virtual (demi)boy

I wish I could work more. I am actively looking for work, I have a work advisor, I have a PhD. Most roles say they are not willing to be flexible on hours. Often you start without any ergonomic equipment and have to wait months (while your body is in increasingly more pain) either hoping your company or the government pay for equipment you are legally entitled to.

When you started that new job you have to re-explain your reasonable adjustments, also legally protected, and then not get them because your managers don't understand. Now your mental health, on top of your physical health, is declining. You try to hold on for months until the adjustments settle, but in that time you've either been unable to do the work due to the lack of support or you've had so many flare ups of symptoms you physically cannot be at work (have 6 weeks bed bound as a treat). You feel guilty taking time off a new job so you work while laying on the floor, or at random hours to make up the time, making everything worse. Meanwhile your employer does nothing.

You finally leave that job because the pain is just too much. You apply for Employment Support Allowance, £400 a month, and constantly fight with the DWP about your benefits while working a part time job thay finally fits your requirements but the hours are too few to cover your bills. You will lose your ESA if you work more than 16 hours a week or make more than £812/month (you wanted to live your life? Fuck you). The DWP decides, without every seeing you, that you're not disabled enough and ends your support.

You become more stressed, the symptoms of your condition become harder to manage, your mental health declines further. But every six weeks the job centre calls and ask you 'are you applying for work', you say 'yes' and that's the end of that.

You burn out so hard that the need to work can cause you to have a panic attack.

"well you could work part-time" - most part-time jobs are in hospitality, care or other trades that are impossible with mobility issues. i can't stand behind a bar for 8 hours, let along move a keg or handle a 3-deep bar.

"what about an office job?" - with what experience? the two-day "employability skills" course the jc+ sends you on is about as useful on a CV as including your fucking shoe size.

"what about an apprenticeship" - that pays less than disability benefits and isn't available to over-25s (and is a struggle for over-21s because it becomes part-funded) - not to mention the fact that most apprenticeships in 2026 are bullshit, you do not need an apprenticeship to become a fucking recruiter, that's called an entry-level position.

my friend is trying really fucking hard to find a job, and they got pointed towards this "job finder" quiz and you know what they got back? beekeeping. fucking beekeeping. they live in a flat in the middle of a city, how many fucking beekeeping jobs do you think they could find?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/north-korea-condemns-us-allies-after-nato-summit-vows-safeguard-sovereignty-2026-07-11/

More than a third of a century after the liberation of leftists from that 'iron cage', where exactly has the slew of glorious new revolutions built on innovative theories been? Why is every single major surviving and thriving socialist state led by a vanguard party that upholds the legacy of the Soviet Union as a monumentally positive influence? Why is the left, supposedly freed from the shackles of doctrine produced by an actual revolutionary superpower, struggling with a record degree of disorganization, alienation and dilution in the face of new fascisms?

The only 'liberation' that the fall of the USSR created for the left was the freedom to peddle ahistorical, revisionist and dilettantish nonsense dressed up in the robes of bold new theories, the freedom to engage in asinine debates on basic points clarified long ago by Soviet theory and practice, and the freedom to practice the kind of rank opportunism among imperial core leftists that leads inevitably into either malnourished social democracy or shameless social fascism.

Without seriously studying and examining the USSR in all its history- not just till Lenin's death, but right up to its final decade- as a serious socialist project that worked as a positive force in the world, made sincere attempts to combat imperialism, contended with serious internal and external issues of encirclement and revisionism that all successful socialist parties shall inevitably face, and produced, despite its ultimate failure, an incredibly diverse body of data and experience that is of vital educational value for the left, there will be no socialist movement that can surpass its achievements. The path beyond the USSR's era is not away from it, but through it, through an honest and comprehensive engagement with its tactics, struggles, errors, reversals and strategies, carried out from a place of deep engagement with the material and ideological conditions that it had to navigate, not with some projected fantasy of what it could have been.