doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc
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A wandering deer, building shrines along the way.
Joined Nov 2022
doe
boosted
"A new way of life cannot be imagined based on the existing institutions. It will need a social regeneration from the bottom up. The starting point of such a regeneration must be territory and reproduction: food, housing, care." -P.M., "Beyond the Economic, the Revival of the Commons" in The Reservoir https://autonomedia.org/product/reservoir/
P.M. is best known for his classic 1983 book bolo'bolo, a delightful, concrete vision of anarcho-communism that I highly recommend. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p-m-bolo-bolo
"We now turn to the factory as a whole, and that in its most perfect form.
Dr. Ure, the Pindar of the automatic factory, describes it, on the one hand, as “Combined co-operation of many orders of workpeople, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill, a system of productive machines, continuously impelled by a central power” (the prime mover); on the other hand, as “a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.”
These two descriptions are far from being identical. In one, the collective labourer, or social body of labour, appears as the dominant subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workmen are merely conscious organs, coordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with them, subordinated to the central moving-power. The first description is applicable to every possible employment of machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use by capital, and therefore of the modern factory system. Ure prefers therefore, to describe the central machine, from which the motion comes, not only as an automaton, but as an autocrat. “In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.”" -Karl Marx
holy shit we made it home a whole day ahead of schedule
the land of Montana, the steppe kissing the mountains, is so beautiful. i hope to be able to see so much more of it than we were able to on this trip, but i feel so lucky to be able to see it at all
"Genghis Kahn is nothing to sneeze at. Will he come back from the dead? I don't know, but if he does it will be in some other form. Just as the despot internalizes the nomadic war-machine, capitalist society never stops internalizing a revolutionary war-machine.
It's not on the periphery that the new nomads are being born (because there is no more periphery); I want to find out what sort of nomads, even motionless and stationary if need be, our society is capable of producing."
-Gilles Deleuze
shoutout to @TheBearEXE for sharing this first on the hellsite
...Groping tortuously forward, it succeeds
in maintaining the capitalist system, but only by restricting each individual capitalist's freedom of movement, and by sacrificing the other branches of the economy on the altar of heavy industry. Only the great capitalists continue to draw their profits, while the economy as a whole is paralysed and individuals of every class are ruined or put on
short rations.
It is a well known fact among doctors that certain
cures seem for a moment to overcome the disease; but the disease takes its revenge. Driven from one site in the body, it reappears elsewhere or in a different form. For a moment, fascism, by repairing the profit-making mechanism, seems to banish the illness that capitalism suffers from. But this only aggravates the disease.
Charged with saving the system, it ends by plunging it into a worldwide holocaust.
Nor is this denouement peculiar to fascism. Every ex-
pedient that capitalism has resorted to in other countries has sooner or later led to the same result. Thus the authors of the "New Deal" in the United States temporarily succeeded in restarting the capitalist machine only by arms purchases even more gigantic than those in Germany.
With the return of peace, American capitalism could survive only by remaining on a war footing - a nuclear war footing - that imperils the future of the whole planet."
-Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business
...When fascism takes power, overflowing with gratitude for big business which financed it, its words and its deeds exhale the purest sort of laisser-faire economic doctrine. It announces its intention of favoring and protecting in every possible way private property and individual initiative. It rejects with horror the idea that the state might meddle in production. But the fascist state stands aside only so long as Messieurs Capitalists request it not to interfere in their private affairs. It imposes on them the
lightest possible taxes, the most tenuous sort of control. But it is always ready to come running whenever these gentlemen cannot pull through by themselves.
In any such crisis, it is immediately at their service, "socializing" their losses, refloating their enterprises, and keeping them alive with its orders. In short the course of events soon forces fascism to give
its program a serious wrench. Carried away by its eagerness to resurrect big business profits, it finds itself embarked, above all in Germany, on a huge armament program. Fascism speedily gets caught up in a system of wheels within wheels which insensibly conducts it from laissez-faire capitalism to autarky and a wartime economy.
Thus, starting from a desire to assure private enterprisemaximum freedom, fascism is compelled to gradually bureaucratize the economy and is more and more trapped in the contradiction between what it would like to do and what it must do.
...
"The fascist state is not satisfied with reducing the workers to slavery and making a general massacre of wages possible. It restores capitalist profits in another way: through various economic expedients.
"Expedients" is the word. It is not a question of taking measures to set in motion once more, however feebly, the "normal" machinery of capitalism. It is not a question of reestablishing profits from the production and distribution of new wealth. It is, quite simply, a matter of restoring their revenues to capitalist enterprises by artificial means and at the expense of the masses.
These expedients, of course, are by no means specifically fascist or National Socialist. They are twin brothers to those used in other countries, differing only in degree and not in kind.
What we are about to describe is not peculiar to fascism, and there is not, contrary to what the plebeian demagogues say, any kind of "fascist" or "National Socialist" economy. The fascist economy is only a sharpened form of the so-called "guided" capitalist economy, first tried in Germany during the First World War under the name Kriegswirtschaft (War Economy).
Nor are these expedients in any way "anti-capitalist." Only the naive could ever have believed that fascism is an actual economic revolution, outmoding capitalism. But the massive scope of these measures drags the fascist state in deeper than foreseen at first. It must more and more reject solutions reputed to be "liberal" or "orthodox."
...
drove for 7 hours today and fuck the highways of the states of illinois and indiana specifically
doe
boosted
Without robust anti-psychiatry dialogues, it can seem reasonable and necessary, even to anarchists, for there to be a process for removing "dangerously mentally ill" people from society (which is to say: it can seem reasonable and necessary to endorse an ideal of freedom and autonomy with loopholes for withholding that freedom and autonomy from people who are marked as undeserving of the dignity of risk and/or as too potentially dangerous to be allowed freedom of choice about their lives). Without robust anti-psychiatry dialogues, it can be made to seem that the person who is undeserving of freedom and autonomy is undeserving because of the type of person they are, as a consequence of some innate quality that makes it permissible to restrain them. (Without anti-psychiatry, anarchism is not anarchism.)
"It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of paupers or of the swindler.
That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption).
But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and “simple” (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis.
It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis." -K. Marx, Capital Vol 2
Admin
A wandering deer, building shrines along the way.
Joined Nov 2022
