#capitalist appropriation of knowledge

[manticore239]

Homemade Diary: 만수

We tried cooking ramen in the rice cooker while we played Settlers of Catan. Nobody wanted to give me their 양. We forgot about the rice cooker. The timer went off. The steam shot out the lid, like a red plume. We accidentally painted the wall and ceiling in the church's kitchen red!

����🤣😆😄☁️🩸🍜☁️

[mesetacadre]

(Different anon to the one who asked the original question)

Can you elaborate on this part of your post or give reading recs?

"The student, housing, queer, etc. movements will have varying importance depending on time and place, will be more or less permeable to communist positions, and it'll be more or less useful to participate in them. But the worker's movement, whose mobilizations always have a direct relation with the mode of production and capitalism's prime contradiction, should at all times be the focus of any pretension of revolutionary work."

I've been interested in this for a while, but I don't have enough knowledge to have a fully-fledged opinion. I just know I dislike the common "we shouldn't get involved with feminism/trans rights/[insert 'controversial' issue of the time] because it distracts from the worker's movement" or alternative "divides the working class" I hear on social media. I do not think the party needs to be involved in every space, and that sometimes we can even build alliances without dedicating our few and precious resources to work in certain movements, but I think the party lines do need to be defined and its members as well versed as possible in dialectical materialism to reach the appropriate conclusions. The issue is, knowing where to intervene and where to remain on the sideline seems a very complicated decision that some parties seem to base purely on "what are people talking about right now" and that also seems like an error, though I struggle to define how.

I'm not saying that those issues are distracting or unimportant, I'm describing the workers shift. The worker's movement must be a priority and the spine of a CP's work, because it's the closeness that it achieves with the working class at the whirlwind of class struggle that allows a party to actually exert a vanguard role. It's the recognition of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, the class that capitalism itself places as the bourgeoisie's undertaker because of its position in the capitalist mode of production.

Having said this, there are many more ways, or fronts, in which capitalism keeps the working class subjugated, and yes, divided. However saying that those other fronts divide the working class does not mean that they should be ignored, waved away as unimportant, on the contrary. It necessarily concludes that, if your goal is the unity of the working class in a single party, then the work in those fronts should be focused in that sense. Not abandon them, but also participate in these fronts just like a CP can participate in a worker-aristocratic union, to promote through the consistent allyship that only a consistent class position can bring the view of these structural oppressions through a class lens. Talk and fight for the struggle of gay, trans, migrant, women workers, because it is only by eliminating the infiltration of bourgeois demands in these movements that they can ever achieve liberation. If bourgeoisie feminism divides the working class across gender, then the only way to mend that division is to make feminist movements be hegemonically proletarian in class content through the intervention of the CP, not to completely abandon the fight against structural mysogyny.

So while I do agree with you that these phrases (divide the working class, it's a distraction, less important, etc) are generally said by reactionary workerists, I think they're taking a kernel of truth to form a lazy excuse for their prejudice. Marxism understands capitalism in its totality, starting from the abstract to work towards the most concrete, that is, complete, understanding of the mechanisms and relations of capitalism. Recognizing that these movements don't directly deal with the core of the mode of production should not mean disregarding them, it should mean engaging with them with the purview that the structures of oppression they fight are still important for capitalism's continued existence, and that therefore, can only really be removed by destroying the mode of production itself.

So I'd say that the criteria for a party's engagement with these questions should be to aspire to work for the proletariat's hegemony in all of them, and working towards that through prioritization without ever losing sight of the workers shift, because that's what gives the engagement in those other fronts any purpose. Looking at Europe, which what the text you quoted is dealing with, and also the context I know best, I think the priority fronts are migrant workers, working women, and trans workers, because the first two's oppression has a direct relevance to the current form of production in Europe, and because all three form the main avenues of attack against our class that reactionaries take.

The entire 9th issue of the International Communist Review deals with placing workers at the center of communist organizing (though I can't vow for what every participating party says or implies about these other fronts), and I've also talked more about how rejecting the centrality of work has come about in the historical CPs.

[zaebeecee]

To Sever a Loveless Bond

••RadioDust Soulmate AU••

Part 21/?

First chapter | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Read on AO3

•••

I know it’s been over a month but to make up for it this chapter is nearly 10k words and a whole lot of stuff happens. Like… a whole lot of stuff. Thank you again for sticking with me, y’all, you mean the world to me.

I headcanon Alastor as having had hEDS in life. Also, in our house we call Vox’s assistant Blink in fanfic because we need to call him something

CW for violence, non-consensual/forced nudity, various forms of torture, slut shaming, Vox being a creepy fuck, blood ritual stuff, electricity super fucking Alastor up in the short term

•••

Alastor and pain were not, nor had they ever been, strangers to one another.

It was true, of course, that he quite enjoyed causing harm of both the physical and the emotional variety to those around him… and the psychological, when opportunity knocked. However, he knew pain much too intimately for such knowledge to come from base violence and chaos; it was a gift that life had begun to give him at a young age, his body plagued with a strange malady that neither his maman nor the few doctors they could afford were able to identify. It caused him pain most every moment of every day, and that, in turn, transformed the pain into something… else, something almost familiar and comfortable.

There even came a time that Alastor had convinced himself that pain was no longer a hindrance for him. Of course, there were different kinds of pain, but when one could never escape from it, embracing it became second nature.

The pain that jarred Alastor out of the nothingness of unconsciousness and into the wakeful dark was nothing like the pain of his life, nor like any other pain he had felt in the time since. An odd sort of tingling sensation lay across every inch of his skin, pervasive and just irritating enough to be impossible to ignore; it persisted until he tried to make any movement at all, at which point the fuzzy, staticky sensation spiked quite immediately into the pain of a thousand hot needles piercing through skin and muscle and deep into bone. His breath came in a sharp and ragged gasp as his eyes flew open, focusing on a neon-edged black abyss that stretched endlessly above him before he was forced to screw them shut again.

“You’re getting soft, Alastor.”

That voice, always an unpleasant intruder in his everyday life when simply heard through a television speaker, was more biting than the hurt that wracked his body as it seemed to slice into his eardrums with its brusque, smug self-satisfaction. Alastor gritted his teeth, lip curling as he forced one eye open again, attempting to look around through the red lens of his monocle only to find that it had been taken off of him.

“Not very hospitable surroundings, old pal,” Alastor hissed with all the venomous sarcasm he could muster in the moment. “Losing your touch at playing host?”

“Perhaps not hospitable, but certainly appropriate.” Vox wasn’t in his line of sight, and Alastor took a moment to try and figure out where the fuck, exactly, he was. He was lying flat on his back on a hard, unyielding surface, metal fastened about his wrists, his legs, and the middle of his abdomen. His clothing had been removed, and he could feel that something thin and sharp had been pushed into his flesh along most of his major muscle groups down his arms, legs, and abdomen, but he couldn’t tell what it was. And his strength… it felt like every ounce of his control over his body and his power had been siphoned from him. “Are you feeling proud of yourself?” Vox asked.

“Usually,” Alastor said, keeping his voice flippant as his grin tightened. “About what, specifically?”

Alastor heard Vox’s footsteps before he saw him. The other overlord stepped up to the slab he was lashed down to—bolted to, really—and stared down at him with that… look that he got when he was (as Alastor had always put it back in the day) ‘thinking like a capitalist’. It was something that was trying for cold and appraising, but was full of too much… greed? Hunger? Alastor didn’t know what to call it, but whatever it was, there was too much for his gaze to truly be called dispassionate.

Vox was maintaining his calm, a fairly impressive feat these days. “You actually allowed yourself to be baited. By Valentino,” the television overlord said with what sounded like every ounce of derision he possessed. “And you always fancied yourself above such base behavior.”

Alastor giggled as a pain stabbed his chest from the inside, like a knife shoving up through his sternum. “Says the one who’s simply let Valentino use him as a meal ticket for the past forty years.”

“I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you,” Vox snarled, a crack in that carefully-constructed image he so dutifully maintained. One of his hands hit the table beside Alastor’s head and he leaned forward to loom over the Radio Demon as Alastor turned his face away, still snickering. “You aren’t exactly in an advantageous position here, Alastor. Do you really want to push me right now?”

“Of course not,” Alastor said with a false contrition, his eyes cutting over to Vox while his face remained turned away. “These newfangled flatscreens topple so easily. I would be absolutely mortified if I broke your face again.”

Fury passed across Vox’s screen for a moment… but only a moment. It calmed, quite suddenly, as he raised his other hand and extended his index finger. Alastor had only a moment to wonder what the actual fuck was happening before Vox touched one of the somethings buried in his arm.

“FUCK!!” Alastor screamed, the word torn from his lips unbidden, as a horrific jolt of unadulterated and pure agony shot through his arm, down into his fingers and up into his shoulder and neck. His hand spasmed, joints cracking and claws gouging the metal table, as his head snapped to nearly lean his ear against his shoulder. The next moment, the overwhelming sensation of active torture vanished, leaving behind a throbbing hurt and the occasional uncontrolled twitch of his fingers and shoulder.

Alastor gasped for breath against the feeling of a heavy weight on his chest, his smile widening as he focused on Vox’s face, studying him as though he were a mildly interesting test audience for a new pilot. “What…” Alastor’s voice gave out, and his head twitched, before he managed to focus again. “…the fuck… did you do…?”

Vox raised an eyebrow. “You’re providing me with intensely useful metrics,” he said. “I had an idea for a new game show, but I hadn’t had the chance to actually perform any meaningful tests to determine what, precisely, would be an appropriate range. After all, it has to be painful enough to be entertaining, but not so painful that the contestants will either pass out or explode too quickly.”

Alastor curled his lip. “I am not your test subject.”

“You… are, actually.” Vox smiled at him, a smile that was nasty and cold and nothing like what he let most other people see. “Listen. Alastor. You are the one who elected to enter into my domain. You nearly tore the damn building down. If I let you go, you’d just proceed to destroy everything you could get your hands on.”

“Obviously,” Alastor hissed.

Vox ignored the interjection. “So, clearly, I can’t release you; it’s not in the company’s best interest. And, if I have you here anyway, I may as well make use of you.”

The word brought the taste of bile into Alastor’s mouth, and he jerked against his bindings, but his body felt… weak. It was as though it didn’t want to obey the commands of his brain. “I am going to free myself from this little contraption of yours, and the moment I do, I am going to fucking kill you.”

“I’m sure you’ll try,” Vox allowed. “But we both know that if you could kill me, you would have already done it.” He turned away, going back to whatever he had been doing out of Alastor’s line of sight. “To answer your question, I’ve inserted silver-plated wires into your muscles. Silver is the most conductive metal, so it will be the most efficient in transferring electricity directly into your flesh. I’m going to gauge your responses to different levels of electrical shock in different places. And you can try to break out all you like, but your nervous system and your brain aren’t communicating right now, and probably won’t be until long after I’m done here.”

Alastor found himself laughing, the sound high and weak as he struggled to breathe, as though the electric shock had flattened his lungs. “And you say I’m sick.”

“You are,” Vox said. “But I really do have to ask. How, exactly, was it that Val got you to come here?”

Alastor snorted. “Why so curious?”

“Because Val is an idiot. But you were so very upset when you arrived.” Vox returned to the table and leaned his hip against it, folding his arms as he looked down at Alastor once more. “I’m sure it will interest you to know that Angel Dust is with him again.”

Alastor wasn’t sure what, precisely, his face did when Vox said that. Whatever it was, though, it was clear that Vox wasn’t expecting it. The television overlord’s eyes widened for a moment before narrowing, his teeth gritting visibly and his left eye spasming briefly. Alastor kept his own voice as steady as he could. “You can’t keep me here forever, Vox,” he said, his voice low. “When I am done with you, and when I am done with Valentino, there will not be enough of you left to even whimper in the radio chorus.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing all of…” Vox’s screen glitched, and he shook it a little, clearing the image. “You’re endangering yourself, debasing yourself, degrading yourself, and for what? A common whore?”

Alastor’s smile sharpened. “The fact that you think he’s common shows how incomparably myopic you are, Vox.”

Years ago, Alastor had realized that he had never truly understood Vox’s mind or how it worked. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking at any given moment, and his motivations (particularly where Alastor himself was concerned) had always been downright unfathomable. That was why, Alastor supposed, he couldn’t predict Vox’s movements when he suddenly held up another silver-plated wire in his clenched fist and slammed it down into Alastor’s arm, piercing straight through the little spider in the crook of his elbow.

Alastor’s scream morphed into laughter that sounded unhinged even to himself, punctuating continued shrieks of agony as electricity shuddered into his soulmate mark. Eventually, it didn’t even sound like it was coming from his own mouth, his consciousness disconnecting and reconnecting as though trying to find a particularly weak station signal on an old radio.

You can’t keep me here forever, Vox.

He knew that more he repeated it, the easier it would become to believe.

•••

Angel stumbled across the bare tile floor and slammed into the wall across from the doorway, unable to catch himself to cushion the blow to his shoulder and the side of his head. His teeth ground together as his socked feet slowly slid across the cold ceramic, his body slipping down the wall in what felt like slow motion until he landed on his hip in an inelegant, uncomfortable slump.

He could still see the agony on Alastor’s face as he collapsed, hear the soft buzz of electricity as he twitched involuntarily, like the moment now seared into his memory had happened moments ago when, at this point, it had to have been more than four hours. When Valentino had dragged him from the studio and into the nearest room with a surface flat enough to pretend to be a bed, he had proceeded to treat Angel like a rag doll, beating him and touching him, taking out what seemed to be every frustration he had built up since the 70s on Angel’s defenseless flesh. He had once thought he could never feel more worthless and disgusting, but Valentino had proven him wrong. Angel hadn’t even been aware of leaving the room, only vaguely registering that he was being dragged down the hallway before Valentino opened a nondescript door and threw him inside.

“I have given you everything you have.”

He tried not to let his pain show on his face. He really did. Even so, Angel could feel the corners of his eyes pinching with pain as he slowly opened them and looked up at Valentino, the overlord standing in the doorway, blocking it with his arms and the cape-like wings that twitched, threatening to open. Valentino would have almost looked dispassionate, were it not for the blood on his claws and spattering the front of his shirt.

Angel’s blood.

The same blood now smeared on the wall behind him, marking the path of his descent like the trail of a large and dying snail.

Angel didn’t answer, and Valentino took his silence as response enough, baring his teeth and digging gouges in the doorframe. “You were nothing before I found you,” he hissed. “Nothing. And without me, you would always be nothing. After everything I have given you, this is how you repay me?”

Angel had never felt so tired in his entire life. Something deep in his mind told him that this, right here, was it. This was going to be the rest of his life. Valentino was stupid, sure, but he wasn’t a complete idiot, and he must have grown his extra hands to make it easier to hold a grudge because the porn overlord had never and would never forgive what he determined to be a true betrayal. In Valentino’s eyes, Angel had betrayed him; no amount of apologizing or flattery or cocksucking would ever be enough to lift him out of the hole he had dug himself into. It wouldn’t be enough for Valentino to turn him out, of course—no, Valentino would much rather make Angel Dust’s life an active Hell for the rest of eternity—but it would be hanging over him for the rest of time, unless he threw himself on an exorcist’s spear during the next extermination.

Angel’s voice was flat in his own ears when he spoke. “Fuck you, Val.”

Valentino’s eye twitched behind his sunglasses. “You will eat those words, Angel Dust,” he said. Angel thought he might leave then, but instead, he said, “He will never love you.”

I know that.

Still, hearing it out loud, and from Valentino of all people, cut through Angel’s haze of numbness with a hot blade that seemed to slice into his core. He flinched, but he didn’t say anything, and because Valentino’s vision sucked, he didn’t notice.

He also didn’t stop.

“You’re more brainless than I thought, amorcito,” Valentino said with a remarkable level of control. “To believe that someone like you could be enough to sway the Radio Demon? You’re gutter trash, a filthy crack whore who would sell out his own family for a dime bag. He won’t look twice at the best this shithole has to offer. What makes you think something like you could change that?”

It would have been easier to take if Valentino had been yelling, but he wasn’t. No, it was that soft, mocking tone he took when he knew he’d found one of the flaws that made a crack in Angel’s psyche big enough for him to dig his claws into and pour his words in like poisonous smoke. Angel wanted to tell him to go fuck himself again, but he was so… tired.

Angel lowered his head. Valentino said something about not trusting him on his own while he checked on the status of the building, and then he left, closing the door behind him. Angel heard the click of the lock, the slow retreat of footsteps… and then nothing.

Slowly, Angel raised his head again, glancing around at where he had been left now that Valentino wasn’t around to observe his mild curiosity and trepidation. It looked like one of the many, many storage rooms VoxTek had scattered around the building; very few of them had a dedicated purpose, instead serving as a place to put furniture or equipment when rooms on the floor were being cleaned or the tech was being updated or any number of other reasons you might want bulky items neatly stacked somewhere out of the way.

This particular storage room appeared to be currently in disuse, the only other thing inside (besides Angel himself) being a bare, stark white lightbulb set high in the ceiling with no visible switches to turn it off. Outside of that, he saw nothing but bare off-white walls and bare white tile, both only marred by Angel’s blood where he had smeared it along the wall and let it drip onto the floor. It was almost blinding, and Angel screwed his eyes shut, letting his head fall back with a soft thud of impact that shouldn’t have hurt but sent pain shuddering all along his spine.

Now that he was alone, Angel felt nothing but pain. Cold seeped into his skin through his socks, the only clothing he had been allowed—and only because Valentino hadn’t bothered to rip them off—and he shivered, wrapping his arms around his bent legs and burying his face in his knees. The mark on his leg pulsed softly, like a heartbeat, and he realized he was crying.

This is so fucking pathetic, he thought, even though he was well aware that berating himself wouldn’t do shit for him or anyone else. All he wanted to do was get out of this room, find Alastor, and get both of them out of there. He’d happily break Vox’s screen if that was what it took.

No matter how badly he wanted to do something, to do anything at all besides sit uselessly in a closet trying to stop crying, he knew it was useless because even if he did manage to find Alastor and free him and even actually stand up to Vox, Valentino could use that fucking chain to stop him. It would be trivial. It wouldn’t help. It might even make Alastor’s situation worse.

Then again, you’re making a lot of assumptions. Alastor might not even still be here. How could Vox keep him? Why would he stay?

Why did he come here in the first place?

Angel sniffled, raising his head just enough to rub his eyes and listening to any sounds he could pick up coming from anywhere else in the building. Even though the power had come back on, it sounded like most of the systems weren’t currently running; more than likely, a ton of fuses had blown, and it would probably take a while to fix them. Since he couldn’t hear the omnipresent and overbearing electric hum that usually followed him whenever he was in this damn place, he was able to pick up the distant and muffled sound of voices somewhere below him, even more distant equipment banging and crashing as employees dealt with the aftermath of Alastor’s rampage, and a hollow sort of nothingness that came with the knowledge that he was alone and no one would be coming for him until Valentino decided to let him out.

Angel’s breath hitched in a sob and he cursed himself, pressing the heels of two hands into his eyes. “Stop it,” he muttered to himself, but it did nothing to stem the burgeoning tide of tears burning as they leaked out through tightly-clamped eyelids and soaked his palms. A third hand balled into a fist and struck the wall behind him, a sensation that did nothing but increase his frustration and make him wish he had something considerably more fleshy to rip apart. “Stupid,” he hissed, not even certain who he was saying it to anymore. He needed to think of something, but his mind was so—

A cold hand wrapped around Angel’s wrist and he screamed, jerking away and striking out at the sudden intruder. His hand hit nothing but air until his knuckles collided with the wall in a sharp snap that made him gasp with pain, yanking it back and cradling it to his chest. Nothing else touched him.

“What the fuck?” Angel whispered, rubbing tears from his eyes to clear his vision. There was nothing else in the room, just him, that blinding lightbulb, his blood, and his shadow.

No. Not his shadow.

Angel’s eyes widened as his vision adjusted and he could actually tell what he was looking at. Alastor’s shadow was on the wall beside him, back a couple of feet as though giving him room. There was something almost apologetic in the way the dark, angular, contorted figure held its hands and the way its mouth twisted into the sort of deep and worried frown Alastor’s own face seemed incapable of wearing. As Angel lowered his arm, raised on instinct to guard his face, the shadow seemed to relax minutely and return to a shape more familiar but no less off-putting.

“…Alastor…” Angel felt as though his heart was breaking at the same moment as the very sight of that shadow caused it to swell, two of his hands moving to the floor between his knees so he could lean forward and reach out a third hand. Angel rubbed his eyes with his fourth hand, sniffling wetly and clearing his throat. “Hey, Big Guy, come back, it’s okay,” he said, the words coming out as a rough murmur.

The shadow tilted its head, in a sense, before drifting across the wall back towards Angel. It reached out towards him, then stopped, twitching sharply like it was in pain.

“…!” Angel slid back over to the wall, placing his hands against the surface; as his fingers touched the blackness that formed the shadow, he felt that depthless cold again, the same that he felt every time Alastor had swept him into his own personal darkness. “What’s wrong?” he asked, pushing past the hurt of his ruined throat. “Are you— is he—…” He wasn’t sure how to ask what he meant.

The shadow’s twitching stilled, its form shifting in minute ways like it was actually catching its breath. Its face tilted down towards Angel’s hands before it moved its own arms, and as it did, Angel watched its shadowy fingers cascade across the backs of his own hands, like it was entwining their hands. The cold made him shiver, but he didn’t move away; even if his fingers had gone numb, he would have stayed right where he was.

“I’m so sorry,” Angel murmured. He reached up a third hand, but didn’t touch the wall. Instead, he watched his own shadow move closer until it touched Alastor’s. Instantly, as though it could feel his shadow hand like a real touch, it tilted into the touch and began practically nuzzling his shadow palm with the top of its head. Even though Angel wasn’t touching the wall, he could have sworn he felt the ruffle of hair, the hard ridge of an antler, and even the soft fur of an ear against his palm and fingers. “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed, watching as the shadow kept pressing its head against the silhouette of his hand. “Val locked me in here and won’t let me out until he comes back.” The shadow’s mouth twisted into a snarl, as if the very mention of Valentino had triggered some sort of rage within it. “And even if I…” Angel shook his head, moving his fingers to make his shadow scritch the manifestation’s ear. “…he won’t let me out of his sight. I know he won’t.”

At those words, Alastor’s shadow straightened, and as it removed its hands from Angel’s, it felt like he had suddenly dipped his fingers into hot water, so sudden was the return of warmth to his skin. The shadow hesitated at Angel’s surprised gasp, but it swept along the walls until it reached the door, and within moments, it had vanished through the crack at the base.

“Wait…!” Angel called, but the shadow was out of sight before he even thought of getting the word out. Slowly deflating, Angel had less than a breath to wonder what he was going to do now when he heard a tiny click from the door. Angel gasped, backing away, but it didn’t open. It didn’t sound like anyone was out there at all, least of all Valentino and his unbridled rage.

When he heard nothing else, Angel slowly got to his feet, placing his hand on the handle and pressing down. With another little click, the door creaked open, and Angel carefully peered out into the dim hallway. There was no one else, not even the terrifying and comforting shape of Alastor’s shadow lurking in the dark. The rooms sounded completely empty, everyone who normally would have been on the floor doubtless busy with the destruction happening far below him.

Angel glanced back at the closet, then made his decision and closed it behind him, twisting the lock with his thumb. He then ran down the hall, heading for the stairwell that would take him to a back hall he could use to reach his dressing room. Valentino wouldn’t check there first, second, or even third, and he had clothes in there that he could change into while he was thinking. He didn’t have a lot of time and he needed to make the most of the little he did have.

Alastor was somewhere in the building, after all, and Angel wasn’t going to leave him, soul contract be damned.

•••

It had been a long time since the vibe (that was the right word, right?) of the hotel had felt this… off. The Hazbin Hotel had its problems, just like any business, and the residents sometimes had their problems, but the atmosphere wasn’t usually this heavy. In fact, this was as bad as it had gotten since the evening after the last extermination.

Charlie had been yelled at for pacing, which meant she was now standing behind the front desk, watching everyone else. Niffty was still hanging out with Husk, who was doing his best to keep her occupied while they waited for any kind of news, silently validating Charlie’s own opinion that he really was a sweetheart under all of his grumpiness. Cherri was sitting with the guy apparently named Arackniss, who was also apparently Angel Dust’s brother, and Charlie would have eaten a whole pinecone for the chance to ask him just… so many questions if it wasn’t for the fact that this was definitely not the time. Moxxie, Millie, and Loona were only a short distance from them; occasionally, it looked like the five of them were interacting a little, but for the most part were just waiting for news (and, in I.M.P.’s case, for their boss to come back).

Charlie knew how they felt. She was certain everything was fine and there was no question that contract things could take a long time, but she couldn’t stand not knowing where Vaggie was. She pulled out her phone, but her girlfriend still hadn’t sent her anything since the text saying Prince Stolas was looking the contract over, and that had been forever ago.

The wait was driving her insane, and Charlie was trying to come up with something that she could do to pass the time (that wouldn’t end with Husk yelling at her to sit down) when the front door opened with an abrupt jerk.

Immediately, Charlie was alert, and she saw that awareness spread through the rest of the room as everyone diverted their attention to Vaggie and Blitzø as they came in, the imp shutting the door behind him. He pointed at Charlie as they approached, Charlie herself hopping over the desk and hurrying over to meet them halfway. “Your girlfriend flies like a fucking maniac,” Blitzø said, his voice winded.

Vaggie looked entirely unapologetic, and didn’t even look at him as she pulled the folded contract from her pocket. Charlie clasped her hands together in front of her chest as everyone else began gathering, some at more of a distance than others. “So? How did it go?”

“He found a loophole,” Vaggie said, offering the contract out for Charlie to take, which she did almost on reflex. “We just have to figure out how to get it to work.”

“How to—?” Charlie blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to pretend I perfectly understood everything he said,” Vaggie said, glancing at Blitzø; he shrugged at her, and she turned back to Charlie. “But in a nutshell, the contract is still active because Valentino keeps increasing the value of his soul. Because of the wording in the contract, since he’s lived here for six months, you now have the power to do that. If you change the value to less than he’s made for VoxTek, the contract will end. But I don’t know how you’re supposed to do that.”

“He didn’t say?” Charlie asked.

Blitzø shook his head. “If he’d known, he would have told us. Soul contracts aren’t his bag, he’s not that kind of Goetia. Moxxie,” he added a little sharply.

Immediately, the other imp straightened. “Sir?”

“You’re good with contracts,” Blitzø said. “Go over it with the princess, see if you can’t help her figure out how it works.”

“Wha— um, yeah, sure.” Moxxie cast Blitzø an almost suspicious look, but broke away from Millie, crossing to Charlie. “If that’s okay with you?”

“Oh, yeah, please,” Charlie said. “We don’t deal with a lot of contracts here, and when we do— well. Alastor usually handles that,” she said a little sheepishly. It felt like every time something new cropped up this past month, she was faced with yet another thing she didn’t know how to do. Shaking off the feeling, she said, “Come on, let’s go back here.”

She led Moxxie through a hallway back behind the front desk to the management office, a place that she herself rarely used; though it was officially her office, Alastor and Vaggie got a lot more use out of it than she did, tending to paperwork or restocking orders and other more tedious work while she handled the face-to-face, public relations sort of duties. Charlie hesitated, then sat at the chair behind the desk, inviting Moxxie to pull a chair over and— “Oh!” Charlie blinked. “I didn’t hear you follow us.”

“That’s my M.O.” Arackniss leaned against the closed door, one set of arms folded across his chest. He had the same expression on that he’d had ever since Charlie first saw him, one that she had a Heaven of a time trying to read. “I thought you could use someone who’s got experience with Sinner contracts. Crimson don’t usually work with those, right?”

Charlie didn’t know what he meant, but apparently Moxxie did, because he stood up straighter. “How do you know him?” he asked, his voice immediately guarded and almost hostile.

Arackniss raised an unimpressed eyebrow, holding up one hand. “Cool your jets, kid,” he said. “I ain’t had the dubious honor of his acquaintance, but he has… entered my sphere of awareness, you might say. He don’t interest me, in any case.”

Moxxie was incredibly tense as he stood, watching Arackniss like he was thinking of… well, from what Charlie had learned after getting in on the ground level (as it were) in Hell society, it looked like Moxxie was thinking about shooting him. Instead, he said, “I didn’t really deal with Sinners there, no. And the contracts we do make with Sinners these days are a lot different and don’t have anything to do with souls.”

Arackniss walked over and placed two of his hands on the desk, looking at Charlie as she sat down in the office chair. “Right. So, let’s look at that contract and see exactly what it says.”

“Ah— right,” Charlie said, opening it up and smoothing over it with her hand to keep it flat against the desktop. The paper had that smooth, almost glass-like quality that paper tended to get when it was really aged; according to the date, it was more than fifty years old, by Sinner reckoning. She scanned over the words, looking for relevant passages, before her eyes lit on something likely. “Ah, here we go, maybe,” she said. “It says… The Contractee—” she glanced at the beginning of the text “—which is Angel Dust, hereby agrees to relinquish ownership of their quintessence to the Aheydrun, which I’m guessing is Valentino, for the purposes of manifest energy transference, defeasance of volition and percopacity and the supersedence thereof, and engagement in the vocation of indecorous dramatization in accordance with paragraph four until such time as the Contractee has repaid their determined value, the appreciation of which is subject to the Aheydrun’s discretion.” She hesitated, then looked up. “What’s an Aheydrun?”

Arackniss shrugged at her. Moxxie frowned. “It’s a Goetian word. It sounds archaic. I don’t know it, but I’m guessing that’s what Vaggie and Blitzø were referring to.”

Charlie nodded. “…so… Angel signed his soul over to Valentino and gave him the promise to perform in any film asked of him, all of the power his soul acquired during the span of the contract, and signed over his free will? …why?”

“Because he either didn’t read it or didn’t understand it,” Arackniss said. “Doubt most any Sinners would understand that shit, it’s intentionally worded to be confusing.”

Charlie nodded and looked down again. “The Aheydrun can determine the value… and Vaggie said that I can do that now, because he’s lived here for six months?”

Moxxie shrugged. “If that’s what Prince Stolas said, it’s probably right.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “How, though?”

“That’s the question. May I?” Arackniss asked, holding his hand out. Charlie nodded and passed it to him, and he took it, looking it over quickly. “Sinner contracts ain’t as ritualistic as Hellborn contracts. You know, we took the concept and… capitalized it, you might say. Assumin’ Valentino followed those rules, it’ll be something kinda ritualistic, but more like a password of sorts.” He waved one hand, thinking, and Charlie was suddenly reminded of the way Angel flailed his arms when he was trying to process his thoughts. “…say if, when Valentino first set the price, he took a piece of paper and drew some kinda symbol on it, then spoke the new value and burned the paper. From then on, he’d hafta draw the same symbol on the same kinda paper and burn it in the same kinda fire every time he reevaluates Tony’s soul.”

Moxxie nodded. “…I guess that would explain why he doesn’t do it very often.” He took the contract from Arackniss and started looking not at the text, but rather at the front, back, and sides of the paper itself. “I only observed Valentino twice, but that’s all I need to know that he’s the kind to simplify things wherever possible.”

Charlie looked between them. “…blood?” she suggested.

Arackniss thought for a moment. “…it would be the most cliche, so… it’d make sense if he thought’a that first.”

“Sinners really are obsessed with the idea of blood sacrifice,” Moxxie sighed. “But it’s the easiest way to transfer energy, so that makes sense.” He tilted the contract again. “The back of the paper is discolored, like something spilled on it. But he clearly takes good care of it. If the paper itself is enchanted, maybe he just cut himself open and bled on the contract itself.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Charlie asked with a frown.

“Then the contract will have blood on it. That’s about it.”

“…right. That makes sense.” She opened the drawer and pulled out the letter opener Alastor had insisted that they have for their office (which was funny because he always just opened envelopes with his claw anyway), a thin and curved knife with a simple dark wood handle and an ebony blade. Moxxie put the contract down, and Charlie placed the blade against her palm, lightly closing her fingers around it. She took a breath, and— “Wait, how much am I supposed to say his soul is worth?”

Moxxie and Arackniss exchanged looks. “…how much has Angel Dust made in his career at VoxTek?” Moxxie asked. “Less than that.”

Charlie understood—she really did!—but she felt her eyes misting up anyway. “But that seems so mean,” she complained. “I don’t think Angel could be bought with any amount of money, he’s priceless!”

Arackniss made a sound like he was surprised. “Sweet as that is, Princess, it—”

“Charlie,” she interjected.

“Okay, sweet as that is, Charlie, him being considered priceless the problem we’re dealin’ with,” he said. “It don’t matter what you say. It ain’t what you really think and it’s just breakin’ the contract. And if you lowball it, he’s gonna think it’s real fuckin’ funny.”

“Yeah?” Charlie asked, then, “…yeah, that’s… that’s true. Okay.” She knew how sex jokes worked. Nodding once, she almost cut her hand open, before Arackniss held his hand out again. “Ow! What?” Charlie asked, quickly moving her hand away as the knick on the side of her palm, which the knife split when she jumped, oozed a drop of blood that only fell on her pants because she moved back.

“It has to be as close to what he did as possible,” Arackniss said. “That means we need his… blood, or his DNA, or something, in addition to yours. If this is how he did it, he imbued it into the contract every time.”

Charlie’s nose wrinkled. “Ew.”

Moxxie threw his hands up. “How are we supposed to get that? We don’t have time!”

Fighting past the thoughts that the phrase Valentino’s DNA conjured in her head, Charlie sat up. “Oh! Oh, wait, no, I know!” She scrambled up and ran to the door, opening it and calling out. “Niffty! Niffty, I need you!”

Both of the men behind her made confused mutters, but Charlie ignored them as Niffty came scampering down the hallway and slammed into Charlie’s legs. The little maid wrapped her arms around one of the princess’s calfs, staring up at her with an excited smile. “I love to be needed,” she said throatily.

Charlie chose to ignore that. “Do you want to help save Angel?”

Somehow, Niffty’s eye grew wider. “YES.”

“Then I need a little bit of your collection,” Charlie said. “Specifically, I need just a bit of the specimen you gathered at Consent.”

Niffty blinked once, twice, and then gasped before she started giggling. “Be right back!” she trilled, running off.

Charlie returned to her seat, Moxxie and Arackniss still staring at the door. “Her collection,” Moxxie echoed flatly. “Do I want to know what she collects?”

“Bugs.”

“…uh-huh.”

Niffty was nothing if not efficient, running back into the office and hopping onto the desk to offer Charlie a little tuft of white and black fur. “Is this good?”

“It’s perfect. It’s okay if I destroy it, right?”

“Sure,” Niffty said. “It’s only a little bit of my sample, and besides, if nothing else…” Her face turned downright terrifying. “I can always get more.”

“Thank you, Niffty,” Charlie said, thinking again how glad she was that she had so much time to adjust to the force of personality that was Niffty.

“Uh-huh!” Still looking genuinely thrilled to have been helpful, Niffty hopped down, running out of the room again.

Arackniss watched her go. “…bugs,” he said, not looking away from the door. “So then, what’s that fur?”

“She stole part of Valentino’s ruff,” Charlie said. “It’s apparently part of his body.”

“…she did that at Consent?” Arackniss asked, something that sounded almost like respect entering his voice. “…she really is some woman, ain’t she?”

“She’s great,” Charlie said, squinting at the back of Arackniss’s head. She didn’t have time to unpack that. Instead, she checked between them for any more interruptions, then sliced her palm open, gathering the blood in her hand and dropping the fur into it. She thought for a second, and then said, “I, Charlotte Morningstar, current Aheydrun of the Contractee named herein, have reassessed the value of the Contractee’s soul and have determined its worth to be sixty-nine cents.” She tilted her hand, the blood trickling onto the contract before the fur tuft landed with a small, wet splat. There was a strange, undefinable sound, and then the blood began to vanish into the words of the contract themselves, even dragging the blood-soaked fur along with it. When she looked up, she noticed the other two staring at her. “…what?”

Moxxie blinked once, slowly. “…sixty…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“I do understand sex jokes, y’know, I’m not exactly single, and I wasn’t wasting his opportunity to get that printed on a shirt,” Charlie said. “So… how do we know whether or not it worked?”

“It looks like it did something, at least.” Arackniss took off his hat, then ran his hand back through the fur that made up his hair. “Guess we’ll have to wait an’ see.”

“Right.” Charlie closed her hand around the cut in her palm, staring at the contract again. She was getting so tired of waiting. “Can you two do me a favor?”

The response was hesitant. “I… guess…?” Moxxie frowned. “Will this get me beaten up?”

“No!” Charlie said, hopping up. “Noooo no no no, it’ll be fine. Just tell people I had to step out for a minute but I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” Arackniss said. “You didn’t tell us where you’re goin’, and we ain’t gonna stop nobody who tries to follow you.”

“That’s totally fair. Thank you,” Charlie said. “And… thank you, both of you. Seriously.” They both looked surprised, but she just grinned, offering them a wave before hurrying out of the office and down another hall to the service door.

I’m so tired of waiting. I’m not going to do that anymore. If you care about something, you fight for it, right? Right.

So that’s what I’ll do.

•••

It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. Angel didn’t keep a lot of normal clothing in his dressing room, but shorts and a tank top were better than nothing, and he pulled them on (skipping shoes, as they would be too loud) as he thought.

Vox had Alastor. Alastor was clearly in some kind of pain, judging by his shadow’s strange behavior and its disappearance. That meant Vox was probably doing something, and he wouldn’t be doing something just anywhere; he had an image to maintain, after all, and the only way he would publicly torture the Radio Demon would be if he was doing it for a television show.

I know Vox better than that. He wants this to be private. Personal. Intimate, even.

Angel snuck back out of his dressing room and took off, heading for the wall and quickly scaling it to disappear into the vents. He didn’t get to do this much, since he usually had eyes on him at all times, but one of the ways he’d become friends with Rocky over the years was finding opportunities to drop on the big lug out of nowhere. Angel had the building memorized, and he quickly traversed the vent system, heading up to the floor where the Vees kept their own private suites. He was familiar with Valentino’s, but he had never been in Vox’s, and when he pivoted direction he got his very first glimpse of the place.

“Okay, just— just stay here,” a voice said below Angel. God dammit. Vox’s assistant. Angel seriously couldn’t stand the guy and his sycophantic bullshit, and he barely even remembered his name even after knowing him for thirty years. Blink? Was it Blink?

Angel peeked in to see who he was talking to, and froze, though he shouldn’t have been surprised. Blink was holding his hands out placatingly and talking about how dangerous things were, while across from him sat… Vark. Enormous, sharp-toothed, wide-eyed Vark, Vox’s pet land hammerhead shark that had once gone everywhere at his heel until the creature grew too large to easily traverse the corridors. Now, Angel rarely thought about Vark—out of sight, out of mind, and all that—but of course he would be in Vox’s suite if he wasn’t swimming around in the giant fish tanks that seemed to stretch the height of several floors.

Vark made a noise somewhere between a dog’s yap and the sound a shark might make if sharks made noise, and Blink backed up sharply. “No,” Blink said firmly. “Sit. Mr. Vox wants you to stay here. He’ll be back. Okay?”

Vark tilted his head, and Angel smirked. It was the same look Fat Nuggets gave when he didn’t understand something, which was all the time.

Blink, like he was just satisfied that Vark was seated now, quickly hurried out of the room and locked the door behind him. Immediately, Vark stood up, then wandered to the door in a mild confusion before wandering back and then starting to meander around the room with no real destination in mind.

Angel took his eyes off the shark to, instead, look around the room as best he could from his vantage point. Vox’s room was exactly what Angel expected, all the same sorts of sleek style and dark colors accented with electric blue and red. It was clean and sterile in a way that put Angel on edge, and he knew beyond a doubt that this was not somewhere he wanted to be.

He was about to move away when something else caught his eye: a glimpse of red, so different from Vox’s that he couldn’t help stopping and taking a second look.

Alastor’s coat.

Not just his coat, either, but that was the first thing he noticed: Alastor’s coat, laid out on the corner of Vox’s bed near the foot, with such care that it looked like it had been smoothed over with hands. Next to it, his shirt and pants were folded with his standing collar, bow tie, and monocle, his shoes set on the floor nearby.

It was… almost reverent, and that made it fucking creepy.

Angel hadn’t found Alastor, but he had found his clothes, and he would think about how skeevy that was when he had even two spare minutes. There was no vent near the bed, which meant he was going to have to play this as carefully as possible, because otherwise he was losing an arm.

Carefully, Angel began unfastening the vent cover, but even with as quiet as he was being he attracted Vark’s attention. The shark swiveled and stared up at him with wide eyes, and Angel froze, staring back. There was no barking frenzy or any other noise; Vark just stared, his tail wagging back and forth slowly, looking for all the world like he was confused about how this visitor had come visiting but wasn’t too fussed about it.

“…you are, without a doubt, the best Vee,” Angel whispered. Vark wagged a little faster when he was spoken at.

Since there was no frenzy and it wasn’t like he could just hide again and make Vark forget he was there, Angel finished and pulled the vent cover into the vent itself before leaning out. Still, Vark watched him with concentrated interest, and Angel slowly lowered himself onto a round metal table and crouching before his socks could slip.

Angel looked around quickly, his eyes falling on a bag of treats. Picking them up, he showed them to Vark. “These yours, sweetie?” Vark perked up immediately. “Then I’ll tell you what,” he continued, keeping his voice as friendly and gentle as he could. He pointed at Alastor’s clothes. “I need those. You lemme get ‘em, and this whole bag’s yours. Deal?”

Vark blinked, following the line of his hand, then walked over to Alastor’s clothes. He sniffed the coat and then sneezed immediately, and Angel had to suppress a laugh; he knew he had gotten used to the Radio Demon’s intentional ‘stay away from me’ odor, but he couldn’t imagine how it would smell to something so hypersensitive.

Vark cast Angel a look that was almost plaintive. Angel snorted. “Yeah. Yeah, I need all that.” He would have sworn Vark sighed before he leaned forward and, to Angel’s shock, grabbed the sleeve of Alastor’s coat between his teeth. Angel almost told him to stop, but Vark wasn’t paying attention; he tugged it off the bed, then dragged it to the table, dropping the sleeve on the surface in front of Angel and wagging.

Angel stared at him. “…you’re a lot smarter than you look,” he said, pulling out a squishy meat treat that smelled like fish and tossing it gently. Vark immediately wiggled with excitement and snapped it out of the air, revealing his massive teeth and an incredibly terrifying snap of his jaw. Angel’s laugh was more nervous this time. “Oh my god you got a lot of… mouth… dontcha?” He cleared his throat. “Wanna get me the rest?”

It took longer than Angel would have liked, but it kept Vark happy and calm, so he stayed crouched while Vark brought him each part of Alastor’s attire in exchange for a treat until Angel had all of it gathered up and held against his torso in his third set of arms.

“Thanks, Vark. You’re a good boy,” Angel said. Vark leaned towards him, and Angel hesitated before carefully reaching out and rubbing him on the front of his head between his eyes. Vark purred, then wandered off, like he was happy to have done a good job and had officially lost interest now that he had been praised. Angel couldn’t be mad about it, and he climbed back into the vent, putting the cover back in place before anyone came in.

At least something went right.

It was harder getting around with his arms full, but Angel took his time to make sure he didn’t drop anything, carefully searching floors where he knew Vox did most of his work. His lack of direction and his desperation were just driving him into frustration when Angel didn’t see anything or hear anything, but he felt something… like the air itself was being disturbed by some kind of interference.

That, he thought. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He was sure of it.

Angel followed that strange feeling as it grew heavier, leading him to a strange room that seemed really big but only had an illuminated table and computer console right in the center. Angel assumed there was other equipment in the dark, but he couldn’t see a damn thing. It didn’t matter, anyway, because the interference had turned into the low sound of radio static that followed Alastor everywhere but was normally so quiet it couldn’t be heard over the other ambient noises. If it wasn’t for the fact that VoxTek was so silent right now, Angel never would have heard it.

Alastor was lying on his back in the center of that table, fastened down with metal shackles and either asleep or unconscious. Angel let himself out of the vent and, after ensuring there was no one around, hurried to the side of the table and assessed the situation. Alastor was bleeding from a series of thin metal rods that had been slipped into his body through incision that had been made in his muscles, the ends of those rods rigged up to wires that ran along the floor and into the console.

“Alastor…” Angel breathed, but the Radio Demon didn’t stir. He hadn’t really expected him to. He didn’t want to leave, but there didn’t seem to be a way to force the shackles open, since they were actually a part of the table.

Angel started moving to the console, but stopped, one wire in particular catching his eye. The skin around it was bloodier than the others, and it looked like it hadn’t been slid into an incision, but had instead been stabbed straight down into… into Alastor’s soul mark.

I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you, Vox.

Grinding his teeth, Angel went to the console and racked his brain with everything he knew about passwords around the company, and namely, the ones he knew Vox had used in the past. It took a few tries, but Angel finally got the proper combination of symbols Vox favored, a couple of sets of numbers that seemed to have some meaning, and the name Clifford that popped up in Vox’s security shit a lot (whatever that meant). With a beep, he got the controls loaded, and carefully combed the menus until he found the option to release the shackles with a metallic snap and the hiss of hydraulics.

Abandoning the console, Angel ran over to the table, carefully dropping the clothes next to Alastor’s legs and leaning over the other demon. “Alastor,” he whispered urgently, reaching out and gently stroking the deer’s hair. “Alastor. C’mon, Smiles, wake up.”

Alastor’s face twitched with pain, his smile strained even while unconscious, and it took him a moment to start opening his eyes. He jerked when he saw Angel over him, probably only registering a shape, and Angel moved back a few inches and waited. Alastor looked mildly unseeing for a few moments before his eyes slowly focused. “…am I asleep?”

“Why, y’feel like you’re dreaming?”

“…no,” Alastor said. He meant something else. Angel didn’t have time to ask.

“We gotta go, Smiles,” Angel whispered. “I gotta get these wires outta you. It’s gonna hurt and you need to not make noise. Okay?”

“Oh, goodie,” Alastor said weakly, immediately slipping into flippant business mode when he saw that Angel seemed to be focused and hurrying. He laid his head back and closed his eyes. “Quiet… as a church mouse, sha… I promise.”

“You ain’t never been in a church,” Angel accused, leaning down to slowly begin working the wires out of his arm.

Alastor hissed. “Well, they seemed very… quiet from… the other side of… town, in my… defense.”

“Pretty sure all mice squeak.”

“I… do not squeak.”

Angel threw down a second wire. “I got evidence that says otherwise.”

Alastor glared down at him. “You have no such thing.

Angel smiled at him, then went back to what he was doing. “I won’t tell. It’s my special knowledge, nobody else gets that.”

As another wire slipped out, Alastor drew a breath, then started speaking in a voice that was almost hesitant. “…Angel—”

“Don’t,” Angel cut him off, speaking as gently as he could but not looking at his face. “Don’t. Not right now. I know, we gotta— we’ll talk. I promise. But not now. Okay?”

Without looking at him, Angel couldn’t know what Alastor might be thinking. But, eventually, he just said, “…of course. You’re right.”

To Alastor’s credit, he did little more than hiss or grunt at the stabs of pain, and soon Angel had every wire removed except the one that had been stabbed into him. Angel moved up and laid one hand on Alastor’s chest, a second on his bicep, and a third on his wrist. “This is gonna hurt,” he warned.

Alastor turned his head enough to look him in the eye. “…I know.”

That sounded loaded.

Angel wrapped his fourth had around the wire and waited for Alastor’s nod before he pulled straight up, pushing down with his other hands to both hold Alastor still and leverage himself up. Alastor’s face contorted in pain, and Angel moved his hand from the Radio Demon’s chest to his mouth, clamping down over his lips to muffle his cry. As another hand wrapped around the bleeding soul mark, Angel leaned down, pressing their foreheads together. “Shh, Smiles, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

Alastor’s breathing was labored and stuttering, and Angel could feel the hot moisture of each exhale, the scrape of Alastor’s teeth, the occasional touch of his tongue…

“Come on,” Angel whispered before he could get any bright ideas. He had never seen Alastor so vulnerable, and this was absolutely not the time for anything but business. “I got your clothes. We gotta get you outta here. Can you walk?”

“Of course,” Alastor grunted, though he still needed Angel to leverage him into a sitting position. He then helped Alastor into his clothing as best he could, which ended up being slacks, shirt, suspenders, shoes, and monocle. Angel left the top two buttons of the shirt undone, and with Alastor’s current state, the collar, tie, and coat were out of the question. Alastor seemed to think the same thing, because he took them in his hands and hesitated before his face contorted in pain and they vanished into shadow.

“Okay. Come on, up,” Angel said, holding his hands out to Alastor. Slowly, the Radio Demon took them, clearly hyping himself up to stand.

“Where the fuck do you two think you’re going?”

Fear shot through Angel, and he felt Alastor stiffen. Angel looked up, and just at the periphery of the ring of illumination around them, he saw—

“Val,” Angel whispered.

He didn’t know how to describe the look on Valentino’s face. Angel had never seen it before. Slowly, he began to advance, his eyes on Angel. “You really have learned how to be slippery, haven’t you, amorcito? Can you imagine my surprise when I came back to your little holding cell and found you gone?”

“Val, I—”

“And then,” he interrupted, “I hear that someone broke into Vox’s room and removed a few… items. Did you think you were being slick, Angel Dust? Did you really think you would get away with it?”

Angel held his hands up, not looking at Alastor and silently begging him to run. “Val, don’t…!”

“Do not tell me what to do!” Valentino shouted. He reached one hand out, clenched his fist, yanked…

…and nothing happened.

Angel stared at Valentino, waiting for the feeling of a chain around his throat that would drag him to the ground… but it never came. It took a moment for Valentino to come to the same conclusion, and he murmured, “…the fuck…?” before repeating the motion.

Still, nothing happened.

Valentino was in shock. Angel was in shock. What happened? Where was his chain? Where had it gone? Why couldn’t he feel it?

After a breath, Angel decided it didn’t matter. Instead, he put his hands on the metal table, scrambled up onto its surface, and launched himself at Valentino. He heard Alastor shout something, but he didn’t look, and soon all he heard was an enraged scream as Angel dragged his claws through Valentino’s face.

•••

[librarycards]

Do you like adrienne maree brown? I read pleasure activism by her and I found it p disappointing bc pleasure is really important to my politics but I found a lot of what she said either boring or more aligned w capitalist logics than I’m comfy with. In the last few days every time she’s come up w different people nobody’s liked her work and it’s made me wonder why she’s even popular to begin with. Maybe it’s less radical crowds?

My main issues are:

-a lot of what she says seems really basic/almost self explanatory

-while she frames her work as radical I think it’s actually p friendly w capitalism

-appropriation of Indigenous teachings— using pieces of Indigenous knowledge without the worldview, thus losing specificity and allowing it to become kinda sanitized + meaningless. This is super common in ~rad~ lit rn but other folks have said (based on other books) that she does a lot of “old wise man said” type drawing on Indigenous teachings w/out sourcing + pan Indigenizing at the some time

i find adrienne maree brown insufferable for the exact same reasons you do. she's like brene brown (no relation) for leftists, or people who claim to be.

[dailyanarchistposts]

New ways of well-being

The way we relate to land must be altered in a future ethical society. No longer would land be thought of a property to be exploited and hoarded. We realize that land is alive, and it is not a commodity to be divided up and bought and sold. Land will belong to those who manage and care for it, holding it communally for the benefit of all. To defend the land is to defend ourselves and it something we should undertake at all costs. We must all come together to design the lands we care for in such a way that they may heal from the centuries of capitalist degradation.

An ethical consideration of water usage will show that all communities need to be returning the water they use to the river, lake, or aquifer it came from, as clean as they found it. We all have the responsibility of cleaning and purifying the watersheds after so much pollution wreaked by capitalism. Water scarcity is a new fact of life in our changing climate, we must take water efficiency seriously when designing future systems. The ability to exist with the least amount of water possible will be advantageous. Pollution of waterways is a threat to mutual survival and should be treated as an act of aggression.

There are many natural borders on the planet but the Nation State borders we are familiar with have been used by those States to homogenize or genocide diverse cultures within it’s borders. They are mechanisms for State sponsored murder, and must be abolished. People can decide for themselves which communities they want to be a part of and how to organize those communities. This is the anarchist principle of voluntary free association. Negotiations and discussions can allow us to develop principles for free movement between such communities, as any community deserves some expectation of privacy from unwanted tourists. Any migrants should be taken care of though, whether travelers or climate refugees, basic hospitality should be extended to these vulnerable people. Between these communities, based on natural borders and watersheds, federations might pop up to coordinate actions across territories.

The need for secure housing is a human right and should be defended as such by our future society. As Malatesta pointed out, capitalism is the system in which builders go homeless because there are too many houses. Houses will belong to those who occupy and care for them, much like the land. No one has a right to more housing than what is needed for their chosen family. This does not mean one house one family, but it does mean that communities should allow for enough housing to meet the needs of every person, however they constitute themselves. We will encourage design that changes the ways people come together in public space, promoting more communal experiences when it comes to child-rearing and kinship.

The commodification of land under capitalism has led to the destruction of whole cultures, and the wholesale destruction of the planetary climate systems. Additionally, this current system has cause the 6th mass extinction, mass starvation, pollution, and the murder of the living soil and torture of non-human animals. The way we feed ourselves says a lot about our values as a society. Safe, healthy, and culturally appropriate foods should be a right under Anaculture. Making sure everyone is fed is the responsibility of all. Food shouldn’t be commodified, it should be produced by workers…for workers, not for the profit of the capitalist class. Farm land and food production facilities should be expropriated to serve this purpose. The Indigenous knowledge assembled into permaculture can inform the future design considerations of our food systems.

A topic not usually confronted by permaculture in depth is healthcare. Most written on the subject is about medicinal plants and herbs used to treat common maladies. The issues of trans rights, neurodiversity struggles, medical racism, and women’s access to birth control are rarely discussed. Under Anaculture health care would be a human right, including preventative therapies. People will determine for themselves what constitutes a healthy life, and be able to access the resources needed to achieve it. People will have the ability to freely alter their bodies for any purpose, including gender expression. The knowledge of healing will not be gate-kept by educational institutions but shared freely with communities so that they may begin to treat themselves with more autonomy. These institutions, along with hospitals, will be anarchized and the worker’s will do their best to equalize treatment for historically marginalized populations.

[dipperdesperado]

Notes on Solarpunk Beyond Eurocentrism

Crisis and collapse seem to be the currency of the present. 1st World societies, enveloped in the long shadow cast by prosperity, find themselves coming into open, naked conflict. Reality, or Eurocentricity¹? Reality says, ‘we can't have infinite growth on a finite planet!’ Eurocentrism laughs, walking away with delight. Rather than understanding “that which cannot be repaired is already broken,”² Eurocentricity tells us that we can pull and pull and pull, that a rudderless faith in extraction will somehow lead to balance. What happens if the world is bent until it breaks? All of our communities are at stake. This is “the clearest signal that there is something deeply wrong with the global system in its current form”³. We can see that somewhere along the line, someone fucked shit up. There's no other meaningful way to explain how we've gotten to where we're at. Eurocentricity is so prevalent that we even understand our technology on the scale of the “complex and special”, rather than “how a society copes with physical reality.”⁴ Solarpunk's focus on appropriate technology⁵ is a welcome corrective to the myopia of modernity⁶ and capitalism⁷. However, it is incomplete without an understanding of coloniality⁸.

If there are facets of coloniality that we need to address, they are the processes of (1) creating rigid taxonomies and categories for classifying the world⁹, and (2) creating hierarchies of power and value for the ways those things are classified. These two moves are embedded in the in-group/out-group exclusionary dynamics that coloniality needs to function, from the way that we privilege ‘humans’ over ‘non-humans’, ‘centers’ over ‘margins’, and the ‘visible’ over the ‘invisible’. This isn't just philosophical or for the sake of pontification. These presuppositions of knowledge, being, and meaning privilege Eurocentric assertions that see "other human beings’ ways of life [as] wrong and harming nature, [since] nature needs no human beings."¹⁰ If we are to move out of ecological calamity, ‘The Last Shall be First’ must be our operating system. By centering the margins (in the ontological and epistemological sense), we can actually end suffering, rather than outsourcing it. This has to take shape in such a way that engenders room for a polyculture of meaning, diametrically opposed to the hegemonic "monoculture of meaning"¹¹, beyond the ability to label any human based on what they "lack" as an "Other"¹².

This move to truly embody decoloniality has to critique modernity, capitalism, and coloniality. This is important to understand as “modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories. Contemporary women of color and third-world women's critique of feminist universalism centers the claim that the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender exceeds the categories of modernity. If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories, then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence. So, to see non-white women is to exceed "categorial" logic. [...] the modern, colonial, gender system [is] a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorial logic. [...] categorial, dichotomous, hierarchical logic [is] central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.”¹³ We see that even in ostensibly postcolonial societies, "indigenous people who had already suffered from decades of colonial conservation policies, little changed with decolonization."¹⁴ This shows the depth at which we have to go to adequately respond to the social and ecological issues that are currently coming to a head.

This commitment isn't (principally) a moral or ethical one. One of the main reasons that we have to move towards a holistic decoloniality is because of the inability of coloniality to address the issues we're facing. "Indigenous leaders say [30x30, a worldwide conservation program] ignores generations of effective indigenous land management. [...] there was limited scientific attention paid to Indigenous stewardship."¹⁵ Unless we are willing to be radical, to grasp the roots of all the oppressive structures that we're facing, we will reproduce the things we are (ostensibly) trying to abolish in our (potentially unintentional) inability to critique coloniality onto-epistemically while proposing responses rooted in other ways of being. In the effort to try and correct the excesses of Eurocentricity, we see that Eurocentric modes of being like "nation-states [...] struggling to catch up with indigenous and other non-capitalist cultures’ understanding of the interdependence of life."¹⁶ This is not to exalt Indigenous, Black and 3rd/4th world onto-epistemes, to reify them beyond critique. It is to say that the Eurocentric onto-epistemic inability to see those modes as valid dampers the emancipatory potential extant in the world preventing the ability to reach the purported values of "progress" and "development". Eurocentric ideas have to play catch-up, and by their colonial and capitalist nature are unable to.

We have to problematize, to see as an issue, many of the foundational concepts might deploy as mired in Eurocentrism and coloniality. We can do this by (1) decolonizing what it means to be human by creating the space for Black, Indigenous and 3rd/4th worlders to self-determine and (2) "[take] non-humans seriously as persons[/beings] with agency [which] allows us to de-center humans, to notice how limited our field of sight becomes when fixated by the idea of the Anthropocene. Far from remaining a matter of theoretical discussion, non-humans [... ] influenc[e] social, political and legal realities."¹⁷ We have to bridge these two worlds: acknowledging the ways that the ideas of animality were defined along the bodies of Black people, how that relates to conceptions of humanity, and the care that we should have in highlighting the agency of non-human beings (both in the actual sense, and those who get denied humanity). This has to be done on the terms of those beings, as best as we can manage. If we are able to acknowledge that there are issues in modernity with how we taxonomize humans & how that relates to non-humans, for the sake of the biosphere, and we center those marginal and invisible beings, we can get a lot done.

I really want to impress the fact that not taking the trifecta of Eurocentrism¹⁸ seriously is resigning ourselves to doom. If we continue to build the cyberpunk future that we've been worried about for decades, the future of "urban decay, corporate power and globalization. The rise of zero tolerance policing, anxieties around health care and the psychological toll of the Cold ‘Forever war’ and the possibility of nuclear annihilation,"¹⁹ we resign ourselves, even in our imaginaries, to further our immiseration. We can use the 30 x 30 framework for conservation as a great example, where 200 countries were willing to accept it²⁰. This conservation framework reinforces the dichotomy between human/non-human²¹, assuming that top-down, bureaucratic processes of "management" are the answer to the problems that those very ideas created. The ironic thing is, even though this move would be woefully inadequate in addressing the issue of biodiversity loss or climate change²², we very likely won't even get to see it achieve protection of "30% of the world's land and water by 2030."²³ There's no meaningful accountability structure within the Eurocentric hegemony to do this. There is no room for living freely and honestly under these conditions.

"To see the coloniality is to see the powerful reduction of human beings to animals, to inferiors by nature, in a [piece-meal] understanding of reality that dichotomizes the human from nature, the human from the non-human, and thus imposes an ontology and a cosmology that, in its power and constitution, disallows all humanity, all possibility of understanding, all possibility of human communication, to dehumanized beings."²⁴ This is the double-edged sword of creating hierarchies and taxonomies around valid ways of being, knowing, and meaning. By operating along these lines, we end up in a situation where there is no meaningful way for anyone to truly reach the kinds of fulfillment that modernity is supposed to provide. Now, this is not to say that I'm personally going to cry very hard about colonizers dehumanizing themselves by dehumanizing me, but I think it's worthwhile to mention; we all benefit by tearing down Eurocentrism and building a new, multifaceted perspective that allows for mutualism between different ways of thinking about the world and our relations with/in it.

By creating these rigid categories of difference, there is an assumption of innateness that tends to become a part of it. If we are looking to dismantle coloniality, we have to situate ourselves in such a way that those seemingly subtle distinctions between differences in general²⁵ and the specific conception of colonial difference become visible. This allows us to see that "the epistemological fractures between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism is distinguished from the critique of Eurocentrism anchored in the colonial difference."²⁶ Critiques of Eurocentrism that don't apprehend the imbrication of coloniality, capital, and modernity are left unaware at the meaningful distinctions that can be made between critique left incomplete and critique that gives us a way to move forward and build new relationalities.

I want to point back towards the phrase "The Last Shall Be First", which comes from Fanon (and the Bible). I understand this as resonant with the adage of centering the marginalized. If we truly believe that harmony and unity in life are worthwhile to work towards, the practical move to make is to, in every moment, work towards empowering those removed from power. By foregrounding those most negatively impacted by Eurocentrism through an understanding of intersectionality in material and onto-epistemological senses while spotlighting the "'decolonizers of the imaginary’, [which can be understood as] future generations, past generations, non-humans, and spiritual beings and concepts"²⁷, we can point ourselves towards more egalitarian and self-determining outcomes. We can compose and integrate efforts together, where cultural workers can do solarpunk art and organizers & community/affinity groups can build solarpunk sociality and architects can do solarpunk guerrilla urbanism and more, where collaboration becomes a space that starts to break down the borders between different ways of relating to the world. By problematizing the human "we", by understanding that while, ideally, abstractly we are including everyone, in practice, there are critical things missed that lead to the issues we purportedly want to face. We have to point towards a world where many fit.

As far as my specific commitments on the matter, I'm what I call an egoist. I've appropriated this term to mean that I find myself to be important (though not supremely so), to assert my onto-epistemology as valid, even though Eurocentric society was built at my (people’s) expense²⁸. I have hope, which I understand as the grounded counterpart to "faith" or "optimism", that things can change, that even if the world has to be broken down, that it can be, and a new, decolonial one can be built. In this space, I hope that every being is acknowledged on its own terms, to have the capacity for its "ego" to be fulfilled, roughly along the lines of the golden and platinum rules, depending on what makes sense given the situation²⁹. Solarpunk is very egoistic/anarchistic in my conception. Through horizontal power structures, we can minimize immiseration and foreground approaches to life that move our social activity towards the biosphere.

We can start working towards this, right now. Like, on some "you can go do the work after this" kind of thing. While we don't necessarily have a linear path forward, we can listen to ourselves and our desires, and experiment with doing things to fulfill them in the present, seeing them as springboards for further movement into the kind of spaces that we want to go. On a basic level, we can think about the ways that we are restricted by our needs due to alienation from self-determination, and devise plans to get those things, from food autonomy, to housing security, to social and cultural spaces. With this, I want us to be rooted in place--no White Flight ass culty commune shit. Our work should ground in locality and communality. If every being deserves the kind of world that solarpunk futures suggest, it makes no sense to leave if we have capacity³⁰ to stay. In a more egoist turn, I think places where we can practice what James Scott calls anarchist calisthenics³¹ are worthwhile endeavors; authority, as in authoritarian rule, is never legitimate. Whenever we can and have the desire to, we should rage against it. Hosting do it yourself (DIY) events are a good example of this. DIY events are usually music shows, but they can be parties or anything else, where you do it without "permission" from the state or authorities. They can happen "in a park, on a beach, deep in the forest, in a barn, under a bridge, in a parking lot, next to a pool, or at the top of a mountain. The event could be on wheels: in an RV, on the back of a truck, in a van. You could build a secret tree house. You could borrow a boat. You could find an abandoned or empty building and re-purpose it. If there’s no electricity and you need it for a PA, find a generator. If you don’t need electricity, use candles for lighting. If you would like to lessen the chance of police interference, acquire several buildings and move people from building to building during breaks. You could even take over a street."³²

If we're willing to commandeer space, the elusive element in much theorizing on change³³, we can start changing the paradigms. Rather than "fall[ing] back on [...] creat[ing] protected areas"³⁴ for the sake of reaching "biodiversity goals" and "ecological harmony", we can focus on land back, we can pull from knowledges in appropriate technology, traditional ecological knowledge, and the best that western science has to offer for being good partners with other beings in our communities. To horizontalize relationships between humans, breaking down barriers of political and socioeconomic varieties, we can put the last first and act as accomplices, supporting their needs and fighting alongside them. Any critiques that we have of the system should, within our capacities, be externalized, the (dialectical and logical³⁵) contradictions laid bare in the material world. If there is a public building that isn't being used for the public, we can commandeer it and turn it into a commons³⁶. Around these moves we can build or tie in networks of support and take seriously the militancy, strategy, and tactics required to defend that space. Or, we can be more fluid, moving from place to place, an occupation traveling band that swarms spaces, creates more solarpunk and communistic relations within, shares those tools and collaborates with folks more rooted in that space, and floats out as to remain flexible. Or, a ton of other possibilities, a ton of other ways to engage space. There are many ways to do it.

This is meant to be a conversation starter. I have a lot of love for solarpunk--you can see that from my writings. It is a really useful meta-frame for the narrative component of systems change. I also acknowledge the susceptibility that it has towards eco-modernism, crypto-scheming, and reactionary yearning to return to the "good old days", whether it's a time "before agriculture" or a time before industrialization". I hope that, through the works of 3rd and 4th worlders, and more material ties to prefigurative and insurgent practices vis a vis systems change, solarpunk can shake off the chains of Eurocentrism, towards a pluralistic decoloniality and anti/non-capitalism.

Notes

Eurocentricity/Eurocentrism is the cultural and philosophical constellation of worldviews that sees the ideas birthed from Europe and wedded to capitalism and coloniality as the only valid, worthwhile, and legible modes of knowledge, being/existence (especially as it relates to “humanity”/humanism), and meaning. Things like linear progressions of time, a fetish for scientific thought, and atomistic conceptions of the individual permeate Eurocentric thought.

XXIIVV — permacomputing

Beyond Extinction. Transition to post-capitalism is inevitable | by Nafeez Ahmed

Anthem of the Sun — Real Life

Appropriate technology is essentially what it sounds like; it looks at what technology would be appropriate, meaning that it would minimize ecological harm, to achieve specific needs/goals.

The advent of nation-statism, colonial empires, and industrial capital make up modernity. It is the “never-ending” historical period in which we find ourselves.

Capitalism is distinct, in all of its configurations, for the fact that it combines: (1)private, dictatorial authority over property, most notably of the means of production, (2) wage labor relations where those who don’t have productive private property need to work using someone else’s to survive, and (3) a focus on continual growth, which is seen as an unquestionable good.

Coloniality is the power structural relationships and ways in which society was chopped up and categorized, that, while originating during the eras of European Colonialism, still persist to this day.

Toward a Decolonial Feminism - Maria Lugones

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Wynter Sylvia 1492 A New World View

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Capitalism, coloniality, modernity

SOLARPUNK: Life in the future - Beyond the rusted chrome

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

This is meant in an expansive sense, where colonized subjects and what is commonly referred to as nature is included

Eurocentric assumptions on what it means to "conserve" certain lands go against the very things that are done to preserve biodiversity. There is not a mechanism by which we can meaningfully protect lands from "on high", away from an intimate understanding rooted in place.

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

I don't find issue with the concept of "difference". I am not my phone, or my mom, or my favorite animal. At the same time, we have to be able to separate the idea of difference from the idea of colonial difference, and understand the ways that material and social processes shape the ways that difference in general is constructed. Ossified understandings of difference, like "I am a man and men do X" are antithetical to liberatory change.

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

Decolonizers of the imaginary. Not that there's overlap here between acknowledging 3rd & 4th world folks ways of being and knowing and a flattening of the "nature-culture" dichotomy that is generally espoused in 'colonized imaginaries'

This system tells me to assimilate or to stop existing. I choose neither, and go towards full spectrum resistance and abolition.

The golden rule is treat people how you want to be treated. The platinum rule is treat people how they want to be treated. I think there's an innumerable number of options in this range, depending on how well we can understand what other beings need. By not pedestalizing any one being over the other while understanding the deep history and present, we can move towards that. I want to make it abundantly clear that we cannot just "jump" towards that moment, as things like reparations and land back need to happen. It's a yes and situation. We should understand that every being deserves what it wants as long as it doesn't systematically/power structurally prevent someone from doing the same. And to this end, there are certain, non-privileged/marginalized/invisibled beings that will have needs that reflect a different reality visavis self-determination.

I am not saying to stay in dangerous, toxic, harmful situations. I'm saying that changing the places you're already in has more radical potential, if you're specifically looking for that, than getting a commune established out of arms reach from society.

Anarchist Calisthenics, by James C. Scott

A DIY Guide to Creating Spaces

Anecdotally, it seems easier to imagine vastly different economic, political, and social systems, but it is harder to imagine different technologies, and even harder to imagine different ways of interacting with spatial-temporal dynamics. Much of politics is actually about space and how it is occupied, and we should lean into anarchic, decolonial takes on "geography", "urban planning", and "architecture" among other fields so we can really take seriously how we are addressing all the things we need to.

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Contradiction (logical): when a subject, object, or phenomena is said to have features or properties that can’t exist at the same time and be factual. For example, All apples are fruits. If someone were to say that some apples are not fruits, that is a logical contradiction, because there is no way to substantiate that claim through information, reasoning, or data. Logic is all about “internal” consistency, where the “internal” refers to the relation between the claims being made and the things being compared. Within the system of interest, in this case the “system” of fruit classifications, of which an apple is an element, the claims and conclusions should be supported by the characteristics of that system. Contradiction (dialectical): In dialectics (or a dialectical process), contradictions can take the shape of logical contradictions, (All X are Y → Some X are not Y | No X is Y → Some X are Y) but they only need to take the shape of tensions between elements in a system more broadly. It’s all about the relationship between elements.

What if We Cancel the Apocalypse

[kaninchenzero]

if you're ever writing something where your characters do some extreme high end dining, understand that the experience bears almost no resemblance to dining as you may know it

note that my knowledge is second hand and limited to the french culinary tradition

i think the chinese tradition is more informed by imperial court but that's all i got there

anyway french tradition fine dining is a highly curated, formalized, more performance art than anything else

diners have little input on what they'll be eating, for one

obviously inform staff of religious or allergy related restrictions as while many chefs are bastards they're usually loathe to poison their customers

and since this segment of the economy has a fuckton of oil money they're unlikely to be perceptibly racist

(they will, however, be extremely sexist if you aren't anna wintour or, like, an actual monarch)

this is not mass market so reputation actually can kill a business super quick

choice is limited to drinks and between the short or full courses

you'll get a menu but it's a declaration of what the chef wants you to know about what you'll be eating, think theater playbill or gallery catalogue

ah! that's the metaphor

it's a participatory theater performance and you are very much expected to know your role in it

the courses will be timed so food is served at the appropriate temperature, so try not to linger

for the people who eat at these kinds of places, what they're doing is hiring the services of an expert servant

some like to joke about how tyrranical their stylist is, or enjoy the chef sometimes yelling at a diner for eating wrong but it is very much a joke and super patronizing

anyone these people interact with are either peers or the help

yes, they are monstrous

personally i think a curated dining experience should be much more widely available and that there should be more room for it in socialist economies than capitalist ones because there could be more freedom for cooks to do art when they don't have to worry about keeping the doors open they way they do here in america

food doesn't have to be art but it can be and that should be encouraged

[shituationist]

I think companies like Google and Microsoft have incentive to embellish and even falsify the results of their machine learning projects, but I do worry that sufficiently capable (we won't say "conscious," because that doesn't matter) AI agents are going to replace human workers in services while "advanced economies" have made their economies dependent on the existence of a service sector with high-paying jobs (on a global scale) buttressing a comfortable middle class existence for the average adult.

This isn't just an AI thing. Professionals in the US and Western Europe advocate more restrictive work visa and credentialing programs in order to protect their salaries. This also goes for unskilled workers, who are afraid of the influx of Latin American labor in the US (especially when bosses can hire these workers under the table and pay them less, while paying no payroll taxes on that labor).

The whole existence of the labor market is increasingly at odds with human needs and the technical horizon of the world economy. Coupling livelihood to wages has also been a monstrous feature of our society, but it is becoming more and more monstrous as the number of jobs which provide a consistently decent standard of living seem to be increasingly the purview of machines.

Theorists like Steven Wolfram seem to think that "computational irreducibility" will keep plenty of jobs around forever, but I don't know. Automation in manufacturing didn't increase the total number of manufacturing jobs in the US and Europe. People didn't go from making the tenth part of the head of a pin to the thousandath part. People who were displaced by automation and offshoring were instead shuffled into the service sector, but as automation hits that sector, where's the next sector for them to go to?

Socialist planned economies struggled with this too, but because of more conscious political objectives, since an employment guarantee (an artefact of the appropriation of capitalist, specifically Fordist, thinking) was part of their social contract, and automation would reduce the number of jobs or otherwise make workers redundant (but you couldn't just fire them, especially since things like housing were often tied to jobs), so there was a conservative impulse outside of the military production sector to keep jobs labor intensive. Political ossification and the gerontocracy ensured that people with no adequate knowledge of on-the-ground conditions would be able to reach a ministerial position and make the Soviet state unable to undertake needed reforms (so they ended up privatizing everything and sending millions to an early grave with the liquidation of the planned economy instead). Glushkov's OGAS project is a testament to this: early digitalization of the planned economy was killed because ministers didn't want to hand over any control to a computer network, even if that computer network would have breathed new life into the planned economy or made it more competitive with its imperialist rivals (bear in mind here that many ex-Soviet ministers would go on to become oligarchs after privatization was pursued).

I don't know. I'm a little scared and therefore motivated to be skeptical of recent advances in artificial intelligence. "Artificial General Intelligence" has seemingly been redefined from "scary superintelligence that's gonna became conscious and kill us all" to "computer program that can complete any task that a human can do", which is a more realistic goal and arguably feasible from a materialist vantage point (even if not commercially profitable). It isn't there yet, and there's reasons to think the current approach could hit a wall, but even without breaching that kind of "intelligence", the impact of automation in services could mean that service workers are increasingly subject to the precarity that American manufacturing workers have been and which such bromides as "learn to code" have been intended to address.

Every day I am more convinced that our choice is between socialism or barbarism: a global planned economy in which our basic and social needs are addressed through collective, non-commercial, association(s), in which opportunities to make our lives meaningful through work have become "life's prime want"; or a capitalist world-system which mericlessly throws people into the industrial reserve army of labor, making people's lives subject to impersonal forces completely and totally beyond their control, preserving the class structure at all costs and bribing the remnants of the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy with patronage while potentially billions suffer. Worst case scenario is we only get the former through the latter.

(I would appreciate it if you have anything to say about this post, don't do it through a reblog but through a reply or DM, just for my anxiety's sake 🥺)

[olippolyp]

rant:

i work in water/wastewater as an environmental engineer. my company consults for municipalities and private companies on designing and maintaining their water treatment quality & infrastructure. with that, i’ve gotten to work on a lot of really cool, gross, and important projects even as a very entry level person, having only graduated in 2023. while i know that i’m capable and that i have great mentors that are reviewing most everything i do, i’m frequently taken aback at just how much they trust me with with such limited practical experience.

i’m highly respected because of my job title, and that’s reflected in my pay. despite having graduated with crippling credit card debt and a mix of student, personal, and auto loans, my new steady income that allowed me to work overtime meant i could stop ubering and reexplore old hobbies. my mental health began to recover. but im still only beginning to get out of the red month to month. if i didnt live with my partner, i would be living paycheck to paycheck, and i would have to find a roommate.

my oldest brother works in the same industry as a treatment plant operator. he never went to college, despite being one of the brightest people i know. traditional schooling didn’t understand how to teach him. when we start talking about water treatment, his knowledge far surpasses mine. he knows what will happen if you add too much alum to a certain process at the wrong point in treatment without jar testing, whether a pump is or isnt appropriate for the application without modeling software, and what sounds good in theory but shits the bed in practice.

yet, because operator positions don’t require a college degree, he is paid a fraction of my salary. he’s been taking classes to advance as an operator since he started this particular job 2-3 years ago and does well. but because he doesn’t have a college degree, that is reflected in his pay.

he’s starting his third job this week and supports 4 kids. he’s one of the most determined and hard working people i know, but is filing for bankruptcy and is in danger of losing their housing. he feels like a failure and jokes about suicide.

if i make a mistake, it is extremely likely to be caught through several iterations of review by myself and others. if my brother makes a mistake, entire populations, ecosystems, and economies could be easily affected.

just look at what happened in richmond, va this past january after a snow storm that interrupted the water treatment plant’s power for a couple of hours caused the entire city to lose water for nearly a week, as well as critically affecting and/or taking out the water systems of connected surrounding counties. all because the plant was under-maintained and mismanaged. experts in my field weighed in around the country calling it the worst water crisis in us history next to flint, mi. it didnt make national news, however, because it was the same week that the la wildfires dominated airwaves.

we must pay our workers living thriving wages. your job, at the bare minimum, should compensate you well enough that when you leave work, you can rest, relax, and live a fulfilling life. your job should compensate you well enough that working a second job is an absurd red flag, not a necessity. your job should compensate you well enough to ensure that when you are there, you are able to be FULLY THERE.

the value of a person’s labor should not be determined by whether or not they have a degree, or how valuable our capitalist society deems their role. every person is entitled to an income that can sustain a happy, healthy life, whatever that means to them. i don’t give a fuck if the person working at wendy’s makes as much as me because i’m an egotistical ass that needs to feel superior to those around me. i want to know that the person across the counter from me is happy and healthy; not working themselves to the bone just to survive. i want to know that the operators at my local water treatment plant are well cared for and well rested, lest they make a preventable error that can have disastrous effects, or leave the industry after a few years, taking all of their knowledge and skills with them. i want to know that the people in my community are not exploited. that they pursue their passions rather than a paycheck.

if you are of the mindset that some jobs aren’t skilled enough to “deserve” a thriving wage, then you have never worked an “unskilled” job and NEEDED it. you may have bussed tables in school, but was your parents’ safety net there to catch you when you needed to give up a shift to study for a test? was it there when you got in a wreck driving home from class and totaled your car? was it there when you were in middle school and being introduced to the expectations for college scholarships? did you know at 12 that the only way you’d ever afford college would be by being perfect in school?

it is unacceptable that in 2025, it requires 4-5 incomes to keep a family above water. our people are worn down, burning out, and isolated. that’s how the system has been designed so that workers believe they are powerless within it. the reality is the system is powerless without them.

raising the minimum wage and taxes on the ultra-wealthy are the bare minimum. universal healthcare and the complete restructuring of the healthcare economic system is next. continue those regulations until the corporations’ price gouging and predatory tactics are eradicated in every industry. pull the united states military out of goddamn everything, and cut all their ties to local police organizations. cut their budgets and redirect it to improving national infrastructure, as well as the infrastructure and livelihoods of those countries and peoples we plundered. eradicate ice and use the budget to set up universal basic housing and income, available to all persons residing in the us, documented and undocumented. reinforce the fuck out of social security. build up our communities and the people that make them up rather than imposing restrictions meant to make them ‘prove’ their worth.

stop taking fucking advantage of each other.

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

I've had a PS5 for over a year now and I've wanted to use it as an excuse to write a kind of review for a while now.

Not that the world needs more reviewers, reviews, or ads in entertainment's clothing. But because gaming has always been a source of joy for me, and because I'd always hoped I'd be able to merge my joys of gaming and writing.

It's not lost on me how much of my joy of the hobby comes not from experiencing but the comfortable knowledge that should I choose to experience, I can, at a moment's notice. Or rather, it was and then my wife phrased it in a way that illuminated it to me.

I am, then, a collector of electronic amusements. I've spent more money than is likely ethical on the hobby over the years, even when doing so was financially irresponsible. It's then interesting to me that I would not recommend it for others, and in part because of how toxic the industry is.

One of the games I've played the most since getting the PS5, 45 hours according to the in-game timer, but that's discounting the time on other saves (and other platforms) is Assassin's Creed Valhalla. A good game, I'd say, one that did not review well because reviewers are intended to play enough of a game in a week or two to make an authoritative judgement on its quality. It like a great many games is not best enjoyed at that pace. I consider it a good popcorn game. It offers enough variety at any given moment that I'm likely to find something I'd like to pursue. Exploring for treasure, raiding a monastery, following the next quest line. It's a good thing to do between other more focused experiences. Something you can turn on in a 30 minute break between work and feel appropriately amused. Like popcorn, not a great meal, and it gets tiring after a while, but when you want it, it hits like nothing else.

A good game, from a talented studio. Ubisoft Montreal, also the studio behind everyone's favorite Not-Really-An-Assassin's Creed Pirate game: Black Flag, and like that game the main character is as naturally stealthy as a thunderstorm, but unlike that game this has far less forced stealth that goes against that grain.

But Ubisoft is also the studio that's been in the news multiple times over the last few years, for accounts of sexual harassment, crunch, unfair compensation, and a culture of misogyny that has likely robbed us of more female protagonists than have even publicly been admitted, not to mention the working conditions it must have created for the staff.

And Ubisoft is only one of a glut of mega-publishers with similar stories. Microsoft bought Activision, who's CEO stepped down in the wake of similar sexism basked controversies, but short of unionizing to protect themselves, what guarantees do the employees have that their new corporate overlords will protect them from abusive management anymore than the old ones?

Even studios that keep their rumors under wraps tend to lean into employee crunch. 80 hour work weeks, hundreds of thousands of employee hours for relatively small details not for art but for marketability. (Not that Rockstar doesn't have their own seedy culture), but would Read Dead Redemption's story feel any less compelling or make any fewer comparisons to Blood Meridian if the horses didn't have realistic testicle behavior?

I'm beyond saving. Absolutely fascinated by the technology, invested in the mathematics behind volumetrics, physics, and ray tracing. A PS5 is an arguably budget conscious way to play modern releases that utilize all those and more, if you too are lost in the pixels like me.

But the reality is that Balatro is probably the best game of the year, and you can play that on a $200 laptop, and unless LocalThunk has absolutely terrible politics, investing in smaller more measured experiences is a better choice for everyone involved.

I'll leave you with one last thing. For a long time the games industry has been kind of an early prediction of capitalistic trends. It's arguable whether that's because of how much money it makes or because there's something about it that reveals these things earlier. Microsoft made profit increases every quarter this year. They laid off more than 10,000 workers last year, and are on track to match that this year. These are layoffs across all sectors, but a good many of them were from the various games studios the conglomerate owns. Many among award winning studios who have released well regarded and well selling games. The business goal quoted for this was to maintain profitability while investing in cloud infrastructure and AI development.

Granted, it's not directly related to them, but after Friday's events Microsoft's stock prices are down. How many workers you think they'll need to axe to maintain profitability against that? It's always eventually a losing game investing in corporations, as a consumer, employee, or even an investor.

[askgothamshitty]

i understand the critique of psychiatry

but wouldn't it be antiscience to just disregard the decades of peer-reviewed research on psychiatry?

/genuine

Despite the claims to "progress" made by official historians of psychiatry such as Lieberman and Shorter, there is no evidence for the supposed “science" of psychiatry. There is no test for any mental illness, no proof of causation, no evidence of successful "treatment" that relates specifically to an individual disorder, and no accurate prediction of future cases. Thus, the claim that psychiatric constructs are real disease has not been proven. Consequently, it is necessary to utilise the existing evidence to more accurately theorise the real vocation of the psy-professions in capitalist society. As the faulty knowledge claims of the DSM are summarised by Burstow (2015: 78, emphasis original), "reliability cannot legitimately function as a validity claim and no studies have established validity"; therefore, "it follows that ... no foundation of any sort exists for the DSM categories. This is a serious issue that calls into question the power vested in psychiatry." It necessarily leads us to consider such institutions as moral and political enterprises rather than medical ones (Szasz 1974: xii) because psy-profes-sionals make historically and culturally bound judgements on the "correct" and "appropriate" behaviour of society's members.

- from the introduction to Psychiatric Hegemony, available here for free: http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/49047/1/80.Bruce%20M.%20Z.%20Cohen.pdf

The Marxist critique of psychiatry is not about rejecting science. Rather it holds the field up to high scientific standards and demonstrates how it fails to meet them.

Other sources:

[fanhackers]

Fannish proximity across time and space

Sedgwick wrote on the transformative potential of queer reading practices in ways that, to me, also describe fannish modes of attachment:  "I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and with love."  In the same passage, she writes of “a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for”: not with one or more of the characters, but with the writing; “on the level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme.” This fannish merging with the text – with its aesthetic form – was “one way of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects.”  Meanwhile, Carolyn Dinshaw, a medieval scholar and one of the founding co-editors of the journal GLQ, was writing about the “queer ... touch across time”: the intense affective attachments, including identification, which produce queer  – that is, oblique, resistant and desiring  – relationships to the medieval past, which exceed and refuse normative trajectories and linear histories, and find in medieval pasts and texts that “numinous and resistant power” that makes certain art objects, for their fans, potent “resources for survival.” Finding in the distant past another way of organising sexuality, selfhood and experience, which we somehow recognise, which we somehow need – the “defiant and confused” feeling of knowing, without knowing how we know, that this book, this person, this artwork, is “one of ours,” as Alison Hennegan describes in “On Becoming a Lesbian Reader.” The queer touch across time retrieves though this is too passionless a word – it rescues artworks and archives from the dustbin of history, resonating with Taylor J. Acosta’s characterisation of fandom as “a historiographic approach in the Benjamanian tradition, not as an explicit critique of history, with its pretences to critical distance, total understanding, and specificity, but rather as an alternative practice in which an art produced of love and affect can function historically.” The queer or fannish touch across time produces “worthless knowledge”: knowledge that has no value that can be registered by neoliberal-capitalist metrics and that is for that reason invaluable. (It strikes me that my desire to quote from these texts, to show them to you, is itself fannish. Look! Look at this thing that I love! It says something to me that cannot be said in any other form. Does it speak to you too? What does it say?)

WILLIS, I. ‘AFTERWORD: FAN THEORY/THEORY FAN OR I LOVE THIS BOOK’. FANDOM AS METHODOLOGY. LONDON: GOLDSMITHS PRESS.

[mesetacadre]

The bourgeois rhetoric attempts to conceal the real culprit that hinders the utilization of this immense technological potential in the interest of social prosperity. Bourgeois analyses present the development of technology either as a danger or as a miraculous solution to our problems.

Both the demonization of technology and the utopian, deterministic expectation of social prosperity that will supposedly result automatically from technological progress, are two sides of the same unhistorical and erroneous theoretical approach.

The main question is who and for whose interests determines the orientation, development and utilization of new technologies. Behind AI lie the choices of human intelligence and the particular class interests it serves.

[...]

Similarly, regardless of whether we examine the era of the steam engine or the age of the intelligent robot, technology under capitalism was, is and will be a means of producing surplus value and a means of control and repression in the hands of capital’s power. Marx had also documented the role of machines in increasing the productivity of labour, making commodities cheaper and increasing the degree of exploitation. He had already highlighted in his work Grundrisse that the development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production. Capital determines not only the use of technology but also the orientation and priorities of its development always driven by profit.

[...]

Contrary to bourgeois propaganda, this technological development sharpens the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the continuous attack of bourgeois policy on workers’ rights a one-way street.

As we know from Marxist political economy, the higher the level of technical development of production, the higher the ratio of the means of production to labour power in the production process, the higher the technical and organic composition of capital, the greater the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. We must not forget that the source of exploitation, the source of surplus value and capitalist profit is the unpaid labour time of the wage-workers, the unpaid labour over and above the value of their labour power, which is appropriated by the capitalist. Only living labour power, not robots, creates surplus value.

Of course, bourgeois policy does not passively watch this downward trend in the rate of profit. It intervenes in multifarious ways to halt this trend and to increase the degree of exploitation of the workers in every sector and in the economy as a whole.

Capital takes advantage of the new technological possibilities which allow it to increase in practice the daily working time, irrespective of the time that workers spend in their workplace and the legal working hours, and at the same time to intensify labour. It exploits the surge in unemployment to generalize flexible labour relations.

[...]

A look at the current EU practice is enough to enlighten us. The EU staffs claim to have enshrined a European Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. What is happening in practice? In the name of security and counter-terrorism, they have legally enshrined the full digital profiling and processing of our personal data as well as preventive surveillance and intervention.

The AI act’s regulations on artificial intelligence are similar. The real rules of the new framework are in fact the exceptions and the downplaying of dangers.

In the name of public safety and counter-terrorism, biometric identification such as the analysis of our voice and our movement in public places are an exception to the rule. France has already become the first EU Member State with legislation allowing the use of biometric monitoring in public places in the name of safeguarding the security of the Olympic Games.

In the name of entrepreneurship, the workplaces in companies and factories are exempt from the bans.

[thegalievthought]

Capital: The Lie of Free Enterprise

The basis of modern society and modern economics as a whole is capitalism. A system based on the ‘free market’. This system in principle, is supposed to reward those who have the knowledge and ability to be successful in the system to succeed. However in reality this is not how this system works. Capitalism on the contrary rewards those with advantages to be successful in this system. In short under capitalism, If you were born into wealth you will thus likely stay wealthy. Many then say in response, “Well it is their right.” However, I disagree. It comes from the fundamental disagreements between how we understand free enterprise and economics vs the reality of how the world economy works. Adam Smith is often cited as the modern father of capitalism, and with no discredit to him, those who cite them in this way are certainly correct. Adam Smith is the modern father of capitalism and thusly can provide us with some background information on a few fundamental questions we have to answer. Who creates wealth in society, who collects that wealth, and is the enterprise truly a free system? And why don't more people care?

The first question is quite easy to answer as Adam Smith says in his book The Wealth of Nations ‘Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.’ (Smith, A. (1902) ‘Chapter 5’, in The Wealth of Nations. New York: American Home Library Co., p. 48.) From this, we can come to the simple conclusion that in a capitalist society wealth is generated through labour. This is called in economics the ‘Labour Theory of Value’. LTV is the basic statement that all value in an object is derived from the labour put into it. If we have a tree, labour was required to fell that tree, then that tree required labour to be transported to a sawmill or other form processing area. Further, still, the processed wood must be sent to a workshop or factory, and then labour there may turn it into a chair. All through that process labour has added value to the wood and eventually the chair. Then at the end of this process, the price for the chair is calculated from its labour and sold. Then this profit was used to produce another chair. However, there is a rather strange happening during all of that. The owner, the entrepreneur, pocketed the leftovers from the chair, the chair that was just sold as a commodity to the free market. However he did not cut the tree down, nor did he process, transport or carve it. He in this process has put no labour into the chair he didn't add to its value. Then why did he take that wealth?

In 1887 a German economist by the name of Karl Marx published a book called Capital after being translated from its original German to English that same year. In this book, Marx goes over many topics but Marx also speaks on several things namely the processes of the circulations of commodities and capital and the appropriation of surplus value from labours. Marx poses that the reality of both the appreciation of the surplus value gained from the commodity and its use to expand either the existing commodity production of the ‘entrepreneur’ is further strange. Marx poses a format of a process for understanding the transformation of the value existing before the labour was put into the commodity versus the after. He calls this the M-C-M format or the money-to-commodity-to-money format. Marx puts forward the simple idea that if the entrepreneur of a free enterprise puts forward £100 to buy Iron, then a further £75 for labour then sells it for £175 he has essentially turned the commodity value into money which Marx declares at this point is itself a commodity. The value you paid for the iron and labour to turn it into a commodity is indistinguishable from the money except for its use value. Now let's say the entrepreneur still puts £175 into the commodity but instead sold the commodity for £275 there is now a remaining £100 extra than we had before. This is called profit or as Marx called this profit surplus labour value. Marx declares simply that profits that are pocketed by the entrepreneur were appropriated from those who did the labour i.e. turned the iron into a commodity. So the labourers are being exploited out of the value that is rightly theirs while all the entrepreneur did was contribute the original commodity of the capital or money with the M-C-M process. However, make no mistake the labourers made the value of the product however they receive the least of the whole transaction the most benefit being to the entrepreneur who can now do with their surplus labour what he wishes.

The myth of free enterprise truly starts to crumble when you understand the concepts we have discussed. Free enterprise is built upon the labour of others being stolen or thusly appropriated. The value that belongs to the labour is taken instead for the entrepreneur or entrepreneurs of the enterprise and used in many ways. This money may be used to expand the ability to make more money by expanding the production or collection that the enterprise does. Or it could go to new enterprises owned by others that have stakes in the first enterprise or it may go to making the entrepreneur's life luxurious. The use truly is irrelevant to the point. The “free enterprise” is built on the theft of value that did not belong to them. This creates a fundamental imbalance between the entrepreneur (the bourgeoises) and the labourers (the proletariat). Adam Smith states in The Wealth of Nations “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many” (Smith, A. (1902b) ‘V: I.b’, in The Wealth of Nations. New York: American Home Library Co., pp. 709–710.) The inevitable outcome of this difference in wealth is class. The ones who create the value in society become the lower class the proletariat while the entrepreneur becomes the high class the bourgeoisie. This relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat necessarily requires the oppression of the proletariat as the bourgeoisie's entire class is based on the theft of the value that rightly belongs to the proletariat. So to the vast majority of society, the enterprise of the bourgeois is not a free existence; they are used and exploited for what is rightly their own and fear losing the ability to create that labour and thus exist in that society based on the power of the bourgeoisie. This thus leads to the power of institutions like the state being irrevocably held in the interests of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the majority of society. This means that the overall power of society is held by the minority of society that control the majority of the capital and commodities of society leading to a society where there is no question about the said “freeness” of the society. Because under the capitalist system, society is unquestionably controlled by the bourgeoisie with a power imbalance that cannot be solved from within the system. The true oppression of the system is not seen in the 1st world, however. The greatest amount of oppression and violence from the bourgeois comes from the 1st world to the 3rd. Underdeveloped countries like Thailand, Pakistan and many others bare the brunt from both national and international bourgeois. Many textile companies haven't or don't have the ability to fully automate their work. So many of these countries often for extremely low wages bear the brunt of such jobs often in dangerous conditions and from young ages. This violence, the violence of greed is a favoured tool in these nations. Once the commodity is produced it is then shipped to wherever it needs to go whether it's America or France that textile is worn but that person wearing it would never know the horror story of its price. This is the case for many items you purchase as Daniel Kahn said in his song ‘The Butchers Sher’, “Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror story in its price.”

Karl Marx said in 1869 in a letter to Fredrich Engels “The English working class will never accomplish anything” but this quote is out of context, it lacks other vital parts and necessary understandings about the day Karl Marx lived. However, let's pretend for a second that wasn't the case. Is this true? The working class of the 1st world especially in our modern day is so terribly separated from the working class of the 3rd world. Almost at times these groups and their interests seem so far apart many would try to argue they are at this point different classes for a simple reason. In Karl Marx’s day, the working class tried organising itself under what were called internationals. As Marx thought capitalism could not be defeated if it was not defeated internationally and wholly. But by the 1950s amid the decolonialism of the postwar period, the true uninternationality of the anti-capitalist movement became all too apparent. This led to major anti-capitalist leaders all over the 3rd world theorising an idea that only the working class of the 3rd world could sufficiently challenge capitalism. This was based on experiences major anti-capitalist leaders like Ho Chi Mihn had with anti-capitalists from the 1st world. Seeing the early beginnings of the consumer economy. This development led many to reexamine Marx’s works and come up with solutions many did and many came to conclusions and one I enjoy is also quite poetic.

The Butchers Sher, you may recognise it, referenced a song by the same name earlier. The Butchers Sher refers to a general idea that the workers in not just the West but all countries must as a result of the system they are a part of consume commodities the necessary conclusion of the capitalist system as we discussed earlier the M-C-M. The idea I propose with this name is the indifference workers have to one another based on the effects of the need for commodities in a capitalist society as well as the unwillingness to learn or empathise with them. The song The Butchers Sher tackles this issue by putting forward the statement that as long as the commodity needs of the West are met the working class of the West does not care and would rather be content to let the ‘butcher’ (the bourgeois) have their share of the exploitation (the surplus value of the 3rd world workers and profits from commodities sold in the west) of the 3rd world. We brought up a lyric from that song earlier “Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror story in its price” The song later makes the statement “You can build yourself a garden, you can cover it in green, but my dear I beg your pardon. How do you keep your little fingers clean?” This is a statement appealing to the nature of the consumer. You can ignore all the privileges and benefits you gain from the exploitation of the 3rd world because the “butcher” gets his share. This is later near the end of the song reinforced by these lyrics. “You gotta give the butcher his price. No matter what you think of human rights. You’ve got to give the butcher his lot, for being everything you think you're not. You gotta give the butcher his share. No matter how you say you care. ‘Cause he’s the one who did the stealing and then named you as the heir. Whose filthiness provided you with the privileges you bare”. This is a statement that as long as the capitalists get their share, the working class of the 1st world can wipe their hands clean if they let someone else do it their collaboration in that system will be washed away even because they didn't do it personally is perfectly encompassed in the line “he’s the one who did the stealing and then named you as the heir”. Because the West is the heir to the exploitation and suffering of the 3rd world and benefits from it every day but at least we can live in comfort.

This is the essence of why the idea of free enterprise is a lie. Because any enterprise is always built on the destruction and theft of the human rights of the proletariat and the only conclusion from the idea of a “free enterprise” is that there isn't one.

[elsa16744]

What Private Equity Firms Are and How They Operate 

Private equity firms can raise money from institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies. Corporations utilize private equity services that guide them in fundraising. Private equity firms hold more than 4 trillion USD in assets. Also, return on investment (ROI) makes this financial instrument remarkably attractive to investors. This post will elaborate on how private equity firms work. 

What is a Private Equity Firm? 

Private equity (PE) means the company is not publicly held. It allows companies to increase their financial capacity by offering investors partial ownership. Private equity services also help publicly listed companies become private by completely replacing previous owners. 

Professional teams hired by private equity firms work on market trend analytics by outsourcing investment research and creating appropriate reports. An investment research report depicts the advantages and risks associated with each portfolio management decision. 

Investing in private equity is financially riskier than traditional investment vehicles. Therefore, private equity funds use tried and tested investment strategies to redistribute risks. An experienced fund manager will use investors’ capital for private equity opportunities with an excellent ROI. 

How Does Private Equity Work? 

Private equity services can charge 2% of assets as management fees. Otherwise, they require 20% of gross profits if company ownership undergoes a thorough structural change. 

Passive investors are known as limited partners (LPs) who do not affect the company’s decisions and policies. However, general partners (GPs) can determine managerial and executive strategies, affecting how the company operates. 

Investment research outsourcing assists private equity firms in networking with more investors and optimizing their strategies for different industries. Besides, each investor can contribute to financial improvements by mentoring the company owners. 

Therefore, private equity benefits the company by enriching its knowledge base with the recommendations made by veteran investors. 

Types of Private Equity Investment Strategies 

1| Venture Capital 

Startups require financial assistance to launch their products and services or expand their production capabilities. Venture capital (VC) helps them secure capital resources and business management intelligence. After all, venture capitalists often have a personal connection with the startup ideas they support. 

Venture capitalists use private equity services to evaluate investment decisions and a new company’s growth potential as part of their risk mitigation efforts. They share their knowledge with inexperienced young leaders at startups to increase efficiency and build stronger teams. 

VC financing involves investing up to 10 million USD in different startups. So, successful investments in well-performing startups will balance the risks originating from the less stable business models of other firms. 

2| Leveraged Buyouts 

LBO means leveraged buyout, and private equity services utilize borrowed capital to acquire company ownership through this investment strategy. Additionally, a company’s assets are collateral for the respective debt. 

This strategy helps private equity funds leverage their investments without committing financial capital directly. While the borrowed money attracts interest, the ROI of highly efficient companies can easily offset the repayment outflows. Many private equity firms have acquired new companies through multiple rounds of leveraged buyouts. 

PE professionals often employ the LBO strategy when privatizing a public enterprise. Privatization results in decreased regulatory obligations and enhanced operational freedoms. Later, new ownership will implement policies to make the public enterprise more efficient and marketable. 

You may also notice how LBO-based corporate acquisitions divide the company into segments with a narrower industry focus. Doing so makes selling the company and settling the debt obligations more flexible. 

Conclusion 

Unlisted companies explore unique outsourcing services to identify fundraising opportunities via extensive investment research. Private equity is a practical financial instrument that helps businesses generate the capital necessary for business expansion. 

Simultaneously, general partners acquire decision-making authority and empower startups with business development insights. Therefore, private equity supports the companies on two frontiers: financial assistance and managerial mentorship. 

A leader in investment research outsourcing, SG Analytics helps investors and business owners successfully deploy data-driven fundraising activities. Contact us today to obtain analytical support for deal sourcing, target screening, and excellent business modeling. 

[dailyanarchistposts]

France, 1968

This has undoubtedly been the greatest revolutionary upheaval in Western Europe since the days of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of thousands of students have fought pitched battles with the police. Nine million workers have been on strike. The red flag of revolt has flown over occupied factories, universities, building sites, shipyards, primary and secondary schools, pit heads, railway stations, department stores, docked transatlantic liners, theatres, hotels. The Paris Opera, the Folies Bergères and the building of the National Council for Scientific Research were taken over, as were the headquarters of the French Football Federation — whose aim was clearly perceived as being “to prevent ordinary footballers enjoying football’.

Virtually every layer of French society has been involved to some extent or other. Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages have discussed every aspect of life in packed-out, non-stop meetings in every available schoolroom and lecture hall, Boys of 14 have invaded a primary school for girls shouting “Liberté pour les filles”. Even such traditionally reactionary enclaves as the Faculties of Medicine and Law have been shaken from top to bottom, their hallowed procedures and institutions challenged and found wanting. Millions have taken a hand in making history. This is the stuff of revolution.

Under the influence of the revolutionary students, thousands began to query the whole principle of hierarchy. The students had questioned it where it seemed the most ‘natural’: in the realms of teaching and knowledge. They proclaimed that democratic self-management was possible — and to prove it began to practice it themselves. They denounced the monopoly of information and produced millions of leaflets to break it. They attacked some of the main pillars of contemporary ‘civilisation’: the barriers between manual workers and intellectuals; the consumer society, the ‘sanctity’ of the university and of other founts of capitalist culture and wisdom. Within a matter of days the tremendous creative potentialities of the people suddenly erupted. The boldest and most realistic ideas — and they are usually the same — were advocated, argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by decades of bureaucratic mumbo- jumbo, eviscerated by those who manipulate it for advertising purposes, suddenly reappeared as something new and fresh. People re-appropriated it in all its fullness. Magnificently apposite and poetic slogans emerged from the anonymous crowd, Children explained to their elders what the function of education should be. The educators were educated, Within a few days, young people of 20 attained a level of understanding and a political and tactical sense which many who had been in the revolutionary movement for 30 years or more were still sadly lacking.

The tumultuous development of the students struggle triggered off the first factory occupations. It transformed both the relation of forces in society and the image, in people’s minds of established leaders. It compelled the State to institutions and of established reveal both its oppressive nature and its fundamental incoherence. It exposed the utter emptiness of Government, Parliament, Administration — and of ALL the political parties. Unarmed students had forced the Establishment to drop its mask, to sweat with fear, to resort to the police club and to the gas grenade. Students finally compelled the bureaucratic leaderships of the ‘working class organisations to reveal themselves as the ultimate custodians of the established order.

But the revolutionary movement did still more. It fought its battles in Paris, not in some under-developed country, exploited by imperialism. In a glorious few weeks the actions of students and young workers dispelled the myth of the well-organised, well-oiled modern capitalist society, from which radical conflict had been eliminated and in which only marginal problems remained to be solved. Administrators who had been administering everything were suddenly shown to have had a grasp of nothing. Planners who had planned everything showed themselves incapable of ensuring the endorsement of their plans by those to whom they applied. This most modern movement should allow real revolutionaries to shed a number of the ideological encumbrances which in the past had hampered revolutionary activity. It wasn’t hunger which drove the students to revolt. There wasn’t an ‘economic crisis’ even in the loosest sense of the term. The revolt had nothing to do with ‘under-consumption’ or with ‘over-production’, The ‘falling rate of profit’ just didn’t come into the picture. Moreover, the student movement wasn’t based on economic demands. On the contrary, the movement only found its real stature, and only evoked its tremendous response, when it went beyond the economic demands within which official student unionism had for so long sought to contain it (incidentally with the blessing of all the political parties and ‘revolutionary’ groups of the ‘Left’). And conversely it was by confining the workers’ struggle to purely economic objectives that the trade union bureaucrats have so far succeeded in coming to the assistance of the regime.

The present movement has shown that the fundamental contradiction of modern bureaucratic capitalism isn’t the ‘anarchy of the market’. It isn’t the ‘contradiction between the forces of production and the property relations’. The central conflict to which all others are related is the conflict between order-givers (dirigeants) and order-takers (éxécutants). The insoluble contradiction which tears the guts out of modern capitalist society is the one which compels it to exclude people from the management of their own activities and Which at the same time compels it to solicit their participation, without which it would collapse. These tendencies find expression on the one hand in the attempt of the bureaucrats to convert men into objects (by violence, mystification, new manipulation techniques — or ‘economic’ carrots’ and, on the other hand, in mankind’s refusal to allow itself to be treated in this way.

The French events show clearly something that all revolutions have shown, but which apparently has again and again to be learned anew. There is no ‘inbuilt revolutionary perspective’, no ‘gradual increase of contradictions’, no ‘progressive development of a revolutionary mass consciousness’. What are given are the contradictions and the conflicts we have described and the fact that modern bureaucratic society more of less inevitably produces periodic ‘accidents’ which disrupt its fuctioning These both provoke popular intervention and provide the people with opportunities for asserting themselves and for changing the social order. The functioning of bureaucratic capitalism creates the conditions within which revolutionary consciousness may appear. These conditions are an integral part of the whole alienating hierarchical and oppressive social structure. Whenever people struggle, sooner or later they are compelled to question the whole of that social structure. These are ideas which many of us in Solidarity have long subscribed to. They were developed at length in some of Paul Cardan’s pamphlets. Writing in Le Monde (20 May 1968) E Morin admits that what is happening today in France is “a blinding resurrection: the resurrection of that libertarian strand which seeks concilation with marxism, in a formula of which Socialisme ou Barbarie had provided a first synthesis a few years ago...”. As after every verification of basic concepts in the crucible of real events, many will proclaim that these had always been their views. This, of course isn’t true.’ The point however isn’t to lay claims to a kind of copyright in the realm of correct revolutionary ideas. We welcome converts, from whatever sources and however belated. We can’t deal here at length with what is now an important problem in France, namely the creation of a new kind of revolutionary movement, Things would indeed have been different if such a movement had existed, strong enough to outwit the bureaucratic manoeuvred, alert enough day by day to expose the duplicity of the ‘left’ leaderships, deeply enough implanted to explain to the workers the real meaning of the students’ struggle, to propagate the idea of autonomous strike committees (linking up union and non-union members); of workers’ management of production and of workers’ councils. Many things which could have been done weren’t done because there wasn’t such a movement. The way the students’ own struggle was unleashed shows that such an organization could have played a most impotent catalytic role without automatically becoming a bureaucratic ‘leadership’. But such regrets are futile. The non-existence of such a movement is no accident, If it had been formed during the previous period it certainly wouldn’t have been the kind of movement of which we are speaking, Even taking the ‘best’ of the small organizations — and multiplying its numbers a hundredfold — wouldn’t have met the requirements of the current situation. When confronted with the test of events all the ‘left’ groups just continued playing their old gramophone records, Whatever their merits as depositories of the cold ashes of the revolution — a task they have now carried out for several decades — they proved incapable of snapping out of their old ideas and routines, incapable of learning or of forgetting anything.

The new revolutionary movement will have to be built from the new elements (students and workers) who have understood the real significance of current events. The revolution must step into the great political void revealed by the crisis of the old society. It must develop a voice, a face, a paper — and it must do it soon. We can understand the reluctance of some students to form such an organization. They feel there is a contradiction between action and thought, between spontaneity and organization. Their hesitation is fed by the whole of their previous experience, They have seen how thought could become sterilizing dogma, organization become bureaucracy or lifeless ritual, speech become a means of mystification, a revolutionary idea become a rigid and stereotyped programme. Through their actions, their boldness, their reluctance to consider long-term aims, they had broken out of this straight-jacket. But this isn’t enough.

Moreover many of them had sampled the traditional ‘left’ groups. In all their fundamental aspects these groups remain trapped within the ideological and organizational frameworks of bureaucratic capitalism. They have programmes fixed once and for all, leaders who utter fixed speeches, whatever the changing reality around them, organizational forms which mirror those of existing society. Such groups reproduce within their own ranks the division between order-takers and order-givers, between those who ‘know’ and those who don’t, the separation between scholastic pseudo-theory and real life. They would even like to impose this division into the working class, whom they all aspire to lead, because (and I was told this again and again) “the workers are only capable of developing a trade union consciousness”.

But these students are wrong. One doesn’t get beyond bureaucratic organization by denying all organization. One doesn’t challenge the sterile rigidity of finished programmes by refusing to define oneself in terms of aims and methods. One doesn’t refute dead dogma by the condemnation of all theoretical reflection. The students and young workers can’t just stay where they are. To accept these ‘contradictions’ as valid and as something which cannot be transcended is to accept the essence of bureaucratic capitalist ideology. It is to accept the prevailing philosophy and the prevailing reality. It is to integrate the revolution into an established historical order. if the revolution is only an explosion lasting a few days (or weeks), the established order — whether it knows it or not — will be able to cope. What is more — at a deep level class society even needs such jolts. This kind of ‘revolution’ permits class society to survive by compelling it to transform and adapt itself. This is the real danger today. Explosions which disrupt the imaginary world in which alienated societies tend to live — and bring them momentarily down to earth help them eliminate outmoded methods of domination and evolve new and more flexible ones. Action or thought? For revolutionary socialists the problem is not to make a synthesis of these two preoccupations of the revolutionary students. It is to destroy the social context in which such false alternatives find root.