Edited by karphead ()
the truth is that autodidacticism on the length of a university education is incredibly rare. there is a reason why communists built schools and organizations, and did not just dump university textbooks on the doors of literate peasants.
cars posted:an attempt to harness antipathy to racist pseudoscience for the purpose of exploitation of workers
Thinking lately about how defenseless the current batch of online, DSA-style "post-left"/"populist right"/etc. social fascists are against this stuff, for the exact reason that they think they've got it all figured out. They've utterly lost sight of the necessary concept of "ideology", if they ever had it to begin with... like, the idea that the bourgeoisie can exploit your beliefs through your employer without those beliefs being wrong or bad, and everyone involved in exploiting them can even deeply believe they SHARE those beliefs, e.g. anti-racism, without that making racism or racist pseudoscience any less a type of bourgeois ideology itself. Thug Lessons alienated that mob recently after he explained to them that "small business owners" are just as bad for workers as "big business", potentially even worse given how they're exempt from a lot of worker-protection laws in many countries... pretty much just explaining to them that ideology exists, that they shouldn't take things they see on TV at face value. Extremely upsetting for that online gang, to the point of blind frothing rage at someone they counted as one of their own just the day before. But all of that is way off topic for this thread lol.
Like: for most people, it's a correct belief that they enjoy time away from alienated labor for their employers more than the time they spend at work. Work does not fulfill them; its absence does. That causes a conflict, because within current social relations, they need to spend so much time at alienated labor to "earn" time off. Ideology tells you that the "solution" to that conflict proceeds from your equal position in the marketplace as a seller of your own labor, so: just be "good" at that and you'll get to a position where you have "enough" free time to overcome alienation. And since the initial belief is correct, but the ideology is... ideology... it's hard to look reality in the face unless you keep the concept of "ideology" in your head... how someone selling their labor hours to meet their basic needs is absolutely NOT an "equal" in the labor market to the buyer, and no amount of vacation or sick days will conquer alienation in the worker as subject, let alone contribute to the benefit of workers as a class.
Losing track of that tricky concept, "ideology", is how you get Marx-influenced pseudo-intellectuals describing themselves as "populist" or "socialist" while subscribing to crude sub-economism bourgeois-serving ideas, like, "Big business says it's anti-racist so it must be pro-worker to be racist," or, "Small business owners are just regular joes like you and me so they're the worker's pal." And then they're already caught in the net.
Acdtrux posted:anti-idpol rhetoric is entirely reactionary in all respects imo
I mean, sure, I agree, except maybe in the exact sense of ideology... like, "liberal idpol", if it's taken to mean e.g. black capitalism as a "solution", etc. is real and real bad, but in large part because it's objectively white supremacist in the same way that Barack Obama objectively served global white supremacy as president, it doesn't really help black people at the expense of white people or anything like that. Both its supporters and the "anti-idpol" sector of its detractors are either blinkered by ideology or are just lying about it for whatever reason.
I guess what interests me more is HOW those sorts of politics (what's normally self-described as "anti-idpol") are immediately REACTIVE, instead of just reactionary in the wider sense, how that reaction works as an ongoing process.
It seems to be a group of people, some loud pseudo-"left" minority whose fan base is almost entirely right-wing, apparently capable of burning calories on questioning the status quo.. they see some social ill get bashed by the enemy in a way that's at best pure ideology—sometimes not even that, just as cynical opportunism, even accounting for ideology I don't know how much a McDonald's franchisee cares about Black Lives Matter—and the "anti-idpol" people say,
"Well, since the wealthy people are talking bad about the bad thing, the bad thing is now the good thing. Racism is now good and proletarian. Whoa, that's exactly what the rich Democrats say on TV, the working class are all truck-driving KKK members who want to bomb Iran, so I will take time off from seeing the rich Democrats on TV as villainous liars and accept everything they are saying about this one topic, and I will not question it. I will not buy a truck or join the KKK or join the imperialist U.S. military, but I WILL talk about those things as necessary for representing the working class and express anger at other people as a form of insecure contempt for myself."
Because like... that's social fascism for you in the DESTINATION reached, the left wing of fascism... but in the current configuration, it's still fascinating to me in terms of all those calories burned for so little movement, right back where they started, believing everything Hollywood tells them on a screen.
It didn't take all that frantic activity for social fascists in the past to go exactly nowhere, is what I mean. The sizable minority spouting this stuff is almost all at the center of empire, which means there's always a Heil Hitler rally right next door for them. And horseshoe theory is liberal horseshit, like, the ultimate destination of these folks is always to become rabid anti-Communists... so this group I'm discussing REALLY took the long way around to attend the local Nazi mixer. The rally was next door and they got there by pointing themselves in the exact opposite direction, hitting the loop and going all the way into another county and back, to end up almost exactly where they started.
Trying to figure out how this happened—and like, not whether it's surprising it happened, because it's not, and that's part of what interests me about it, how easy it's become in political discussions to become Vox dot com "explainers", to slip into "this isn't surprising, I can explain it away with a Just-So story, therefore it's not necessary to think hard about it" and elude explaining it—it interests me. Because it seems important to understand how ideology works as power in the world and how to change that world. Which is supposedly what our politics is about.
Right at the core of this for me is the idea, which I think is so well-proven that arguments against it are sheer pseudoscience (see all the stuff about Sam Harris on this site), that under the expanding global flattening of culture from capitalism in the 20th and 21st century, people's subjective lives are just not that different beyond the material fact of class. "Generations" are marketing bullshit; ideology is real, but it shapes even the bourgeoisie by its nature... and most people alive today, the vast majority, think in mostly the same ways, with no great insurmountable boundaries between the socially constructed, socially accessible, partially socially operated machines in each of their brains.
So I want to know how people who at some point thought essentially the same way I did, and have at least gotten the gist of stuff I've read in the same way I have, turned into performative believers in the corniest, cheesiest, laziest bourgeois idea of what "worker" means, and have made it the absolute center of their performance of themselves to the world in a way that's objectively opposed to the politics they seem to think they're performing, however cynical they're being about it. How they end up as America's / Australia's / UK's / Compradors' Dumbest Neo-Nazis. Because I'm from their planet too, and further, I'm typing this post on the Internet, in English, and so there but for the grace of etc.
cars posted:I'm making beef jerky
the jerky store called, they'd like to buy all your jerky!
cars posted:I'm making beef jerky
karphead posted:i love enduring the nepotism and moral midgetry that comes with working for a small company. love it.
same here
this went on until i asked him if he thought the other captains faced the same level of disrespect as he perceives, and he did not like that at all. he went off to get me fired by the real manager and all that happened is they gave me the day off. i'm back in work tomorrow.
Horselord posted:this went on until i asked him if he thought the other captains faced the same level of disrespect as he perceives,
owned
according to the store manager one of his own responsibilities is solving the problem of riders quitting after only a few days. this is the first time i've ever seen WONTFIX on a bug ticket irl
going to work for their competitor now
i've never seen his face. i don't know where he came from, or where he was going. but i'll always remember his lyric: "I WAS WALKING ALONG, SINGING A SONG, (unintelligible)"
god bless this man, wherever he is