"Power and domination is not natural to humanity. When you expose power and these forces of domination to the sunlight, it evaporates. No more power. This has been happening since systemic structures of power have existed. If you asked my grandmother whether or not she was oppressed, she wouldn't have known what you were talking about. If you asked my mother, she knew she was oppressed and she resented it. If you ask my daughters, they don't even have to answer you. That's a shift in attitudes over just a few generations. When people talk about how wage slavery will never end, or capitalism will never end, they will. They said the same thing about chattel slavery and feudalism. All forms of domination end. It just takes time and education. It's why, when Emma Goldman argued for anarchism, she said it would take five hundred years to blossom into reality because systems of domination have to be removed first. Labor reformers, particularly the girls in mills, the women of the 19th century, they had no idea what socialism, anarchism, or Marxism were. They weren't educated. They still organized. They wrote that they hadn't faught the Civil War so that they could replace chattel slavery with wage slavery. They regarded wage labor as slavery because if you rent your time for a wage to survive, that is not freedom."
Noam Chomsky, 2009
Most of us have been conditioned...
Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is a criminal attitude.
In fact, we have been brainwashed.
War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. It's very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
"The present moment is a desperate one. If you look at statistics, the reality has never been more clear that, the west, particularly the United States, has always been built on the idea that the U.S. has it so much better than the rest of the world. Isn't better a relative word? I mean, in 2019, fifty million Americans are living in distressed communities. The desperation is real, with high unemployment, dependancy issues, addiction, and high crime rates. Well, okay, what if we didn't treat employment as a status? What if it was socially acceptable to not have to grind and slave away? Wouldn't that make crime rates and addiction rates drop sharply? Maybe we should de-stigmatize unemployment and encourage others to not be so dependant on a job. Granted, work is valuable and needed for societies to exist, but under global capitalism, employment isn't about working for the benefit of society. Millions of jobs don't need to exist. Employment is about productivity that benefits the capitalist class. So, I would argue that, if employment isn't about benefiting society, it shouldn't be seen as a sacred idea. And to be unemployed should not be so stigmatized."
DAVID GRAEBER, University of Birmingham, 2019
@40dd35b6@224c1c1d That's not his way of giving back. Nothing has changed. Everyone is just as poor as they've always been, and he's still one of the richest people on the planet.
@deb6f389@c6275ce1@a0b5ba53 Countries with the highest amounts of atheist are ones with more accessable healthcare, education, and other necessities, and I believe the two are directly linked. And whatever services religious organizations provide can be easily done by secular organizations.
@5d35507a@a0b5ba53 They prevent it through collective effort. Just because there's no government doesn't mean there's no organization. It's just that whatever organization there will be will be of a voluntary nature. So if someone were to try any forcefully impose their will onto people, people would just get together and stop them. People don't need an authority figure in order for them to know when to fight and defend themselves.
@c6275ce1@a0b5ba53 Religion gets a lot of it's support from poor and suffering people who latch onto religion to help cope with reality. Without poverty and suffering people will be less inclined to be religious.
It's no coincidence that there are less religious people in the modern world, with our modern medicine and technology, than in the past, and why the places with the least religion are the ones where people have more access to the basic necessities of life and more freedom.
If religion is to be done away with then everyone will have to be given all of the necessities of life without exception and the freedom to associate and travel as they see fit. Only then will the two primary gateways to religion, poverty and desperation, be gone, significantly decreasing the appeal of religion.
Of course there are other reasons people are religious that have nothing to do with socioeconomic suffering, such as a yearning for a meaning to life, which will exist even if an ideal society where suffering doesn't exist. Philosophical education can surely be a viable solution to tending to people's existential quandaries so that they don't fall into religion as an escape.
@a0b5ba53 1. China wasn't Communist, they tried to achieve Communism using the state and failed, and ended up creating a totalitarian dictatorship. I could understand if you were criticizing their method of achieving Communism, but using China as an example of how bad Communism is, even though they never achieved it, is dishonest.
2. People with a stronger will than others will always try to impose themselves onto people, and so long as hierarchical institutions like the state and capitalism exist they'll continue to do so.
3. Capitalism and the State aren't human nature. They are relatively recent human constructs. Humanity for most of human history existed in some society similar to that of Communism.
Let's say you made $10,000 a day. That's an insane amount right? You'd be able to get everything you could ever want or need. Let's say you make $10,000 every day for a really long time. Let's say from O BC to now, 2022 years. You'd make 7.3 billion dollars. That's truly an insane amount right? That's 6% of what Elon musk made last year.
The Luddites were skilled weavers who saw the power loom as a threat to their lively hoods, but it's so much more than that. Britain passed laws making it illegal to what we'd describe now as unionize and take collective action. The government also universally rolled back regulations for factory owners. Factories would pop up far out into the country side because the conditions were so abysmal, it was so dangerous they knew people would protest if it was common knowledge how many kids were pulled into looms and killed. The Ludites formed and would send threatening letters to mill owners to stop using the power looms. At night they would break into the factories and destroy the machines but leave the hand tools and other equipment alone. The Government dispatched troops to try and suppress them as a group. At one point a mass trial took place in which they charged 60 men with various crimes. Harsh sentences of those found guilty, which included execution and penal transportation, quickly ended the movement. The Government also made "machine breaking" illegal in 1812.
@095e5c5b When I hear stories like this about the police the emotional part of my mind wants the officers to be beaten or murdered, but then the intellectual part of my mind informs me that doing so wouldn't really solve anything because it's been long proven that systems of justice that are based on revenge have never been successful at eliminating crime, and that whatever energy people would put into getting revenge should be put into creating self-defense organizations to defend against the police in the future.
@24f7d599 I absolutely agree. There's no greater revenge than proving your enemy wrong. Not only is it satisfying, but this kind of revenge is better than killing them, because in doing so you're also making the world a better place. So after the revolution, grab the defeated powerless enemy by the arm and take him not to the guillotine, but take him to his home that the revolution has provided for him, inside the community of people that have completely opposite morals and goals of mutual aid and solidarity, where he'll be constantly reminded of his loss until the end of his extremely comfortable life because the revolution would have improved everyone's life, and he'll realize that the reactionism he dedicated his life to was inferior all along, and he'll either go mad and become a hermit and ghost of bourgeois society, or he'll accept the truth and join everyone else in peace and harmony.
A man gets arrested for stalking a person in his car, forcing him out of his car at gunpoint, and shooting him to death in front of a large crowd of witnesses. He's charged with impersonating an officer.
Cop City in Atlanta is an ecological issue, an abolition issue, and a civil liberties issue. It'd be the largest urban warfare training centre in NA built on the largest urban forest in the US and people who protest it are getting thrown in jail on domestic terrorism and RICO charges. #STOPCOPCITY
@267c0e5b Police officers shouldn't have unions because A: The police are the enemies of working class unions (it's not the Capitalists that go out on the street and beat/arrest striking workers, it's the police, the tool Capitalist use to keep their power); making their jobs easier shouldn't be the working class's priority, and B: The police shouldn't exist. Their primary purpose is to protect capitalist wealth and property, not to help us. The goal shouldn't be to make the police more agreeable, but to abolish the police and replace it with non-hierarchical community protection/security groups.
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