BUY NOTHING DAY, GUYS
I TRY TO BE RELATIVELY POLITICALLY NEUTRAL AND I KNOW I FAIL AT IT COS I'M STILL ON THAT WATCHLIST OR WHATEVER
ANYWAY
PLEASE
BLACK FRIDAY IS THE FUCKING WORST
DO NOT GO SHOP TOMORROW
IT'S SO DUMB
PHYSICAL ITEMS ARE MEANINGLESS AND CAPITALISM IS DUMB I HATE IT I JUST WANT TO BE A MOSSY SKELETON IN MY SPOOKY COTTAGE WHY DO I NEED A CREDIT SCORE

How long are we gonna do this??

🔗 Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (@JoshuaPotash)

Banksy is eh tbh, but this is a very good take!

Me: money is fake

Them: yeah it's just paper that we ascribe value to

Me: no it's faker than that. Only 3 percent of USD exists as physical currency. The rest is just bank credit.

Them: right, so money is just numbers in bank accounts that the government creates from nothing

Me: no, it's faker than that. Most money is bank credit, created by private banks. Not the government, not the Fed, banks like Chase or Bank of America. They take zero dollars and turn that into a loan and debt. They decide who gets new money. Capitalists decide where new money is created and who it goes to. If the government paid back all government debt, there would be no more treasury bonds, and then if everybody paid off all their private debt, there would be no more money.

Them: wow, so most money is just credit corresponding to debt, and there's just a small amount of money they borrow from the federal reserve that was created by the government.

Me: no, it's faker than that. Since 2020 reserve requirements were abolished. Banks don't need to legally keep any money on hand or borrow money from the federal reserve or each other at all. They can just pay interest on every dollar they create to the federal reserve without borrowing from the Fed at all.

Them: oh. So money is REALLY fake.

Me: yeah. so if the government just paid off all of our student debt it wouldn't affect the money supply at all. It would do nothing to the economy other than release a huge debt burden.

Debt is a permanantly-fixed class hierarchy system created by people at the top who can create and destroy debts at will because they can control their ledgers which are deemed important solely because they are in power.

Hell yeah

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbb9d/hackers-are-spamming-businesses-receipt-printers-with-antiwork-manifestos

New oedipussy complex just dropped🔥🔥

ARCA IS MY ALIEN QUEEN.

Capitalists.

I want to start off by saying that I am going to shamelessly steal memes for this channel, and there are a couple of reasons supporting my decision.

1. This is already the status quo in the Telegram meme community. The whole thing is an incestuous web of forwarded or resaved memes in the first place, most of which are lifted off of other sites like Reddit and Instagram.

2. It is often impossible to determine who the original creator of a meme is. By the time that it is posted to content aggregators, it could have already had names added or removed, or any number of edits made. I have seen some try to track down the origins of memes using google or twitter to establish a timeline, but these methods are unreliable given that many memes are originally shared on transient image boards like 4chan or in private group chats. So essentially, unless you are personally aware of who created a meme, it is basically anyone's guess where it came from. And even if someone does claim to have that knowledge, they could easily be fabricating their story. The exception to this rule is that of comics made by well known artists, but those live on the boundary of what might prototypically be considered a meme (a good topic for another time).

3. Anonymity isn't all missed opportunities at fame for meme creators. It also provides the freedom to crap out low quality work with poorly articulated opinions while still getting your ideas out into a public forum. This is the ultimate enabler of political discourse for the masses, and that this is such an integral part of online culture is something that I see as a huge positive.

To be clear, I still intend to credit original artists when possible, but this was an opportunity to rant about the nature of modern memes that I couldn't turn down. Does it sound pretentious? Probably, but I don't care if I sound cringe because I'm comfortable that my opinions aren't actual dogshit.

Anyway, back to my point. It is obvious to anyone in the leftist community that pro-labor sentiments have been on the rise, and the rise of antiwork is plain evidence of that. But what we have seen tragically little of is widespread, and especially publicized praxis. This week antiwork did that by denying Kellog the ability to hire scabs online, which I don't have to tell you is majorly based. But more importantly, it has done tangible damage to a major corporation. This is work that will transcend your local community. This is the power of organization. The whole fiasco has even become big enough now that even Biden put out a statement in support of the striking workers. Whatever you attribute it to, this is a major win for labor.

As exciting as that is, that's not really why I decided to make this post. What I'm concerned about is how corporations (and potentially state actors) are beginning to respond. In years past, leftism had been irrelevant enough that it just wasn't worth it to try to undermine the integrity of online communities. But now that we have the will and ability to actually fuck over big business, there's finally a profit incentive to make our movements as disorganized and ineffective as possible. And coming back around to antiwork, we're starting to see just how powerful their disinformation campaigns can be.

The word astroturfing has been around for years now, but up until this point it was mostly associated with hamfisted attempts by companies to advertise as if they were actual users. But now they've entered the plainly political realm by attempting to infiltrate /r/antiwork. And frankly, those attempts were about as successful as you could expect. But what came after is what really concerns me, friends. Because now seemingly every other post on the front page of the sub is about said astroturfing, or accusing other users of astroturfing, or disagreements about how the movement should be organized or what the proper narratives are about leftism's relationship with liberalism and right wing politics. It's leftists eating other leftists, and it's a story as old as socialism itself. It took surprisingly little effort on the part of the capitalists to set us off, too. Regardless of whether antiwork survives this trial by fire, it is clear that we as a community will need to come to terms with this flaw.

Now, you may think that perhaps the issue is with our organizational structures, but there I would have to disagree. Though clearly decentralized movements tend to devolve into disorder like we've seen here, those with too great a degree of centralization are prone to corruption due to the power distance between members and leadership. Organizations which have an appropriate mixture of the two are already complex enough that you're basically running a party, or even a state, and if that's the case then you're no longer just trying to get your budding movement off the ground. So if not organization, then what else? Ideology is the natural culprit after this, and to a degree I would indeed attribute the dysfunctionality of leftism to this. But not necessarily in the way that you would expect. In fact, the issue is with how we ourselves relate to leftist ideology, and which parts of it we see fit to model our own lives around.

Leftism invites us to imagine a kinder world. One in which people care for their neighbors, not entirely unlike preindustrial society. One in which people feel genuine empathy for one another. This is not the leftism I see today. There is a certain level of social and emotional intelligence that I think was lost in the process of the commodification of labor, and which has only been worsened by the rise of the internet. Now, this isn't something which is the fault of technology. This is a result of our own deprioritization of socialization in general.