A Propos Nothing

maybe Meeko understands corners better than we ever will…

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.

it’s really stark how parasitic the cosmopolitan city and ethics is on the economics, culture, and social relationships of virtually the entire area/polity around it. like how can we truly reconcile the cosmopolitan nature of our societies and socialism.

i live 40 miles from NYC and my rent is still tied to rent in NYC. if I want to experience some culture or art, i need to go to NYC. if i want a good paying job, I pretty much need to go to NYC.

ive been thinking a lot recently about how damn cosmopolitan modern leftism is, and how weak it is compared to leftism of 100 years ago. like we’re all proletarians but we have no real connection to the working class movement of 100 years ago. none of us work jobs anymore that actually matter. we can’t go on strike and completely shut down a city like they used to 100 years ago. we don’t have jobs where we’re the ones who are building and fixing things, and if we stop working things come to a screeching halt. it’s harder to grow and organize a labor movement when we’re atomized and our work, if withheld from capitalism, is not a big deal.

This is a good point. I think I can add something because it’s the same in the UK. Thinking about London Birmingham Manchester, probably Glasgow, Belfast and Cardiff as well - these huge cosmopolitan cities clean up all of the social, economic and cultural forces and leave cities/towns/villages struggling. And there’s an elitism amongst the left from big cities towards poorer/smaller cities. Living in a large cosmopolitan city is a badge of honour. You’re seen as cultured, understanding, worldly. The rest are seen as uncultured, thick, not worthy etc. And when people talk about poverty they typically visualise inner cities or housing estates. But rural poverty is huge too like our former fishing towns, villages that have been abandoned and starved - they’re not all posh tory retreats.

Yep, I’m totally dismayed by the utter abundance of anarchists that seemingly only want to shudder themselves behind the walls of academia or education more generally. I guess another tendency is technology, there’s lots of anarchist programmers and tech people. But like, these jobs are replaceable and functionally powerless jobs.

My comparison was to show that sanitation workers get paid more because at the end of the day, they have real power in the eyes of the ruling class (collected trash is something we take for granted and garbage workers usually get their demands met when they go on strike because conditions rapidly deteriorate if you don’t). 

what’s so insidious about this ‘self-love’ mentality is the assumption that with enough bubble baths, prioritisation of the self/growing individualism, kale smoothies and exercise, you can overcome the obstacles around you and be a functional human being in the current socio-economic system. used as a bridge between the alienated individual and capitalism, the growing desire for individualistic self-help fuels the tools required for surviving capitalism, justifying our psychological isolation, masking the fact that human beings require communal living and a natural environment in order to flourish. what’s also deeply unsettling about this mentality is that it suggests that mental illness is merely subject to internalised thought patterns, removing the necessity of understanding the root of the conditioning, thereby also removing the contribution of one’s environment in altering one’s cognitive processes. this, in turn, removes responsibility in the external environment, making it easier to ignore and justify oppression, exploitation and injustice, because one is told that with enough positive thinking, they’ll realise things aren’t so bad after all.

alcohol culture is so wild…people all over fb will be sharing a meme like “i can’t have just one glass of wine, it’s always 2 bottles and 3 people i can never look in the eye again” as if that’s normal? but if a meme like that was going around about cocaine or any other drug, everyone would be like “sounds like a drug problem bruh” 

The neural network has weird ideas about what humans like to eat