Cockroach / Malaise
The company I work for is bearish on AI datacenters. The labor I perform day-to-day is meaningless and consists, in large part, of bossing around underpaid workers in the Third World to do menial data entry I could do alone in half the time.
These colleagues of mine are ruthlessly underpaid, as am I. I pantomime working for the last thirty minutes and leave at five o’clock sharp, as usual. I go to the grocery store to buy food. The surplus profits of which are at record levels
I wish to comfort myself with a small delight — a bar of chocolate, to be precise.
The two largest ingredients in the selection before me are cacao and palm oil, the supply chains of which are inseparable from slavery and child labor, which creates the ‘economy of scale’ that I benefit from.
This thought is quickly sublimated by my desire to kick the cleaning robot whizzing past me on my way to the self-checkout. They’d get rid of us all if they could.
Living under capitalism is an endless series of micro-humiliations intentionally designed to break your spirit1.
I for one, feel utterly broken.
Don’t be the guy. A lot of people out there saying someone’s gotta DO SOMETHING. About the left the right Zionists Hamas blacks whites troons Nazis etc. etc. etc. Don’t let it be you. You are gonna live a long life. A nice house. A nice dog. Not end up cold and alone in the woods on the run from big men putting knees on your neck. With everyone who said someone’s gotta do something saying you’re a piece of shit cuz you did something. Someone’s gotta do something. Never them. So not you. Live a long life
Principled Leftism cannot achieve anything, in part, because of the commitment to “morality”. We are constantly purity-testing our own kind in a race-to-the-bottom death spiral that prevents any meaningful progress from being made2
To draw historical parallels, the KPD and the SPD wasted valuable time bickering amongst themselves while the NSDAP consolidated its voting bloc amongst the petit bourgeois and capitalist classes.
The Fascists care little for the morality of their actions, they care about winning.
Au contraire, we should not kill the desire in ourselves to do better. The times simply do not allow for it yet. We may allow focus on rigorous self-criticism when the revolution has been achieved. The basic principles of Marxist thought can, and have been distilled by modern propagandists into the “hype moments and aura” that captures the hearts and minds of the post-lingual TikTok generation.3
The organs of society have been allowed to fall into decay to foment this fascist takeover and the process of excoriating this institutional rot will take generations. I do not think the leftists of today are willing to accept the damage that has been done. By and large our movement is full of elitist dickwads who do nothing but write self-aggrandizing blogposts online4.
A successful socialist state will not be built by revolutionaries alone, but by the concerted effort of revolutionaries to launder Leftism to the general populace as an acceptable and desirable alternative to Fascism.
Sunday scaries are one manifestation of this phenomenon. ↩︎
For a recent example of this phenomenon, see Your Party infighting and on a smaller scale, all the splinter studios resultant from ZA/UM layoffs. ↩︎
I dislike Hasan intensely but his influence on the modern discourse is undeniable ↩︎
