Some Things Don't End

Happy belated Workers’ Memorial Day, celebrated April 28th

hmm okay i'm trying to dig up a source on this painting, to see if i could find it in any higher quality

ooooh this one is really nice

Stranger Things season 1: beneath the superficial image of “peace and prosperity” in 1980s small-town America, there was the painful legacy of countless atrocities committed by the American government in the name of ‘freedom.’

There’s probably a term that already exists for this but if there isn’t I’m gonna call it ‘Rambofication’ in honor of its probably most well known instance: Rambo First Blood was about a soldier, John Rambo (that’s his actual name I’m not doing a bit), returning home from the Vietnam war, so traumatized by war that he brought the war home with him to a small town, unable to adapt to life without strict military discipline and hierarchy. Subsequent Rambo movies were about how John Rambo was the only supersoldier tough enough and patriotic enough to kill faceless hordes of dastardly foreign commies.

When Spain's economy modernized in the second half of the last century (i.e. tertiarized), you see both an increase in the weight of large and monopolistic enterprises on the economy, and an increase in the number of medium and small enterprises. Under a simplistic view of the petty and haute bourgeois classes, this is contradictory and impossible to explain. The reason for this is that the monopolization of Spain's economy meant that the petty-bourgeois class was binded to the economic activity of the haute bourgeois. For every monopolistic or oligarchal state of a sector, you have a myriad of small business owners whose main activity was complimentary to those monopolies and oligarchies. From mere transport of goods to financial and legal consultories. The monopolization of a capitalist economy does not reverse its anarchic nature, it exacerbates it. Not even the service industry is free from this, the concentration of capital can mask under forms such as the franchise and underlay an apparently genuine petty-bourgeois network when you take suppliers into account. It becomes even clearer when you take the international supply and capital chains into account. Your local café serves coffee from Ethiopia and sugar from Brazil. There is nothing "small" about this.