TODAY I’LL DRINK TO THAT!

“Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!”

Yes, it’s also the guy who takes advice from the spirit of his dead dog. I’m not kidding.

You know… That’s actually not a crazy thought. I’m not a professional Bible scholar but I’m super interested in the topic and read my share of books and research articles on critical biblical studies.

Some of the craziest prophetic writings in the bible are actually super anti-elite, criticizing kings and priestly leaders for extorting the poor and not caring for their people, decrying foreign and domestic opressors, etc, etc.

If you read Amos, Baruch, Ezekiel, Isaiah and so on it’s not rare to find stuff like “what is the value the sacrifices in the temple have if you’re starving your people?” directed at kings and other elites.

Not all of it, but some of the later stuff (exilic and post-exilic) is surrounded by crazy visions like “… the angel of lord showed me the throne of YHWH and it was awesome and terrifying and full of eyes and wheels within wheels and 200 heads”, etc.

So… part of it might be a way of saying “BTW, here’s the mothefucking terrifying being that’s going to fuck you up if you don’t stop oppressing the people…”.

Of course, all that was later coopted by an institutional priestly class who couldn’t give a fuck about the actual social message. But there was a lot of social preoccupation by some of the original authors.

Well, I’m Brazilian so I can tell you: they’ll do it as many times as we allow them.

Since the 90s we had at least three neoliberal waves in Brazil with mass privatization and austerity measures, punctuated by center-left periods of “it’s ok to enrich banks but let’s at least guarantee that people can eat” periods.

Dude, I’m going to show you how to get rich with this simple trick:

step 1: find a dependent capitalist country and destabilize its government

step 2: find a way to destroy it’s public infrastructure. Just coopt a local comprador class and defund everything, but if all else fails just start a war.

And so on.

It’s ripe for some good old neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatization.

Ah yes, the vast fields of tea plants that grow in Yorkshire…

It’s very telling that in the host of reasons this person gives for the so called “shortage of labor” (which is actually a shortage of an industrial reserve army), not one of the is stagnant salaries.

No one is willing to admit that in most areas salaries are stagnant when compared to the enormous growth in labor productivity and cost of essential goods and services (food, housing, education, etc) and that’s the root cause of a resistance or workers to enter the “reserve army” in those areas. Simple like that.

Increase pay, and people will join. If you can’t increase pay enough to find employees, then your business isn’t viable and you need to do something.

The main reason is because we use natural cycles that are important for civic and agricultural reasons as the basis of our measurements. And those cycles are unrelated phenomena that don’t match with each other well.

Day and year are based (duh) on two solar cycles (Earth’s rotation and translation), while the month and week are based on the lunar cycle of translation around the earth in roughly 28 days. When people tried to force lunar and solar calendars to fit, we ended up with the inconsistent months we have.

The 12/60 base divisions of the day were chosen before we had good calculators. Numbers with many divisors like 12 and 60 help a lot with mental math when you don’t have calculators.

There have been proposals of better calendars. The French tried something during the revolution and other people as well. The French republican calendar was:

• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 10 days
• 1 month = 3 weeks
• 1 year = 12 months + 5 monthless holiday

Another idea is the Cotsworth Plan:

• 1 minute = 100 seconds
• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 7 days
• 1 month = 4 weeks
• 1 year = 13 months + 1 special monthless holiday

I like the French Republican Calendar, but I would change it to months with 6 weeks of 5 days instead. And divide the week into 3 work days, 2 weekends.

Literal nazi shit. Literal fucking nazi shit.

libertarian

So. As he said, white supremacists.

I love how people use this kind of metaphysical argument, invoking human nature and such, and then have the nerve to call Marxism idealistic.

Marxist logic is literally about eschewing idealistic metaphysical arguments and focusing on the material conditions that influence history. Go read the Misery of Philosophy, people ffs.

Fucking unionize then.

I’m not even going to comment on the EU being « authoritarian ».

As one small and simple example, ask the people in Niger if it doesn’t feel authoritarian that they can’t enjoy the material wealth of their country because France steals 80% of their Uranium, paying peanuts for it. Go ask France’s former colonies how democratic it is for a foreign central bank to control their currency, artificially keeping it favorable for France to steal Uranium for peanuts. How nice it is for them that the material wealth that should be making their country rich, is going to subsidize the electrical bill of someone’s fancy apartment in Paris.

Go ask people who live near mines owned by Swedish mining companies how much those companies bribed the local governments to allow them to pollute the fuck out of their countries, deregulate the fuck out of their labor laws, etc. See if they consider this democracy.

Go ask someone in Libya how democratic it was when a government that provided them with the best standards of living in the whole continent was bombed and removed from power because some French and American folks decided that it was time for his counter-hegemonic ass to go. And left a fucking mess of warlords and civil war in his place. Super democratic I guess. Not authoritarian at all.

The EU can only maintain itself relatively open and prosperous by fucking over their former colonies in ways their population mostly ignore. If your democracy at home depends on autocracy and destruction elsewhere to be maintained, how is it real democracy?

I don’t think anyone expect that. We expect that to happen in a workers revolution.

I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.

Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.

Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.

I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.

So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…

But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.

I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

It’s nice that neoclassical economics is now verifying with their methods what we know since… the 1830s maybe?

Today we’re celebrating in Brazil because the fucking fascist (Bolsonaro) that was our previous president had his political rights stripped for 8 years for abusing power in the previous election.

You know what’s better? Dude did EVERYTHING he could to rig the elections and LOST. That’s how incompetent those fucking fascists are today. Even the libs saw through him.

Yep, bourgeois justice sucks but at least it brought this to the table today. :)

We’re still far from where we should be, with our “center left” conciliatory government defending basically a continuation of liberal economic policies. But at least that particular fascist is out of commission for a while.

We’re going to celebrate like carnival or world cup today.

FUCK YOU, BOLSONARO. I’ll still live to see you ROT IN A FUCKING JAIL CELL, YOU FUCKING GENOCIDAL MURDERING PIECE OF SHIT.

Ooff… That’s a bit worrying.