimilating these people into the Proletarian Majority.

“Networth”

The most common kind of property people might own is a house of some kind, and often that house is worth more than a million dollars because of inflation. It might be a normal house but a person has become a millionaire because they own it.

If one wants to be able to sell their home and get one million dollars for it then one views the thing they live in as private property and will defend the system fo private property. If someone has no interest in ever selling the place they live in then the market value of the home is irrelevant.

The reason it matters is that policies which increase the market values of homes are directly contrary to the interests of renters. Class struggle exists between property owners and non-property owners even for those that have a small amount of property. Is a person who purchased a house for one million dollars willing to be underwater on their mortgage when policies result in prices going down? It is possible to just abolish all debt to deal with those who are underwater, but are those who paid off their mortgage willing to advocate for such a policy?

The fact is that small property ownership complicates the political landscape by introducing a whole bunch of financial interests that might run contrary to other small property owners depending on the exact way one has small amounts of property. The proletariat, which in its ideal form is a wage worker who rents and therefore has no property at all, is the class we advocate for on the simple assumption that this theoretical (and also real) person has identical interests to all other people who fit into that category.

We do not advocate for people with networths below a certain amount, but instead we advocate for this particular kind of person because of the simplicity of determining what the interests of that person is, as this simplicity results in the largest possible block in society being formed, as opposed to trying to cobble together a bunch of small groups.

We have well studied the challenges of creating minority IDPOL coalitions and how doomed as an endeavour that is, and how just expecting that “the proletariat/communists” are expected to get onboard with this minority coalition in order to be a “heckin good person”. Structurally trying to create a coalition of small property owners which disparate interests and then expecting the proletariat/communists to get onboard with it is no different.

It isn’t on job to keep your circus together when we can just advocate for one singular group that vastly outnumbers everybody else in society.

Majoritaranism Of Class

The majoritarian implication here leads one to think that if one was an IDPOLer that we would then be Nationalists who are anti-minority groups. That would be true if we were IDPOLers, but we aren’t because in addition to thinking the notion of the “minority coalition” as being ridiculous and impractical, whether it is a coalition of random sets of small property owners or random identity groups, an additional critique beyond merely pointing out that minoritarianism will never work is that we also think that the purpose of IDPOL is to peel off sub-groups from a larger group in order to weaken it. The major reason that Fascism oppose Communism is precisely the opposite reason where they think that class struggle is a “trick” to weaken the nation, so might as well just say that national struggle is a trick to weaken the class if that is the proposal on the table.

The proletariat, the global proletariat, the largest majority group in the world is the one we advocate for. Even the largest group in the world, the Han Chinese who are roughly 20% of the global population, cannot hold a candle to the global proletariat in size. If however the proletariat are to be divided into groups the Han Chinese proletariat would be a majority of that 20%, which is nevertheless an impressive group, but it still isn’t as large as it could possibly be.

So we reject nationalism out of majoritarianism, because it doesn’t lead to the largest possible majority.

Our chief rejection of IDPOL is that we make the proposition that the interests of a wage worker who rents is identical regardless of any identity group they might belong to.

Now what if you aren’t a wage worker or a renter? That is fine, you might have things in common with wage workers who rent. One of those things you might have in common with them is that both you and the wage worker who rents is not a billionaire who is trying to engage in mass surveillance of society to prevent revolution. You can indeed work with people you have commonalities with, but given that wage workers who rent are the largest possible class in this proposed coalition, they should be the ones the small group adapt to rather than the other way around. The proletariat shouldn’t be the one being asked to accommodate small property owners, rather small property owners should be asked to accommodate the proletariat majority.

Assimilating Into The “Majority” Is What Defines What The Majority Is

Now are the proletariat in the sense of being wage workers who rent the absolute majority? Well, only 31% of Americans are renters, so splitting off non-renters from wage workers means that this theoretical group would actually be LESS than 31%.

Similarly are wage workers even the majority? There are plenty of weird employment situations that don’t count as wage work. For instance someone who works for tips makes a wage, but is also in some sense selling themselves, so they are running a business in a way. “No tax on tips” can actually be quite significant as certain people actually get quite a bit from tips.

So does everybody fit into this theoretical ideal? No, not everybody is a wage worker who rents. However, even someone who works for tips is ALSO a wage worker. To create an analogy with IDPOL, a service worker who gets paid a wage but can also earn tips is a bit like a mixed-race person where a portion of their ancestry is the majority group, but another portion is a minority group.

If you look at Brazil, the majority group is actually mixed race, but is it really a mixed-race country, or is it a white country where there are just a bunch of people who have an additional ancestry alongside a european (usually Portuguese) one?

Paraguay is an interesting alternative case as while Spanish is often used and the entire population is mixed-race (or at least that is the official story, maybe somebody doesn’t actually have some of the ancestries they think everybody is mixed with), the official language is a Native one called Guarani. Is this a “mixed-race” country, or is it a native country where people just have alternative ancestries? Or maybe they are just both white countries where people have some native ancestry, as Paraguay is notable for having accepted Spanish speaking immigrants to help repopulate after a war on the condition that they learn Guarani and thus the “mixed-race” Guarani speakers will often look “whiter” than the “mixed-race” populations of surrounding Latin-American populations who are darker despite speaking a European language such as Spanish or Portuguese.

Anyway, if you are not particular caught up with determine exact ancestry percentages, there is a concept of “which way do you assimilate?”. In Paraguay, the “white people” assimilate into a Native-language society, while in Brazil the “native” people assimilate into a European-language society. In that way Paraguay could be more “native” than Brazil even if you took a random ancestry sample of the population and it turned out that Paraguayans are actually genetically more European than Brazilians.

If people are assimilating towards the proletariat then we are in a proletariat lead society. Not everybody needs to be a “pure” proletariat to be a proletarian society or political movement.

So if you have people who have certain characteristics of a wage worker who rents identifying with those characteristics then they can fit into a proletarian lead political movement even if they have additional characteristics that don’t match. This can even work if the majority of the characteristics of the majority of the participants don’t fit into the characteristics that are deemed to be “majority”. Brazil is very clearly a majority Portuguese society if the criteria that is important is considered to be language even if the majority of the genetics of the majority of the population is not Portuguese.

“Peeling” Off People From Your New Majority

I very much like the idea of being the equivalent of “race supremacists” but for a class which is the wage workers who rent. If you understand the concept it can be a hilarious way of describing it but it does work. If a mixed race person “forgets” they have other ancestry they can be a race supremacist for one of the races they belong to. So too could a person be a class supremacist for a class they only partially belong to if they “forget” the characteristics of the additional class they belong to. It is just a matter of blocking out those portions of the person while they are doing politics, just as doing politics means blocking out portions of the persons.

“Blocking out portions of the population is exclusionary though!!!” Yes, and saying “trillionaires are not allowed” is ALSO exclusionary and is blocking out portions of the population even if that population is 1. You are excluding somebody. You might think that you get a bigger group by saying “anybody who isn’t a trillionaire is part of the included group” but what do non-trillionaires even have in common?

Musk, the trillionaire, is actually able to peel off portions of the non-trillionaire group to support him. One of the clearest ways is that the reason Musk is a trillionaire is because the value of SpaceX shares is considered to be high. Therefore even though he has the MOST SpaceX shares out of all of them, anyone who has SpaceX shares, including many crew workers who were given them a long time ago, has the SAME interest in those shares having a high value as Musk does.

Secondarily, anyone with shares in general has a general interest in the value of shares. The clearest version of this you will come across is people arguing that you can’t actually tax the value of shares because they aren’t real money because if you sold the shares in large quantities the value of the shares would go down because there are not that many buyers in comparison to the amount of shares that are owned.

Large portion of the American population own shares in retirement accounts, including many wage workers approaching retirement whose goal of “retirement” is in practice to transition from a wage worker to a bourgeois person of modest means, so all shareowners in generally can be “peeled” off from this “grand coalition against the trillionaire”.

This thing people say to “peel” people off is true, if you did tax the value of shares some of the shares would probably need to be sold to pay the tax, and this would result in the value of those shares plummeting, and revealing that Musk was never really a trillionaire in the first place, but also that large portions of the wealthy were never really wealthy in the first place too. Anyone whose wealth might be a tad inflated by the stupidity of investing in our era is going to be peeled off from trying to “eat the trillionaire”.

A solution to this would be to not tax the value of shares where the goal is to collect money, but instead one could actually just tax the shares themselves where someone would be required to hand off the shares they own as the tax. So this “solution” to the “trillionaire problem” is the government saying that Musk needs to give the government part ownership of SpaceX. Then the government could decide what to do with the shares (they wouldn’t want to sell them either as they too would crash the price if they did, so in practice the government would just permanently own a portion of SpaceX)

This is NOT communism, but rather would be State Capitalism, but State Capitalism is the thing States that were called Communist States did, so of all the things that get called Communism, this would be the least wrong thing to call Communism. It is also amusingly enough, something that is already happening as the American Government is increasingly becoming a shareholder in a large number of companies. Ironically too, you could call this Fascism as it was also something the Fascist governments did with that whole “Merger of State and Corporate Power” thing that people like to point to as a “definition” of Fascism, but if this is the criteria people are using they we are left in the akwards situation of all three of Communist States, Liberal Democracies, and Fascist Dictatorships all being Fascist, at which point the term stops being useful to describe a system, and instead it just because a descriptive term of our era. We live in the Fascist Era. Everything gets called Fascist because everything is Fascist. And in fact that is the point of Fascism, for everything to be Fascist. “Everything in the State, Nothing Outside the State” etc, so of course EVERYTHING would be Fascist when you live under Fascism, that is the whole point.

That, however, isn’t very useful as a descriptive term anymore, so we aren’t going to dwell too long on how everything is, in fact, Fascist, and the annoying people who call everything Fascist are correct as a result.

Anyway, the most reasonable solution to “abolishing tr/b/millionaires” is just to directly seize their wealth as “taxes”.

Mussolini, Liberal-in-Chief

As amusing anecdote, the most famous altercation between a Communist (Antonio Gramsci) and Fascists in Mussolini’s Parliament basically devolving into a quibble over how in Italy they imposed taxes, while in Russia they “stole”, with Gramsci taking the “taxation is theft” route.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/05/speech.htm

Gramsci: You promise a billion for Sardinia, you promise public works and hundreds of millions for the whole Mezzogiorno; but to do serious concrete work you should start by restoring to Sardinia the 100-150 million in taxes that you extort from the Sardinian population every year! You should restore to the Mezzogiorno the hundreds of millions in taxes which every year you extort from the Southern population.

Mussolini: You don’t impose taxes in Russia!

Voice: They steal in Russia, they don’t pay taxes!

Gramsci: That is not the question, honourable colleague, who should at least know the parliamentary reports on these questions which exist in the library. It does not deal with the normal bourgeouis mechanism of taxation: it deals with the fact that every year the state extorts from the Southern regions sums in taxes which it does not restore in any way, neither through services of any kind

Gramsci is of course saying that the Southern Italian peasantry is being taxed to pay for things which benefit the growth of Northern Italian industry (AKA the bourgeosie), and he calls this extortion, which is not the same as theft, but the sentiment of “taxation is theft” is the same as “taxation is extortion”.

Mussolini The Liberal (how the mighty fall given what he started out as) is all like “no we are just taxing people which is okay”

So why were the Southern Italian peasantry “taxed” while it Russia what happened was “stealing”? Because the bourgeoisie controls the mechanism of taxation, anything that isn’t taxation is just stealing because the bourgeoisie isn’t doing it.

So can we even tax the bourgeoisie? Well the Bourgeoisie is not going to tax itself, which is a bit like saying the Bourgeoisie isn’t going to steal from itself. When you explain it like that the prospect of ever taxing the rich seem to go out the window.

However in the realm of pure abstraction you can in fact propose that we “tax” trillionaires by making them just hand over shares intact as opposed to being required to convert it into money first.

Who knows MAYBE you could actually just get a special tax passed through where we make the government the chief shareholder in many companies by taxing the shares into be directly handed over, but the practical result of that policy though is just making the government the chief shareholder in most companies, so given that we are operating in the realm of pure abstraction, you can even skip the taxation part and just postulate that the government be the chief shareholder in most companies without regard to how that situation develops. Whether the government taxes or borrows or prints money to buy the shares or forces “the rich” to hand shares over is largely irrelevant.

The Final Solution To The Trillionaire Problem

The only actual “solution” to “wealth inequality” when the vast majority of companies being Joint-Stock corporations is to just have the government be the major shareholder in those companies instead of a bunch of random rich people (This is also the Permanent and therefore “Permanent” solution to the problem as if the government just owns the shares you don’t need to worry about someone new becoming a trillionaire by acquiring them). You could in theory “eat” Musk by transforming him into some kind of retirement fund for a social security like program where his shares are now part of some big retirement account everyone has access to, but in practice social security is not considered separate from the government even if in theory it is, so even in the case where the “government” really “owns” all these shares through a retirement account, it doesn’t really change the fact that the “State” is the entity that controls the shares, all anyone does is quibble over the details.

Really the only thing people are arguing about anymore in our society is how share ownership is distributed. The thing is though, the ownership of shares can change multiple times per day with the day to day operations of that company having no impact. So the only thing people argue about is irrelevant 99% of the time. Every so often there is a shareholder vote and presumably that might impact corporate governance, but again, that doesn’t change the notion of it being irrelevant 99% of the time, and even in the 1% of the time where shareholder votes are occurring, they rarely do something out of the ordinary. Ordinary here meaning the normal operation of the bourgeois system which means “deliver the most profit to shareholders please”.

Thus even if we made the government 100% shareholder of all joint-stock corporations instead of having this whole stock market thing, nothing would actually change for that group I mentioned earlier, wage workers. They still work for a wage, and profits for shareholders are increased or decreased relative to how high those wages are, with wage workers naturally wanting high wages while shareholder want low wages.

If we were to abolish wealth inequality by making the government the sole shareholder of everything, the government would just end up being the sole Representative of any and all capital interest. All we really would have done was abolish particular people who some people find annoying to look at knowing they have an arbitrarily high amount of wealth, but the “spirit of the bourgeoisie” that wants wages to be low would remain, it would just BE the government, instead of “controlling” the government.

Still while this doesn’t change much it is useful to do this purely for the purposes of getting people to stop raging against particular people as maybe they might finally realize that it is ownership itself that is the problem instead of someone whose face you find annoying to look at having a greater portion of ownership than others. Thus I do support nationalizing everything for the purposes of simplification, as well as that unifying all bourgeois interests into one thing would remove redundancy and the anarchy of production, which is also covered by “simplification”.

This brings us back to my point about “assimilating” people into the proletariat. The reason I said that is we need to decide what perspective we are taking. Are we representing wage workers who rent and thus have no property as class, or are we placing that group of people at the bottom of hierarchy based on net worth and then just agreeing to lop people off the top of that hierarchy? First we decapitate the trillionaires, then the billionaires, then the millionaires, and then ... well that’s fine. Or alternatively are we trying to build a society where wage workers who rent get to decide things instead of property owners?

Personally I don’t think property should be deciding anything. It should be blocked from decision making entirely, and the extent that someone with property can make decisions, it can only be on the basis of the things they share with wage workers who rent, as opposed to being based on the aspects of their unique situation that differ from that.

“That in the case of most of the quotations I have indicated the party to which the respective authors belong, because in nearly every instance the Liberals try to emphasise the distress in the rural areas and to argue away that which exists in the factory districts, while the Conservatives, conversely, acknowledge the misery in the factory districts but disclaim any knowledge of it in the agricultural areas. For the same reason, whenever I lacked official documents for describing the condition of the industrial workers, I always preferred to present proof from Liberal sources in order to defeat the liberal bourgeoisie by casting their own words in their teeth. I cited Tories or Chartists in my support only when I could confirm their correctness from personal observation or was convinced of the truthfulness of the facts quoted because of the personal or literary reputation of the authorities I referred to.” -Preface to Conditions of The Working Class In England, Friedrich Engels, 1845

In fact Thomas Carlyle was the vector by which Engels, and England as a whole, was exposed to Sismondi’s liberal critique of capitalism. In the later Communist Manifesto Marx’s scholarship determined that Carlyle had gotten his “proto-fascist” critique of capitalism that he introduced to England from Sismondi in France, and thus Marx determined that they endorsed fundamentally the same “solutions” to the same system (without actually structurally changing that system) that he assigned Sismondi the authorship of these critiques of capitalism both in France as well as England due to this known tendency for liberals to dismiss anything coming from “conservatives” out of hand, as they MIGHT be more willing to even acknowledge the existence of this critique if it came from one of their “own”.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England. -Communist Manifesto, 1848

Had it said that Sismondi became the head of this school in England through Carlyle, the English Liberals would have dismissed the Manifesto even more than they already inevitably would have because to do otherwise would require them to admit that the standard of the peasant and petit-bourgeoisie against capitalism in England was taken not by any liberal, but by what they now call a “proto-Fascist” as it was academic complacency of those English liberals that lead to a proto-fascist being the standard bearer of even the most mild criticisms of the capitalism system in England coming from a petit-bourgeois standpoint.

This academic complacency has festered for so long that the English language has been forced to take on French loan words like “petit-bourgeoisie”, perhaps I should rectify this by translating it into something English speakers might understand: Imagine a burger that is really petty, that is the petty bourgeoise. What is a burgher you might ask? The Virginia House of Burgesses was the largest parliament in colonial America before the Revolution, the term Burgess comes from the medieval term for a market town that sprung up that would often be called “burgs” such as Hamburg, with someone, or something from Hamburg being called a Hamburger, and thus the residents of these market towns in general were called Burghers. As capitalism developed the residents of these places split into “big burgers” and “small burgers” based on how much property they held, but whether big or small both kinds of burgers would agree on the fundamental sanctity of property in general. Those who only have a little bit of property, or the petty burgers, while often at odds with those with a lot of property, held some fundamental assumptions in common with the big burgers. Therefore when liberals, who represented the big burgers, wanted to criticize the system created by the dominance of the burgers, they had to do so from the perspective of the petty burgers because they held true to these common assumptions with the big burgers despite their other disagreements so the criticism of capitalism by the liberals wouldn’t actually challenge these deeply held assumptions about property.

If you liked that analogy you’ll love that the term proletariat means “producer of offspring” in Latin, as the proletariat were the people in Rome who lacking any other property could only register their offspring on the taxrolls in regards to what property they might be able to offer the State, so if we were to translate proletariat in the same way we’d be going around talking about “breeders” all the time. The small burgers (petit-bourgeoisie) and the proletariat are considered to be different classes because while they might live in similar circumstances when compared to how leagues apart both are from the big burgers, the proletariat are thought to be able to transcend the basic assumption in regards to the inviolability of property that both big and small burgers would share.

Anyway, the nature of the capitalist system is that everything is going to get replaced by everything else. Just like how the bourgeoisie invented replaceable parts to be exchanged when one broke down, or another became more cost effective, they treat workers just like their machinery. Interchangeable.

Engels noted that there was a replacement of English with Irish labourers in the industrial cities of northern England. He had to deal with denialists even then and made a note of only ever using liberal sources when making his arguments as even then the liberal bourgeoisie were in mass denial, while the conservative landowners were more likely to just say what was going on (provided it was in the cities, things reversed in the countryside with the liberals being more honest to get in a dig at the Tories). Nothing ever changes, it is the same as it has ever been.

If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses.

I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman’s second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working-people’s quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by them.

And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-men should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status—in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.

- Friedrich Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England

The system will replace its entire population and then it will replace the the people it replaced them with until there is no one left on earth as the last Amazonian tribe has been tapped out for immigrants to replace the last Congolese Bambuti pygmy tribe, who themselves replaced the Inuit.

So is “replacement” happening? Ask the UN who wrote about proposing it in 2000. “Replacement Migration: Is It A Solution To An Aging and Declining Population?”

https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547?v=pdf

So it is happening. Replacement is what the bourgeoisie have always called it, except when anyone questions it, in which case it doesn’t exist. The solution to it is the same as everything else. Overthrow the ruling class and abolish private property.

To not address this would be eschewing our role as political radicals. We are not afraid of anything (except getting banned). Communists have a long history of directly addressing "fascists" and most of our best concepts arise out of doing so. Lenin wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism largely in response to John A Hobson, calling him more advanced than Kautsky on the topic, which if people actually knew who he was would also result in incessant whining from Modern Liberals even though at the time Lenin referred to him as a social-liberal ironically enough.

We see that Kautsky, while claiming that he continues to advocate Marxism, as a matter of fact takes a step backward compared with the social-liberal Hobson, who more correctly takes into account two "historically concrete" ... features of modern imperialism: (1) the competition between several imperialisms, and (2) the predominance of the financier over the merchant. - Lenin

Why would Lenin refer to him as a social liberal if I am placing him in the same category as Thomas Carlyle who I have referred to as a "proto-fascist". Because Thomas Carlyle through being influenced by Sismondi who was a social-liberal was materially a social-liberal as well, as are all Fascists. However since the term Fascism didn't existed yet there was nothing for liberals to screech about. The distinctive quality that apparently makes someone a fascist rather than a liberal hadn't emerged yet (Hint: Fascists are just Liberals who aren't morons)

I’m not interested in personal attitudes or why the left should dislike him, but more why the DNC seems to loathe him so much. I get why they hate Zohran or Bernie, they aren’t part of the party infrastructure, they genuinely seem to hold Left-wing economic principles, they present a threat to Dem control of leftwing/progressive voters, but Platner is the most milquetoast version of left populism you could imagine. Like just take the W and call it a day already. I do not understand why they can’t stand him, maybe his mild critique of israeli policy in Gaza?(his stepbrother works for the Jerusalem Post btw) Maybe him vaguely calling out “the oligarchy”?(Bernie, AOC, Warren have been doing a half assed version of this for years, so who cares?) Are they doing some sort of 4-D chess to make it seem like they can’t stand him? Is it just that it’s a senate seat and he’s not the anointed one as per DNC tradition? Why is the DNC resurrecting the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover to hunt down every sordid detail of this dudes life, like, what am I missing here? He’s literally just going to fall into line, even if he doesn’t, the man is not Lenin, so why do they give a shit? - Thomas Stultus

I call this phenomena the “lightning rod”. Hating on someone gives them attention, but someone needs to be where hatred can be directed. People can decide they don’t actually hate the person you hate though, thus it is thus safer to hate on someone under your control.

When the media runs a story on something, they can’t control what opinion people will take on that story, but they can control the thing people will be taking an opinion on.

Every once in awhile they need a lightning rod to be the safe thing for people to be absolutely seething over. These will also be some figure that is under their control if thy can ge away with it. Think Tommy Robinson, the biggest lightning rod there is. Aparently English Football Hooliganism is super concerned with Israel for some inexplicable reason. I assume you are clued in to the situation considering you know to check the Jerusalem Post.

For a long time Lauren Southern was this figure, but she was under the thumb of Rebel Media. There is a problem with this though because she they would prefer NOT to have o hate on her, because he thing they are hating is not their prefered thing they want people to agree with. What they want people to hate on is actually Ben Shapiro, so they try to make it seem like Ben Shapiro is the destination of the alt-right pipeline. Then when you have an opinion on the alt-right pipeline and it just ends up bing your opinion of Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is the prefered lighting rod but Lauren Southern is the acceptable alternative. Regardless of who it is they want everyone hating THAT person to avoid giving attention to anyone else.

Pratner is the prefered lightning rod right now. He is just a DNC goon so he is safe. They probably have war crime charges they could level against him so no need to worry about him going rogue.

They want everybody fucking hate Le Ebil Nazi who, for some inexplicable reason has a step brother who works for the Jerusalem post.

Why the left though? Because they are more worried about the left right now. For awhile they could just ignore it and trust that the left would just implode itself but it is starting to get its act together so they ned to start deploying lightning rods for the media and bot argumenters to pay attention to.

When we do the “you are a nazi, no you are a nazi!” dance where both sides accuse each other of being Nazis, they want us to be talking about two people: Elon Musk, and Graham Platner.

You also need to consider that the purpose of having controlled opposition figures presented right before you is because they want to “prove” that the opposition ar hypcritical. If anti-zionism is ahainst war crimes they kind of what a war criminal to be the face of the opposition. Makes it easy to say that the anti-zionists are just anti-semitic Nazis instead of anti war criminals. This “gotcha” breaks down though if you point out what you pointed out, namely the dude likely has mossad connections anyway, so even if he is a war criminal he is a war criminals connected to Israel, so its war criminals all the way down. Israel has so many war criminals that they are exporting them to serve as the anti-israel opposition!

Musk is safe because he think anti-semitism is people upset about Jews being rich. He is allowed to point out that Jews do “anti-semitism” as he understands it towards white people where they try to get to hate white people for being rich. He wants Jews to cut it out, and largely Jews HAVE cut that out. They are no longer promoting anti-whiteness as such because they’ve realized everybody thinks they are white.

The thing is though that anti-zionism is also “anti-murderism” (hence why they want a murderer lading the controlled opposition) and not just complaints over people being rich. (Musk won’t ever understand this though) Now the flows of money in the capitalist system is are linked to Zionism like they are linked to everyone else so rich people are connected like they are to everything, but the basis for why there is a large anti-zionist coalition is just people are tired of people getting killed. The “left” is where this anti-murderism manifests so they need “left-wing Nazism” to match Musk’s right-wing Nazism. They want these two Nazism to point fingers at each other with the Nazi salute or the tattoo. This can be inflamed by having plants whine about Musk’s Nazi salute and then having other plants whine about Platner. The key here is: by whining about either person someone is taking the position that whatever Musk or Platner says is something worth whining about, and secondarily by whining about it people are induced to take the opposite position and support a “safe” opposition.

Are Platner and Musk really contradictory? Not really, they are kind of like two ships in th night passing by each other, but whining about Nazis connects them and they want people to pick sides and whine about the other side being Nazis.

The way you can escape this is even if you don’t like Nazis you must refrain from anti-Nazi whining. You have to remember the Three Body Problem of Zionism. There isn’t just Nazis and not-Nazis, or any dichotomy. There is always this third thing in the form of Zionism.

Like with the Sydney Sweeney thing, everyone argued over “OMG eugenics” but nobody cared that American Eagle is literally owned by a Jewish Zionist Billionaire. They wanted people arguing about this and picking sides thinking there was some impending Nazi takeover. Either they were against this and thus were scared of Nazis (and thus not scared of Zionists) or they were happy about it and supported the Zionist image of Nazism, which is apparently just that blonde hair and blue yes ar cool I guess? Jews can have these things so rest assured Nazi anti-semitism was not based in the lack of blonde hair among Jews, this is just something Jews projected onto the situation, if you look at Captain America, created by Jewish comic artists, they were the ones who created the idea of a blond haired blue eyed super soldier punching swarthy manlets in the form of Hitler. Clearly the Nazis weren’t actually against people with dark hair if they liked Hitler.

You don’t need to like Nazis, but as Communists the reason we don’t like Nazis is that they are anti-Communist Reformists, we don’t need to add a bunch of stupid reasons on top of that and can just analyze a situation properly. The key thing to understand is that Nazis aren’t running any countries right now so no revolution actually needs to be against Nazis as there is no Nazi to be revolted against. The revolution in Palestine will have to be against Zionist authorities so they are the more relevant party.

Anyway why is so much negative attention being directed against Platner despite him being controlled opposition? Well you’ve answered your own question when you phrase it like that. The purpose of the system is what it does. All this negative attention is being directed towards Platner BECAUSE he is controlled opposition.

Aristocracy means rule by the “best”. So the point of elections is for people to select the “best” candidate from among a list of options. Electoral Democracy is not actually a Democracy, it is just a method of selecting aristocracy. Meritocracy is something where you dispense with the selection process and then promote people over time based on performance. This is another method of determining who is the “best”. If someone was implementing a Democracy they specifically did NOT want to be ruled by the “best” or else they would have said that. They would have said they wanted an Aristocracy.

Oligarchy is the “degenerated” form of Aristocracy. In practice all methods of trying to have an Aristocracy devolves into an Oligarchy, which means rule by the few. Democracy according to Aristotle was the already degenerated form of the optimized version of rule by many. He insisted that Athens political system while flawed had at least revealed its flaws, and that if you were going to invent optimized versions of things if you were going to keep suggesting different versions of Aristocracies whenever someone points out that in practice they all devolve into Oligarchies, you can say “My optimized version of rule by the many has already devolved into a Democracy, but if you are going to keep suggesting Aristocracies with the flaws of Oligarchies removed I can suggest a version of rule by the many with the flaws of Democracy removed”

He called this a “polity” which was just the term for Greek City-States, with the idea being that the optimized version of society rather than “rule by the many” would be “rule by the whole”. The idea being that “Democracy” causes the many to neglect the few. When you suggest that the many are not skilled and neglect to put the best people in charge of particular things on account of the “mob” being bad at deciding things, you are saying “the rule of many is not the rule of all”. So Aristotle says that the Rule of All degenerates into Rule of Many. He un-degenerated form of this would somehow have the entire polity working in unison.

What that actually entails has been a topic of philosophical debate for millennia, with many philosophers implicitly dealing with this concept even if you by reading them aren’t aware that they are. If you think about all philosophers having an extended conversation you can being to place them into these concepts initially presented by Aristotle and Plato.

What it matters to us is that we are “True Democrats” in the sense that we don’t even think that the “degenerated” form of rule by many that is Athenian Democracy was a bad thing. We actually like the rule of the many which excludes the few. We have no desire to have Rule of All. Thus Aristotle’s dilemma doesn’t concern us anyway. We can figure it out later.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat embraces the concept of the “real” Democracy being the many to the exclusion of the few, at least temporarily. It is thus a Democratic Dictatorship, using both of those terms in their original sense, with Democracy being in its Aristotelian or Athenian sense, and Dictatorship being in the Roman sense. Roman Dictatorships were idealized as being a temporary thing to deal with a crisis.

Thus we can argue about Aristotle’s dilemma of how to avoid the Rule of the All devolving into the Rule of the Many against the Few LATER. For now, we specifically endorse the aspects of Democracy that philosophers claim are “flaws”.

The State Of Exception, or The Schmittian “Emergency”

Now if it was only the notion “crisis” that was taken from the American Civil War, that wouldn’t be enough to justify a connection, but the particular policies taken during that crisis can also be used as examples of the particular policies Germany would pursue during their deliberately induced crisis intended to take advantage of the concept of crises allowing otherwise impermissible actions. Schmitt basically thought that the way leaders like Lincoln governed in a crisis is the way leaders should always govern.

Thus if one can get oneself into one of these States of Exception then one can pursue all the exact same policies that were an outflow of that State of Exception, whether this be caused by an attempt to seize federal property by a State Government or somebody burning down the Reichstag parliament building, you just need something to get yourself into a State of Exception and then you can do whatever you want. Given that the system that is in an “exceptional” state is based on property rights, the purpose of the State of Exception is to have the ability to ignore property rights while being able to pretend like you are upholding them, as obviously this is the thing exceptions are going to be made about. This is because the system does not need to make exceptions to violate anything other than property rights since it does that during normal states of affairs.

I’m not the only person who says something similar, so I didn’t just conjure this up due to burning to many hemp rope bridges. For instance, Zohran Mamdani’s Father saying that Hitler was inspired, not by Jefferson Davis, but rather by Abraham Lincoln.

https://matzav.com/great-chinuch-zohran-mamdanis-professor-father-claimed-hitler-inspired-by-abraham-lincoln/

So why do people constantly say this? Is everyone just hating for no reason and somehow came to the same incorrect conclusion? Or do people of vastly different beliefs come to the same conclusions because this disparate view points

People will say the extermination of the buffalo was genocidal intended to kill the natives. Maybe that is true, but it was Union General Tecumseh Sherman who created the buffalo extermination strategy. He is also credited with burning down Atlanta, which was part of the same general strategy of economic warfare to make it impossible for the South to continue the war. He applied that same strategy to make it impossible for the Natives to pursue an independent existence by destroying their economy rather than fight them directly.

If one wants to say “Atlanta deserved it” then maybe one also ought to say “Buffalo deserved it” too. (Explaining the joke: there is a city in New York State called Buffalo as an analogue with Atlanta, but buffalo is also something American Bison are called, so the joke is implying that Sherman burned down the city of Buffalo instead of the city of Atlanta as an allusion to him also being responsible for the extermination of the plains buffalo. So the joke is that if Atlanta deserved it, the buffalo also deserved it, since the same guy is responsible for both)

Others might mention that Lebensraum was inspired by American History, but the specific period of time where that Lebensraum was occurring in American History was the US Civil War when Lincoln used the emergency situation to pass the Homestead Acts. The purpose being that they strategically wanted to surround the Southern States in the Anaconda Strategy and the Settlers would fight the slavers from taking large areas of land to work with slaves as the settlers would want that land for themselves.

Note that the year of the Homestead Act was 1862, which was in the middle of the civil war. This was possible because of what Carl Schmitt called emergency governance in the State of Exception. Normally you couldn’t just give property away for free, but Lincoln could actually do that during the Civil War because everyone was playing fast and loose with things. Anything which could be justified as necessary to win the war could be justified to be done, even if it violated private property, as the entire war in the first place was being waged to defend federal property from seizure by the Southern States.

Manifest Destiny Was Something People Literally Believed

The war of extermination by the Union against the Confederacy is often justified on the basis of “they owned slaves”. All well and good, but the Natives also owned slaves, so was a war of extermination justified against them? Rarely do you find a person in our current era who supports both the war of extermination against the South AND a war of extermination against the Natives, but at the time supporting both was the common position. The same person who thought “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” also thought “traitors should be fed to alligators”. Largely because neither of those positions was based on anti-slavery sentiment but rather it was based on Manifest Destiny sentiment that the Union should just control the whole continent and both the South and the Natives stood in the way of that.

Indeed if you can just take over a country because it has slaves then Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was totally justified as the declaration of war literally mentioned slavery, but most people are smart enough to realize that Italy just wanted to expand and slavery was an excuse. Similarly the Union just wanted to expand and needed an excuse. The carpet bagging economy that emerged afterwards was a crucial component of the Northern bourgeoisie’s quest for world dominance, and thus the first act of US financial imperialism the world now deals with got its jump start in the post-Civil War. Mussolini justified imperialism on this basis that smaller countries like Italy needed empires to avoid getting taken over by the larger ones, as he was predicting the current state of the world where the USA dominates Italy financially and didn’t want that. Japan also more or less used this as their justification.

World War 2 was largely a coalition of middle powers against the super powers of the USA, Soviet Union, and British Empire which dominated the whole globe except for the scraps the middle powers fought over. Indeed, the WW2 Axis was fighting each other in the Interwar Period. Nazi Germany provided support to Ethiopia against Italy, and to China against Japan. The middle powers all felt thy needed to replicate some kind of Manifest Destiny in order to compete. “But they fought America!!!” yeah they did, because at this time the USA was ALREADY an established power and so needed to fight those seeking to revise the world order. World War 2 happened because the middle powers all temporarily aligned against the super powers, and in the absence of the middle powers keeping each other in check the superpowers had to engage in an expensive war against the middle powers.

There is an interesting case where the British Empire could have prevented the rise of America as a superpower if they supported the Confederacy, but the foreign policy of the Confederacy failed to achieve this kind of support the same way the Continentals in the American Revolution got France to support them against the British. British strategy could have been getting middle powers of the Union and Confederacy to fight each other, but thy failed to stop manifest destiny, though they did try on numerous occasions, with Canada being the product of one attempt to create a pro-British middle power to challenge the USA, but the USA eventually just scooped it off them.

Preventing A Slave Rebellion Against the Union Army

The Emancipation Proclamation is actually similar to the Homestead Acts if you remember that slavery was based in the concept of property and the reason it was so difficult to abolish was because abolishing it was kind of like abolishing property, which is usually difficult to do in a system based on private property. If you recall the Fort Sumter incident which prompted the Civil War was over the States thinking they had the right to try to seize Federal Property, so the Civil War was technically being fought by the North FOR property retention, and it was the South that was against property and therefore the “bad guys”. The Emancipation Proclamation was essentially declaring that the property in the form of slave in the rebelling territories was no longer property on account of their rebellion, which was only possible with the same emergency situation as the Homestead Act where governance was ignoring the concept of the unviability of property to just give it away as they saw fit in order to win the war. One must recall the Emancipation Proclamation only impacted slaves in territories considered to be in active rebellion. Slaves in New Orleans occupied by the Union remained enslaved, while slaves in the still rebelling parts of the South were liberated.

Much of the reason for this was that slaves that crossed over to Union lines were technically still slaves as the Union had not abolished it yet, so the Union advancing to occupy the plantations they fled technically meant the Union was fighting to send them back to those plantations as they would be required to restore all property after the war. To avoid a slave rebellion, against the Union Army advancing, by all those slaves that had fled the plantations which were to be occupied, the Union Army needed to ensure that them advancing further did not technically mean they were advancing to the point that they would have to start giving the slaves back. This threat of the slave rebelling against the Union was a sufficient enough “State of Exception” that it could be justified to forsake the principle of property in this one particular instance if it meant preserving it in all other instances, as a slave rebellion would be deleterious to property rights, so if the choices are “slave rebellion against the union” or “confiscating the confederacy’s slaves” the choice was always going to be to confiscate the slaves of the Rebels. Note that the slaves of non-Rebels were not confiscated until the passing of the 14th amendment which was considered more “legal” because it passed through the convoluted process of making a Constitutional Amendment, and even then it retained the exception that involuntary servitude could be maintained as punishment for a crime to make it even more legalistic than it already was.

You can sort of imagine that they transferred the ownership of slaves from slaveowners to the slaves themselves such that thy now owned themselves in the same way that land was just transferred from natives to Northerners (more accurately “those who have never rebelled against the Federal Government” was the criteria used for determining who was eligible) through the homestead act, which was required under technicalities as prior to this slaves were quite literally treated as property. When people hear that “slaves were property” they think about it in terms of outrages, but they were also treated as property in the most boring senses which meant that people would take out loans to buy slaves with the slaves being collateral on those loans. There was entire debt bubbles related to slavery which made it difficult to abolish without ruining large sections of the financial system. This is why it took a Schmittian Emergency where they would just ignore the financial consequences of recklessly transferring property like this and just let the chips fall where they may. It is for this reason that New York was a hotbed of Confederate support in the North, as all the bankers were freaking out that all the loans they made would be worthless is slavery got abolished.

The Loophole To Abolish Slavery By Being Even More Racist

If you consider that slaves were literally property, then the laws against the expansion of slavery were in practice laws which forbid particular kinds of property from being brought into particular areas. This is what Bleeding Kansas where the shooting of the civil war actually started was about, in fact the anti-slavery side literally declared Kansas to be a White Ethnostate to make it illegal to bring slaves into it.

Following the model of Oregon, citizens of the 2nd Territorial District petitioned the 1855 Free State convention to incorporate a “black exclusion” clause in the Topeka Constitution. This would have prevented not only the enslaved, but also free African Americans from residing in the state. It was rejected by convention president James H. Lane and others, who allowed the issue to be voted on separately in the January 1856 referendum; the results favored exclusion.

Yet the constitutional convention called by the radical free state element, meeting at Topeka in September, 1855, was in favor of excluding free Negroes from the new state. ... The free state party was anxious to clear itself of “the stale and ridiculous charge of Abolitionism.” The Negro exclusion policy of the Topeka meeting was upheld, in a large majority, by the free state voters. “Three-fourths of the Free State settlers were in favor of a free white State,” says Villard, “and the heaviest voting against the free Negro was” in Lawrence and Topeka.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topeka_Constitution

Part of the reason for this was that the Doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty” (The topic of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates for their Senatorial election in Illinois, concurrent with the Bleeding in Kansas, before eventually facing off once again for the Presidency) declared that a territory would vote on if it would be a Free or Slave State at the point of admission into the Union, but this implied that it would be a Slave Territory until it became a State, and being a Slave Territory first would allow the slavers a chance to get themselves set up. The White Ethnostate concept was essentially a loophole which circumvented this by just making it illegal for black people to be in the state, so while a slaver could move to Kansas and then vote to make slavery legal, they could NOT bring any slaves with them until that happened. In the mean time the settlers just shot at the slavers on the pretext that bringing in black people was illegal in what was called Bleeding Kansas.

John Brown, who Americans seem to worship for a reason I will never understand, moved to Kansas into this period of time because he wanted to shoot slavers, but I find it humorous that in doing so he was essentially fighting for the white ethnostate since the Territorial Government he was fighting for made it illegal to bring black people into Kansas and so Slavers would be outlaws under such a law even if Slavery itself could only be made illegal after admission as a State.

Lincoln’s Republicans also passed the Anti-Coolie Act, with Coolie being a word for imported Asian labourers often in situations that resembled indentured servitude as opponents of Slavery predicted that after slavery of black people was abolished that slave owners would just import a bunch of Asian labourers instead so they had to close that loophole. This served as the basis of future Asian Exclusion as they just banned the entry of Asians entirely to end indentured servitude the way they tried to ban the entry of Black people as a means of getting rid of slavery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coolie_Act

Astute readers might think that all the illegal Mexicans are just a product of the slave owners trying to loophole themselves back into having some kind of bonded labour the way the anti-slavery people tried to loophole an abolishment of slavery by banning all non-whites. Therefore the Republicans and Democrats have not actually changed their positions over the centuries and everyone is still fighting the Civil War.

“But that’s racist, and slavery was racist. Racism is bad. I’m against racism so I’m good”. Yes, but would it have accomplished the goal of eliminating slavery or indentured servitude if they just banned other races from being in the country? There are many different ways to accomplish the same material end, some racist, some not. You can’t just say “racism” to a proposed solution to a material problem, you need to propose something with the same material result. Most of the time counter-proposals don’t actually change the material situation. Marginally increasing the treatment of migrant labourers by ending immigration enforcement does not abolish the migrant labour system intended to make it so that employers are not bound by local employment market dynamics. Employers can still reach into the recesses of some random country and scoop up random people so they can avoid paying local wages. If your “anti-racist” policy doesn’t end that system then you aren’t solving the problem in a material way. Banning immigrants does actually make that system impossible even if you don’t like that solution.

During the American Civil War you had both these “racist” and “anti-racist” opponents of slavery in the same political movement, because ultimately racism was immaterial. It is important to recall that the issue of slavery had dragged on for at least over a decade since the Compromise of 1850, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned it completely in favour of the slavers occurring in 1854 (Civil War begun in 1860). Immediacy of the solution took precedence over an optimal solution and everyone was willing to support any short term solution that might immediately stop it in its tracks. So yes, just banning people who would be slaves was considered a viable solution at that point, as that does get rid of slavery.

You might interject that you, as one particular kind of Democrat, is fighting to “free” the slaves (taken up the mantle solely of whatever particular opponent of slavery who you classify as being “anti-racist”) by abolishing this illegals system entirely by just giving up on border enforcement such that the migrants no longer need to fear deportation and then somewhere down the line they might be able to bargain with their employer for marginally better conditions. That maybe so, but the standard policy for Democrats here is that whatever the outcome these jobs must still be done by the migrants, even if in theory some might insist that they get better conditions if border enforcement stopped (“Slavery would be fine if they just treated the slaves better”). There is no material difference in the desires of Democrats here as regardless of how “extreme” one goes in regards to border non-enforcement, the implied assumption is always that migrants must be doing this labour as it is impossible for citizens to do it for some inexplicable reason. Opponents of migration, for any fault you might assign this, reject this premise entirely.

The Radical Republicans and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

By contrast, while the Practical Republican is not different than the Practical Democrat and just does performative border enforcement to appease the Radical Republican while making Exceptions to justify non-enforcement of agricultural labourers (The crops will rot in the fields if w don’t import migrants! This is a crisis worthy of ignoring the law!), just as the Practical Republican once did performative abolishment to appease to the Radical Republican, but the nature of who did labour and under what conditions remained unchanged with the emergence of the sharecropping system, the Radical Republican does endorse something which has a material difference: either the labour is done by Citizens, or it will not be done at all.

That “it will not be done at all” line is operative when it comes to it defining a materially different reality. Even the most radical proposals to tax the rich implicitly endorse the notion that those rich can with whoever they choose generate the wealth that is to be taxed to pay for those programs, and in response to this implicit assumption the bourgeoisie threatens that these taxes will result in the operation of those businesses that generate that potential tax revenue not occurring at all. The proposals of the Radical Republicans turn these threats by the Practical Republicans to end production if they can’t have the conditions the bourgeoisie desires into the goal. Rather than being afraid of the cessation of production by the bourgeoisie reducing tax revenue, the Radical Republicans WANT production by the bourgeoisie to cease UNLESS it occurs under the conditions demanded by the proletarian citizens, which is possible since as Republicans they have no desire that can come from taxation of the bourgeoisie and instead simply wish to be in control of the conditions where labour will occur.

To the Radical Republican this just seems like common sense, democratic even. Of course all labour in the country should be done by its citizens, how can we even call ourselves a distinct country otherwise! They think that they are asking for less than nothing as the only thing they consider is the cost to the taxpayer, indeed they are the only people who truly take this principle of bourgeois government seriously in their thinking that they should be able to do anything that costs the government no money, but to the bourgeoisie this is a demand to place the proletariat in between them and their ability to hire who they wish to maximize their profits, which in practice is also the proletariat so it mans the proletariat would be in charge of determining the fate of the proletariat as thee proletariat would be deciding democratic when and where and by who labour is to be done.

Pumped full of propaganda from birth as to what matters when it comes to governance, and completely devoid of any real thought leaders in their language as any potential intellectual has shirked that responsibility, by hyper focusing politics on only if something costs the taxpayer money as being the only thing which is impermissible, the proletariat in seemingly the most capitalistic society ever devised or could be devised has restricted itself to one sole modest demand: the complete abolishment of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the assignment of labour.

Contained within the demand that only citizens may work in a country, and that they are free to determine who it is that is a citizen, is the core of what makes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and also what means that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the only class dictatorship that is democratic and not based on the subjugation of any other classes. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat seeks only self-regulation, and is only oppressive towards the Bourgeoisie because it denies them the right to direct labour via whatever convoluted scheme they might come up with. The Bourgeoisie of course thinks this is oppressive towards them because without the ability to direct labour the Bourgeoisie would cease to be the Bourgeoisie, so preventing the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is an existential issue for them. Thus the demands of the proletariat in establishing their dictatorship will always be denied for whatever flimsy reason the Bourgeoisie can come up with, as they know that once it is established and the proletariat themselves is in charge of determining when labour occurs, the whole Bourgeois system will unravel.

While the wages system would be maintained under this dictatorship of the proletariat, and competition would still technically exist between citizens, the first steps would be taken where the proletariat gets to determine who does labour instead of the bourgeoisie. It matters not that they do not wish to split the profits with the bourgeoisie the way Democrats do, as the proletariat is demanding no profits can be made at all unless the Proletariat consent to it in the first place by “voting with their feet” on if a job even exists based on a citizen being willing to work it. The Radical Republicans violate the bourgeois principle that profits MUST be made in ways Democratic taxation never does by asserting that if no citizen is willing to work a job that this job cannot exist regardless of if the Bourgeoisie might be able to whipped out some imported labourer out of their back-pocket. In early days this labourer would be bought and forcibly ripped away to do this labour, now it is different but the consent of a slave does not change the underlying system they uphold.

Now I say Radical Republicans in reference to the term as it was used historically, but also in reference to political modernity. I do this because contrary to widespread belief amongst Americans, the factions have not changed and American politics is the same as it ever was. There was indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat around the US Civil War, and this same faction if their demands were realized would establish another one. Objections to this statement would come from people who simply don’t know what the original Radical Republicans were like, but I assure you any objection you might have to them in the modern day existed back then.

It should be noted that you will find amongst the Radical Republicans people who might fit into your adequate definitions of an “anti-racist” but the reason they fit in so well is precisely because that faction within the party was so full of oddballs that you would have weirdo anti-masonic Thaddeus Steven who briefly joined the nativist Know Nothings being the exemplary figure of anti-racism within the Radical Republicans. If banning black people to abolish slavery strikes you as a contradictory position to hold, then being pro-black because at least they aren’t immigrants will make your binary concept of racism brain explode, but that was a faction within th Know Nothings. The Radical Republicans attracted such groups of people who ran the gamut of every conceivable position as they only needed to agree on one thing: slavery must be stopped IMMEDIATELY.

In practice Americans simply don’t know their own history so they will simply refuse to believe that slavery was abolished by the vulgar masses who held opinions the vulgar masses would hold. (Yes, slavery was abolished by the 19th century equivalent of anti-vaxxers because they were the only ones crazy enough to actually want to do something about it, go cry about it) Advocates for “the masses” or “the workers” would also be aghast to find that the masses might hold opinions held by the masses. I assure you that since that the Republican Party of our current day has never been more like the original Republican Party than they have ever been since before Reconstruction.

Inclusive vs Exclusive Language, Or In Other Words, Irrelevancy

When tasked with determining if the inclusion of people from out of the country is more important than placing the conditions of labour under democratic control some “radicals” might balk a the assertion that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat might be limited to something as arbitrary as “citizenship” in the first place. Such people have determined that “inclusion vs exclusion” is the dividing line of politics rather than class conflict. In reality whether a policy is “exclusive” or “inclusive” is what is arbitrary, and “inclusive” policies can be designed that accomplish the same things as “exclusive” ones, so one need not care if the trial run is based in exclusion as it was essentially just a flip of a coin if one ended up excluding or including when the policy was pulled out of the recesses of a class’s consciousness.

Structurally this demand to require jobs to only be done if they meet the demands of citizens to do them is identical to the Programme of the French Workers Party from 1880, which is prefaced by statements that these demands exist with the aims of the eventual expropriation of the capitalist class.

The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means of organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following immediate demands:

4) Legal prohibition of bosses employing foreign workers at a wage less than that of French workers;

One might point out that this is not demanding that no foreign workers can be employed, but rather they can only be employed at the same wage as a French Worker. Yes, that is what it says, but the implication of foreign workers only being paid the same as French workers means that if no French workers is willing to work for less than a specific amount, no foreign worker can be employed at that amount either. The employer must offer whatever it is that French workers demand instead of circumventing French workers entirely by only hiring foreigners for less.

The objection someone might have to the vulgar demand of the Radical Republicans to ban hiring all foreigners to prevent them from being paid less than the Americans who would otherwise work the same job should go away when confronted with this demand by the 19th century Programme of the French Workers if it was simply based on inclusive versus exclusive language, but the material results of policies are not based whether one talks in an inclusive or exclusive manner, but rather the material results of policies are the result of party making the demands. In both cases, inclusive or exclusive, the party of the proletariat is demanding that the citizens of the nation have the power to decide the rates at which labour is to be done, rather than the bourgeoisie. In my experience the naysayers will raise objections over it not being “inclusive enough” in both cases anyway, they just look more ridiculous in the latter case.

If one objects to “exclusion” contained within the details of the language of the demand, one cannot “counter” the exclusionary demands of the proletariat to be in control of the rates at which labour is to be done with inclusionary language if that demand to moderate the language results in a materially different outcome, such as the proletariat not being in control of the rates at which labour is to be done.

They will reject it, and will rightfully consider those demanding the language change which results in a materially different outcome to never be trusted. Any “inclusive” alternative MUST preserve the ability of the proletariat to decided on the conditions of labour with their country by refusing to work when conditions are not to their liking. If your “inclusive” counter-proposal to just banning non-citizens falls short of that, your proposal is a step backwards, not an “inclusive step forwards”.

Indeed people “counter” with an entirely different proposal that doesn’t include putting the proletariat in charge of determining the conditions labour is done because that was the point of making a big deal out of the “exclusion” in the first place.

In the American case this demand for the proletariat to decide on the conditions of labour within their country has manifested in a vulgar exclusionary language only because the educated inclusionary “thinking” (I use that term loosely) class has neglected to think up an inclusionary language for achieving the same material outcome that the proletariat demands. That burden of producing “educated” “non-fascist” language in the English speaking world once against falls upon the French (in the nineteenth century no less!) due to the complacency of the English-speaking intelligentsia in their historical refusal to ever be intelligent about anything.

The lack of a sympathetic intelligentsia to “do the thinking for them” didn’t stop the English-speaking proletariat though, it merely vulgarized them as they had to operate within anyone attempting to elucidate the purposes behind why they were making particular demands. Even without a “brain” the proletariat still came to the conclusion that they, rather than the bourgeoisie, ought to be able to decide which conditions of work are worthy of being done, and which should result in the operation closing down (something the bourgeoisie routinely threatens in regards to any taxing demand created by the “intelligent”, because taxing the rich is something dreamt up by the intelligent, but the workers deciding when the rich can hire them is something only the dumbest workers voting against their interests could ever want), the workers just made the fatal mistake of phrasing it in a way which caused the "brains” to shriek and reflexively scurry back into the arms of the employers.

Much of the reason that these demands manifest first in exclusionary terms is that it presents a quite simple solution to the issue. If the employers use imported labours to circumvent local labour conditions then you can just ban that practice. “Just ban it” is immediate. That is an immediate answer that is actionable even if not ideal. The consequences of banning “it” can be dealt with as they emerge as opposed to deliberating upon it endlessly while doing nothing. It is no surprise that in the decade long deliberation on the question of slavery those for which the issue was of immediate importance and couldn’t afford to deliberate just came up with the solution of “then ban the slaves”.

Der Fuhrer Burgermeister von Lincoln

Even the anti-semitism has precedents in the US Civil War as Union General Ulysses S Grant expelled Jews from the states under his military occupation because he accused them of smuggling cotton out of the southern states which was prolonging the war by funding the Confederate War Effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)

The advancing Confederate Army actually ended up rescuing Jews from expulsion.

The Secretary of State in charge of foreign policy of the Confederacy was also a Jewish man named Judah P. Benjamin. Now it should be noted that the Confederacy FAILED to achieve its foreign policy objectives of getting recognition from other major powers, notably the British who would have the greatest geopolitical interest in it by permanently dividing their main rival power, so not only were Jews running the Confederate foreign policy, they were also BAD at running it, which is similar to the situation where not only are Jews secretly running Israel and are also bad at secretly running it.

If one asserts there is a Jewspiracy one might think that maybe they undermined the Confederacy deliberately, but the other Jewish Senator who supported the Confederacy, David Levy Yulee, was eventually tried for treason by the Union due to him assisting the Confederate President Jefferson Davis in escaping. It should be noted that this is a completely futile act from when the war would have already been well and truly lost, so there is literally no reason to do this if Jewish involvement was just to undermine from within. They stayed loyal to the traitors until the end.

I point this out as a counter another prominent Jewspiracy claim involving the Soviet Union. Jews being involved in government is one thing, but the real question is if those Jews were loyal to the government they were involved with, or their involvement with it just amounted to undermining it. The Jews involved in the Confederate government demonstrate a profound loyalty to it despite their incompetence. By contrast the Jews involved in the Soviet Union were always disloyal to it and constantly undermined it in both a deliberate and plausibly deniable manner. Trostky is the most famous example but, there was also the likes of Genrikh Lyushkov who defected to Imperial Japan after asserting that he was “merely following orders” to explain away all his crimes while Head of the NKDV in the Far-East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Lyushkov

On top of that you also had Fanny Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin, and the two Jewish Bolshevik Triumvirs who defected over to Trotsky to form the United Opposition after having been in alliance with Stalin against Trotsky’s Left-Opposition, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, were also notable for having been opposed to the idea of the Bolsheviks attempting a unilateral takeover during the October Revolution, which Lenin remembered in his Testament.

The October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [their opposition to seizing power in October 1917] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.

None of this has to mean anything, but if you are going to assert a Jewish conspiracy, the conspiracy needs to at least conform to the actions of the Jews in involved, and all actions point to if there had been a Jewish conspiracy, it would have been against the Soviet Union rather than for it. By contrast the Jews involved in the Confederacy seemingly remained loyal to it long past the end of the cause being lost.

So Jews ARE loyal, they are just loyal to reaction.

“But what about all my favourite Social Democrat Jews!!?!” Congratulations on correctly identifying that Social Democracy is the reactionary position. Accusations of Judeo-Bolshevism fall a little flat when you start counting the number of Jews involved with the Mensheviks, and Menshevism is largely what you can describe the usual Social Democrat position to be.

The only time I can point to Jews being loyal to a revolutionary state is their support of the Williamite Wars against the British Catholic Jacobites. Anglo-Catholic books by authors like E. Michael Jones assert that there is some kind of “Jewish Revolutionary Spirit” due to their support of the Protestant English revolution against Anglo-Catholicism, but he clearly did not think through the entire rest of Jewish History where Jews acted in the most reactionary ways imaginable.

The revolution can exist with Jews or it can exist without Jews. If Jews remain with the revolution rather than undermine it, the revolution won’t have a problem with them, but if they undermine it the revolution will have to take action against them like any other enemy.

From a Schmittian perspective the expulsion of the Jews by the Union Army occurred for the exact same reason that Germany used to justify their actions. The opinion of “the revolution” on these actions does not measure based on “anti-semitism” or “fighting anti-semitism” but rather the revolution generally thinks that defeating the Confederacy was a good thing so whatever actions taken to do that were either necessary, or if they weren’t necessary and were an “excess” the actions would be regrettable but the revolution will not stop itself just to obsessively contemplate if it is in the “morally correct” position simply because an excess occurred.

In regards to the terror in the French Revolution, it might have been necessary, or it might not have been. Marx’s daughter suggested that in the French Revolution the Terror was an act of the terrified bourgeoisie, with this passage coming from a discussion Marx and Engels had over it by highlighting it.

The defence of Paris, if nothing extraordinary happens in the course of it, will be an entertaining episode. These perpetual little panics of the French – which all arise from fear of the moment when they will really have to learn the truth – give one a much better idea of the Reign of Terror. We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in 1793 lies almost exclusively with the over-nervous bourgeois, demeaning himself as a patriot, the small petty bourgeois beside themselves with fright and the mob of riff-raff who know how to profit from the terror. These are just the classes in the present minor terror too.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_09_04.htm

Given that this comes from Marx’s daughter it suggests when the French Revolution was still new (Marx and Engels were born just after the end of the Napoleonic Era and so were the first generation to be born when the French Revolution was firmly in the past) opinion among revolutionaries was that the terror was necessary even if perhaps regrettable. Marx and Engels themselves never questioned it, but as time went on it began to be questioned more, and identified as a product of the bourgeoisies precarious position. The possibility therefore exists that this was merely a characteristic of the bourgeoisie and a proletarian revolution might not need such a phase. Nevertheless the historical progressiveness of the French Revolution is never questioned even if repeating parts of it gets to be deemed unnecessary.

In this sense while we can question why something happened, if it was necessary, who was ultimately responsible, but we don’t question our stance of being on the side of revolution vs reaction simply because this stuff happens. Marx and Engels were ultimately supporters of the French Revolution and were in a sense trying to take the next steps, but at the same time acknowledge that it was a bourgeois revolution and a proletarian revolution might differ.

For the US Civil War, the actions of the smugglers were thought to be aiding the reactionary enemy, the Confederacy, and thus the population accused of engaging in these actions had to be removed in order to alleviate the “Emergency” created by the War, which was being prolonged by the actions of the party to be removed. Anything could be justified as part of the War Effort, including the expulsion of a particular population.

The same exact thing can be said about Germany’s actions in the war. They thought that the Jews were detrimental to their war effort so they got rid of them. One’s opinion on this is ultimately related to one’s opinion of the war over anything else. Nobody was going to change their mind on who they were supported just because an atrocity occurred, instead the sides and therefore opinions pre-distributed themselves already based on the side one supported before the war based on class interests.

The reason I say this is because the revolution at the moment is clearly on the side of the proletarianized Palestinians seizing back their land from the circular system of Israeli seizure and then sales to fund the war effort. While for a time the Israeli system can continue this circular process of seizure and sale, the inevitable result of it is a larger and large proletarianized population that will seize it back. Supporters of the revolution worldwide that recognize this will end up supporting this revolutionary cause. This is inevitable and is not a product of any innate bias against any group of people.

This might be falling on death ears, but revolutionary support for Palestine is not just some kind of unique bias against Israel, but instead can be logically deduced from first principles. If the revolution sides against you, it is because you have taken the side against the revolution.

With all these things together: exterminations, ethnostates, bankers freaking out, Schmittian emergencies, Jewish expulsions, the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln has Hitler written all over it. There is even a German connection where a bunch of Germans left Germany after 1848 and came to America and many of them fought for the Union in the Civil War, so it is not out of the question that the Germans in Germany would have known all about them. Thus the Nazis could have been inspired, not by the Confederacy as some might say, but instead by the side that the Germans had supported in the Civil War, the Union, but not the Union of mythology, instead the Nazis were inspired by the ACTUAL Union as it was in reality.

The biologists who made advancements off his ideas actually misunderstood what he was talking about when they invented the concept of carrying capacity. What Malthus was actually talking about was a primitive form of the business cycle where he argued against unrestrained capitalism on the basis that it would have cycles rather than steady growth. Malthus was part of the Anglican clergy and the Church was a large landowner in England so he was taking that side against the nascent bourgeoisie who wanted to repeal the Corn Laws so that food prices would go down so that population would go up so they could pay workers less. Malthus was arguing that steady population increase was fine, but food prices should remain permanently high because the population going up too quickly would cause food prices to eventually shoot back up when the surplus is taken up.

“Free trade” in general is like this, (repealing the Corn Laws was the original free trade debate) one could argue that stuff like NAFTA results in cheap goods, but a smart cookie would point out that eventually goods would go up in price when everything stabilizes, you could argue instead for permanently high prices of goods to avoid that entire cycle so you don’t have the price shock after Ross Perot giant sucking sound is over. Prices go down at first until things equalize, and as Perot said “in the mean time you’ve ruined the country”. We are in the late cycle of that now where prices are going up. One could argue that keeping high goods prices permanently would have been better than having to deal with high goods prices after the “country has been ruined”.

Malthus was not against population growth, he just wanted the population to grow at artificially high food price levels such that there was never any “trap” set by temporarily low food prices.

What is the most mystifying of this is how far ahead these people were thinking. Malthus was thinking generations into the future and saw disaster caused by a temporary low food prices that would go back up. Sure he just wanted to make land more valuable within his lifetime, but imagine literally anyone these days thinking more than a year or two in the future.

Malthus was in practice describing the business cycle inherent to capitalism where we have booms and busts. The reason he only talked about food is not for any reason related to the biologists, but rather at the time of his writing agriculture was 90% of the economy so what else was an economist supposed to write about?

The American system in practice is the ability for the rich to lobby the government to do whatever they want (”redress grievances”). Zionism is something that particular rich people want, as Israel allows Jewish non-residents access to 97% of its land. If one is a poor Jew one would need to physically move to Israel to take advantage of this, so that non-residents who are Jewish have access to it is irrelevant to a poor Jew who doesn’t move there. If one is rich though, rich enough to be in the foreign investor class, what Israel represents is an exclusive colony for rich Jews that they can invest in that no other rich people can.

This exclusive colonialism which is what people think of when they think of stuff like the scramble for Africa where everyone tried to paint the map their colour gave way to neo-colonialism where instead of exclusive colonies the world effectively became one big colony for everyone. Israel is therefore an archaic outdated domain that rich Jews can enjoy because all the other rich people don’t complain about it in order to open it up like South Africa (massive minerals reserves that have now become investable for the entire world now that apartheid is over because the ANC has gone even more neoliberal than virtually any country on the planet) because they aren’t missing out on much by not being able to invest in 97% of some dusty shithole that regularly gets bombed.

So what this means is that just like rich investors lobby to try to keep markets open by preventing anti-imperialist seizure of assets, rich Jews lobby to keep Israel closed. Both are in the interest of he people lobbying. Technically a non-Jewish rich person who thought Israel’s investing rules were making it to difficult for them to make money could lobby to open Israel up like rich people did with South Africa, but Israel is clever and instead just gets rich families to marry Jewish. Kamala’s husband and Trump and Biden’s children through their spouses have the ability to invest in Israel so the rules, even as small as they are, don’t affect them.

Okay so a lot of rich people “redress grievances” related to their exclusive investment destination needing to be protected. This is part of the American system. The CIA therefore usually thinks that opposition to Zionism is an opposition to rich people being able to lobby the government to do whatever they want it to do, and therefore anti-Zionism is “anti-American”. Except the CIA also has the goal of protecting the whole rest of the system, they can’t let one issue blow up the entire system. If Israel is on the way out they need to make sure it happens in a way that doesn’t disrupt the ability for rich people to lobby the government to do whatever it wants. In shitlib terms the CIA “protects Democracy” by protecting the ability for the rich to buy elections.

However if opposition to Zionism galvanizes such that the rich can’t buy elections anymore the CIA might have a plan for this. This is the “Carnation” option, where colonial capital gets cut loose by regular capital. Portugal was veering towards Revolution because this small country was trying to manage and expensive giant colonial empire. Portugal tried to integrate every aspect of their businesses into the empire in a “corporatist state” where capital was a state organ, but empire really just aren’t that profitable so it was still a minority interest that had anything to lose but cutting the empire loose.

The United States and Israel is the opposite case, a giant country stuck with a small colony, but the minority of capital interests are involved in both cases. The minority interest gets its way because their interests aren’t directly opposed to other capital interests so the only opposition is usually the government expenses they drain. In Portugal case it was getting excessive, but Israel spending is relatively minor, so most of the opposition just comes from “the government should spend zero money at all” crowd.

Portuguese capital did not want a revolution to happen over colonial-capital, so they joined the neoliberal system by cutting their empire loose. This is far more profitable than trying to run an empire because the United States does the dirty work of preventing revolution.

So the Carnation Revolution was Portuguese Capital trying to thread the needle of ending colonial capital without ending all capital.

The CIA probably needs to have a contingency for this, so if Tucker is CIA, he is the Carnation guy. What he is there to do is making sure the system is preserved but without Israel, and thus what he believes is American Conservatism without the Zionism.

Tucker is therefore a historically progressive figure but he isn’t the end destination, as Communists we want the revolt over Zionist capital to translate into a revolt against all Capital and he doesn’t, but so long as Zionist capital still has free reign we are pulling in the same direction. Tucker is essentially just someone who will stop pulling when Zionist capital faceplants into mud in the tug of war.

So the CIA MIGHT have a contingency plan to have Tucker be the first anti-Zionist US President, which will preserve the system while ditching Zionism. Zionist capital won’t be able to buy off the government anymore as the populace will deliberate vote AGAINST anyone who takes money from that lobby, but thy will still vote for candidates who take money from other lobbies. Thus the CIA retains the American system of the rich being able to redress grievances.

Keep in mind Tucker might not actually be CIA, it is just that I have a “conspiracy neutral” worldview where I don’t particular care if any theory is correct or not, instead I just try to figure out what a conspiracy is trying to accomplish and then I don’t care what methods, secretive or non-secretive are used to accomplish that. Conspiracies can and do happen, but conspiracies happen for particular reasons and I care more about the reasons than the actual conspiracies. Tucker, whether he is CIA or not, will in effect preserve the American system without Zionism. Me assigning him the role of the CIA chosen Carnation President is just me giving the CIA credit for being pro-active which is credit they might not necessarily deserve if Tucker is acting without CIA involvement. If the CIA isn’t getting Tucker to do the things he is doing, the CIA SHOULD be getting Tucker to do the things he is doing because there needs to be a contingency plan as opposition to Zionism grows.

You aren’t Norwegian, but “The People of Norway” profit. Alberta is ironically probably “better” in a “self-contained” way if you think about this “system” in terms of sustainability. For people who hate those who hate those who cross borders, redditors have a difficult time understand the concept of wealth crossing borders in this manner, and those that do take the inane position of arguing that if wealth can cross borders then people should be able to as well! What I mean by all this is that Alberta’s “self-contained” fascism is clearly better than Norway’s global fascism if you truly think fascism is a bad system. Norway is making it everyone else problem, where as in theory in Alberta actually invested in theirs at least their decision to exploit themselves through the capitalist system and call it socialist would only impact those who actually chose to do it. Alberta stopped investing in their bond fund because the returns were low (that is what bonds do, get small consistent returns) so people decided to stop investing it. This phenomena can be modeled as if one was a “real investor” as individual people also can get dissuaded from investing if the returns are boring. This proves by the way that the logic of the system is maintained.

We can discuss if the people or Norway actually profit. For instance the Mormons also have a Sovereign Wealth Fund, but in practice this is identical to the concept of Church Lands in the middle ages. In the Late Roman Empire, the Church was the best accumulator of wealth given that it didn’t have to deal with the struggles of inheritances. The whole landed property of the church neatly passed down under on entity, the original Corporation which inspires the term Corporatism.

A recent discussion of ex-Mormons being angry about this because the Church has all this wealth but doesn’t share it with the congregation made me think: Is Norway even sharing that big wealth pile with Norwegians? What I mean by this is the Mormon Church or the Government of Norway any different in how they behave being in the “accumulation phase”?

The reddit logic of the billionaire sitting on a pile of wealth and hoarding it like a dragon still applies here even when it is being done by their darling countries, it just makes them gleeful that they, apparently, would get to participate in it.

Is Norway actually sharing the sovereign wealth fund with “the people” or are they, like the Mormon Church, just building a great big pile of money? (in the eyes of redditors, I know that it isn’t a pile of money, it represents ownership in companies which generate money)

Overall, what these developments represent is the system of capital overcoming the need for the capitalist to efficiently exploit the workers, that can be more readily achieved by salaried employees working for the mega corporations, which we call the Professional-Managerial Class. The furthest the redditor can imagine would be to take the stock that someone like Elon Musk has which makes him a trillionaire on paper (numbers don’t matter anymore, I care not if he actually is a trillionaire yet or not) and then just having some entity own it instead, but the actual day to day aspects of life would remain unchanged after this “wealth transfer”. Musk or Bezos naturally doesn’t like this and doesn’t want their wealth to be transferred, but merely transferring it wouldn’t be socialism. Just having a pension fund or something own Amazon stock would do absolutely nothing to change the behaviour redditors claim to hate. Why? Because numerous pension funds alread own Amazon. Bezos is just the biggest shareholder but in practice everyone who invests owns a piece. Sometimes I think that redditors only hate Amazon because they think Bezos owns it and their hatred of Amazon is merely an outgrowth of their hatred of Bezos.

In this view of what Fascism is, Musk throwing up that roman salute just demonstrates the reality we all live in. What makes the reddior seethe is that ONLY Musk gets to be the fascist. For his audacity of having revealed the situation we all live in the redditor can only possible imagine a more equitably distributed Fascism, and not something which is totally different than what currently exists.

That totally different society is not one where the profits of Amazon are more adequately distributed, but rather one where Amazon is no longer even trying to generate profits. The workers and the facilities would continue to operate but instead of trying to generate profit for someone (it doesn’t matter who) they would instead just do the social function of Amazon’s distribution network, which is getting stuff where people need it.

Now the conservative argument which redditors hate but have no response to is why would anyone continue to work if there was no profit motive? Redditors can’t argue against this because they don’t want to abolish profits entirely, instead they just think that someone else should be working instead of them,

The easy answer is that rather than there being some “other” people doing the jobs citizens just won’t do, if someone wants stuff from the Amazon network they themselves would be required to go to the facility and start shipping things. Rather than having dedicated desperate people working there, anyone who needs things will at some point need to work there. They would do this even without it being a requirement because the system is so complex that one likely cannot even find their own package without working through the backlog of the entire system which has been set up. So to get your order you might need to ship out a bunch of stuff just to make room for it. No money involved in this process, all you need to do is allow access to the facility for people that need things as opposed to having a system of money that locks anyone out who isn’t desperate enough to subject themselves to the specific ritual of doing what Amazon managers want you to do in exchange for currency.

Arguably the thing that makes redditors seethe the most is that the people they hate are the ones that create the system they endorse. None of them forgoe the underlying system, they just want everyone to share equally in it.

“Everyone” of course being an impossibility, the “state” is everyone (in the sense that everyone pays for it) as the conservatives will tell you to justify their opposition to it, but the liberals might retort that if the state is paying for it then obviously the rich being taxed are paying for, ergo the state is the rich and the conservatives just incorrectly assume “the rich” applies to everyone, but overall there is no disagreement over what the state is. Nobody genuinely thinks the state is everyone, except the fascists who will do what is necessary to realize the promises of social democracy.

Paul Mattick demonstrated this in his obituary on Redditor-in-Chief, Karl Kautsky

He believed that after fascism there would be the return to the ‘normal’ life on an increasingly socialistic abstract democracy to continue the reforms begun in the glorious time of the social democratic coalition policy. However, it is obvious now that the only capitalistic reform objectively possible today is the fascistic reform. And as a matter of fact, the larger part of the ‘socialisation programme’ of the social democracy, which it never dared to put into practice, has meanwhile been realised by fascism. Just as the demands of the German bourgeoisie were met not in 1848 but in the ensuing period of the counter-revolution, so, too, the reform programme of the social democracy, which it could not inaugurate during the time of its own reign, was put into practice by Hitler. Thus, to mention just a few facts, not the social democracy but Hitler fulfilled the long desire of the socialists, the Anschluss of Austria; not social democracy but fascism established the wished — for state control of industry and banking; not social democracy but Hitler declared the first of May a legal holiday.

A careful analysis of what the socialists actually wanted to do and never did, compared with actual policies since 1933, will reveal to any objective observer that Hitler realised no more than the programme of social democracy, but without the socialists. Like Hitler, the social democracy and Kautsky were opposed to both bolshevism and communism. Even a complete state-capitalist system as the Russian was rejected by both in favour of mere state control. And what is necessary in order to realise such a programme was not dared by the socialists but undertaken by the fascists. The anti-fascism of Kautsky illustrated no more than the fact that just as he once could not imagine that Marxist theory could be supplemented by a Marxist practice, he later could not see that a capitalist reform policy demanded a capitalist reform practice, which turned out to be the fascist practice. The life of Kautsky can teach the workers that in the struggle against fascistic capitalism is necessarily incorporated the struggle against bourgeois democracy, the struggle against Kautskyism. The life of Kautsky can, in all truth and without malicious intent, be summed up in the words: From Marx to Hitler.

To begin with there is some kind of irrelevant dispute within the ruling class related to succession probably, and in response to this Elsa, the older sister and the ruler of the Kingdom of Arendelle, creates an internal winter crisis which along with other things makes it impossible for Kristoff to sell his ice wares, which he usually transports with his sled which he owns but had to take out a loan to afford, and had only just paid it off after years of work.

Kristoff gets into a dispute with a petite-bourgeois shop keeper over the crisis because the shopkeeper Oaken is trying to benefit from the crisis by price gauging and so has difficult affording the things he needs, exacerbated by the fact that Kristoff had just to pay back his loans and was expecting his next shipment of ice to carry him through to being able to afford to maintain his operation, which leaves him cash poor. He only has assets, one of which is the unsold ice, which is now worthless, and the other is the sled which is more valuable due to the crisis. The lack of business and his liquidity problem requires him to take on alternative clients such as Anna, the younger sister and main protagonist of the story, who agrees to pay for some additional winter equipment (and ice axe and rope, he seems to have bought this solely for plot reasons to explain why he had them when they were needed later as I’d imagine he would already have an ice axe, but IDK maybe he lost his in the storm. Story wise demonstrating him obtaining this items is important though in a Chekov’s gun sense where stuff should get introduced rather than only becoming important when it needs to be so I understand why they did it. It also allows them to have Oaken say the “supply and demand problem” line to make clear the price gauging dispute and the fact that Kristoff has his own supply and demand problems) and the fuel in the form of carrots that will maintain the Reindeer, Sven, which Kristoff requires to maintain his set up through the crisis.

He can’t just stop feeding himself and Sven. Therefore the crises induced by one member of the ruling class necessitates him serving another member of that ruling class in the mean time despite the fact that he usually serves the common population’s ice needs and doesn’t interact with the ruling class. That chekov’s gun thing with the ice axe and rope being useful for the later events of the movie though does demonstrate that all Anna was really paying for was the the equipment she herself would require in their escapade, and the fuel too (carrots for both Sven and Kristoff) was just something required to make the set up run for the duration that she was using that set up for her own needs. She was not actually “giving” Kristoff anything she herself did not also require.

In the process of his employment to the ruling class Anna proceeds to destroy Kristoff’s possessions. Albeit the wolves were not her direct fault, it was her decision to “leave now” after throwing the literal and proverbial carrots when Kristoff had said they will “leave at dawn”, which would have been much safer.

See: disputes over working conditions, she was putting him in danger in order to carry out the job despite the fact that he was aware of the dangers, as obviously he sensed the wolves might have been there when he paused to check around him, so his decision to want to leave at dawn was informed by his knowledge of the dangers that lurked in the woods since he had worked in the woods before so he knew the risks.

Immediately upon hearing about the wolves (something which was entirely her fault for insisting they leave while it was dark) she wants to “help” but Kristoff refuses and they get into an argument because he doesn’t trust her judgement so he doesn't think she can help and might just makes things worse. While he is distracted by this argument he stops paying attention and is “saved” by Anna destroying his personal possession, the musical instrument, in order to whack the wolf. While she does save him from the wolf jump attack, had she not been arguing he wouldn’t have been distracted to the point of not noticing it, as he had previously been able to kick one away. While she does whack one away his reaction to her being successful distract him again (not to mention that he had to lean away from her swinging the instrument which left him exposed out the side of the sled) and he gets dragged off the sled and conveniently gets looped by that rope. Then she calls him Kristopher and they argue over that since his real name is Kristoff (later the snow man insists on calling him “Sven” so this is a repeated problem), and she lights his rolled up bed on fire and throws it at him telling him to duck, which does successful keep the wolves away briefly. He then says she “almost set him on fire” but Anna defends herself and says “but I didn’t”, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is making the work environment unsafe. They even get into a debate over who is in charge of telling Sven to jump the ravine, as Kristoff thinks he should be in charge and Anna doesn’t get to tell Sven what to do. He even keeps her safe by throwing her onto Sven as Sven is able to jump far enough to get himself across, but not the sled, which means Kristoff himself needs to jump off the sled just to only barely reach the edge of the cliff.

The destroyed sled then comically burst into flames (which actually makes some sense since they had a lantern which probably broke) and he makes the statement “but I just paid it off”, with a common joke in all the movies being that the sled is like his car, and the joke is “men and their cars amirite” in the same sense that both Anna and Elsa smelling the chocolate and liking the smell was a “women and chocolate amirite” joke where it had only thus far been established that Anna might like chocolate but not Elsa yet but her also liking chocolate is supposed to demonstrate they are similar. Therefore the joke in this case is that you get into a wreck after having just paid off your car, and so this is actually supposed to be an anachronistic joke where they have this wooden sled standing in for a car which has a car loan, which is humorous as modern problems get projected backwards, but it actually does make sense that Kristoff might have taken business loan to afford his own means of production. The comedy here relies on a lack of understanding of this “car” being a tool of production rather than merely something Kristoff likes to own because he is a man with a special attachment to his car as an equivalent to women having a special attachment to chocolate.

Now Anna once more rescues him by almost slicing his head open with the ice axe tied to the rope. In fact she would have hit him had he not been sliding down at that point in time as it went where he had previously been (He even says “no no no no” as the axe is flying). Indeed she does rescue him, but had she not been there (beyond the fact that they wouldn’t even be out at night) he himself would have jumped onto Sven rather than throw her on. Had he thought the sled had a decent chance of getting across there would be no need to to throw Anna on to sled, so he was aware of the possibility of the sled not making it across. In fact he deliberately stays on the sled in order to cut the sled off Sven.

At this point Anna does offer to replace Kristoff’s sled and all of his possessions and releases him from any obligation to help her. At this point however Kristoff’ reasons that he needs to keep her alive in order for her to be able to pay back the debt she owes him, so rather than working for her because she owes him the small debt of the rope and axe and carrots, now she was to work for her because she owes HIM a large debt, and she even at first acts excited to get his help but then pretends to act non-chalant as if she just “will let him tag along”.

In this situation she relieves him of the employment of taking her up the mountain to pay for the rope and ice axe due to the greater debt she now owes him, but if she were to die she would be unable to pay that debt leaving him with just the ice axe and the rope (plus the caroots already eaten) which started the whole situation. His only choice is to continue to work for her in the hopes she might be able to pay him back in the future. Incidentally the ice axe and rope ended up being useful for helping her accomplish her mission of ascending the mountain so we only ever see Kristoff use the things that put him into debt in the first place in the employ of Anna who he owed the debt.

Anyway the rest of the movie happens and the rope and axe, the only possessions of his that still remain, and exactly the thing Anna bought for him, and useful in Anna’s journey in order to make the snow anchor later on when they are fleeing the snow golem, which was itself created by Elsa to throw them out (and then attack them when Anna gets mad and throws a snow ball at it, and Kristoff even tries to calm her down to prevent her from provoking the snow golem, but she even pretends to be calm only to throw it behind his back) in an intra-ruling class dispute despite the fact that it has no relevance to him.

Towards the end once the ruling class dispute is solved Anna gets Elsa to pay for a new sled and also gives him a fake job just to keep him close by. This is supposedly suppose to be his good ending because obviously he gets to be around rich people with a fake job which is the best. Leaving aside Anna’s nepotism of asking for a fake job to keep the man who she wants to be her boyfriend close to the royal court, Kristoff is skeptical of the job as to him it seems to be fake and unnecessary. However in truth everyone is aware that even though Kristoff does get his sled in the end we know there isn’t really a future for him anyway as now Elsa has the ability to produce ice on an industrial scale (in fact she always did but her hiding her powers made it seem like being an ice deliverer was worth investing years of labour into paying off a sled over) and therefore Kristoff never actually “got ahead”. He still worked for years to pay off that sled in the first place despite the fact that it was now largely worthless despite the fact that he still retained the exact same property in the end by having it replaced.

What’s more while he could potentially turn down the royal position, in practice he doesn’t have that option since the ice business is dead. He has no real choice but to become an employee of the ruling class even if he technically owns the same property. In fact it is only at the end of the story that his sled becomes the equivalent of a vanity car without economic purpose despite that being the “joke” about it. (In fact in the script it specifically says that Sven is supposed to walk up to it like the woman on wheel of fortune does when they give away cars, demonstrating that this situation is like when certain poor people are gifted expensive objects by the rich for the amusement of viewers, rather than this merely being the ruling class paying back a debt they owe him from the property of his they destroyed in the process of his employment, and notably while it can be argued that by releasing Sven from the sled he might had sacrificed the sled on his own accord to rescue Sven’s life, Anna herself destroyed his personal possessions in the form of the musical instrument and bed, which we never see being restored to him, only a new sled is purchased for him by Elsa, though it appears as if there is a new instrument is in the sled, the sleeping bag she lit on fire and threw at wolves is not)

Now does he own the sled, or is he now fully proletarianized needing to worj equipment for the benefit of one sole employer who owns that equipment rather than being a free agent like he was before? Well in the second movie Elsa requests of Kristoff to “borrow your wagon ... and Sven” and he replies “I’m not very comfortable with the idea of that”. Later when Anna says she will go with Elsa, Kristoff says he is coming to and that he will drive. Therefore he is trying to assert possession over not only the sled, but also Sven, which I will remind you was his sole remaining possession that actually predates his involvement with the royal sisters, so they are actually asking to borrow even more than they had originally owed him in the first movie. He does seem to have the power to turn them down so he can be said to own the sled, but overall the point of this scene (beyond getting them all to go on the road trip together) is to extend the “men and their cars amirite” joke where he insists upon being the one who drives, because that is a thing men stereotypically do. So does he own the means of production? Not really as it is no longer a means of production, its more of an expensive luxury at this point, but one that is available to the ruling class when they need it.

As for how Kristoff feels about this whole situation, you get two different answers based on two different versions of the second movie.

In the deleted version of the movie, Kristoff is torn between his relationship with Anna and the fact that he doesn’t enjoy his life as a “Lord” in Arendelle. He even reiterates the point in the first movie about the royal ice deliverer being a fake job.

By contrast in the actual second movie though, he sings about how he is “lost without her”, which is the exact opposite sentiment, because in the deleted version he laments over wanting his lost alternative life back, whereas in the actual movie the message seems to be that he has no place without the relationship, except he only lost his place because of all the things the ruling class did which put him there. The problem becomes that he fits into this new life too much and can’t do something else. It isn’t that he wants to go back, it is that the possibility of going back doesn’t even occur to him.

The “Lost in the Woods” song makes reference to the fact that in the first movie he was “needed by her”, which is evidently true in that adventure since Anna is not able to ascend and descend the North Mountain without his skills and experience, but now in the second movie he isn’t needed anymore, rather only “his” sled (bought by Elsa) is needed which Elsa wants to use without him. As such taken together with the part where he insists on driving despite Elsa wanted to do it on her own, this demonstrates that his fear now is that after having lost everything when he had been needed with his independent existence replaced by one where he got supplied his equipment by the ruling class, he might one day not be needed to do the same things he once did.

Ironically despite this ending being far less adapted to Kristoff’s actual character arc as the mountain man who obviously would have difficulty adjusting to royal court life, it is perfectly adapted to Kristoff’s class arc. Kristoff’s class of the previously independent tradesmen who owned their own tools, perhaps bought own credit, were destroyed by crises created by the ruling class, and gradually replaced by those same tools being bought by the ruling class and handed to them to be used for ruling class purposes, leaving the members of those classes in a state of total dependence where they need to be needed by that same ruling class in order to sustain their own existence.

Even the central story of the second movie, something about a dam made by the royal sister’s grandfather destroying the livelihood of some Sami inspired noble savages trope and that needing to be rectified by destroying their Kingdom of Arendelle (which they decided didn’t actually need to happen likely at the last moment) despite the fact that it was the ruling family who were responsible for doing this for the reasons that the grandfather King didn’t like that the tribal people having access to magic were in a position to defy the will of a king, and therefore was entirely done for purposes related to royal authority rather than done for the purpose of some interest relevant to the collective population of Arendelle itself) could have been something which could have originally been relevant to the character of Kristoff, in the script, Kristoff is introduced at the very beginning of the movie, even before the girls as “a young Sami boy, Kristoff (8)”

https://imsdb.com/scripts/Frozen-(Disney).html

He does relate to the “Northuldra” as they are called, I guess because they live even further north than the Norse northmen, making them “Ultra-North” like how Ultra-Violet is beyond violet, with his relationship to reindeer, but it is never explored beyond that. The ice harvesters are also describe as wearing “traditional Sami clothing” and so its possible that a generation after the grandfather mucked about Sami were working as ice harvesters and Kristoff tagged along and got lost, and in fact got “adopted” by the Trolls without any permission, similar to the process of residential schools are forced adoptions which were applied both to indigenous people in Australia and America, as well as to the Sami despite the fact that the Sami and Norse had before the industrial period largely lived alongside each other for thousand of years (and therefore this proves the process has more to do with the industrial system’s reaction to those outside than it necessarily has to do with any group being more “indigenous” than any other, and arguments over historical primacy in a territory ignores the reasoning for the process being relevant to placing such people into the industrial system despite their prior capacity to live outside it)

However that last retroactive impact upon him requires many assumptions to be made, some of which require ignoring the backlash which cause “Sami” to get changed to “Northuldra” despite it showing up in the original script as Sami, namely they decided to make the North-ultra look more like native americans as I assume Americans require everything to be colour coded for their convenience or else they won’t understand what is going on. The original movie received backlash for culturally appropriating Sami culture and by making Kristoff look like any other European, but Sami are Europeans so they look European. In the sense that they look different than the Scandinavians it is because they are more related to the Finns, who still look pretty Scandinavian all things considered, and the Fenno-Scandians together have a much lighter look than most other European groups, with the only differentiating feature being that Finns are more likely to exhibit the “epicanthic fold” along their eyes, but not all of them do and some Nordics also exhibit this trait, so it perfectly makes sense for Kristoff to look the way he does. After all they did live with each other for thousands of years, it makes sense for them to look similar unless one is suggesting they someone only made contact recently and Arendelle is a new rather than ancient Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicanthic_fold#Lower-frequency_populations

Therefore it cannot be concluded that he is related to the Northuldra despite both he and the Northuldra being inspired by the same group of people due to the fact that it had to be ignored due to backlash, which is ironic given that erasing their distinctiveness and connection to their prior identity was the exact purpose of the residential school and forced adoptions. They may have retroactively and unintentionally made events of the first movie a lot more sinister by adding this context which is never addressed considering the Trolls essentially stole him away from his family and forcibly adopted him.

As John Rolfe, secretary of the colony of Virginia, wrote to Virginia Company of London treasurer Edwin Sandys:

About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope, his Pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett with the Treasurer in the West Indyes, and determined to hold consort shipp hetherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not any thing but 20. and odd [Africans], which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualls (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could

Technically though they were still being sold as indentured servants since slavery is maintained by existing laws and slave laws had not yet been created in the colony so they were legally treated like the indentured servants from Europe. However this likely meant that she owned indentured servants through her husband as he was the one who had first successfully started to export Tobacco because he acquired a better variant from Spanish colonies by some unknown means and thus he was the only guy in the colony who had any income streams and reason to employ indentured servants. This also means she married the first guy she met who had money.

The Disney move is inaccurate but not in the way people say about it being biased against natives but rather because none of the events in the movie took place. The sequel however is far more accurate despite it like most disney direct-to-dvd sequels being a worse movie and not watched. Those events where she went to England to request an audience with the royal family to continue to financially support the development of colony actually did take place, and this is actually the real thing which she was known for historical. So it is rather ironic that people have created this fantasy of her somehow being against settler colonialism despite her being the chief proponent of it.

The events of the movie were just elaborate backstory created by John Smith, in reality he probably only saw her running around the colony as a child rather than having notable direct interactions. What John Smith was trying to do was make her seem a lot more important than she actually was because she wasn’t actually set to inherit anything from her father within the Powhatan system as they had a matrilneal inheritance system, meaning it was actually her father’s maternal brothers who took over, and after that it would have been the sons of his maternal sisters.

Another irony being that the reason a woman was disinherited was because of matrilineal inheritance. The colonies system of patrilineal inheritance actually gave her son the opportunity to inherit something, as given that we don’t know who Pocahontas’s mother is chances are she probably died early and so likely didn’t have any sons who would have supplied inheritance to the sons of Pocahontas, and thus Pocahontas could have property within the English system by marrying into it, but that was not possibly within the Powhatan system, and so again her decisions made sense when you considered her property interests. It made sense for her to create private property from thin air out of her tribal lands because she was no on track to be able to inherit anything within her tribal legal system despite being born into a high position. Her social status greatly improved by marrying into the English colony, and so John Smith’s elaborate stories were intended to cover for the fact that her system didn’t actually provide her a high position despite it seeming like it would have if you projected the English system on to it. You could say that Pocahontas wanted to ... smash the matriarchy.

Her son eventually inherited the now private property which had previously been his grandfather’s tribal lands, and he lead militias to defend his private property from his tribe. He also likely was indeed a slave owner as it is commonly understood since he probably inherited African indentured servants from his father, but he also likely inherited European indentured servants since the workers of both races at this point were legally still indentured servants as permanent servitude was not yet part of the legal system of the colony, but in popular consciousness slave = black, so I’m just going to go with “he (likely) owned black people so he was a slave owner”

Her son’s descendants eventually married into almost the entire Virginia Planter Aristocracy, who are confirmed slave owners for what it is worth, so despite the vast majority of their ancestry being European, they still could all claim to be descended from Pocahontas. This actually proved to be a problem with the One Drop Rule so they eventually said that natives don’t count for the one drop rule because if they had the vast majority of the Virginia Elite would have been considered non-white. This really reveals what the point of the one drop rule actually was, rather than really something intended to protect blood purity it was intended to prevent the descendants of slaves from having children who intermarried and eventually became legally white and then began to use that legal status to try to demand reparations for slavery. The point was to permanently politically disenfranchise former slaves rather than specifically to disenfranchise people with dark skin. An anecdote from that period was that some dignitary from an African country showed up asking for a shave from a segregated barber in the South and despite initially being refused the African Dignitary declared that he was in fact white because he was a slave owner and then he got the shave he requested. Don’t know how true it is, but as a story it does demonstrate what the actual point of that convoluted system was.

Therefore I bestow upon Pocahontas the illustrious title of the most bourgeois of disney princesses, Queen of Primitive Accumulation. Tiana gets second place because she only gets the rank of petit-bourgeois. Incidentally, they are both the American Disney Princesses, as opposed to being from fantasy realms like Norway.

Kristoff gets the title of most proletarian Disney Prince as he actually gets proletarianized through the course of the movie. Aladdin and Flynn Rider get disqualified for being lumpen.

In it I discuss that her husband and son likely owned indentured servants from both Europe and Africa, but that these were not quite yet slaves. I also went into how there was a “Pocahontas Exemption” to the “One Drop Rule” because most of the Virginia Landowning Aristocracy was descended from her, as the point of that wasn’t actually racial purity but rather to ensure that former slaves and descendants of slaves could not marry their way into reaching positions of political power where they could start demanding reparations simply by becoming white over the generations. The landowners had no issue with non-white ancestry if that ancestry posed no challenge to their property, and the ancestry from Pocahontas reinforced their claims to their property, whereas people with slave ancestry posed a threat to their property.

Here I will discuss part of that transformation from indentured servants to slaves and how it is related to landowners not wanting their labourers to be taken by neighbouring landowners, and that this is related to how the conditions of illegal immigration today help to replicate that ideal for landowners not liking labourers being in what can be described as “proletarian conditions”.

Trump Being “Reasonable” By Agreeing To Not Deport The Slaves

Trump has been taking a “nuanced” position on illegal immigration where apparently illegal immigrants who have had “good relationships with farmers for years” are going to stay, where as the illegal immigrants in Los Angeles which can switch jobs are being deported. We ought to respond to this nuanced position by demanding the opposite. A slave owner would have said that they had a “good relationship with their labourers for decades” and it would have been good to have ended that “good relationship” even if it meant the slave had to be returned to the country they came from, which is arguably necessary as absent moving the “slave” the landowners by owning all the land can quite easily just replicate the prior conditions as the “freed” labourer has no other options. The labourer MUST be removed from that situation OR the land must be confiscated for the conditions of slavery to not replicate, as it is the monopolization of land itself which causes conditions to approach slavery, and legal enslavement is just a byproduct of those conditions existing and the landowners being able to write the laws. Therefore deportation from farms and rural areas can be argued to be necessary, but deportation of workers simply lacking documentation from urban areas where they can switch jobs easily is not necessary. Therefore the correct “nuanced” position is the opposite of the administration’s “nuanced” position. The reason the conditions of agricultural workers will always closely resemble slavery, especially if they are illegal immigrants, as usually there is one employer who knows exactly where they are, and if there are other employers in the area the first employer will still know exactly where they are and might try to get them deported if they start working for another farm, and all the landowners know this so none of them bother trying to poach them by offering better wages since they know the others might just get them deported if they are angry about it.

This is of course because the landowners physically own a large area, there are no other authorities on their properties but them. They will know if a worker has left their property and might get them deported if they don’t come back quickly. Nobody who is a landowner is going to risk an irate neighbour getting them fined for offering an illegal immigrant better conditions. You see while it is illegal to hire the illegal immigrant, that also means it is illegal to poach that illegal immigrant from another landowner. The person who knowingly hired the illegal immigrant will also know that the immigrant is illegal if they go work for someone else. By contrast when a third person isn’t introduced the only people who know this relationship is illegal are the employer and employee, and both can be punished for revealing this knowledge. If a third person tries to employ them then that introduces someone who can avoid the law coming down on them because technically they are no longer hiring an illegal immigrant if they lose their employee to someone else.

John Casor

That scenario actually reminds me a bit about an early slave case where it was unclear yet if slaves were just indentured servants or permanent slaves. The case is notable for having been a dispute between a Black Landowner by the name of Anthony Johnson and a White Landowner by the name of Robert Parker. A black indentured servant by the name of John Casor once he was free of his indenture contract took a job nearby with Robert Parker but Johnson argued that Casor was still his property and Parker had basically stolen him. Apparently this dispute maybe had something to do with the practice of granting land to the people who ha paid to bring in colonists so Johnson may have thought that Parker would get the land grant by claiming he had brought Casor to the colony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casor#Legal_dispute

Anyway what’s important about this is that it was a legal dispute between two landowners (Johnson vs Parker) rather than something that involved Casor, and the court ruled that Casor be returned to Johnson and Parker pay damages to Johnson. This is notable because the courts sided with a black man over a white man. The caveat being the black man the court sided with was a landowning black man, the indentured servant black man wasn’t even being considered by the court, and in fact was basically made a slave of another black man by the court decision.

John Punch

This was not the first instance of someone being made an indentured servant without a clear number of years before they would be free, as there was previously the John Punch case where an African indentured servant tried to escape with two European indentured servants and the African indentured servant was punished more harshly than the Europeans for the same crime (of trying to escape) by making his indenture permanent rather than something which would expire in a set number of years (the europeans who tried to escape were sentenced to an extra year in service of their master and then three years in service of the colony)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)

Something that is brought up as a distinction was that Casor has not actually sentenced to anything, his case was purely a civil case (one that technically didn’t even include him) and thus Casor wasn’t actually being punished according to the law, rather Parker was the one being required to give restitution to Anthony Johnson, the court just regarded Casor as basically property being transferred back to a rightful owner rather than as a person being punished for a crime. Therefore this might be the instance where people started to be regarded as property and where you can distinguish “slave” from “permanent indentured servant” as John Punch, while he was sentenced to life for a crime which really shouldn’t have been a crime (sentenced for trying to escape) was still basically regarded as person being sentenced to a life of labour rather than as stolen property to be transferred to be transferred back to the original owner with no regard to if he had committed a crime himself.

Solutions?

Anyway the tangent I went it to was to describe how landowners being territorial with their workers explains why the conditions of those workers might degrade to situations of slavery. It might be regarded as “stealing” the workers from each other. The reason for the discrepancy is that proletarian conditions is where a “labour market” can be said to exist. Both employers and employees have many options so it is not that big of a deal if one transfers to another. For landowners you basically have like 5 employers nearby, the actually farm you are on and the four which are next to it on each side. The labourers are equally scarce since you can probably only try to recruit from your neighbours as well. The logic dictates that the landowners will try to do everything in their power to make sure their labourers cannot be taken from them and they have no other options because replacing them would be a headache. You might think this would give employees more leverage, but you have to remember they don’t really have other options either. Conditions are so terrible for this very reason. It is not that picking fruit is a particularly terrible job, rather the conditions are terrible because the antagonism between labourer and landowner is so high. The landowner essentially dictates the conditions without challenge, but they also have no guarantee of even having someone they can dictate the conditions to. This is why they eventually just import labourers directly because at a certain point it just becomes easier to force someone to come to your farm and work for you rather than wait for some random person to realize your farm exists 20 miles up some backroad.

That antagonism can go away by abolishing the concept of the landowner and just making the fruit farms a kind of state property where the workers get to dictate their conditions where they have some kind of contract to pick fruit from a kind of state orchard or something. IDK I’m coming up with a solution on the fly, you are free to poke holes in it, its just I think nationalizing fruit farms and then making it possible to basically purchase the right from the state to harvest them under their own conditions might be easier given that the orchards are kind of like a static thing and it isn’t like someone is making market based conditions of what to plant on particular years. For many decades you know what is going to be harvested and it is basically just a matter of harvesting it, the price of the harvest contract people might be willing to pay to claim the produce of that orchard is what would go up and down with the market. So maybe like a kind of state maintenance of the orchard could be coupled with a team who gets to pay for the right to harvest them for a particular year might create conditions where the whole thing isn’t miserable and there is no exploitative landowner who tries to control the conditions in every step of the process. Technically the state is the landowner, but they aren’t also the employer, the harvest team is the employer, they would need to secure a workforce before they would be willing to purchase the harvest contract.

This is of course assuming stuff like “money” and “commodities” still exist, but I’m calibrating for something that could conceivable work within the current system. I imagine that breaking up landowner, employer, and labourer might reduce poor conditions created by the employer also being the landowner.

Anyway tangent aside, agricultural labourers are exactly where the problem is and exactly where I don’t want current conditions to continue. “They have a good relationship with their employer over the course of decades!” yes and a slave owner would have said the exact same thing. I’m sure there were even some “good” slave owners genuinely had a friendly relationship with their slaves as the slaves understood the situation that they basically had no other options for miles as they were brought to a foreign country with no knowledge of what things would be like outside the farm. None of that changes that the reason this relationship existed was for lack of options and it is this situation where one is forced to be with a singular employer which I want to eliminate. If a farm can only exist by having some kind of permanent illegal labourer maybe it is time to radical reorient how agriculture is done such that we advance beyond the need for outdated paternalistic relationships. Maybe its time for industrialized large scale state-run farms that produce for a national planned harvest where labour can be distributed as needed scientifically to be coordinated at different times of the year such that working there can be stable employment rather than a temporary thing that locals obviously won’t sign up for since they need to work full time to afford a living? IDK if that is specifically an issue but there are so many issues with the current model of “guy runs a farm and needs some other guy to bring in the harvest but can’t find anybody so lets have this continent wide migration to resolve it instead of scientifically reorganizing agriculture so this problem no longer exists”. I’m sure if you got smart people working on it they could solve the problems, but apparently we’d rather have this situation where every year people complain about the harvest rotting in the fields because not enough people are illegally crossing an entire continent and somehow ending up in the EXACT random farm who needs labourers. No we HAVE to let the market decide this for us, we couldn’t possibly just pre-plan the harvest and planting season so we don’t run into these issues they complain about every year.

The possibility that the voters of Trump and Brexit simply wanted to have a different “place in the world” than it currently had never occurred to anyone who asserted that they should just have a “do over” or something to mean that the results of the Brexit Referendum shouldn’t go through.

What was actually going on that the, yes, globalists refused to understand is that there was a conflict within their own country, a conflict that had a basis in class. The “place in the world” that THEY enjoyed didn’t benefit everyone in their society. They asserted that these people acting in an isolationist manner would “ruin” their country, but could not accept the possibility that the country had already been ruined obtaining that place in the world.

The global imperialist system does not universally benefit the entirety of society. Yes, there is money that can be used to “buy off” aspects of the proletariat, but overall maintaining the financial ownership of “British” or “American” assets in countries around the globe is something that exclusively benefits the bourgeoisie. In such a situation the proletariat simply doesn’t understand what the harm could be in “alienating” the globe (which is what the Remainers would be concerned about). It is not their profits at risk, the proletariat has no profits to protect.

The global imperialist tradeoff is that in exchange for having investments in other countries, those other countries can have investments in your country as well. This is “fair” insofar as there is one global market, but the volume in investments is different between countries due to certain places being “financial centers”.

How they got that way is unimportant, one can argue it is about ancient exploitation accumulating but we can ignore this and come away with a systemic understanding of the world without needing to complain about how things got this way. The reason I say this is that there is a particular strain of “left-wing” activist that think it is hypocritical for residents of a
“financial center” country to complain about the exploitation of foreign investments in their country. This is nonsense. The proletariat is exploited by capital regardless of the origin of that capital. If the proletariat is complaining about capital one does not need to take out some kind of archaic slide rule from a prior era to try to exactly calculate the relative amount of exploitation between countries over the years.

Brexit

The assertion that the British could be exploited by the global imperialist system is enraging if you are some point dexter doing bean counting, but one needs to remember that it is not countries that exploit each other, but classes. The British proletariat is being exploited by imperialist capitalism, to say otherwise makes you a massive idiot. They voted to end that. You just complained about it for ten years. You failed to understand this and turn it into a true withdrawal from the imperialist system.

This is made all the worse for those getting enraged at the “hypocrites” complaining about foreign exploitation because their isolationist policies would effectively end that foreign exploitation coming out of the “hypocritical” country anyway. Why else would the Remainers be so concerned about their “place in the world” if there wasn’t a real risk of these disruptions dealing a blow to imperialism?

The bourgeois class is the one that extracts profits from capital held in other countries, while the proletariat does not understand the purpose of this. When confronted with “foreign aid” to them it just sounds like a waste of money since it seems like those foreign countries literally have nothing to do with them so why spend money on them? “Leftists” when confronted with the true opinion of the proletariat are indignant until this intelligent leftist has it explained to them by an intelligent bourgeoisie talking about how dumb the proletariat is for opposing it, because of how it isn’t actually about helping those countries, rather it is just to ensure the compliance of local government to allow the imperialist countries companies to operate there. Only then will the intelligent leftist adopt the position the proletariat took on instinct just based on “this sounds like the type of thing which is a waste of money”. Even more intelligent leftists will still act indignant towards the proletariat in imperialist countries opposing foreign aid even if they understand it’s sole purpose is to bribe foreign governments by getting angry at the proletariat for not understanding that they are benefiting from that foreign aid as a resident of the imperial core (this confuses the proletariat as there is to person simultaneously complaining about a thing and then getting angry at them for complaining about it because they aren’t complaining about it in the right way)

Countries Don’t Have Interests, Classes Do

All of these weird situations can resolve if you take the simple view that: countries aren’t real entities. Countries don’t have a singular interest, the people in countries all have different interests. The liberal bourgeoisie thinks that giving foreign aid “boosts their influence abroad” because for them it does “boost their influence”. The proletariat in the imperial core thinks foreign aid is a waste of money because for them it is a waste of money.

Where things get interesting is the assertion that this imperialist influence is to the benefit of the imperialist country at the expense of the imperialized country. Beancounting aside where one pulls out the slide rule, if you ask the governing bodies of these countries they indeed are quite dependent on foreign aid. This is of course due to the lack of tax collection on foreign companies, where instead the foreign company collects taxes and gives some of that money back to the imperialized third world government to fund some nonsense program related to something popular with some micro activist group back home. Still that money allows the government of the imperialized country to operate so it is indeed in their specific interest as the government. To argue it is not in the interest of “the country” implies the existence of a totally different government that collects taxes instead of foreign aid. That totally different government doesn’t exist, so how can one even begin to decide what would be in its interest? You would need to first imagine such a government and then get angry that your imaginative government isn’t getting its proper taxes. Your imaginative government doesn’t exist though, precisely because the foreign aid receiving government exists. If the foreign aid receiving government collapsed due to the aid getting cut off, the only reasonable thing that could emerge to replace it would be a tax collecting government (provided there is no imperialist intervention to “restore” the aid-receiving government). It would therefore be an entirely different government so one cannot reasonably say that the current government is in anyway exploited.

So who is exploited? The proletariat in that country is. They will still be there even if governments rise and fall. The companies exploiting them because the rate of exploitation is higher there will also still be there. In the event of government collapse those companies will have an interest in re-establishing some kind of order, and thus they lobby the imperialist governments to re-establish regimes compliant with imperialism.

It is wrong to think of the companies as representatives of their government in the third world country, instead their government is a representative to the third world country for those companies. The companies are the ones who demand action, the government just executes it. The imperialist governments exists to serve those companies, not the other way around. If the companies didn’t exist there wouldn’t be anyone in the imperialist country that would know about the upheaval, let alone care about it.

There Is No Country To Put Before The Party

To assert that this representatives an “empire” that serves some kind of central nervous system which is harmed if one of its appendages are misunderstands the situation. If the company can’t get an “empire” to intervene on its behalf it will just go to another one. Quite literally a company operating in a third world country can just register to declare itself a company from a different country. This process is expensive and requires moving central offices, but it can be done. Therefore the country to which a company is “loyal” (pays official taxes to) is up to the whims of the market. If a company were to be destroyed that is identical to any given country as it choosing to register itself elsewhere. Can we really say these are aspects of a country acting on behalf of a government in another country? No we can’t. That’s a dumb statement. It is not an “empire” it is a market to choose your packages of regulations and taxes.

Therefore can one say that this “empire” which doesn’t exist has been objectively harmed by less companies choosing their subscription package?

No it isn’t hurt but that. The “empire” isn’t falling.

What is happening is that the influence those companies operating in foreign countries had over the domestic government is going away.

In colloquial terms, the globalists lose.

During the Biden Reaction there was an attempt to make things “return to normal” to salvage their “place in the world”, but the resumption of 2016 and the random aggressions have confirmed the necessity of “moving away from the United States” which is exactly what the people in 2016 wanted. They didn’t like their place in the world, they wanted something different. The last decade has merely been a refusal to believe this, but now it is confirmed. Prior to this is was still possible to think that it was possible put the pieces back together, that it was just an aberation. Now it is a necessity to look elsewhere.

“But they destroyed their own empire!” No, they freed themselves from it.

It wasn’t an empire, it was a subscription package for internationally operating companies. What does it matter to them if a random country looks to secure resources lanes from another country rather than them? Are you expecting them to care? None of that had anything to do with them in the first place.

Where it did impact them was with the perpetual onslaught of people trying to maintain their “place in the world” controlling the actions of the body that governed them. “Country before party” they might say. There were things they were all supposed to agree on while some kind of nonsense musical tea party was allowed to play in front of it all. There was no country, there was just businesses controlling both parties.

The unfortunate aspect of it all was that it was only possible to make it impossible for such people to take back control to put everything back to the way it was by just wrecking it so it was too damaged to repair. To make it not even worth it for the business to try to control the foreign policy anymore.

The method this was acheived was roundabout, but if you ignore your own impulses to want to hate the people who achieved it, you must realized that the overall effect of what they have done has made it impossible for the empire to continue. Understand that THIS WAS THE POINT. They made globalism impossible. They won.

It doesn’t matter who is right about this because in order to accomplish this you will have to first create a corporation which is jointly owned by the employees, so if anything the appropriate term for this would be “Corporatism”. It is capitalist because it exists within the capitalist system and follows all of its rules. There is nothing illegal about what people here are doing. It is socialist because the goal of the corporation is for workers to own the means of production. It is a “third position” so to speak, neither socialist, nor capitalist.

In truth it is capitalist because what determines how things will evolve is the underlying structure of how society is organized and none of the capitalist structure is challenged by this, and thus by keeping the capitalist structure the worker owned corporation will naturally evolve into a regular corporation owned by shareholders who are not workers, but it ostensibly seeks to achieve socialist goals, so someone who is at odds with the capitalist system might be interested in doing this as it is something that can be done immediately. There isn’t anything wrong with doing this if this is what you want to do, but having the situation lain out before can demonstrate why this isn’t a long term solution to anything.

“Corporate” is a word that is associated with the Bourgeoisie, but entities like the Catholic Church also qualify as “Corporations”. This is because the Church is an entity with members that has assets that are held by the Church itself rather than by any of its members. The Bishops “run” the Church, but they do not own it. Not even the Pope “owns” the Church, we just gets to tell the Bishops what to do. The Church is a hierarchical corporation as it has “clergy” and “laity”, the laity have next to no say in how the corporation that is the church is run. Some protestant churches addressed this problem and have a more “democratic” ethos. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland for instance has its own Parliament which is distinct from the Secular Parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Assembly_of_the_Church_of_Scotland

Fascism is another word people misuse, often neglecting to understand that there is an economic component to it, and that economic system REAL Fascists try to implement is called corporatism. The idea being that rather than just having Bourgeois Corporations, a Fascist state based on class collaboration would be filled with corporations for everyone, not just the bourgeoisie. Where the fascists are wrong in their assessment of the situation is that if the proletariat were to become co-owners in their means of production without upturning the entire system (which is to say without doing class struggle, as the point of fascism is to try to avoid class struggle occurring) the proletariat would just become bourgeois, but of the “petite” variety.

With that said while the petit-bourgeois is annoying towards the proletariat for having opinions that distract from the core issue the proletariat has with the bourgeois system, the petit-bourgeoisie is not inherently the enemy of the proletariat the way the bourgeoisie is. For this reason I never really understood why it was of upmost importance for the proletariat to “oppose Fascism” as if a Real Fascist was running around trying to implement some weird Corporatist economic system I would just be more curious of if it could work than I would feel threatened by it.

For instance in their Fascist commitment to try to end class struggle, a Fascist governance strategy would try to not step on the toes of any of the corporations by trying to incorporate them all into itself. For instance a British Fascist would try to incorporate both the hierarchical Church of England that is structured like the Catholic Church but based in England rather than Rome, but will at the same time try to incorporate the more democratic Church of Scotland and they would try their best to avoid addressing any of the conflicts these different bodies might have with each other about their structures.

“The Crown” is another one of these corporations that a Fascist would try to incorporate together. The King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is at the same time the head of the Church of England so they would have to try to incorporate that into itself, but the struggle the Fascist has for themselves is they have to try to incorporate the powers of the King into this grand body that encompasses the entire “nation” without the King actually ever using those powers in a way that might contradict any other corporation or class or interest group in the country. You can imagine that Mussolini breathed a sigh of relief when he finally got to just abolish the Italian Monarchy instead of having to deal with that nonsense.

The problem with Fascists is not the economic system they are trying to implement, but rather that they attached the implementation of that economic system with a bunch of petit-bougeois distractions that have no relevance to the proletariat. In addition to that the issue is not that “corporatism” is itself bad, but in a fascist system the working class corporations (such as Unions. Unions are corporations) would be expected to cooperate rather than fight with the bourgeois corporations. In Fascist corporatism the unions and shareholders are somehow supposed to come to an agreement which leaves both happy. If they can’t come to an agreement El Duce will make them agree with each other.

The whole “At least the trains ran on time” thing in regards to Mussolini is that even though both the workers and the railway company thought they were getting a raw deal with Mussolini telling them what to do, Mussolini didn’t give care so long as the trains kept running, and thus rather than having a bunch of strikes stopping the trains from running, the “trains ran on time”. A particular kind of person (petit-bourgeois who is neither a worker nor a business owner, but instead merely rides the trains as they do their incredibly specific kind of work) might think that the trains running on time is the ONLY purpose in the trains existing in the first place, so the trains running on time is the only thing that matters. That theoretical petit-bourgeois person neither cares for the profits of the train company nor for the wages of the train workers, and instead just wants the train to be available to them when they need it for a price which is reasonable. It is this theoretical person who is the basis of Fascism, the person who “just wants things to function properly”.

There is nothing wrong with wanting things to function properly, but neglecting to understand that there is a constant class war going on between employers and employees leads to this theoretical person siding with the employers far more often than the employees, even when the disruption is likely the employers fault given that most “strikes” actually begin as “lock outs” where the employer is the one who decides to cease operations when a negotiations date passes. Why would an employer close their business? That is the sort of question that horrifies a Fascist as to them the only purpose of a corporation is to be open on time. If the owner closes it down, that means the corporation has failed to be the cog in the system the corporation is required to be. The reason the fascist doesn’t understand is that the owner of the railway does not WANT to continue operations if they have to continue operations at a loss or even in a way which is less profitable than it was before. They’d rather just wait the workers out and liquidate the invested capital if need be. It isn’t the workers who would want to sell the railway for scrap, but the owner of the railway is always considering that as an option, and if the workers were to win a supreme victory and get the exact amount in pay that they can generate for the railway company, the only way for the railway company to get any money out of the railway now that profits are impossible would be to sell the rails for scrap. The Fascist HATES that this is a possibility because they think “but the Nation NEEDS the railway, why would you destroy it?” because they don’t understand that the railway company isn’t just operating itself for the good of the nation (though the Fascist assumes they do, or at least would like to FORCE them to do that)

If you recall the Railway Strike under Biden, you can recall that he engaged in arbitration to get the railways “running on time”. Was Biden a Fascist? Well technically that was the closest the USA got to the actual purpose of Fascism in the past decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute

You might recall that the Democrats would say stuff along the lines of “we voted to give the rail workers X,Y,Z!” and that the “Republicans blocked up from giving you more”, but the railworkers weren’t asking the Democrats to vote to give them X,Y,Z, they were trying to have a confrontation with their employer over the concept of Precision Railway Scheduling which among other things was resulting in them not being able to take the days off that they wanted. Precision Railway Scheduling might also be responsible for the East Palestine Railway disaster, which occurred not long after Biden forced the railway workers back to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_derailment

So was Biden a Fascist? Well, the concept of Presidential mediation on strikes dates back to at least Theodore Roosevelt. I can’t be bothered to determine if someone before him did it too, all I recall is there were several high profile strikes he mediated. Teddy is also associated with American Imperialism as he was one to enjoy a “jolly good war” and was actually upset that the US didn’t enter WW1 sooner. The memory of him neglects to understand that he was a bit crazy. However conceptually one can begin to understand that in a situation of imperialism where “the nation” needs to be constantly ready to fight other nations that having a bunch of strikes going on might be something that gets in the way of doing that. Thus if you have spoils from imperialism that you can try to dole out to keep the imperial machine running, you might just dole them out to keep both the railway company and the railway workers happy.

So were Biden and Teddy fascists? The answer is no because Fascism is a complete system, it just finds its inspiration in the interventionism of the progressive era. Fascism seeks to totalize the organization of society into corporations that attempt to mediate their class differences without overt class conflict, and this became possible to imagine when governments started intervening into labour disputes, and occasionally started telling business to just give their workers part of what they demanded. That the State would sometimes just not want to have to deal with a strike so much that they would just give the workers what they wanted gave hope to Statists that the state could be used to mediate class differences rather than always be just a vessel of the bourgeois class. Fascism is therefore pro-State and pro-Imperialism, at least abstractly, they might object to certain States and certain kinds of imperialism because “it isn’t being done right”, and “doing it right” would be to try to use the State and Imperialism to resolved all class differences.

So in that context, no Biden is not a fascist, just because he and the Democrats were willing to vote to force the rail companies to give their workers certain concessions does not make Democrats fascists. The reason the Democrats aren’t facists is that no Democrat is seriously proposing a totalizing advancement of corporate unions which seek to resolve all disputes between workers and businesses through this method. A True Fascist would not be embarrassed by what they did, instead they would think it glorious and be pushing to transform the entirety of society such that all disputes can be mediated in the same way.

It is in this context that my preference to Fascism over whatever we have now can be understood. At least Fascism is seeking to transform SOMETHING. If you are going to start intervening in these disputes, why stop at just the rail dispute? Why not go Full Fascism and make EVERYTHING work like this? At least then we will know which system we are now dealing with.

With all that said that brings us to the main point:

What about forms of corporatism which are not trying to do class collaborationism? Usually these are called Mutualism, and it too is a full system. The idea being that the workers ought to put their savings into a mutually owned bank and then loan that out to other workers who will collectively try to purchase property they will mutually use together. It is a bit like being a member of a private club and the benefits of being a member is loans and purchasing your way into having a job with other people doing the same.

Mutualism comes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was an early influence of Karl Marx, but they eventually got into disputes with each other over Proudhon not being philosophically rigorous. Early Marx would go around insulting people quite often so he titled his critique of Proudhon “A Poverty of Philosophy” in reference to Proudhon’s work titled “A Philosophy of Poverty”, though Marx’s critique was not just against that just is was just against the concept of what Proudhon was doing in general, so much of the critique was actually against “What is Property?” which Proudhon announces that “Property is Theft!” but simultaneously states “Property is Liberty!” and “Property is Tyranny” and “Property is impossible”. The reason it is so contradictory is that is was a system based in practicality to a fault. In Mutualism, property is theft and tyranny when in the hands of the state and bourgeoisie, while property is impossible and freedom in the hands of the workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poverty_of_Philosophy

Proudhon isn’t wrong about any of this, it is just confusing. For instance “theft” is the taking of property, so if property is theft, then if you take property are you taking theft? Expropriating the expropriators is kind of “theft” but it also dispenses with a colloquial understanding of the situation. Yeah the bourgeoisie “stole” from the proletariat when they kicked the future-proletariat off from the lands they were enclosing, but understanding this situation as transforming the nature of the system is more useful than just saying “it was stolen”. The workers aren’t really “stealing” if they simply use the means of production as if it was not owned by anybody. Maybe you could call it that, but a better way of understanding it is that the system of property is brought to an end via the refusal of the workers to participate in it. The problem with mutualism is that it requires the workers to participate in the capitalist system.

As an initial assessment of the situation trying to solve your problems within the bounds of the system presented to you isn’t bad. You might not be able to immediately bring an end to the system. Mutualism has the benefit that it is likely the first impulse anyone has when they realize something is wrong with the current system. It corrects the apparent flaws in a way that is understandable to anyone who knows how to operate within that system.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t abolish property. Savings that come from wages are still property. This is a whole lot of work, almost as much work as having a general strike and just flipping the table over. The idea though is that since none of this is illegal and doesn’t violate any rule of he bourgeois system, there isn’t any reason the bourgeois could stop you from doing this. They might even just sell you the property you require to do this for $1.5 Million.

Marx was particularly attracted to the comprehensive nature of Proudhon’s writings up to 1845 and the latter’s willingness to make larger connections from smaller observations.[7] In his book What Is Property? Proudhon emphasized the social relationships emerging from private property, and the tendency of economic development to produce a propertyless proletariat in ever increasing numbers—ideas which Marx found compelling.[7] Marx’s praise of Proudhon was not limitless, however, as he felt Proudhon did not fully grasp the way in which wages and money, for example, were themselves forms of private property

Proudhon asserts that the economic system is bound to create an ever increasing number of propertyless proletariat and that this process can be stopped by mutual ownership, which renders property “impossible” since property by its nature within the system is a thing the bourgeoisie uses to “steal” from the proletariat. So if the proletariat obtain property they abolish property.

Marx basically says the same sort of thing except that if you have a critical mass you don’t even need to follow the bourgeoisie’s rules anymore and you can just seize the means of production instead of doing a convoluted system.

The problem is that Marx’s view of the key to the problem being the ever increasing number of propertyless proletariat just overthrowing the system leaves you with no actual options while you wait for the critical mass to emerge.

In our case the Professional-Managerial Class, while weakened by AI, is still annoyingly dominant in the imperial core. What are we supposed to do while we wait for them to be proletarianized so they stop blabbering on about their useless opinions on how the world ought to work? In that context I can’t tell anybody to not try to get together with friends and implement mutualist ideas. In fact there are benefits to having examples of things to point to so people can understand the sort of thing we are talking about.

While you might be able to purchase the facilities required for $1.5 million. You probably can’t purchase a steel mill for $1.5 million, so the context for which your solution is possible is limited.

Workers can get together a buy a Starbucks facility because the capital costs per worker are not prohibitive. In fact that might even be a solution when dealing with the problem of Starbucks constantly choosing to just liquidate locations when workers decide to unionize. It might even be a better strategy to try to organize workers for purchase in some cases where invested capital is low as those are specifically the cases where the decision of the business to shutter at the first sign of a union is most likely.

However could workers get together and purchase an Amazon Warehouse? It isn’t like the Starbucks Cafe where sunk capital is low relative to the employees, the capital investment of the facility per worker is way to high for the workers to be able to afford to purchase it. You are just going to have to seize the distribution centers instead of buying them. Amazon CAN’T just liquidate a warehouse. Class Struggle to seize the facility is the only option in that case.

Capital as a whole wants a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but none want to be the dictator. It simply is not lucrative unless it is being done for the explicitly purposes of graft, which is to say extracting from the public purse to create private profits, which operate under the same profit-expense model where it is about the return on investment into the political process which is considered. Carrying out that role of implementing the system of graft is left to whatever puppet the bourgeoisie selects from its ranks to become popular with the masses rather than with any capital interest which has prospects for capital multiplication outside government. To take on direct political power itself rather than as part of the general collective amalgamation of all bourgeois interests, otherwise known as The State, is an abnormality for Capital interests.

Capital wants for nothing to ever happen forever because that is when it grows, but its growth itself undermines the conditions which enable nothing to be happening. The natural state of capital is automatic growth, anything else is capital in crisis. To take the reins itself and make something happen, while outwardly a demonstration of its power, is required by the crises it generates weakening it. If capital is “doing something” it means they either can no longer grow naturally unassisted by state actions, or that it has found itself in such a crisis that its very foundations are being threatened by the opposition it is generating and must take action against it.

Therefore aspects of capital which “do nothing” are in reality the strongest, and those taking actions are the weakest. Not all actions play the same roles though. An aspect of capital in its early stages of initial weakness might take actions to aid in establishing itself and these will be progressive in character, and then while in its prime will seamlessly slip into the inner workings of the overall system, and on its way out an aspect of capital struggling to deal with the crises it generates will become increasingly reactionary.

As aspect of capital that is reaching the stage of maturity where it no longer needs to “do anything” is globalized imperialist trade. To say this might seem strange since it has been criticized more than ever, but the root of that criticism comes from the country most responsible for setting it up, rather than the countries it needed to be set up in. The criticism comes from the notion that the system no longer wants or needs to support the development of global trade for it to carry on, and thus the country which has thus far been funding it is crying out to end that funding such that it can instead run automatically. Rather than this spelling the end of this aspect of the system the defunding of organizations intended to open up the imperialist system means it is entering its era of peak stability when active management is no longer needed. The United States is no longer necessary to run the system of imperialism because all of the other actors, even in a world of “multi-polarity”, would pick up the slack the United States is leaving them rather than seeking to leave it because they have all become so invested in its continued operation. It is no longer necessary for the system to “do anything” and so the funding to “do things” is going away as global trade is unchallenged in all places but the place that set it up, and even then it is only in the cost associated in setting it up they are expected to shoulder.

However there is another far more exclusionary aspect of the system which is reaching a fever pitch of “doing things”. As all other aspects of the system continue to reach points of great stability increasingly fewer events will be driven by them and more actions will be rooted exclusively in Zionism.

While it started out requiring a burst of activity to set itself up, for decades it was able to blend into the background supported by automatic processes few payed attention to. Recently though more and more things have required active Zionist involvement just for the state of Israel to maintain itself by preventing effective anti-zionist activity from getting off the ground. The state, by existing, was obviously interested in responding to political threats to its existence and so had an interest in funding methods to contain opposition, and so quite obviously the political dominance of Zionism was rooted in the existence of the state of Israel and those capital interests that could financially benefit from its existence. The funding for maintaining the potential for those profits obviously too were passed off onto to be a burden on the taxpayers of Israel and America. This involvement still isn’t free though, and while for a time it could ensure that everything that happens is Zionist, eventually too many things will be happening for that to be possible, made all the worse by the actions they take resulting in more things happening which will need to be made Zionist.

That we can visibly see that so many things have zionist involvement is an indication that so many things need zionist involvement. Stable forms of capital don’t need to fund political activity.

While a singular organization can be subverted, multiple will need multiple subverters. Eventually there cannot be enough subverters to subvert everything. Therefore organizations that needs subversion even if they don’t do anything drain the resources of that which is in a position where it needs to subvert everything.

Technicolor Political is a political consultancy firm which worked with the Zohran Mamdani campaign. They have also worked with many prior campaigns that they call “progressive”, which is what would be described as their “market”. This is notable because the same company would be working on a supposedly “working class” campaign as they would a “ruling class” campaign, as both can be classified as being within this “market”. Regardless of who is running, the same entities are tasked with manufacturing “stories” which are sold to the runner of the campaign as “helping them win”.

Whether they actually help win is irrelevant because the nature of political system means there is usually a 50% chance of winning anyway, so it is difficult to discern if a consultant is dead weight or even harmful, as rather than always losing a harmful campaigner would just result in a 45% win rate instead of a 55% one, and the firm will neglect to inform people of instances where they have not been vitorious, giving a distorted picture of their capabilities.

However the term “there is no such thing as bad publicity” might mean that having ANY story at all is better than having none, so perhaps a consultancy firm tasked with creating “stories” for the campaign might actually be helpful under usual circumstances. What is the win rate of having ANY agency working for you at all versus having none? All these things would need to measured, and the win rate would itself be distorted by lower funded campaigns not hiring agencies, and thus their numbers might be negatively impacted by the overall low rate of funding.

The name “Technicolor” in a period of time where racecraft was a major aspect of politics might suggest the sorts of things the consultancy firm specialized in. The reliance upon this firm and others which might do similar things would certainly explain why all political campaigns seemed to converge around racecraft. The bourgeois and market aspects of the political system determined this to be the most marketable means of advancing the interests of their enterprises. It is something for which it is easy to tell “stories” with.

What is notable is that consultancy firms which specialize in doing this can suggest that this is not just the result of particular people with radlib politics inserting things where they are not required, but rather it is systemic on the basis that most campaigns hire the existing consultants and the “tools of the trade” are going to be a particular way, and so “sameness” is reliant on a limited number of people who form the class of political consultants making bizarre decisions rather than everybody seemingly making the same bizarre decisions (if it was a result of natural stupidity you’d expect people to make bizarre harmful decisions in multiple ways rather than always in the same way)

Again if such firms regularly deliver victories, who is to say that they don’t “belong in the system”? Stories are powerful and they can make and break campaigns, however given that such consultancy firms would necessarily work for both “bourgeois” campaigns and “proletarian campaigns” it might be possible that what “makes” one kind of campaign might “break” another. It should therefore be regarded with skepticism if the same “expert” can seamlessly work for a class enemy as they would for a proponent of socialist politics. Even if nothing nefarious is going on the “sameness” generated by mutual reliance on consultants would make “socialists” candidates resemble “bourgeois” candidates in form even if not in content.

This sameness can provide stability even in situations where politics can be widely divergent. Having small connected groups of people in multiple organizations provides stability to those organizations and provides coordination, which can be mutually beneficial. However for anti-system politics this “sameness” which benefits the pro-system candidates becomes harmful as the reason one votes for anti-system candidates is precisely because one takes issues with the political norms and so would not want those norms to carry on through any radical change.

Much of the reason Donald Trump was victorious is precisely because he flaunts all these norms which are stifling, and thus there is a contingent of people who will vote for people simply because they don’t feel the same as everyone else. On the flip side there is a contingent of people who will vote for candidates precisely to reinforce these norms. Hyper focus on these things takes focus away from the class content of a campaign and thus excessive levels of consultation are always going to serve to neutralize any divergent politics.

Naturally however since the norms are produced by the economic base, no change in the economic base would occur without the norms also changing, but the carrying on of those norms through an attempt at radical change can obfuscate the nature of the proposed changes by giving the appearance of being the same as what existed before.

“Stability” within a bourgeois system is necessarily bourgeois. Even proposed radical changes such as “Democratic Socialism” by offering to make those changes with “stability” it is in effect compromising with that system and those compromises will eventually lead to opportunities for the system to interrupt or reverse the changes. A Democratic Socialist by running with the same kinds of campaign consultants as a bourgeois liberal is already compromising with the system before the campaign even begins. In order to truly revolutionize the system one doesn’t simply need to “win”, one would also need to win without the extensive campaign structure which already exists to manage bourgeois politics. There is nothing wrong with getting lots of votes to try to implement change by holding a political office, but one must first understand the nature of the political system one is trying to change, and one can’t change it if one is just another “brand” created through consultation.

Democratic Socialism differs from Revolutionary Socialism by presupposing the necessity of implementing their similar radical changes through existing bourgeois channels. Revolutionary Socialism has no opposition to using the existing political process to advance its goals, but it presupposes that any victory within the bourgeois system will only be the first step in implementing those changes. A revolutionary socialist electoral victory rather than being the end of a revolutionary process will be its beginning where the revolutionary socialists will be required to undertake all class struggles they would have had to do outside the political process anyway. The only difference is that winning an election gives the veneer of bourgeois legitimacy to those actions, but ultimately legitimacy within a bourgeois system to dismantling a bourgeois system will not be accepted by that bourgeois system, and the bourgeoisie will drop their support for the political system the moment it is no longer to their benefit. However to preserve their own long term legitimacy they will at first attempt to disrupt the changes through the system of “checks and balances”, which might be reliable enough that sections of the bourgeoisie could even support Democratic Socialism without fear that it ever actually be implemented provided they agree on some other issue, or because Democratic Socialism makes concessions to petit-bourgeois interests.

Thus Democratic Socialists are allowed by the system to exist because they serve as an alternative to Revolutionary Socialism which brings such elements back into the bourgeois system where they can be later stymied by covert means due to the isolated nature of bourgeois decision making where after victory the Democratic Socialist might find themselves cut off from their base of support, and because they can serve as a political vehicle for otherwise marginalized sections of the bourgeoisie.

However the process by which the Democratic Socialist wins an election creates a “risk” to the system, namely that by gathering a base of support who when their desired policies are stymied may move on to seeking more revolutionary solutions. Therefore it order to retain the benefits of being able to retain people within the system by getting them to engage with the process while also neutralizing the risk of gathering a block prepared to revolt, it becomes necessary to craft narratives about what it was this group of people actually supported to direct that in such a way that either it does not seem as if their desired changes were blocked by denying they ever wanted any that were, or by insisting that even the changes that were blocked were ultimately of the non-threatening variety so they will be less likely to rally around something threatening.

In short, for elections, the bourgeoisie must rule, the petit-bourgeoisie must win, and the proletariat cannot exist.

What the bourgeoisie will say about the election afterwards with their “storytelling” must always fit into that pattern, even when it doesn’t. They might for instance have to admit that the proletariat turned out to vote, but they must say they voted “against their interests” either for petit-bourgeois or bourgeois causes which were sprinkled in. They cannot be perceived as having actually voted for any ofthe proletarian interests scattered within an overall program, as to admit that is to admit that it was precisely this proletarian interest that will never be implemented, and to admit that proletarian interest will by nature always be ignored is to admit that the system can never be in the interest of the proletariat, and that there can be nothing left for the proletariat but to overthrow the system.

The task of Political Consultants is to control the behaviour of their candidates such that they do not veer away from such a narrative in who they try to get to support them, what they promise, and what they end up doing, or if they cannot do so to craft a story as to how the behaviour actually does fit into the narrative of the proletariat never voting for anything that is for the proletariat. The reality however is that it is impossible for the proletariat to ever vote for anything that is not in the interest of the proletariat. The “storytelling” simply consists of obfuscating this fact.

These stories obfuscating what happened are always told in public with positive tone, in private the real story is told with negative tones. The political consultants tasked with doing so merely professionalized the process.

The requirement to have such consultants whose task is to carefully manage the bounds of a political campaign is produced by making the process otherwise needlessly complicated such that this professional class of consultants with experience in prior campaigns is a requirement to do any of it, and the consultants by being in this professional class that requires the political system to exist for their job to exist will naturally seek to perpetuate its existence to protect their profession, and therefore serve as another source of “stability” for the system (which is bad for a revolutionary obviously, you want an unstable system) by controlling and crafting narratives for their candidates, and even when the candidate is a radical the same set of consultants must be used as with the moderate and so they will carry over the assumptions and techniques from them.

“Victory” is not necessarily required for this professional class to exist. Somebody has to win so naturally some campaign strategy is always being proven “effective”, while the loses of a similar strategy can be buried. This enables the consultant class themselves to pick which strategies they think are winners (through telling stories) and proliferate them in such a way that the interests and necessity of this class can be seen as being even more important and lead to their growth. Were they all to be eliminated the win-loss ratio of all political campaigns would remain exactly the same. Therefore the goal of this political infrastructure is not political victories but to perpetuate themselves as a class by making themselves seem necessary, with their increased effectiveness, provided they actually do help, only being required because the other campaign might have consultants from the same class of people working for them.

Therefore the sum total effect of this class is not in winning elections, as those will be won by someone regardless, but instead they have an effect because they are allowed to determine HOW elections get won by choosing what stories to tell about them. They additionally have the choice to ignore or amplify certain aspects of a campaign even if they don’t have anything to do with the election having been won. This selection process can be done even if no actual direction is given to the candidate, where stories are just weaved about it afterwards.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zohran-mamdani-morris-katz-campaign.html

In another, he talked up rising halal-cart prices to highlight affordability — never mind that the traditional Democratic strategy guide would suggest a Muslim candidate avoid anything associated with halal. The video was picked up by Eater and other food media. Another simply showed Mamdani arriving unannounced at the homes of donors to thank them, showing the sort of ease with people that became his strength as a candidate. “There is a broader lesson for the party in that one,” says Katz. “A lot of times, the consultant approach is you have your playbook and you’re jamming these candidates into your playbook. With Zohran, it’s the other way around. If you believe your candidate can pull something like that off, you just have to let him cook. That’s our campaign motto: ‘Let Zohran cook.’”

There is a risk to this, however, and to any campaign that puts authenticity at the highest value. Compared with his rivals, Mamdani has scarcely backed away from his earlier calls to defund the police, and the campaign didn’t scrub his social-media feeds of tweets in which he criticized capitalism or proclaimed that “defunding the police is a feminist issue.” Just this week, Mamdani set off a torrent of criticism when he refused to reject the slogan “Globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call for violence.

In the 19th century context where bluntness was the highest value, “affordability” would have just been called “cheaper food” or “lower rent”, as that would have made the exact issues clear rather than obfuscate them by requiring they all be talked about at the same time, but what is additionally missing is the talk of “higher wages” that went alongside that. This is not an accident. While “cheaper food” and “lower rent” may seem like they are proletarian interests, they are also the interest of the petit-bourgeoisie, with wages being what lies in direct contradiction between the two. In some respects the crisis of affordability for the proletariat is merely one of low wages as higher wages could overcome any rise in prices. Talk focuses on affordability rather than wages to obfuscate this fact and prevent the proletariat from demanding higher wages to compensate and instead keep the proletariat within the realm of petit-bourgeois politics, an additionally the “solutions” the petit-bourgeoisie offers to solve the affordability crisis will be policies which directly benefit the petit-bourgeoisie like lowering their taxes and fees under the assumption that this would somehow result in prices being lowered.

With the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1848 it was quite common to question why the labourers were not siding with the bourgeoisie against the landlords, as clearly cheap food was in the interest of the proletariat. Cries of “they are voting against their own interests” were abound. The bourgeois thought “how ungrateful these proletariat are when we do so much for them”. In doing that the free-traders were crafting a story about how everything they did was for cheap food and high wages rather than for the manufacturer.

https://libcom.org/library/on-free-trade-karl-marx

In this speech Karl Marx gives he explains why the proletariat would be opposed to repealing the corn laws despite it being portrayed as being entirely in their interests, and additionally gives voice to the manufacturers who behind closed doors claimed that the reason free-trade would expand industry is precisely because cheaper food can lead to lower wages, which leaves the proletariat no better off, but the manufacturer in a better position.

Were the bourgeois narrative of the “ungrateful proletariat” have remained unchallenged the proletariat would just seem entirely irrational, but the proletariat is only irrational to the bourgeoisie because the proletariat wants the opposite of what the bourgeoisie wants. Ultimately however Marx takes a position in favour of free-trade from an accelerationist perspective, as fulfilling the bourgeois interest in increasing the size of industry would enlarge and therefore strengthen the influence of the proletariat, but nonetheless defended the reasoning behind why the proletariat did not. One cannot blame the proletariat for not being accelerationist supporters of expanding industry for the explicit purposes of increasing their numbers.

Thus what should the proletariat support? Free trade, or be against Free Trade. This doesn’t matter, the Free Trade position of wanting to boost industry to have a larger block of proletariat is in the interest of the proletariat, but at the same time the anti-Free Trade position of being against Free Trade in food because the proletariat knows that the bourgeoisie only wants cheaper food so they can lower wages is ALSO in the interest of the proletariat. The power of storytelling is that regardless of what the proletariat did you can tell a story about why it is they did it. You choices are to either describe the proletariat as being rational or to describe them as irrational. Either way a story is being told.

Given that the proletariat is a large group of people rather than a person who can only have one opinion most likely there were workers supporting each position for a perfectly valid reason, even if there were workers taking opposing positions. This is why that it is important to not split the proletariat down the lines of what stance they take on the issue and instead always focus on making sure the proletariat is self-conscious in understanding that the reason they are making a particular decision is on the basis of being proletarian, regardless of what decision they end up making.

Therefore regardless of what the proletariat decided on the question, they were making rational well thought out decisions, either they refused to buy the stories the bourgeoisie was selling, or the proletariat had already developed a revolutionary consciousness and knows the bourgeoisie is lying but doesn’t care.

It is ultimately a matter of reclaiming the story from the bourgeoisie which counts rather than any specific policy be implemented. Regardless of what the proletariat decides the proletariat asserting itself means the end of the bourgeoisie, and so the bourgeoisie must tell a story where the proletariat is incapable of asserting itself due to being irrational. The proletariat in turn must tell a story where rather than being irrational actors like the bourgeoisie would like to tell, they are quite calculated and preparing themselves for the seizure of power, either by opposing the bourgeoisie or allowing the bourgeoisie to make mistakes. The proletariat, while it is a class with the same interests may not have all arrived to the same conclusions yet, and so may be attempting to do different things, and all that demonstrates is that the bourgeoisie is being opposed at every turn by the whole proletariat and that it would be impossible for anything to occur otherwise. The key is making the proletariat realize the nature of the struggle they had already been waging the entire time such that they begin to openly wage it.

Therefore “Democratic Socialism” while veering into challenges to private property, such as with plans for city-run grocery stores, is bound by the system of property in other respects and through “democracy” (which in the liberal sense is just anyone who happens to be in an area as a kind of headcount without consideration to what they might actually have as class interests) attempts to blend petit-bourgeois and proletarian interests, which can be done occasionally, but favour the petit-bourgeoisie so long as no challenges to property are being mounted. In the linked article by the “Political Consultant” working for the Mamdani campaign one may note that there is exactly zero mention of the city-run grocery stores, and so the most direct challenge to property being mounted simply does not exist to a news media attempt to praise the candidate. One may contrast this with the criticisms of the Mamdani campaign that do mention city-run grocery stores.

The abundance of praise for the multicultural petit-bourgeois policies of helping of small business owners to make ethnic food cheaper are contrasted heavily with what the article considered to be “risks” associated with “allowing” the candidate to do as they pleased, namely the internationalist anti-imperialist policy of supporting the phrase “globalize the intifada”. When juxtaposed the article suggests that it is this great thing if people become multicultural and enjoy halal food from petit-bourgeois vendors, but that if they were to extend their gratitude for the meal they paid for to seeking the liberation of the vendour’s potential homeland, that would be “risky”.

Clearly the proletariat is only expected to align with foreign petit-bourgeoisie interests in particular contexts but not others.

The nation-state transforming into the multi-cultural imperialist state dispenses with the nation assuming this ends all national oppression, but by preserving the state and its interests preserves the system of imperialism that oppresses foreign nations outside its borders, nations the citizenry of the imperialist state are expected to be perfectly tolerant of were they to cross some kind of magical line outside of which instead oppression somehow becomes acceptable. You will eat at the hallal cart, but don’t you dare think about globalizing the intifada. If anything the “accepting” wing of bourgeois politics is worse than the xenopobic one, as the accepting wing exists to draw boundaries as to what is acceptable and those boundaries are going to be specific policy choices with particular class content, by contrast the xenophobic wing simply wants to have absolutely nothing to do with any foreigners whatsoever, which is an opinion which lacks class content. It is far more difficult to explain to people why “internationalize the intifada” it unacceptable but “we must stand with Israel” is. Both are foreign, and xenophobia can be used against both. The xenophobic masses may much more easily forget who they are supposed to be xenophobic towards. By contrast the progressive xenophilia is conditional in the exact manner in which the bourgeoisie needs it to be.

You can forgive people under such a system for thinking that shooting people before they cross the border would be perfectly acceptable given that this is exactly the rules the system has presented them with, they are merely adapting them to their perceived interests of keeping these “risks” they are told to be concerned about away from them. That would be “logical” where if “globalizing the intifada” is supposed to be this big risk they are concerned about, why are they supposed to be eating at the carts of these people who are an imminent risk of globalizing the intifada? Is globalizing the intifada a risk to them or not? Wouldn’t the halal cart globalize the intifada at any moment. You cannot tell people to be worried about a thing happening and then expect them to not be worried about it, the the “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie does exactly that. At least the xenophobes are consistent. They just don’t want them at all. “Monitoring” them at every moment of everyday to make sure the halal cart doesn’t suddenly decide to “globalize the intifada” becomes unnecessary if you just don’t like having them around regardless of what they do. The progressives wants them around, but only if they do exactly the stuff they want them to be doing.

Rather than at least being consistent in regards to wanting to keep “risks” away from one self, they are instead told they should be patronizing these “risks” as new petit-bourgeoisie and giving them benefits, and that this something to be celebrated. At same time money is being sent to Israel to kill these “potential vendors”, and this is perfectl acceptable so long as it occurs outside the geographic boundaries of the imperialist state, but if one of these vendours does show up to the imperialist state they are considered to be a risk if, and only if, they object to having been killed while residing outside the imperialist state. As long as they are perfectly fine with it being acceptable to kill them outside the imperialist state the imperialist state will not only protect them while inside it but will patronize them.

Thus we see the contrast between bourgeois multiculturalism which seeks to make it so nobody can be prevented from doing any kinds of business within a multicultural bourgeois state, and proletarian internationalism which seeks to end all business everywhere. The business Israel does is unacceptable and if someone comes to an imperialist state and objects to it then they become a risk, but are celebrated if they don’t.

Therefore the influence of these “political operatives” must be to claim the election of Mamdani as a triumph for petit-bourgeois multiculturalism, while calling the “risk” of anti-imperialist internationalism arising something that can merely be tolerated if taking that risks allows petit-bourgeois multiculturalism to thrive. Long gone are the days when migration was justified as a means of increasing peace and understanding between peoples, now it gets promoted so long as it explicitly doesn’t result in people demanding peace after having come to understand other peoples.

Anti-imperialism is by no means a solely proletarian interest, as various section of the bourgeoisie see no point in imperialism and object to the costs associated with it, or the petit-bourgeoisie may align against it, but it is a priority of the proletariat in the imperialist core as they are unable to pursue their politics so long as the imperialists can use extracted wealth to dominate the political process, and so the proletariat aligning with the petit-bourgeoisie for “affordability” is praised, but aligning with them against imperialism is a “risk”.

Therefore the priorities of the “storytellers” are quite clear.

To these petit-bourgeois the proletariat is wrong when it supports a bourgeois policy, correct when it supports a petit-bourgeois policy, a “risk” when it supports an anti-imperialist policy, and either condemned or ignored when it challenges property directly.

Additionally the storytellers get to choose which of those actually occurred. Were the people of New York voting for lower fees for halal carts, or were they voting for the only candidate who refused to visit a country conducting a genocide they were expected to pay for? With time the story will erase all anti-imperialist and proletarian aspects of the campaign to be replaced with some great victory for the petit-bourgeois halal cart vendour being stymied by the bourgeoisie, not because he is opposed to the genocide in Gaza, but rather because there are too many barriers to setting up some kind of cart.

To advance the proletariat must reclaim their own narrative and make it clear what it was they were voting for and why, that way when they are betrayed it can be made clear that it really was them who got betrayed, rather than anyone else, and use it for justification for challenging the bourgeoisie more directly. So long as the petit-bourgeoisie obfuscates the proletariat’s interests for their own the mere question of deciding to challenge property in response to political solutions failing can never be arrived at, and instead the political system will only ever be used by the bourgeoisie to corral the petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat back into the bourgeois political process. If the proletariat can demonstrate to itself that they have been being reasonable and it is the bourgeoisie who are unreasonable, it can justify to itself taking matters into its own hands, and ultimately the proletariat need only justify things to itself in order to take action.

While we are technically perfectly free to create political organizations, it doesn’t actually happen. This is largely because we don’t actually know each other. While many people value anonymity the rise of AI means that anonymous accounts might not actually be real people anymore so meeting tangible human beings will become all the more important. Thus while the purpose behind having reading groups rather than organizations is technically not there, the reading groups served as the material basis for organizations later existing, and therefore they should be recreated if one wants to have any hopes of actual organizations emerging.

Much of the issue with going to any reading groups that may already exist is that, for lack of a better way to describe it, people have become insane, so the window of people that people will tolerate without having to worry that the entire group with be representative of tendencies they don’t like is limited. This got be wondering about how many people one could actually find in a city that have a particular tendency that one is comfortable with.

If a forum gets 100k weekly visitors and if we assume that this is being drawn from the 1.5 billion people who speak English as either a first or second language, where we just say 1 billion for simplicity, that is one ten thousandth of the English speaking population. This means that if you divide the population of an English speaking place by ten thousand you can get the number of people in that place that visit this forum weekly. In a city of one million that means that there are 100 weekly visitors. This means that it would definitely be possible to set up reading groups composed of people who are, for lack of a better term, normal by our standards. Once a group is formed it can expand as needed from by finding like minded people offline and then the need for the internet is shattered completely. This is important given that there is a constant worry that the internet might get clamped down upon.

Much of the reason people don’t like meeting up in person based on online groups is the propensity for there to be infiltrators, but if there are infiltrators monitoring where people are planning to meet up that means there are already infiltrators in online communities. The resources of the organizations that must infiltrate are less strained by just needing to monitor online communities than they would be by needing to send physical people to reading groups, so rather than being afraid of being infiltrated if one has the potential to create enough different groups one could instead view this as a deliberate strategy to overwhelm the ability of the organizations to infiltrate everything, thus forcing them to have to choose which organizations are priorities.

This necessarily helps all other groups who might want to organize as they won’t be as quickly infiltrated so just seeking to waste the resources of intelligence agencies by getting them to need to have physical presences once again will help others even if one does not know what to do one’s self. Therefore one ought to embrace rather than fear the infiltrator with the major risk instead being physical rather than online profiles being created on persons, but given that stuff like Palantir and IP tracking already exists they probably have a better idea of who someone is based on their anonymous internet usage than they do in real life.

It is mundane yes, but the fears that keep people online are exploited to keep people trapped in a prison of their devising. Nowadays one can arguably obtain a greater level of anonymity offline than on. We act like we are under the worst repression of Tsarist Russia but that sense makes us only feel safe where we would be under the heaviest surveillance.

The tendency of this forum is most associated with the Class Unity organization so naturally the reading groups we would create would likely be associated with Class Unity even if not outright affiliated. I am not a member of Class Unity as I assumed it was an American organization, but I think it is a mostly online thing, and while the internet has an ease of use that fulfils the literal educative function of a reading group, it lacks the secondary effects in person reading groups would have.

Covid did a number on in-person groups in general and if we ever want to get into a position where organizations can begin to form again we are probably going to need to make an effort to reclaim the real world instead of all living online. There isn’t anything illegal about doing any of this but everyone avoids it because everyone has grown to hate each other and be suspicious of someone doing surveillance on us, but we hate each other mostly because we only interact online where we are constantly under surveillance, however that is enough pontificating about the struggles of the online society.

The actual material dispute between liberals and conservatives is so minor in the grand scheme of things that what really happened was this minor dispute over trying to get anyone who disagreed banned manifested in a cultural acceptance of private property rights on the internet. The often cited “paradox of tolerance” served as a digital parable for the “tragedy of the commons” resulting in its own enclosure movement.

Previously the culture of the internet was “liberal” in the sense that they were against all kinds of censorship on principle, and would engage in user revolts at the slightest infraction. Now suddenly this phenomena reversed where there would be user revolts if people they disagreed with weren’t being censored. Whether this was intentionally cultivated to increase the hold of being the owner of a platform or purely an accident is irrelevant as the overall effect was that these “liberals” found themselves begging the owners of platforms to ban “conservatives” and were therefore dependent on that owners to enforce this new paradigm, giving them increased levels of control and the ability to “clean up” platforms which could help avoid embarrassing content that would reduce the revenue generating capacity of a platform.

Now as all things which are now old were once new, and can be new once more, this phenomena has matured such that the “side” which is supposed to be for private property rights is in a position to actually use and defend those rights such that the “its a private company they can do what they want” retort isn’t being deployed with smug fake irony. th example being Elon Musk purchasing twitter. Having accepted that the platform owner can literally do anything they want, the “liberals” have nothing thy can say if Musk does something they don’t like with Twitter.

The “sides” are irrelevant, as the owners of the platforms which served to benefit from being allowed to do as they please with them merely changed the political party they donated to, and these new found private property rights for platform owners are locked in.

Regardless of everything else that is going on, Communists should be opposed to the notion that “private companies” have the “freedom of the press” to decide what goes onto that “press”. Printing Presses were capital investments and the “freedom of the press” when that notion was created and printing presses were what they were literally talking about meant that anyone who could afford a printing press ought to be able to use it to publish whatever it is they want. Freedom of the Press is therefore by definition a bourgeois right.

You can technically sink hundreds of dollars into a printer, ink, paper, etc and have your own “freedom of the press”, but then you would have to go around distributing pamphlets by hand, which usually would require paying people to distribute them. There were instances of “pamphlet wars” where a bourgeois or other wealthy backer would pay to print and distribute pamphlets. This created equality between “bourgeois” and “other wealthy backers” as while a King could distribute pamphlets, so could anyone who could afford a printing press.

This is why Kings might try to restrict the “freedom of the press” and say that just because you are rich enough to afford to print stuff making fun of the king doesn’t mean you are allowed to distribute it. In practice this meant stopping the guy distributing the pamphlets and asking him where they were printed and then holding the owner responsible for having printed it. Obviously though if someone printed and distributed pamphlets in covert way that wouldn’t lead back to the printing press one could reclaim “freedom of the press”. In practice this meant you could probably distribute “banned books” quite easily in a one on one fashion, but pamphleting would require some poorly paid child you picked up out of a gutter who would rat out other whoever paid him because it is not his problem and he wouldn’t want to get in trouble with royal authorities. Therefore in practice the freedom of the press is not so much the right to do whatever you want with the printing press you bought so much as the right to distribute the stuff you printed publicly.

Therefore the oppression of the King restricting “freedom of the press” was really against the bourgeoisie, and this oppression really only became salient with the development of technology which allowed anyone with capital the ability to print whatever it was they wanted.

The legacy of this is found in the “private company” argument, as implicitly this is saying because a company sunk an amount of money into building or paying for communications infrastructure they get to decide what goes on that communications infrastructure. This is a perfect example of how “bourgeois rights” directly contradict the rights of the proletariat (and petit-bourgeoisie) who obviously could not afford to buy a platform. The petit-bourgeoisie can effectively own a website but nobody goes on normal websites anymore, and selective search engine algorithms and other kinds of bans act the same as that King going around restricting the freedom of the press, as recall that one could easily distribute banned books to friends, the same way one can easily circumvent selective search algorithms by posting direct links, but you couldn’t go into the public square and pay some gutter child to distribute pamphlets of banned material. That old king could argue “sure the printing press belongs to you, but the public square belongs to me” and there isn’t really anything that would be incorrect about that as technically the King did “own the country” which meant the public square DID belong to him. The King could just as easily argue “it is a private kingdom” if some bourgeois argued “its a private company”.

This sounds a bit like “techno-feudalism” but recall the differences in classes involved. The King in regular feudalism was restricting access to public platforms for the relatively rich who could afford a printing press, where as “techno-feudal barons” are restricting access of the poor to post comments and publish and distribute materials. The classes involved are different. One can argue that when the internet was still “free” that one did not feel like a “serf” require to follow the lords rules, but now one does. The poor who had internet access were in a sense “free” despite being poor, but now the class distinctions become more and more apparent as the inability to afford one’s own infrastructure is increasingly felt. This difference is still very much a difference of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (and petit-bourgeoisie a lesser extent thought hosting one’s own website technically makes one a small property holder even if this property will likely cost more to maintain than it could produce in income for you, and as such these petit-bourgeois people go onto platforms owned by others with particular terms of service to increase their incomes).

The original bourgeoisie having their freedom of press restricted could be quite wealthy despite being restricted, now it is largely a product of wealth which prevents one from being totally free to publish and distribute on the public square. It was not a matter of “having more money than the king” which could give you access to the public square as the possibility of “building your own” did not exist. There was only one country and only the king owned it, and so only one person owned the public square.

Thus “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” are inherently at odds with each other, just as the freedom of the press of the King’s freedom to control the public spaces were inherently at odds with each other. One cannot continue to support the freedom of the platform owner while supporting freedom of speech any more than one can support the King’s freedoms to the country while maintaining freedom of the press. You are certainly free to shout whatever it is that you want in your own room, or even go outside, shudder the thought, but that isn’t any different than printed materials being possible to distribute privately but not in public spaces. Sure you can produce the materials as fast as you can print or speech just as loud as you can shout, but you aren’t allowed to actually distribute it.

For freedom of speech to live, freedom of the press must die.

It it he calls it “an extremely efficient program” which echoes Elon Musk talking about his Department of Government Efficiency. Despite apparent enmity between these groups of people, let’s zero in our the common worldview they share.

What is “government efficiency”?

Government efficiency is nothing more than how little friction there is in converting taxpayer money into profits for a business.

Hank Green says that food stamps “helps out local businesses” when describing one of the benefits of the program, and that the vast majority of the money in the program goes to the recipients. These two things are in reality the same thing. Because the recipients receive cash equivalents they then spend those cash equivalents on “local businesses” (which in reality need not actually be locally owned as any business you physically can walk into is local to you, and these local businesses are owned locally largely on account of the franchising model where a “non-local” business extract money from the “local business owner” to use brand names and other kinds of business infrastructure) That people just spend money on their own is also responsible for most of the complaints over the system where non-recipient tax payers disagree with the stuff the recipients use the money on and wish that they could decide what the money could be spent on instead.

If we circle back to Musk, this process isn’t all that different than one of the chief complaints people have with him, namely that the government provides grants that his companies take advantage of such that his companies get government money if they do the things the government promises to give money to companies if they do. This complaint is really just complaining about the system working as intended as the point of creating those grants is for a company to rise up to take them in order to make money in ways they otherwise would not be able to do. It is really not that different to the food stamp program “supporting local businesses” as government money is finding its way to those businesses such that they can make money from things they otherwise would not be able to make money from, in this case people deem to be too poor to be able to afford food. With the food stamp program even these people who are too poor to otherwise buy food can enable businesses to make profits off people purchasing food.

What Green and Musk have in common is that there is this belief that the government can give out money to address some kind of perceived market failure where things that are needed (such as food for the poor, or electric vehicles) can finally be a source of profit for those that might provide it even though the money to get those needed things is not otherwise being supplied by the market.

When talking about the supposed efficiency of the food stamps program, Green says that since there already exists this extensive method of distributing food to people the most efficiency method of delivering food to people who need it would be to just let them tap into this system by providing them with cash equivalents so they too can use this system. This is considered “efficient” because 95% of the program is spent on feeding people, and it is viewed as if no additional people would need to be employed in order to make this system work as all those people running the stores would be working anyway. This is untrue as certain stores would be is business in areas where there is unusual levels of usage of the program so there are people employed solely because of the program.

Additionally even if food stamp recipients actually did just shp at the same stores everyone else did, those stores are not supporting their employees, they are also supporting their owners with extracted profits. That stores might make 10% profit is never considered, only the 5% the program uses to administer itself is considered “inefficient”. If one considers that what is being measured as “efficiency” is how much of program can be profited on by the bourgeoisie then one can begin to understand why food stamps are considered to be “so efficient”.

Those who complain about the system do not view it that way though as they do not view foodstamps as a profit opportunity but instead as a tax sink. The program is zero percent efficient because none of the money they spend on the program results in them getting any food. This “selfishness” is contrasted with the “selflessness” of those who support the program, and like with Hank Green ask people to think of the bigger picture of all the money that gets funneled into the profits of local businesses. The program increases the total profits that can be collected and thus it is incredibly efficient at translating government money into money available for the bourgeoisie. True it flows out of taxes, but some of those taxes come from workers anyway rather than just from businesses, and only 5% of the money gets spent on government salaries so if anything the business class is coming out on top as it can increase profits without requiring new employees to be hired since most of those people in the stores would be working those jobs already.

When it comes to the anger Musk gets for collecting subsidies despite this being those policies working as intended, it comes from a belief that Musk is somehow “hording” all those profits for himself becoming a billionaire. Musk benefits with the bourgeoisie as a whole benefiting the way the food stamp program gets portrayed for its efficiency. The liberal is “selfless” as they are concerned about another’s profit opportunities, while the “conservative” (who was once a liberal darling) is “selfish” for only being concerned for their own profit. However from Musk’s perspective those subsidies he receives are 100% efficient, the go directly to him and he uses them as he pleases. What is “inefficient” is when the government spends money trying to administer something. On that regard, Hank Green, and Elon Musk are in agreement where apparently government is only “waste” when nobody has a chance to profit, and the internal dispute between the liberal and conservative is if the collective or individual profit is more important.

But hold on, won’t somebody stick up for the aggrieved taxpayer! Indeed, the taxpayer experiences zero percent efficiency everyday when they pay for things and don’t see any of it. This can combine the individual and collective interest of bourgeois society as everyone must individually pay their taxes and so cutting costs can provide relief for everyone was simultaneously being something which can directly be felt by an individual. However this sentiment is somewhat muddied by both workers and businesses paying taxes, so like I said taxes which can be translated 95% into profits for “somebody” can be regarded as an extremely efficient way to recycle profits back into the system as less than 95% of those taxes may be from forgoed profits and instead are forgoed wages.

Debates over the incidence of taxes aside, the “taxpayer” is not a proper class in its own right, which can explain why taxes might keep going up. The bourgeoisie does not view taxes as solely being their own and thus is instead view as an opportunity for profit like anything else, and thus the costs of government continue to balloon as more and more attempts to profit keep getting added, with the costs being shouldered both by other businesses and by workers to varying degrees. So long as enough interests can find profit in that mess they will dedicate some of those profits to keeping the systems in place making it difficult to get the mass cuts of all programs people will often fantasize about.

Therefore what actually matters to the bourgeoisie as a whole is how efficient the government is at translating taxes into opportunities for profit, with waste only be viewed as the government cost of administering that transfer from taxes to profits.

The taxpayers, as nebulous as an entity as it is, cares about the actual sum total cost of the things it pays for. The taxpayer doesn’t not care how much of a program is spent on administrative costs, rather they just care how much it cost THEM in real terms in a kind of collective selfishness where they don’t consider the opportunity for profit other might be experiencing (how rude!). The non-bourgeois debate amongst normal people who don’t have this insane worldview that the collective good is how much total profits are possible instead view this as a question of “I don’t want to pay for other peoples food” versus “Poor people need to eat too!”

This is an entirely separate “selfishness vs selflessness” debate, and this debate is as entirely as irrelevant as Hank Green pointing out that Musk gets individual profits from subsidies while “local businesses” can get collective profits from food stamps. The actual class dispute pits the people who want poor people to be fed AND the people who don’t want to pay that much for it AGAINST the people who are concerned about what percentage of the government spending is available for profit. This is because a program which costs the taxpayers trillions of dollars to give to companies directly can be regarded as extremely efficient if it has no administrative cost, that in this particular case it is mediated through poor people needing to be fed is irrelevant, as with all things the argument is really between those who think “how can we do this thing” and those who think “how can I profit off doing this thing”.

In short, at no point in the bourgeois discussion of efficiency is the actual cost to the taxpayer relevant. SNAP spends $100 Billion a year on 40 million people which translates to $2500 per person per year, but it could be $5000 and if the exact same administration were used the program would suddenly be twice as efficiency in terms of “government waste” despite costing twice as much. The actual “taxpayer” just thinks of the total cost of the program and naturally would want the program to cost $1250 instead of $2500. This leads to suggestions that people who need food assistance should be fed like prisoners as the SNAP program costs about $7 per person per day, whereas prisoners cost around $3 dollars per person per day.

This however is considered being cruel to the poor, as the poor would have to consume something the taxpayers would not themselves have to consume, and so is “unfair”, but the reason the taxpayers don’t consume the same things those on food assistance consume is because they literally don’t have the ability to do so. Only the poor qualify for the program, so even if one were to pay more than $2500 a year in taxes, one cannot receive that $2500 to purchase food through the program. Were someone to pay $5000 in taxes and get $2500 in food, from the perspective of the taxpayer that would be a 50% efficient program, but since they don’t get anything the program is 0% efficient and they also don’t care what the quality of the provided food is. If instead there was a universal basic food program, taxpayers could choose to consume the same food that “the poor” receive, and thus they might start to concern themselves with the quality of the program. Quality vs quantity (in the sense of cost) because the debate when the program is universal, where the topic because the efficiency in translating the program into profits when the program is market based and means tested.

Therefore the “cruel” option of the government specifically providing the cheapest food to people to minimize cost is closer to overthrowing the notion that efficiency of translating into profits are the only thing which matters when it comes to government spending. While currently the driving force behind wanting such a policy is contempt for the poor purchasing certain foods, a program where the public decides upon the cost and quality of publicly available foods is far closer to there being a public system that meets the needs of the public without a market than the current paradigm of trying to correct “market failures” by providing additional money to be spent on the public where the cost isn’t even considered because anything being spent on the market at all is regarded as being inherently good. People should be able to democratically decide upon what they want to be available for people to have and even if they democratically decide upon making the cheapest stuff be available that is still beginning the process of democratically planning an economy and putting control over society back into the hands of a public that has been alienated by market dominance.

Early on in the establishment of the bourgeois system the creators of modern democracies were troubled over the prospect of people just voting to abolish property, thinking that if enough people without property could vote they would just vote to end property entirely, which is why they tried to make sure only property owners could vote. Seemingly the people who created the system were far more optimistic about the non-propertied recognizing that the system of property was entirely against them than our current world of universal suffrage would suggest.

Modern politics had instead creating entire moral systems that determines if someone is a “good person” or a “bad person” based on the opinion on just giving away free stuff. On the “conservative” end you have people who think that it makes someone a bad person to either want to get free stuff or to use the promise of giving away free stuff as a path to power in the system. This is a “conservative” opinion because it comes from understanding the nature of the system and recognizing as those people who created it did that “giving away free stuff” would undermine this glorious system that has been bequeathed upon us. That somebody at the times of the bourgeois revolution said “when people realize that they can use democracy to vote themselves things is the end of democracy” and thus the people have the moral duty to uphold democracy by resisting the temptation to just vote themselves free stuff. It is immoral to do anything else because the conservative believes that the entire system ends when people realize the trick that they can just vote free stuff for themselves, and upholding the system can only ever be moral, so one must do everything in ones power to stop people from voting for free stuff.

On the “democratic socialist” end they think it is immoral for someone to have much more stuff than they need when there are people who are suffering for lack of stuff. Contrary to the worst fears of the bourgeois revolutionaries these people by no means want to undermine the system they created, as instead they argue that giving away free stuff doesn’t actually mean the end of democracy, which is to say everything else about the system can carry on as intended even as people periodically vote for free stuff. They think the conservatives are being immoral for not giving away free stuff when there is more stuff than needed, and argue that if people don’t share stuff that this will undermine the system because people will overthrow it via mechanism which is not voting.

Everything else is just arguing over second and third order effects where they debate over if giving away free stuff might impact the production of stuff in some way. However all that comes down to the morality question of “giving into temptation” vs “allowing suffering”.

This moralistic conversation surrounding the upholding of the system of democracy however neglects to even consider the initial fear which was that the propertyless would vote to abolish property outright. Not just vote to receive free stuff from the people who own things but vote to make it so nobody owned anything in the first place. To that there is no real moralistic reply, as either property exists or it doesn’t. One must make a moral case for property existed first before arguing that it would be immoral to abolish it, but in that case one is already on the defensive. By contrast the moral debate over “resisting the temptation to give away free stuff” vs “sharing stuff with those that have less” implicitly assumes property exists and is instead just debating what to do with it in accordance with the warnings of the people who created that system about a fatal flaw contained within the system that could lead to its own abolition.

Contrary to both camps of moralists, the only way to totally prove that what those initial writers wrote was correct would be to indeed assert that property should indeed no longer exist, as if nobody does that then the creators of this system were fundamentally incorrect about their assertion that this system contained within it a fatal flaw which must be guarded against. It is therefore only the Communists who truly believe in what those people said all those years ago as it is only the Communists who believe that a large group of propertyless individuals would inevitably come together and realize that it was the system of properly as a whole which should be abolished, rather than merely debating what to do with it.

In the 19th century various intentional communities were created in France, England and in America, and in the 20th century Zionists created intentional communities to take over Palestine. At the time of creation they were responses to capitalist society but most did not outlive their founders, and those that did became reactionary to the proletarian movement. This makes sense on the basis that effectively the residents of the commune own the commune together and thus the residents of the commune have a kind of small amount of capital to work with. In Israel this process was explicit with the privatization of the Kibbutzim into businesses that hired outsiders but were owned by the former residents as a group.

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated ―phalansteres‖, of establishing ―Home Colonies‖, or setting up a ―Little Icaria‖ * – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem (Munster Rebellion from Protestant Reformation which saw early Christian Communists take over the city of Munster for a spell) – and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel. The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes.

- Communist Manifesto, Chapter III. Socialist and Communist Literature, 3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism

Friedrich Engels details the difference between these Utopian experiments and the broader proletarian movement in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and discusses the intentional communities which existed in that era.

Those early communities were called “Utopian” in reference to Thomas More’s work which is based on monastery life where people lived without property of their own. The term “Utopian” invokes an idea of some kind of idealized world without problems but the term can just as easily refer to how More designed how his society would be run before it actually existed, and it never did actually exist as it was a thought experiment, but by contrast the 19th century examples of utopian socialist communities did end up existing and we have examples of how they turned out. This contrasts with “Scientific Socialism” which derives not from a pre-planned system but from the actual material development of society.

One of the first differences one finds with trying to translate monastery life when attempting to create such a community for “normal people” is the lack of religious proscription. People may be interested in living the way monks do but they don’t actually want to be monks, they’d naturally want to be able to live a normal lifestyle, but amongst the arbitrary religious rule such communities also have necessary rules deriving from the circumstances of that kind of living arrangement. The problem is that the religious discipline of the monks extended to both the arbitrary and necessary rules so removing the religion leaves a vacuum to explain why anyone should have to follow any rules at all.

RTTL

This central problem is this kind of community can lead to dramatic shifts in what might stand in for “the religion” of the community. Out of keeping tabs on the alt-right I have an interest in the whites-only intentional community called Return To The Land (RTTL), what I find notable from looking into their backgrounds is that one of the founders, Peter Csere, had previous involvement in a vegan intentional community in Ecuador. I postulate that veganism or white separatism are both stand-ins for a religion which places one at odds with the rest of the society and that this oppositional stance is a prerequisite for such communities to exist. Therefore it is no surprise that one might go from something that seems “left-wing” like veganism to something that seems “right-wing”, those terms are arbitrary and both veganism and being whites-only are exclusionary to some degree and one needs to want to try to exclude some aspect of the world to attempt to create one’s own society with its own rules.

He actually isn’t a vegan anymore as apparently he raises chickens so I presume it was more an opposition to factory farming and he is fine with killing animals if he thinks the animals have a sufficiently decent live before hand. Anyway before “becoming a racist”, four years ago he was talking about creating rules and enforcing rules for the intentional community and objections to it like calling those who create rules “authoritarian” or “ageist” etc

I assert that the adoption of racism isn’t actually the purpose behind creating the commune, but rather the people who otherwise wanted to create such a commune simply “became racist”, and that doing this is something that makes it easier to impose discipline and so that this is the underlying reason for taking such a stance.

In another interview he asserts that “according to critical race theory all white person are inherently racist anyway” when dealing with a liberal moralizing, so likely he has had to deal with actions he otherwise think are mundane ad necessary to making such a community function getting called racist, so given what we all lived through the past decade some people likely just decided that if they were going to be called racist if they ever suggested imposing discipline on anyone for any reason they might as well just pre-select people based on race to begin with in the hopes that they will either select people more willing to accept discipline in the first place, or will be easier to remove if they refuse it since it won’t devolve into a “racism” incident that divides the community in half since the whole thing is already saturated in racism. We all saw various “left-wing” style organizations obliterated by such incidents in the past decade, some people must have just given up on being “left-wing” entirel

I suspect that previously a lot of these people would not have minded someone of another race who otherwise fit into the communes lifestyle have since decided that it isn’t worth dealing with the potential for the community to break down over some cultural misunderstanding, and honestly it is probably more important to keep out the kind of white person who would object to other white people living in an all-white community, as I suspect it was those kinds of people who created most of the problems that came about due to everything getting called racist. In essence racism is a way to filter out crazy people, with a negative consequence of that being that non-crazy people of other races also get filtered out as well. What is more important when doing this is being selective in the first place rather than what exactly it is that you select for.

Another thing the racism is does is that by being the greatest taboo that exists in society it draws attention to the community so for my purposes there is usually a wealth of information discussing it. I’d suspect most intentional communities would not want this level of attention so it would be difficult to actual obtain information on them.

Racialism As a Source Of Secular Discipline

The racialism serves a purpose in the same way veganism or a religion might. The community accepts “Christians and Pagans”, and anyone who is aware of Christian doctrine knows that nobody who is a serious Christian would ever live in an intentional community with pagans. Yes there were Christian communes in the Roman Empire, but their purpose was to get away from “Pagan society”. However that divide is now irrelevant but much like how the Protestant Reformation left behind outdated prejudices between Catholics and Protestants which nevertheless were quite necessary at the time as Protestants had to genuine get away from Romanist influence to facilitate the more bourgeois oriented society they were creating, but now that everyone is bourgeois it doesn’t matter what religion you follow, the whole Christian/Pagan thing is basically irrelevant now too so it is historically pointless to have a dispute over it.

Instead of trying to get away from Pagan Roman society by forming intentional communities within it, they are just trying to get away from what they consider to be an anti-white society which would call them racist for trying to impose even the slightest level of discipline that would be necessary to make such an intentional community work. Therefore Christians and Pagans both being accepted basically means they have a secular commune because no religious rules are being imposed.

It is actually quite difficult to achieve secular discipline because while religion can impose one form of discipline, it makes it difficult to impose the tolerant kind of discipline where you don’t just have a bunch of people trying to impose their beliefs upon each other all the time. Part of the issue with wokeness which would have made communes impossible was that there was simultaneously this intolerant kind of religion everyone on the commune would have to follow (even if it was not originally set up that way as wokeness tended to infest everything) that would at the same time make a religion out of why you couldn’t impose various kinds of disciplines.

The thing I find notable is besides being “racists” the people who live there otherwise seem like normal people, whereas I do not think that progressives seem like normal people to me (not to psychologize but there is just something about them that is off). The question is can one achieve a commune composed of normal people which is nevertheless selective in making sure people are “normal” without also being racist? Is the selection for normalcy just a product of the highly selective process, or is the ability to have “selective tolerance” that one can either turn on or off the key to actually being a “normal person”? The secular nature of the community necessarily means one can’t be a religious bigot which often correlated with being a racist, but while tolerating opposing religious views it is also an exclusive community that isn’t afraid to kick people out who wouldn’t fit in. I highly suspect a lot of these people reasoned themselves into “being racist” due to the rather intolerant nature of anti-racists that makes them act like religious bigots rather than were people who just can’t stand to be around differences. If my theory is correct one can also just as easily reason one self into being selective in a way that doesn’t also include selectiveness along immutable characteristics, as “selective tolerance” as a concept can be selectively tolerant in whichever ways one wants to be selective or tolerant.

The second purpose the racialism serves is to create some kind of common struggle of the commune against the rest of the world. Christians communes trying to escape “pagan rome” does that but the conditions aren’t the same now. We don’t live in pagan rome, we live in a capitalist society that recently became obsessed with calling everything racist. The media constantly running stories on them does a sufficient job of making it seem like there is some common struggle which keeps people willing to accept discipline. This is actually something that would be lacking were you to have a commune which doesn’t break any big societal taboos. You wouldn’t have the “advantage” of the constant harassment. You can do this with an ideological struggle which accepts discipline while accepting anyone regardless of birth (religious communes technically accept different races but religion is so closely associated with parentage that it doesn’t make a practical difference), but you eventually run into a multi-generational problem, namely nobody can guarantee that the children born on the commune will want to carry on this ideological struggle.

The Failure Of The Kibbutzim

I dated an Israeli girl and both her parents were raised in a Kibbutz, but both got educated and left to join the regular Israeli society as engineers or pharmacists. Her grandparents still live on kibbutz though. So it was basically just a thing that generation wanted to do, but the next generation left to join the capitalist Jewish society of Israel in high-paying jobs. The girl I dated calls this a “success” of the commune as they paid to educate her parents (so the problem is the commune is too successful in her view) but I consider it a failure of the model, and even she told me the Kibbutz are in disrepair with the factory shutting down in the one her father was from, and the one her mother is from was converted into a tourist attraction which now serves kosher meals to people from the rest of Israel who might visit for the weekend even though they never kept kosher while the commune was in its hey day. Still she talks up the kibbutz of her grandparents as being this great example of socialism despite me immediately recognizing them as failures.

The problem here is largely that your all-Jewish commune is unnecessary in a Jewish ethnostate. Her parents could just join Jewish society without issue. If we take Orania in South Africa by contrast, South African is hostile to Afrikaners, they have affirmative action policies for the MAJORITY population, which makes it difficult for whites to find employment because so many people are being affirmative-actioned. Critics of Orania state that “it only works because poor white people do all the labour” without understanding that providing jobs for white people which aren’t subject to affirmative action policies is the entire economic purpose of Orania. Economists who study Orania find that wages are a lot higher in Orania but everything is also more expensive than the rest of South Africa where you can usually hire what seems like an infinite number of africans (often from other countries in africa) to do anything for a low wage. It therefore isn’t clear if it is better to live in Orania or out of it if you are strictly looking at how far your wage might go (as whites usually work for higher wage jobs even outside of Orania and one has the benefit of that wage going much further if one can use your wage to hire black people to do things). Orania however has been around for long enough that people have been born there, gotten educated in a South African University, worked a little bit in the South African economy, and then chosen to return. Why? Well South Africa just isn’t a pleasant place to live even if with a little bit of money you can afford yourself a bourgeois lifestyle, and the affirmative action policies still apply if you are white as those didn’t go away despite Apartheid ending decades ago. The conditions therefore encourage people to stay there.

Orania differs from RTTL as the land Orania is on is technically owned by its founding families, where as RTTL’s land is owned by a corporation that people buy shares in, with the ownership of one share entitling that shareholder to one plot of land that they don’t actually own directly, they just have usage rights. What the share does represent in terms of ownership is a portion of the value of the land as a whole, though all the shareholders would have to agree to sell all the plots together to get that value back since the land was no subdivided. Officially subdividing land is usually difficult though so this can be considered an advantage if you are only concerned about using it. If for instance lawyers decide this is actually illegal due to violating the Fair Housing Act it is thought that at most this would result in a forced subdivision of the corporation’s land into individual plots in order to avoid fines, but they are choosing to not subdivide it so long as the loophole is maintained. Thus the “failure” scenario arguably would increase the exchange value of the land by going through the process of subdividing it, thereby making it easier to sell for a profit or to just stay in the now subdivided community.

This is similar to how the peasant commune obschina in pre-revolution Russia operated, and also how they were often subjected to forced subdivision. Effectively it is a co-operative housing arrangement but you have to avoid calling it that because the civil rights act applies to co-operatives as so a reporter from the Jewish Daily Forward wanted to try to engage in legal action against them on the basis that they qualified as a co-operative.

Avoiding stuff like this happening is the reason RTTL has the loophole that they do. Becoming a member of RTTL by paying the $25 membership fee then allows someone the ability to then purchase a share in one of many co-operatives the membership organization oversees. In a normal co-operative purchasing into it is something that can be done on “the open market”, but with RTTL by contrast it requires you to become a member of a Private Members Organization before you might purchase a share in one of multiple “group land buys”. Being able to purchase land as a group is another advantage the structure offers, as oftentimes due to land consolidation over time, what is often offered now on the market is both too large and too expensive for any one person to buy and use fully, and since subdivision is expensive and tends to raise the value of land buying lots of smaller plots next to each other would become prohibitively expensive. A “group land buy” can allow a group to purchase more total land and for cheaper.

Therefore economic factors would tend toward doing something like this even if they weren’t trying to get around the Civil Rights Act, one can argue that this “struggle” is something that can transform what would otherwise be a compromise forced by economic factors of not being able to purchase one’s own property into a noble endeavour to assert one’s Freedom of Association to purchase property as a group in a specific way that isn’t allowed for some reason. One can postulate that economic factors deteriorating like they are would always have resulted in the Civil Rights Act coming into question as what was otherwise a minor inconvenience is now preventing something that is becoming increasingly necessary.

Since these co-operatives are not actually open to the public it doesn’t violate the Fair Housing Act, so ironically being more restrictive gets around laws against restrictiveness. There are no laws against a Private Members Organization engaging in some kind of phrenological screening process for members, and there are also no laws against a Private Membership Organization having the ability to purchase shares in a set of co-operatives as a benefit.

Recreating the Obschina

You can sort of imagine if there was a Veterans organization that is a Private Members Organization and they had a club house of some kind that offered services and in addition to that they might also have a retreat one can use for a weekend if one pays a fee. Extending that to construction and usage rights on land the Private Membership Organization owns but can be traded internally amongst members is just taking that concept to the next step. The overall effect of this is “recreating the Obschina” given this is approximately how pre-Revolution Russian peasants interacted with their land and communities, as the Russian peasants were effectively members of their village and the village itself allotted them land to use from what was considered village land.

While not a total solution in of itself (as it doesn’t seem amenable to industrial production yet) obschina are something which have been shown to be complementary to a proletarian revolution.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. - Preface to the 1882 Edition of the Communist Manifesto

- Preface to the 1882 Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Obviously though half of Russias land being organized is vastly different than a scattered set of random communes, but if somehow everyone started using these structure for housing using whatever criteria they feel like that might transform the more reactionary suburban housing model into something which is less hostile to the proletariat, thus these reformist measures while not end goals by themselves can be useful intermediate steps.

Real Neo-Feudalism Has Actually Been Tried

Therefore while it is compared to Orania, RTTL does resolve some of the issue Orania has due to the land being technically owned by the original founding families, which creates a kind of feudal arrangement which resembles the feudal arrangements of the various South African native land reservations that Orania is modeled after. Orania is legally justified on the basis that in the post-Apartheid negotiations the various native African tribes wanted to keep their exclusive lands for themselves as opposed to everyone being required to join the wider post-Apartheid South Africa, the Afrikaners argued that their specific language derived from Dutch group is one of the native groups of South Africa since they actually do pre-date some of the various African groups as they migrated in too. The Anglo Saffers can’t live in Orania for the same reason that Xhosa can’t live in Zulu lands. It is just a quirk of South Africa’s system where this legal structure was available to the Afrikaners and it happens to be feudal in nature in South Africa since many of the natives didn’t want to totally abandon their feudal arrangements.

It should be noted that the recent Native Land Title arrangements that occur in British Clumbia where some native group now technically owns the land people previously bought resembles such quasi-feudal relationships, in this instance though it often seems like you have Native feudal lords owning the land whites and asians live on. In Australia it is even funnier because “the traditional landowners” are the most white looking Australian Aboriginals you will ever see, so you just have these white people pretending they are Australian Aboriginals acting like this entitles them to be feudal lords over parts of Australia.

Lifestylism or a Pyramid Scheme?

RTTL by contrast is structured like a co-operative with extra steps that both prevents legal challenges and also “decommodifies” housing in ways normal co-operatives don’t as normal co-operatives can sometimes socialize housing without necessarily decommodifying it since they are still open to the market to be purchased and sold even if one is only purchasing shares in a housing arrangement.

Now there is still the ability to try to make money out of this “decommodified” arrangement, but the structure makes it far more difficult. It will be difficult to “liquidate one’s assets” if one were to try to leave a RTTL community as one can only sell their share to another member of the organization, and they likely already own a share on some community somewhere so wouldn’t want to buy another one. As for one a member might buy an additional share one reason is that they might have a child who want to set up their own household. They therefore require constant new members in order to make it possible to get their investment back, either by attracting new members or by having children, thus natalism is actually a necessary part of the system. Even if you don’t have children in order for your investment to pay off you ought to encourage members of the organization to have children so you can sell your unit one day. The other way is “immigration” into the organization, or in other words, getting new members, which makes it similar to the regular housing market with the caveat that “immigrants” can only be white americans who would accept the community’s rules. Is this a pyramid scheme? Only as much as the housing market in general is a pyramid scheme. It is pretty lousy pyramid scheme though since it is restricting itself to members. It is only a pyramid scheme if one thinks of it terms of exchange value rather than use value.

The reason this “decommodifies housing” is by placing immense friction on “unlocking” the exchange value of the land to such a degree that it might be regarded as a scam due to failing to adhere to the logic of a pyramid scheme that regular housing follows. I’ve seen criticism of RTTL from within the “racist community” and beyond the “why are your retreating to the middle of nowhere?” criticism (which from our perspective would be like saying that one who wants to live on a commune is someone who has abandoned the revolutionary struggle for lifestylism) the other criticism comes from people calling it a scam on the basis that one buys land without “owning” land. They argue that there are plenty of all white communities already where people can freely purchase and sell their land, but one cannot do that if one buys into RTTL. To me that just sounds like the criticism is coming from someone who specifically wants land to be commodified and thinks that the decommodification of land is a “scam”. Yes one cannot easily sell the land one purchased under this scheme (everybody would have to collectively agree to sell the whole thing), but one can buy and sell usage rights. Therefore the value of the land comes from its use value rather than its exchange value, which is to say “decomodified” even if it is still tradeable. It is not quite abolishing property but that is largely impossible under a system of property, the original Utopian Socialist communes didn’t abolish property either, they just pretended they had abolished property on property granted to them by people wanting to engage in experiments about the abolition of property.

Democratic Socialism Is Just National Socialism For Everybody

I was looking at Mamdani talking about his housing plan and it seems structurally similar where he says they will gradually take housing off the market. The difference is that Mamdani will use the government of the city of New York to do this where as RTTL is doing it scattered about in a nation-wide organization that functions a bit like its own government.

This however should be said that if Mamdani is not doing anything Nazis haven’t already done first then one shouldn’t exactly use Mamdani as a good example of a Communist. Saying “Mamdani is a national socialist but for everybody” is the best way to describe him. “Vienna model” okay sure so the stuff the Nazis did? “It existed before Nazis” okay but they integrated it seamlessly. Mondragon the large worker’s cooperative was created under Franco’s Spain by Catholic Falangists but “Marxists” like Richard Wolff praise it so the majority of this stuff that all these prominent left-wing figures are promoting co-exists within broader capitalist society and is perfectly compatible with Fascism even if you find that word scary and exclusionary. Communism is not inclusive due to preference for inclusion, instead Communism is inclusive because it has to be, where as all these intermediate proposals everyone keeps making are all perfectly compatible with being exclusionary even if you personally as the one proposing it doesn’t want it to be exclusionary. This is why for instance it is so important for the people who propose them to signal how “inclusive” they are all the time. With Communism everyone has to be included whether you like it or not, but with all these Democratic Socialist initiatives the possibility exists to not include people so inclusion becomes an ideological project instead of a mere fact of the system.

Anyway moving on, given that there are already housing developments for “the black community” in Nova Scotia, it would seem that while these progressive versions of these things are “technically not discriminatory” as anyone can live there, it definitely seems like it is meant for black people so one would probably be taking something away from black people if one tried to live there.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/land-trust-in-n-s-secures-61-2m-to-build-housing-for-black-canadians-1.7622076

Thus this idea of “racial” discrimination in decomodified housing is in the air so to speak even if “the progressives” will insist they aren’t being technically discriminatory the way that RTTL is discriminatory (but RTTL can just whip out their own technicalities with their Private Members Organization loophole)

Taken together when I said I foresaw that there would probably be a broader class based movement (which I called petit-bourgeois socialism) doing approximately the same thing when I was talking about RTTL I wasn’t expecting to be as correct immediately as I was as it seems like a bunch of stuff just all started to come about at the same time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1n0kftc/the_three_body_problem_of_zionism/

Now why is it petit-bourgeois socialism? It is petit-bourgeois rather than proletarian as one needs a small amount of capital rather than no capital to participate. One still needs to purchase in, and one still can technically profit off this arrangement even if profit, or “multiplication of capital, ie capitalism” is not the point. Why is it socialism if there is small amounts of capital involved? Because it “decomodifies” housing and makes it focused on “use value” or some “social” end. Ergo it is petit-bourgeois socialism.

Minoritarianism vs Majoritarianism

The difference between Mamdani and RTTL is minoritarianism vs majoritarianism. Both however seem to exclude Jews, it is just that Mamdani excludes Jews under the cover of Jews being “white” and therefore “majoritarian” but he insists upon “combating anti-semitism” despite being an anti-Zionist, this is because he is committed to his minoritarianism to such a degree that he endorses it even in Israel. He is not really an anti-Zionist in the sense that he actually does not endorse stripping the Zionist entity of the land they have taken, instead he would endorse his policies but in Israel, so anti-racism, inclusive co-operatives, etc, rather than the proletarianized Palestinians seizing the land settlers have taken from them when they were proletarianized. Of course Mamdani doesn’t ACTUAL exclude Jews it is just the whole “taxing richer and whiter neighbourhoods” thing weirdly racializes things in a way it doesn’t need to be. At a certain point though you just have to accept that this is the way things are going to be and these things are ust going to continue to amplify each other. Our task in that case is to bridge the divide and demonstrate the material similarities in the hopes of allowing for more cooperation.

The problem with being a proponent of minoritarianism when dealing with Zionism though is that support for Israel is based on the minority rights of Jews in America to be Zionist. Zionists will insist that Israel needs to exist because of anti-semitism in other countries for instance, so they are making a “minoritarian” argument of Israel protecting a minority. That Jewish Daily Forward person, Hannah Fuer, who wants to legally challenge RTTL on the basis of it being a co-operative and therefore subject to the Fair Housing Act has written articles in favour of Beverly Hills flying the Israeli flag which is framed entirely about protecting the minority rights of Jewish Americans to express themselves in their support of Israel. She is treading the fine line of somehow remaining a Liberal Zionist in a period of time when that is increasingly impossible. I wonder what she might think if the RTTL people were to assert that they were “Liberal Nazis” as a reflection of her “Liberal Zionist” position. RTTL entirely fits within the liberal legal paradigm, so if being a Liberal Zionist is fine, why can’t someone be a Liberal Nazi?

https://forward.com/news/766018/beverly-hills-israeli-flag-jewish/

Much of the reason I like the existence of the alt-right so much is because their existence allows for these hilarious situation where you can hold a mirror up to society and come up with ridiculous phrases like “I’m a Liberal Nazi” and it isn’t even that inaccurate based on the way everyone else acts. “Yeah but what if you want to do what RTTL does but without the racialism” Okay it is entirely possible to do this. Stupidpol ideology is almost at odds with current society as the alt-right is (why is why I like the term alt-left) so we definitely could support a concept of ideological struggle which keeps people disciplined and more importantly would keep people from just leaving the commune to join the rest of the society. The issue is that racialism solves the multi-generational problem. While you can get a bunch of people who ideologically agree to set up a commune, there is no guarantee that children would feel the same way, by contrast children will be the same race as the parents so the founding principle of the commune is maintained cross generations when racialism is a founding principle. Technically you can have a long ideological commitment that children can adopt so it can technically continue across generations but at a certain point if the children can’t change the ideology passed down to them from their parents the ideology is basically a secular religion that can’t be questioned.

Racialism, while one can argue is also basically a religion that can’t be questioned, can allow for religious and ideological diversity so long as the racialist principle isn’t challenged. Even if race is constructed people carry a race with them wherever they go and can’t shed it that easily, so you can’t ask for a better organizing principle for a secular commune than race. The Jewish kibbutz were not religiously Jewish, like I said, the one of the grandparent of the Israeli girl I dated only started offering kosher meals due to becoming a tourist attraction. They leave because Israel doesn’t really have a hostility towards Jews, but if the political hostility towards whites continues the racist white communes have the best conditions to last long term. Unless the hostility to whites in progressive circles abates, children from the white commune who otherwise live a progressive lifestyle that progressives want are going to have difficulty fitting into progressive circles, thus they will return to Return To The Land. This doesn’t mean that you can have a multi-racial secular commune which is accepting of discipline and rejects the stupid identity politics of the general society, it is just that keeping people around multi-generationally will be more difficulty when you don’t have society making your ideological argument for you the way the ideological argument for Orania is made by the persistence of affirmative action in South Africa decades on.

A Monastery For Normal People

I’m not saying don’t try to organize something like a “monastery for normal people”, you only have one life to live so if that is the life you want for yourself then go ahead, what I am saying is that if the goal is to eventually transform the entirety of society (or at least create a parallel one that serves as a challenge to it permanently) then you need to think about it long term and how you are going to keep people on the commune multi-generationally. In regards this whole concept of Utopian Socialism being based on the monastery if you are planning on “abolishing the family” by gender segregation then you won’t even be replenishing your ranks at all even before you consider the attrition of people choosing to leave when they come of age. Monasteries even if they didn’t extract resources from surrounding communities could only function by extracting people from them to replenish their ranks and thus would have been dependent on a religious community of people living a normal reproductive lifestyle even if the monastery were 100% self-sufficient for day to day needs. They functioned to escape from the world rather than create a world on one’s own.

Extracting people is still a form of extraction and a secular monastery even without peasants supporting it would still be functionally identical to a country that requires immigration due to a below replacement birthrate. Given that countries have millions of people they can technically handle below replacement birthrates for quite some time, but a monastery doesn’t just have a below replacement birthrate it has a zero birthrate. This one ABSOLUTELY requires an outside society producing children even if a country with a 1.0 birthrate technically doesn’t.

Functionally a commune were it to be totally self-sufficient to be sustainable multi-generationally would need to have and raise children and would end up being like RTTL except rather than being for an existing race the founding members would eventually end up creating a race of their own when all their descendants inter-mingle. If your commune is large enough “inbreeding” isn’t actually a problem. Iceland’s marriage records indicate there are no obvious problems from third to fourth cousins on wards so a population of dozens is fine albeit pushing it, you’d ideally want hundreds of founding members.

Additionally while founding a new race sounds fun, but it doesn’t actually resolve the issue of racism. Just because your descendants are mixed race doesn’t mean they won’t be prejudiced towards outsiders or having people prejudiced towards them. Latin America already tried this and they are still racist. You often just get Mestizo Supremacists which results in the weird situation where white Mexicans who are secular complain about the Spaniards oppressing their Aztec ancestors while brown catholic Mexicans glorify those same conquistadors. Both of them are opposed to the ACTUAL remaining indigenous Mexicans who usually just want to live in their own communities apart from Mexico and thus don’t actual have an issue with the Spanish conquest as they were unaffected by it, to them it is actually the Mexican government and its ideology of all Mexicans being mixed race that is engaging in a kind of Mestizo colonization of them by trying to integrate them into a system they never agreed to. The actual races involved was never actual the problem with the system of colonization, it carries on just the same even if you try to pretend like racism gets solved if everyone is mixed race.

With this said gradual attrition with members leaving and potentially recruiting new members would forestall the commune becoming the progenitor of its own new race, but with time as most people end up being born on the commune the members will develop a culture all their own which might be alienating to outsiders so they would indeed eventually become their own ethnic group if the project was sufficiently large and successful. Take the Amish who are “white” (German Anabaptists who diverged in the 16th century) but could probably be better described as being ethnically Amish, or Mormons who are derived from largely English derived people but can probably be described as being ethnically Mormon at this point. Any successful commune even if it started out diverse would end up becoming its own ethnic group with its own traditions if it lasts as long as the Amish do. There are other groups like the Hutterites, Mennonites, Russian Old Believers, etc and one can technically join them, but most don’t do that because ideally one would want to have a planned society that is amenable to one’s current generation rather than locking in something from the 16th century that was nevertheless progressive for its time.

The North Korea Method Of Conquering Your Enemies Because They Stop Having Children

I’m just saying if you really think that creating a parallel society is the solution to capitalism then you need to account for the fact that you are essentially waiting for the population of your parallel society to exceed that of the dwindling population in capitalist society. In South Korea this is a viable solution and North Korea is already functionally doing it where they have a self-sufficient society which is poised to be more populous that South Korea in a couple generations unless South Koreas starts to implement mass immigration. In countries with migration you aren’t going to take over demographically by just waiting for capitalist society to die off any time soon. There is also the conceptual issue of everyone basically giving up and creating a bunch of racist or non-racist communes and just waiting for capitalism to grind enough people into the dust to eventually become non-viable because they can do this on a global scale by continuously pumping as many people from all over the world into the “rich” countries (where nobody can afford to have children unless they live on one of these communes geared towards it).

The reason I keep bringing up RTTL is that despite the obvious objections people might have about it, the concept is functionally the same as a non-racialized version would be it. We can’t reasonable try to extract as many people from the system as possible to try to break it down when they can just import people as quickly as we sequester them away. Whether you want to be “racist” about that question or not, it is still the same material phenomena. This is why I largely just ignore racism and think of things just in terms of the math. Mass immigration makes it really difficult to try to defeat the system through non-participation (ironically racialism that asserts immigrants would be inferior actually has a built in stop gap as one could postulate that non-participation of the “superior race” would EVENTUALLY undermine the system even if they can just flood in people to do the jobs everyone is refusing to do because the system would slowly breakdown. Counters to this as the horror story of this worldview, South Africa, this “functions” even if it the most unequal society in the world so countries can limp on long after they become totally unpleasant to live in). Even extincting the original race of a country is not technically going to kill off the capitalism in that country because the capitalist countries have already made it clear that they fully plan on replacing their population and then replacing the population they replaced their original population with until there are no more people to replace them with. You can’t do some kind of feminist “birth strike” on such a system, they’ve already gotten around it. Yeah maybe you can make plans to burst forth from your communes like some kind of North Korea marching into a South Korean ghost town in 2125, but are you going to actually be able to stay out of that worldwide suicide pact for that entire century?

Like I said though, you personally only have one life to live so live it the way you want to live, if you have always dreamed of living in a secular monastery then go make your dreams come true, but lifestylism is not going to solve things. It MIGHT work for the white nationalists though because their goal isn’t to overthrow the capitalist system but just to replenish their race despite it, but ostensibly we are supposed to actually be trying to bring about an alternative system so that we don’t undermine capitalism itself is a criticism that applies to us that would necessary apply to “racist communes”

RTTL receives criticism (likely fabricated from “glowies”) for “scamming” the White Nationalist community due to one not actually owning the land if one participates. This criticism of them engaging in what is basically Utopian Socialism by accident is a criticism which is available in this particular instance. This is because it is possible to argue that the little progress RTTL does make in abolishing the commodification of housing is actually the exact problem one has with it, given that it is not a universally held belief that the “commodification of housing” is something one is trying to overcome, so that is an argument that can be made against RTTL and not an explicitly socialist commune because ostensible the point of the socialist commune is to decommodify production, but one could easily make the exact same argument that a “non-racist” commune is equally a scam as the racist commune would be given they are materially the same thing, it is just the lack of an overarching ideology means that within the alt-right you can get some wild criticisms you’d never experience anywhere else given that they don’t technically have any economic program. (This is another reason I find following them interesting because not having an economic program allows for some whackadoodle economic proposals)

Appealing To The Sympathy Of The Bourgeoisie vs Revolution

Many of the peple who yearn for such a thing simply don’t have the resources to accomplish it. Naturally it is proletariat who would benefit from being able to extract themselves from an exploitative system, but one needs a small amount of capital even if one tries to do this in a large group. RTTL is not a proletarian commune, it seems to something created by the middle class for demonstrative purposes. They have larger plans though where they talk about eventually having apartment buildings in cities so that might be more amenable to turning proletariat of a desired race into petit-bourgeois part owners of their apartment building (which is similar to what Mamdani talked about).

If you want to try to create some kind of more inclusive version of that project, you can try to appeal to some rich benefactor to set up your secular monastery, but the reason that these were originally religious is because a religion like Buddhism or Christianity was the only way one was going to convince rich benefactors to fund setting these things up. Even Israel never got anywhere until Theodore Herzl decided to appeal directly to the Rothschilds to fund its creation. Herzl’s writing “Der Judenstat” was literally just the thing he presented to Lord Rothschild.

By contrast Moses Hess who was originally an associate of Marx and Engels before he wrote “Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question” DECADES earlier and it barely got off the ground. Because Moses Hess was a utopian whose concern for the proletariat was based on the suffering of the proletariat, naturally if some other group, such as Jews suffering anti-semitism, was suffering more than the proletariat, his concern could just as easily be transposed onto them. Marx and Engels already criticized his work as “Utopian” even before Hess went rogue and became a “Labour Zionist”. Deciding who is “suffering more” or what we now call the “oppression olympics” is actually irrelevant to Communism as the proletariat is the subject of the revolution because the proletariat is the only class capable of liberating itself as opposed to needing to appeal to some common idea of alleviating suffering. Utopians who engage is oppression olympics are therefore unreliable allies and should just be ignored it not mocked.

Appealing to the bourgeoisie for help is largely where early Scientific Socialist Theodore Dezamy disagreed with Utopian Etienne Cabet within French politics, and it was their political disagreements which formed the basis for Marx and Engels to expand upon that French politics with German Philosophy and English economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_D%C3%A9zamy#Life

Alexandre Théodore Dézamy was born in Luçon (Vendée). He worked as a schoolteacher in Luçon before moving to Paris in the 1830s, where he became superintendent of a rooming house. Dézamy had already been developing ideas for a reorganisation of society on republican, communalistic and collectivist principles. He admired Gracchus Babeuf and Philippe Buonarroti and was influenced by the writing of the utopian communist Étienne Cabet. In Paris he joined Cabet’s association and for a time worked as his secretary. He also contributed to Cabet’s journal Le Populaire. Dézamy also made contact with several revolutionary secret societies. In particular, he joined the ‘Society of the Season’ of Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès, which carried out an unsuccessful insurrection in 1839. Blanqui and Barbès went to prison, where they became enemies. Dézamy was arrested but in 1840, he was free and collaborated with Jacques Pillot and others in organising the first communist banquet at Belleville. (Banquets were a common way of circumventing prohibitions against political demonstrations, with oppositional speeches disguised as toasts; in the 1840s, republican opponents of the Orléanist monarchy organised a nationwide campaign of banquets, but most were liberal in orientation.)

Dézamy subsequently broke with Cabet, whom he considered too opportunistic and reformist; instead of appealing to the bourgeoisie for sympathy with the proletariat, as Cabet was doing, Dézamy thought the workers should organise themselves and achieve their own liberation. Instead of hoping for reforms from a benevolent monarch, workers should support a revolution and the establishment of a unitary, centralised, egalitarian republic. Dézamy also deplored Cabet’s religiosity, seeing the Church as an enemy of the people. He envisaged a republic of federated communes, each comprising about 10,000 people and combining industrial, agricultural and cultural work. Private property was to be abolished; work was to be assigned on the basis of ability; goods were to be distributed on the basis of need. Dézamy combined this social system with militant anti-clericalism, atheism and a materialist metaphysics derived from d’Holbach. Dézamy called his system ‘unitary communism’ and propagated it in his own journal, L’Égalitaire. In 1842 he published his best-known book, Code de la Communauté. In The Holy Family (1844), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that ‘the more scientific French Communists, Dézamy, Gay and others, developed the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism.’