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What's behind this?

Two things- Yankee migration into the South over the last several decades and the fact that most pre-Mid 20th Century Southern housing wasn't built to last in the way pre-Mid 20th Century Yankee housing was.

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DARK DICK RISING

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DARK ALEX AKA SHOOTSHOOT

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Jackson Hinkle is not a Marxist. He is a socially reactionary welfare capitalist. Period.

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The Chimney Cove Village Travesty

On August 12th, the tenants of Chimney Cove Village, a working class multi-family housing development on Hilton Head Island, were informed by their landlord that they would soon have to vacate their residences- most of them within thirty days, a few of them by dates in October, November, and December. A follow up notice delivered on the 31st of the month, presumably subsequent to the complication or collapse of the sale agreement with a luxury condominium developer that had motivated the issuance of the notice of eviction, rescinded the notice of eviction and informed them that their previous lease agreements were once again in effect. Curiously, however, the owners of the property have responded to inquiry from news media outlets as to whether its residents might again face eviction in the near future only with assurance that an update on the situation will be released at some point.

The spectre of houselessness still looms over these tenants, largely families supported by non-native English speaker first generation immigrant parents (that is, refugees from the abject squalor driven by Western Capital’s reign of terror in Latin America- a reign of terror that has been buttressed by the threat posed by Uncle Sam’s forces under the leadership of, among others, the swathes of field-grade/senior officers, generals, and admirals who retire to and gentrify Beaufort County) working in the island’s hospitality industry or as domestic workers for its resident idle rich. They have been sent on time-consuming and anxiety-wracking searches for non-existent affordable housing- as anyone living the housing affordability crisis or familiar with the South Carolina real estate market would assume, very few properties available to low wage workers are nearby- and will in all likelihood be sent on them again in the coming months. As we can see once more, slumlords don’t at all mind subjecting human souls to tear-welling whiplash and limbo and should not be trusted to provide or service anything.

Religious congregations, community organizations, and the “philanthropic” (that is, reputation laundering) campaigns of short term rental companies promise that they will be able to at least temporarily secure housing for several people among the hundreds almost certainly soon to be displaced.

Several people. Hundreds of people. A vast, vast majority of the parents who, following displacement, will still wish to work on the island, will face forty to ninety minute one way commutes from lower housing cost areas, provided they can make transportation arrangements, and provided they can even locate and rent housing in those areas. And needless to say, the education of the children of the breadwinners in question will be severely disrupted.

These efforts do not meaningfully ameliorate this crisis, just as similar efforts undertaken elsewhere do not meaningfully ameliorate the housing affordability crisis at large. These people are going to be set adrift into a storm. Same ritzy-smelling pluff mud, new day. It is a travesty.

Local and state government officials and controlled opposition NGO mouthpieces speak of limited scope “public-private partnership” workforce housing initiatives that will create fortunes for developer slumlords and lead to the construction of some housing for the island’s hospitality industry and domestic workers in the coming years. And the island’s Carpetbagger mayor has serenaded the sweet little money-mising hearts of his snobby Henry McSlavemaster “local flavor" comprador song and dance routine-loving NIMBY gentrifier carpetbagger support base by suggesting, in marvelously ineloquent prose, that the island establish a long-distance busing- that is, state-sponsored economic apartheid- program for this labor force.

But, of course, no actual solution to the problem that led to the Chimney Cove Village Travesty is being proposed by the local dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Peckerwood Bob who cooks at thegoodtimemargaritasgodblessparrisislandandmcasbeaufortspookyoathkeepeerskullsrockleegreenwoodisthenewwoodyguthriebluelivesmattermorethandotheirthuglivesspqrbabymolonlabetikishrimpshack and some of those damned immigrants who work at Sea Pines are going to have to get off of the island? Tough luck for them! The communities of the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the Port Royal Experiment have been and are being stolen? Pssssh! Who cares? In fact, it is all to be seen as “progress”! The gentrification, ethnic cleansing, and cultural genocide party must go on! The stinking plebs must be kept out of sight, unless they are on the clock! Get them out! They must not be allowed to spoil the beautiful mosaic of ritzy Garden & Gun plantationplantationplantation lifestyle neighborhoods and resorts! They cannot continue to sully the Salt Life experience!

The situation playing out on Hilton Head Island and in the sections of South Carolina that have become or are in the process of becoming gated communities and playgrounds of the wealthy of the world at large is a perfect demonstration of the need for radical movement towards the decommodification of housing. This atrocity is going to keep playing out on Hilton Head Island, in Beaufort County, and in the chicified sections of South Carolina in general until the democratic socialist minimalist program for housing-a housing guarantee, a serious program for the construction of public housing, the elimination of property taxation upon low value owner-occupied primary residences, the imposition of a severely punitive property tax upon luxury and secondary residences, a ban upon short term rentals and long-term luxury single family home rentals, and prohibition of the construction of sprawling, ecologically destructive single family homes- is won via open, organized class struggle.

This can be a flash point. Comrades of the Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the South, let us seize this opportunity. We cannot continue to procrastinate. It is time we begin to branch out beyond our narrow circles, prioritize fighting these battles, and establish our movement as the force capable of ameliorating the everyday suffering of the proletariat. It is through “unglamorous" political struggles like this one and the labor union struggle that international democratic socialism will begin to establish itself as a credible political force striving towards the revolutionary emancipation of the working class and begin to develop general mature revolutionary proletarian class consciousness.

We must learn how to fight and win local and state reform struggles against the bourgeoisie and its institutions if we wish to build a socialist revolutionary proletarian consensus. We can have no greater immediate priority, apart from the formation of institutions capable of carrying out these efforts. Comrades of the Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the South, let us begin to undertake the task at hand.

(Republished from my blog)

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Democratic Socialism and the “Politics” of Exhibitionism

Tailing socially reactionary sentiment would lead international democratic socialism to a dead end. So would continuation of its accommodation of exhibitionism practiced under the guise of democratic socialist agitation.

Not only does exhibitionism carried out on Twitter, city streets, TikTok, organizational meetings and conventions, and all spaces in between under the name of democratic socialist organizational effort repel or frighten the vast majority of those that are exploited and oppressed by Capital, the vast majority of those who would make up the ranks of the Socialist Revolution, but it is in itself demonstration of a lack of commitment to a serious revolutionary politics and program, a lack of commitment to a politics and program of development of an international class conscious proletarian consensus, seizure of state power, expropriation of Capital, and realization of a global cooperative commonwealth. It amounts to display of the mindset that Marxism and democratic socialist agitation is simply a pretext for lashing out and being "bad", "edgy", or generally unlike so-called "normies", for ribaldly signaling that one is "different", for throwing temper tantrums of raw, indiscriminate iconoclastic rage.

If a movement is one of trumpeting that its faithful are "different" from and somehow better than the "normies", of shocking and offending simply to shock and offend, of being a boisterous "Catboy", "commie witch" or "commie Satanist", "Tankie"-themed BDSM practitioner, or clotheshorse of styles and articles meant only to be grotesque, it is not one of serious politics of radical social transformation and is, by definition, a movement which is anti-popular. The objective of the democratic socialist project, as laid out by Marx and Engels, is developing the class consciousness of all proletarians to a mature level, freeing humankind from the scourge of capitalism, and building a classless world of human solidarity and democratic production for use economy. It is about emphasizing what the exploited have in common and emancipating the "normie" and the "eccentric" or "queer" oppressed alike. The idea that the eccentric or the exhibitionist libertine is superior to the "normie" is anti-majoritarian, counter-proletarian solidaristic, anti-socialist, bourgeois hyper-individualist nonsense. International democratic socialism must be intolerant of these attitudes, just as it is intolerant of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation bigotry. How can we continue to allow space for thinking so oppositional to genuine Marxist thought in our institutions of political education and organization?

Intolerance of the practice of exhibitionism in the name of Marxist revolutionary politics does not in any sense amount to intolerance of deviation from aesthetic or sexual norms. It amounts to enforcement of a serious commitment to revolutionary politics and protection of our movement from tendencies opposed to serious constructive mentality and programs of action, to protection of international democratic  socialism from tendencies that would derail the movement. Institutions of international democratic socialism must not accommodate elements which deem the objective of the democratic socialist project to be the advertisement of sexual or aesthetic preferences in a manner designed to offend the "everyman and everywoman", establishment and broadcasting a "subcultural" identity, simple castigation of the "masses" or bragging about how "bad" or "edgy" we democratic socialists are.

No, we cannot write off proletarians practicing this rubbish as "irredeemables" or individuals incapable of becoming revolutionary actors, just as we cannot write off those proletarians under the sway of socially reactionary ideology or "radical" essentialism and identity reductionism as such, but we cannot pretend that they are as of yet serious, genuine Marxists.

(Republished from my blog) 

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THE QUEER OLD DEAN HAS DESCENDED TO HELL!

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JUST AS THE SAGE OF LJUBLJANA HAS TOLD US, IT IS INDEED THE REAL THING.

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WHAT IN THE OINK IS THIS?

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WHAT IN HELL?

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Here's my first article in Sublation Magazine, originally released on my blog as "Let Us Proudly Own Our Class Reductionism", and retitled by the publication as "In Defense of Class Reductionism".

Although some of it was edited into a style a bit different from my own, the article as it was republished pretty fairly represents the argument I laid out in the manuscript I sent in.

I must, however, publicly state that, while I do believe her to be a cynical granola profiteer and peddler of bizarre anti-solidaristic, bigotry and capitalism-reinforcing approaches to the problem of racism and post-Age of Discovery race ideology, I do acknowledge that Tema Okun does at least profess the position that this problem is a product of capitalism.

I do not believe her advertised understanding of "race" to be analogous to essentialism of the Hiram Wesley Evans or even the Frank Wilderson sort. The article as it was republished does not accurately represent my take on this one matter.

Don't be mistaken- I think Sublation Magazine is one of the best Marxist publications out there today and will play a role in the development of proletarian class consciousness and a socialist revolutionary consensus. I simply need to issue a clarification of my understanding of an opponent's position.

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/in-defense-of-class-reductionism

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SPICE FOR SPICED FOOD.

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An absolute classic.

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Another damned good book from perhaps the greatest Southern Marxist.

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The Columbia Canal and the Congaree River!