#and proletariat farmers/workers

[transrevolutions]

some of us need to learn the difference between subsistence farming and for-profit farm management fr.

[disinherited-dornishman]

Personal thoughts on Team Black, Rhaenyra, and Misogyny.

This is going to be a messy one as regard structure but also topic. Stay with me, people.

I've been seeing a lot of accusations of misogyny against anti-team black, anti-rhaenyras, and anti-hotd posters for criticisms uttered, and I can't help but be a little dumbfounded. Like are we really doing this? Pointing out that Rhaenyra was reckless for having 3 bastards is not misogyny. I'm sorry, as much as you guys might love your make-believe character, I'm just not humoring it. Not if you're going to make the conversation about feminism and sexual liberation.

Okay, let me just say. Rhaenyra having Jace I can understand. An experiment that was stupid but also respectable in a way, because Laenor was definitely traumatized and not fit for keeping up their agreement, so I can support that mistake wholeheartedly for the empathy behind it. But Luke and Joffrey? After finding out that her genes get overriden by Harwin's?

Plain stupid. I'm sorry, that's just playing with fire, especially since she should know how precarious her position would be after the precedent of the Great Council that robbed Rhaenys of her birthright on the basis of her gender.

And like, I'd be fine with it if the show didn't portray it as this girlboss, don't-give-a-fuck win, because all it does is highlight how ignorant the showrunners are about the world in which their show is set! I liked selfish and decadent Rhaenyra in the books, she didn't need to be treated as a hero for it.

And the fact that the rest of the world and everyone in it is portrayed as being at fault for not going along with what's basically that society's equivalent of a political clown show is absurd. Pointing this out doesn't mean I'm condoning it either, I'm criticizing the show's lack of self-awareness. It's so obvious the showrunners are disconnected from the their world.

GRRM writes all his characters as believable people grown up in a medieval society, but critiques it through his own modern moral lense in a way that's seemless, yet in this show they use characters as mouthpieces to spout modern feminist and egalitarian ideals from characters who are ruling class. Who the fuck are they kidding? If you want to make a feminist show, don't use bourgeoisie feminism!!! Idgaf about some Princess' sexual liberation while she's allowed to hold feasts that rips the food from the tables of peasants! There's nothing inspiring about that!

Rhaenyra, one of the single most bourgeois figure in the show, is supposed to be praised for her "sexual liberation" when it literally threatens the stability of the entire realm, and directly caused a war in which countless sexual atrocities were committed and will still be committed? Forgive me if I can't find it in me to be inspired.

If you want the show to be feminist, display the themes through the people at the bottom, the normal workers, the whores, the thieves, the daytalers and smiths and carpenters and undertakers and farmers, etc etc. Don't ask people to cheer for a reckless white woman from a colonizer background with a biological WMD at her disposal for breaking the social contract of a ruling class SHE'S A PART OF and risking destabilizing her entire country, it's fucking insulting! And don't get me started on the gender essentialism of the whole "women good, men bad" horseradish horseshit.

I'd love to discuss and analyze these concepts if we're talking about Rhaenyra's character arc, her as a person, and the themes of patriarchy that one can glean through her. But if we're talking actual, meaningful, proletariat feminism that means something to the medieval society they live in?

You wanna praise this brave monarch for sexually liberating herself, go ahead and praise the female Romans in Spartacus while you're at it. Praise their sexual liberation when they avail themselves of sex slaves taken from Thrace and Gaul and wherever else the Roman Empire had reach and rape them for fun. Understand I'm not comparing Rhaenyra's actions with having her kids with Harwin to rape, I'm pointing out power dynamics. And at least that show had the decency to show that the patrician romans were cruel and vile alongside their humanity, unlike HotD which seems to insist its ruling family of dragonriding depraved incestuous monarchs are actually virtuous while literally having Meleys burst through the floorboards and massacre a crowd.

P.S.: for any Anti-Rhaenyras, please don't start shit about her unless you wanna discuss how the writers fucked up her beloved character. I actually liked her in the books and she should've gotten a bigger part than Daemon, so don't slander her all willy nilly. It's unconstructive and I feel no desire to engage.

[mesetacadre]

are these groups part of the proletariat?

farmers

priests/nuns

retail salesmen

strippers

people who invest in stock

taco truck owner

actors and singers

Priests, salesmen, sex workers, and actors/singers are all workers. Priests sell their labor-power to the church they're a part of, traditionally for extremely low wages as well. Salesperson is just one function a worker can have within a retail workplace, sex workers sell their labor-power to a capitalist as well. Actors and singers, and more generally people in the entertainment industry sell their labor-power in exchange for a salary. As I explained in the post I assume you're asking about, in some cases that salary is so high that it enables some workers to acquire private property and become part of the bourgeoisie themselves. In any case, the basic economic relationship is still that of a proletariat's

"Taco truck owner" has it in the name, they own a small amount of private property, and sometimes 1 or 2 workers. Investing in stock requires capital, and stock itself is also capital.

As for farmers, it depends on what exactly you mean. Historically, although nowadays it is practically extinct, the peasantry as a class were a holdover from feudal production, an exploited class distinct from the proletariat. Their production was individualized, as opposed to socialized in the case of proletarian production. They often produced only for themselves and some type of lord who owned the land. They were largely adjacent to the proletariat, but some aspects of their economic relations also sometimes placed them closer to the petty-bourgeoisie.

Most farmers nowadays are large landowners who own large amounts of machinery and employ specialized workers, while others (in the imperial core) are still landowners but they instead rely on cheap labor by migrant workers, sometimes undocumented ones, allowing for practically slavery conditions. These agricultural workers are proletarian, distinct from their historical ancestors of feudalism, in that they only earn a salary, and don't own their tools nor their land. Their production is also almost exclusively geared towards the national and international market, it's not individualized production. This is even more marked in the imperialist relations that govern the monoculture plantations of the global south.

[dailyanarchistposts]

F.8.4 Aren’t the enclosures a socialist myth?

The short answer is no, they are not. While a lot of historical analysis has been spent in trying to deny the extent and impact of the enclosures, the simple fact is (in the words of noted historian E.P. Thompson) enclosure “was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to the fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” [The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 237–8]

The enclosures were one of the ways that the “land monopoly” was created. The land monopoly referred to feudal and capitalist property rights and ownership of land by (among others) the Individualist Anarchists. Instead of an “occupancy and use” regime advocated by anarchists, the land monopoly allowed a few to bar the many from the land — so creating a class of people with nothing to sell but their labour. While this monopoly is less important these days in developed nations (few people know how to farm) it was essential as a means of consolidating capitalism. Given the choice, most people preferred to become independent farmers rather than wage workers (see next section). As such, the “land monopoly” involves more than simply enclosing common land but also enforcing the claims of landlords to areas of land greater than they can work by their own labour.

Needless to say, the titles of landlords and the state are generally ignored by supporters of capitalism who tend to concentrate on the enclosure movement in order to downplay its importance. Little wonder, for it is something of an embarrassment for them to acknowledge that the creation of capitalism was somewhat less than “immaculate” — after all, capitalism is portrayed as an almost ideal society of freedom. To find out that an idol has feet of clay and that we are still living with the impact of its origins is something pro-capitalists must deny. So are the enclosures a socialist myth? Most claims that it is flow from the work of the historian J.D. Chambers’ famous essay “Enclosures and the Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution.” [Economic History Review, 2nd series, no. 5, August 1953] In this essay, Chambers attempts to refute Karl Marx’s account of the enclosures and the role it played in what Marx called “primitive accumulation.”

We cannot be expected to provide an extensive account of the debate that has raged over this issue (Colin Ward notes that “a later series of scholars have provided locally detailed evidence that reinforces” the traditional socialist analysis of enclosure and its impact. [Cotters and Squatters, p. 143]). All we can do is provide a summary of the work of William Lazonick who presented an excellent reply to those who claim that the enclosures were an unimportant historical event (see his “Karl Marx and Enclosures in England.” [Review of Radical Political Economy, no. 6, pp. 1–32]). Here, we draw upon his subsequent summarisation of his critique provided in his books Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor and Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market Economy.

There are three main claims against the socialist account of the enclosures. We will cover each in turn.

Firstly, it is often claimed that the enclosures drove the uprooted cottager and small peasant into industry. However, this was never claimed. As Lazonick stresses while some economic historians “have attributed to Marx the notion that, in one fell swoop, the enclosure movement drove the peasants off the soil and into the factories. Marx did not put forth such a simplistic view of the rise of a wage-labour force … Despite gaps and omission in Marx’s historical analysis, his basic arguments concerning the creation of a landless proletariat are both important and valid. The transformations of social relations of production and the emergence of a wage-labour force in the agricultural sector were the critical preconditions for the Industrial Revolution.” [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, pp. 12–3]

It is correct, as the critics of Marx stress, that the agricultural revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labour as claimed by Chambers and others. And this is the whole point — enclosures created a pool of dispossessed labourers who had to sell their time/liberty to survive and whether this was to a landlord or an industrialist is irrelevant (as Marx himself stressed). As such, the account by Chambers, ironically, “confirms the broad outlines of Marx’s arguments” as it implicitly acknowledges that “over the long run the massive reallocation of access to land that enclosures entailed resulted in the separation of the mass of agricultural producers from the means of production.” So the “critical transformation was not the level of agricultural employment before and after enclosure but the changes in employment relations caused by the reorganisation of landholdings and the reallocation of access to land.” [Op. Cit., p. 29, pp. 29–30 and p. 30] Thus the key feature of the enclosures was that it created a supply for farm labour, a supply that had no choice but to work for another. Once freed from the land, these workers could later move to the towns in search for better work:

“Critical to the Marxian thesis of the origins of the industrial labour force is the transformation of the social relations of agriculture and the creation, in the first instance, of an agricultural wage-labour force that might eventually, perhaps through market incentives, be drawn into the industrial labour force.” [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market Economy, p. 273]

In summary, when the critics argue that enclosures increased the demand for farm labour they are not refuting Marx but confirming his analysis. This is because the enclosures had resulted in a transformation in employment relations in agriculture with the peasants and farmers turned into wage workers for landlords (i.e., rural capitalists). For if wage labour is the defining characteristic of capitalism then it matters little if the boss is a farmer or an industrialist. This means that the “critics, it turns out, have not differed substantially with Marx on the facts of agricultural transformation. But by ignoring the historical and theoretical significance of the resultant changes in the social relations of agricultural production, the critics have missed Marx’s main point.” [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, p. 30]

Secondly, it is argued that the number of small farm owners increased, or at least did not greatly decline, and so the enclosure movement was unimportant. Again, this misses the point. Small farm owners can still employ wage workers (i.e. become capitalist farmers as opposed to “yeomen” — an independent peasant proprietor). As Lazonick notes, ”[i]t is true that after 1750 some petty proprietors continued to occupy and work their own land. But in a world of capitalist agriculture, the yeomanry no longer played an important role in determining the course of capitalist agriculture. As a social class that could influence the evolution of British economy society, the yeomanry had disappeared.” Moreover, Chambers himself acknowledged that for the poor without legal rights in land, then enclosure injured them. For “the majority of the agricultural population … had only customary rights. To argue that these people were not treated unfairly because they did not possess legally enforceable property rights is irrelevant to the fact that they were dispossessed by enclosures. Again, Marx’s critics have failed to address the issue of the transformation of access to the means of production as a precondition for the Industrial Revolution.” [Op. Cit., p. 32 and p. 31]

Thirdly, it is often claimed that it was population growth, rather than enclosures, that caused the supply of wage workers. So was population growth more important than enclosures? Given that enclosure impacted on the individuals and social customs of the time, it is impossible to separate the growth in population from the social context in which it happened. As such, the population argument ignores the question of whether the changes in society caused by enclosures and the rise of capitalism have an impact on the observed trends towards earlier marriage and larger families after 1750. Lazonick argues that ”[t]here is reason to believe that they did.” [Op. Cit., p. 33] Overall, Lazonick notes that ”[i]t can even be argued that the changed social relations of agriculture altered the constraints on early marriage and incentives to childbearing that contributed to the growth in population. The key point is that transformations in social relations in production can influence, and have influenced, the quantity of wage labour supplied on both agricultural and industrial labour markets. To argue that population growth created the industrial labour supply is to ignore these momentous social transformations” associated with the rise of capitalism. [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market Economy, p. 273]

In other words, there is good reason to think that the enclosures, far from being some kind of socialist myth, in fact played a key role in the development of capitalism. As Lazonick notes, “Chambers misunderstood” the “argument concerning the ‘institutional creation’ of a proletarianised (i.e. landless) workforce. Indeed, Chamber’s own evidence and logic tend to support the Marxian [and anarchist!] argument, when it is properly understood.” [Op. Cit., p. 273]

Lastly, it must be stressed that this process of dispossession happened over hundreds of years. It was not a case of simply driving peasants off their land and into factories. In fact, the first acts of expropriation took place in agriculture and created a rural proletariat which had to sell their labour/liberty to landlords and it was the second wave of enclosures, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was closely connected with the process of industrialisation. The enclosure movement, moreover, was imposed in an uneven way, affecting different areas at different times, depending on the power of peasant resistance and the nature of the crops being grown (and other objective conditions). Nor was it a case of an instant transformation — for a long period this rural proletariat was not totally dependent on wages, still having some access to the land and wastes for fuel and food. So while rural wage workers did exist throughout the period from 1350 to the 1600s, capitalism was not fully established in Britain yet as such people comprised only a small proportion of the labouring classes. The acts of enclosure were just one part of a long process by which a proletariat was created.

[racefortheironthrone]

Is there room in a standalone ask to talk about why Eduard Bernstein "concluded...that Marx was basically wrong about the internal dynamics of capitalism, their effects on the class structure of society, and the implications for political action"?

Ok, so there's part of this that I'm really not going to get into, because all you really need to understand is that Marx had this theory of falling rates of profit being inherent to capitalism, and Bernstein did all of these calculations of German industry at the turn of the 20th century that he felt showed that wasn't happening, and all of that stuff is really only interesting to Marxist political economists of a particular age.

What I find more interesting is Bernstein's work on immiseration and the class composition of the industrial workforce. A big part of Marx's theory of the inevitability of revolution is that he argued that capitalism would constantly oppress workers with lower wages and worse working conditions (in order to extract more surplus labor-value from them), that artisans and the petit bourgeois would find themselves squeezed down into the proletariat by the forces of capitalist competition, and in this fashion, the industrial proletariat would not only become radicalized, but they would also become the overwhelming majority such that they could overthrow the capitalist system by force of numbers, once they had been properly educated and organized.

Bernstein did a bunch of empirical analyses of the industrial workforce of Germany and realized that Marx's predictions were not coming true - wages were going up not down, but more importantly the middle classes were not becoming proletarianized, nor were the proletariat becoming the numerical majority. Instead, what was happening was that industrial capitalism was calling forth a new middle class - engineers, clerks, accountants, corporate lawyers, foremen, etc. - and the working class was becoming increasingly subdivided between unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers.

To Bernstein, this empirical fact had important political ramifications: if the socialist movement wanted to prosper, it needed to build a cross-class alliance with the bourgeois political parties of the middle classes to establish democracy and civil rights, and then to use those rights to push for the eight hour day and old age pensions and other reforms that would improve the immediate material conditions of the working class.

And, arguably, Bernstein was right about this - a lot of socialist and social democratic parties got into office for the first time through alliances with non-socialist political parties, whether that's the Scheidemann cabinet pulling together the SPD, the DDP, and the Center Party or the Swedish SAP starting their historic run at government with an alliance with the Swedish farmers' party.

[comradeupdog]

what do you think of fluttershy my little pony comrade. whats your opinion about Her.

Fluttershy is one of only two proletarian ponies of the group (Pinkiepie is also proletariat) they, and the honorable peasant-farmer Applejack, shall lead the Maoist Revolution which shall destroy both the landlord class headed by the repressive and superstitious monarchy as well as the bourgeois class which is crushing the workers of Equestria and keeping them backwards.

Once she has encounter the works of Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Moa she shall lose her shyness just as the workers shall lose their chains. No longer will she be self-conscious but class conscious! No longer just the pony of kindness but also the pony of Solidarity! No longer a cutie mark of just butterflies but a cutie mark of the ranks of labor marching together to the creation of a world communist society! No longer yellow, but red!

She will be the founding mother of the Democratic Pony’s Republic of Equestia when she leads an animal army into battle against the monarchists! Long live the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Fluttershism!

[radiomonkeys2]

~PajamaJames

An infographic about the city of Atomsk on Planet Kollidor, starring the Titanist teacher and martial arts master Amota Kundorog

Atomsk is renowned on Kollidor and off-planet alike as one of the great landmarks of this particular stellar system, though tourism is discouraged unless you're simply coming to watch one of the many blood-fights taking place.

Atomsk is not a very welcoming place on any given day, and never was supposed to be much more than a hive of villainy and evildoers.

The original inciting idea for Atomsk dates back to 2015 around the time of the proto-Yabanverse, when I imagined the idea of what cities and cultures on Planet Vegeta might be like and inevitably came upon the idea that, if Saiyan women were so strong-willed and allegedly mighty, surely Saiyan Amazons had to exist in no-small number (respective to the small population of Saiyans, that is) and they must have formed their own spaces. Indeed, while I did not like Gine very much, one thing many people oft overlook about her and the implication of Saiyan non-combatants is that it appears that Saiyans are not leisurely like humans (or Tsufruians). Saiyans did not have air-travel, mini-malls, or cappuccinos— Gine, despite being a complete weakling, still seemed to be part of the Vegetan proletariat, suggesting that if nothing else, Saiyans were almost entirely segregated between workers and warriors with no other real definable classes— there didn't seem to be artisans, consumers, farmers, etc (then again, Toriyama never concerned himself with worldbuilding, so that might just be the implication). Either way, the point I took away was that if Saiyan women were indeed generally weaker than Saiyan men and less cut out for combat as Toriyama seemed to imply, that still meant they were almost entirely laborers, and not even service or professionals like we tend to view human women as being, but rather legitimately heavy laborers much like blue-collar men.

Of course, again, there is no actual evidence of this, only headcanon, but like with so many other ideas, I ran with this for the Yabans to create bollois (whose name literally stems to "industrial/heavy laborer person"). Heavy/blue collar laborer culture tends to share many similarities across the world, being very macho and tough, so that bled into those early ideas for bollois as well, leading directly to the current conception of them. And a side effect of that was the idea that bollois would be the primary builders of whatever cities were on the otherwise primeval, ultra-ultraviolent planet of Kollidor, and if that was the case, it just felt natural for some kind of "Martian Rome" aesthetic for them.

The general rule of thumb that "if bollois were male, we'd call this for what it really is" remains in play here. Atomsk being the "Anti-Themyscira" doesn't mean it's a rival city-state to Themyscira or anything, but that its context and values contrasts so sharply with Themyscira that it shows the difference in mindset between bollois and women.

In one Yabanverse AU, a "New Atomsk" is constructed on Earth-Prime when a colony of Yabans are exiled there in the mid 1940s, and it follows the same principles. This 'Nova Atomsk' is a place I used as a sort of "Anti-New York City" rather than "Anti-Themyscira," especially when that particular AU develops into the 1970s, and the overwhelming martiality and asexual laconic ruggedness of Nova Atomsk clashes fiercely with the decadence and hypersexual hedonistic decay of NYC. I may do more with that in the near future, because my love of sociology and politics makes the concept of "Yabans, especially bollois and yenois, in the conservative mid-20th century" inherently fascinating.

[thetldrplace]

Capital Vol 1 Sec 8

Part 8: So-Called Primitive Accumulation 

This is the last section of the book, so this post will conclude the notes and summary from Capital Vol 1.

Chap 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation  In order for capitalism to have arisen, there must have already been some that had the means to buy labor power, and others that could be that labor power. How did this situation happen. Marx says: "Never mind! It came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell but their own skins." Despite this, he proposes that capitalist society grew out of feudal society. The dissolution of feudalism set the peasants free, but without land to provide for them, all they had was their own labor to sell. The immediate producer that worked the land could only dispose of his own labor as he wished when he was no longer bound to the soil. To become a perfectly free seller of his own labor power, he would need to be free also from the guilds and their restrictive regulations. 

Hence, the historical movement which changes producers (the serfs producing on farms) into wage-laborers is their emancipation from serfdom and the fetters of guilds. These men could only become sellers of themselves once they had been stripped of their own means of production and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangement.  

Chap 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land  This chapter is essentially a more particular look into the process outlined in the last chapter, of peasant farmers being released from feudalism. 

Chap 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century.  The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament. The proletariat created by the dissolving of feudal estates were turned loose in society, as free, but now without means. Many could not adapt to the discipline of this new condition and in massive quantities, were turned into beggars, robbers, and vagabonds. To counteract this new wave of crime, the governments enacted brutal legislation against vagabondage throughout western Europe. Some instances are detailed in this chapter. 

Marx then looks at wage laws passed during the time. He mentions a compulsory extension of the work-week; wage ceilings set, and higher penalties on taking higher wages than on receiving them. 

In the sixteenth century, wages rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and corresponding rise in prices of commodities. Real wages therefore fell. 

Chap 29: The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer  The capitalist farmer developed originally from small farmers, not too much distinct from peasants, but who, provided with seed, cattle and farm implements from a landlord, could employ labor to help him farm. He next became a sharecropper, dividing the crop yields with the landlord and himself. But soon enough, he has enough to pay rent to the landlord and simply farm the produce for himself. During subsequent centuries of land reform and agricultural revolution, he was able to usurp land without cost. There was subsequently a devaluation of money so that he was able to pay less to his workers. 

Chap 30: Impact of Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital.  Short chapter repeating the charge that the displacement of agricultural workers meant a mass of people desperately looking for work and therefore ripe for exploitation. 

Chap 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist  Continuation of chap 26's hypothesis. But adding credit. The middle ages, says Marx, handed down two forms of capital: usury and merchant. The money capital formed by usury and commerce was prevented by organization of the countryside and guilds in towns from turning into industrial capital. But the dissolution of feudalism released those fetters. But particularly it was the system of credit that was developed in Genoa and Venice that took hold in Europe. The national debt became the benchmark of national wealth. Credit became the credo of capitalism. 

Chap 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation  This is a good recap of where Marx has gotten to. The expropriation of immediate producers; serfs on feudal lands, of private property based on the labor of its owner is the start. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry. It is necessary for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself.  It flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its classical form only where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is accomplished performer. This mode presupposes the fragmentation and dispersal of the means of production. But this is narrow and will decree universal mediocrity. This will bring the material means of its own destruction. It has to be annihilated and it will. Fragmented means of production will be concentrated. As soon as the capitalist mode of production takes off, the further socialization and transformation of means occurs. The expropriation of labor further centralizes and one capitalist strikes down others. Exploitation grows and so does the revolt of the working class. Eventually the whole system collapses. 

Chap 33: The Modern Theory of Colonization  Not gonna say much here. Marx goes through some examples of capitalist oppression with the British East India Company. 

[hanban371213]

hello again and again Hannah nation

finaly we're at the 12th grade books, which are packed with essencial content for the exam and is a pain to write. book 7 is probably the biggest, split into 5 parts. once again, context in the first post, check through the first tag

Book 7 - Crisis, Ideological clashes and cultural mutations in the first half of the 20th century

Part 1 - The transformation in the first decades of the 20th century.

After the end of the First World War, there were many changes across all aspects of life, society, and the world. The geopolitical landscape of Europe was severely altered. Empires fell(German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires), democracies triumphed and spread all over Europe, new states were born(such as Finland, Czechoslovakia and Poland), borders were expanded(Alcase-Lorraine returned to France, German colonies annexed by the UK, France and Japan), and a new international organism responsible for solving international conflicts, the League of Nations, was born.

In the Russian Empire, the economic consequences of the Russian participation in the First World War, alongside previously existin problems, such as the unexpected Russian loss in the Russo-Japanese war, that kickstarted the anti-tsar movement, and the various issues and demands across all classes(farmers want land, workers want better conditions, bourgeoisie wants liberal policies), all led to the February Revolution of 1917. This revolution led to the abdication of the Tsar Nicolaus II, and a new Provisional Government, led by the bourgeoisie, was created. Alongside it, Soviets(localy elected councils made up of farmers, workers, soldiers and sailors) proliferated across the country, creating a very unstable dual-power dynamic, with both the Provisional Government and the Soviets ruling the country.

In October 1917, ANOTHER revolution takes place, this time led by the Bolsheviks, who take down the Provisional Government and give all power to the Council of Comissars of the People, and publishes the Revolutionary Decrees. The Decree over Peace(Russia signs a disastrous peace treaty with Germany, losing a lot of land, resources and population), the Decree over the Land(land is taken from the big landowners and given to the farmers), the Decree over Worker Control(workers are given control over the factories and companies), and the Decree over Nacionalities(all peoples of the old Russian Empire recieve equal rights, and the right to self-determination).

This inicial period right after the Revolution is known as "soviet democracy".

These decrees were very unpopular with the kulaks(rich landowners) and with businessmen, and with the bad living conditions of the Russian people, the Bolsheviks end up losing the elections, ending up in second place with only 25% of the votes. However, they refuse to leave the government, and with the existing resistence against Bolshevism, a civil war breaks out, between the Whites, oposition to the Bolsheviks and suported by France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, and the Reds, composed of the very disciplined and cohesive Red Army, organized by Leon Trotsky.

With this climate of civil war, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat happens in a very violent matter. Requisition of part of the agricultural production for the army, nationalizations, forced labour from 16 to 50 year olds, alongside increased working hours, mass education of the illiterate masses, and the Red Terror, with the creation of a political police, the Tcheka.

This period of repression during the civil war became known as "war communism".

Before the First World War the Russian economy was way behind the rest of Europe. After the First World War and the civil war, it was left in complete run. Not wanting to build Socialism atop rotten foundation, Vladimir Lenin decided to strategicaly take a step back into Capitalism, in a very limited and controled way, as means of developing the country.

The repressive measures of war communism were lessened, such as the abolishment of obligatory work; The colectivization process was suspended, farmers were allowed to sell their surpluss products, and small businesses were privatized.

These measures led to a slow modernization and revitalization of the Russian economy, but it also placed the Bolshevik's communist values at risk, with the rise of the kulaks(rich farmers) and the nepmen(rich merchants).

These measures were known as the New Economic Program, NEP.

The mass brutality and death caused by the First World War created a large feeling of pessimism and doubt across ALL previous social norms and beliefs, acelerating the already going on changes. Most notably was with Feminism, in two different ways. One relating to social norms. Women began going out, wearing looser and shorter clothing, participating in sports, and cutting their hair. The other way is the fight for equal rights, specificaly the right to own property, acess to education, right to work, and right to vote.

Changes and advancements also occured in technology and science. More acessible cars, plane rides and the creation of the telephone united the world in many ways. Mass media such as the press or radio homogenized hobbies, values and behaviours. And there were many new scientific discoveries, such as the Theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics and even the way the human mind works(by the famous incest guy Freud)

Many changes occured in the arts too, with new vanguardist and modernist art styles being progressively created, that go against the traditional Realist art forms: Fauvism, that sees colour as more important that shape; Expressionism, that focuses on portraying emotions; Cubism, analytic cubism that focuses on decomposing shapes into gemoetric ones, and synthetic cubism that focuses on recreating shapes with random materials; Abstracionism, believes that shapes and colours have their own expressive meaning; Futurism, focus a lot on portraying speed and modernity; Dadaism, rejects art itself, creating "anti-art", in very absurdist ways; Surrealism, uses art as means to project the unconscious, heavily based on Freud's(famous incest guy) mind theories.

[unwilting]

However, if instead of remaining at the phenomenal level of property forms and market relations Capital is approached in terms of its delineation of the time-determination that grounds capitalism, the relation between racism and the logic of capital appears in a different light. Central to this is chapter 10 of Volume One ofCapital on ‘The Working Day.’ Here we find Marx’s famous declaration, ‘Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’ The statement has been heralded by many Marxists as a sign of Marx’s sensitivity to anti-Black racism while being downplayed by critics of Marxism as a rhetorical flourish that is undermined by his privileging the industrial proletariat as the ‘universal’ class that leads everyone else to liberation. What tends to be overlooked by many on either side of the debate is that the chapter on the Working Day was not composed until 1866, shortly before the publication of Volume One; no version of it appears in the earlier drafts of Capital. This indicates that the impact of the U.S. Civil War, climaxed by Blacks fleeing the plantations in what Du Bois called nothing less than a ‘mass general strike’, finally led Marx to devote a chapter of his greatest theoretical work to the question ‘when does my working day begin and when does it end?’

Marx himself argued that ‘so long as the determination of value by working time is itself left “undetermined”, as it is with Ricardo, it does not make people shaky. But as soon as it is brought exactly into connection with the working day and its variations, a very unpleasant new light dawns upon them’. Marx explicitly states in chapter 10 that the freedom struggles of former Black slaves is such a new stage in the fight for freedom that it inspired white workers to take up the fight for an eight-hour workday, as witnessed by the formation of the General Congress of Labour in August 1866 in Baltimore. It wasn’t the struggles of the industrial proletariat that paved the way for the emancipation of Black slaves; on the contrary, it was the self-activity of former Black slaves that breathed new life into a previously dormant class struggle. This had Marx’s ear, and it led him to incorporate issues of race and racism into his critique of capital on a level that is not found in his earlier work. He calls attention to, “Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind […] in its blind and measureless drive [capital] usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body…. Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labor power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labor power that it can set into motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labor power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility’…”

A page later he writes, “It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in then tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that Negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race.” Marx here poses race-based slavery in the Americas as internal to the dynamics of capital accumulation, which hinges on extracting the greatest amount of surplus value in the fewest hours of time. And he is indeed referring to surplusvalue – not simply a surplusproduct of use-values, since he invokes ‘annual profits’ based on ‘the capital of plantations.’ Moreover, Marx infers that the American system of race-based slavey is not an archaic hangover of a precapitalist past that impedes the development of a ‘higher’ and ‘more efficient’ mode of production, since he calls it ‘the most effective economy’ when it comes to maximising profits. If this is often overlooked, it is because it is easy to conflate Marx’s discussion of precapitalist slave modes of production – in which labour power is not commodified and production is aimed at augmenting use-values instead of exchange value – with the form assumed by slavery in the Americas, which was integral to the accumulation of capital based on a global division of labor.

“In the second type of colonies – plantations – where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitalist and landowner. And the elemental existence of the land confronting capital and labour does not offer any resistance to capital investment, hence none to the competition between capitals.’” — Johnson rightly asks, ‘If slavery was not capitalist how do we explain its commercial character’. Clearly, if American slavery was not capitalist we could not account for its commercial character. But Marx never denied that capitalism existed prior to industrial capitalism, even though the latter was the focus of his critique. The ‘excrescence of money changers and cotton factors in southern cities who yearly handled millions and millions of pounds of foreign exchange’ and ‘the thriving slave markets at the centre of their cities where prices tracked those that were being paid for cotton thousands of miles away’, which Johnson says demonstrates the commercial character of U.S. slavery, did not signify for Marx (unlike Fox-Genovese) that U.S. slavery was exogenous to capitalism. To be sure, there is no capital without wage labour, and no wage labour without capital; a society exclusively defined by slave labour is not and cannot be capitalist. However, nothing prevents slave labour, especially in its most racialised forms, from augmenting capital in a society whose ‘general creative basis’ is wage labour. Roman slavery could neither create nor augment capital because the conditions of generalised wage labour did not exist. American slavery could and did augment capital since it operated in the context of a capitalist world market in which wage labour generally prevailed as its ‘creative basis’. The same goes for racialised forms of violent social control that followed the end of chattel slavery.

What ‘makes labor abstract’ is adhering to socially necessary time: labor becomes ‘homogenous’ insofar as it conforms to a universal time determination, as represented by the ticking of the factory clock. And it is precisely this which accentuates differences between workers: some adhere to the average, others do not; the latter are sooner or later dispensed with and/or deprived of the benefits that others possess, since in capital’s view any hour of labor performed in excess of the social average (which is communicated to the agents of social production through the laws of competition) creates no value. There are many reasons why some enterprises conform to the dictates of socially necessary labor time better than others: it could be the quantity and quality of labor-saving devices, the skill or education of the workers, the level of social cohesion among workers that enables them to resist overwork and speed-up, etc. Although an array of contingencies determines whether or not enterprises follow the law of value, they are compelled to follow this singular law. Race and gender play a critical role in this. If making use of socially-inscribed differences can pump out greater output in less relative units of time, so much the better from capital’s standpoint. The utilisation and reproduction of difference poses no barrier to the homogenising power of abstract labor, so long as they meet the requirements of value production. It is one reason that the majority of factory workers in the world today are young women – gender discrimination tends to lower wage rates while expending the bodies and lives of young women boosts profit rates. It is also why capital sees to it that Blacks are the last hired and first fired – racial discrimination acts as a disciplinary agent in forcing greater output from the most marginalised while enabling many white workers to feel relatively privileged even as they come under increasing pressure from capital’s time constraints. Capital relies no less on the reproduction of national and ethnic difference – as in employing immigrant workers speaking over a dozen different languages in a single enterprise (as in many meatpacking plants in the U.S.) in order to make it harder for them to come together to fight for better conditions. There is nothing in Marx’s concept of abstract labor that suggests that all concrete laboring activities become the same or that social differentiations become washed away. On the contrary, abstract labor in Marx’s theory as well as in life is productive of difference. In this sense, Roediger is correct in writing, ‘we have too often forgotten [John R.] Common’s suggestion that the hurrying and pushing could be chronically infected by playing races against each other.’ We need only add that this ‘hurrying and pushing’ is part and parcel of the disciplinary power of socially necessary labor time, which serves as the inner core of Marx’s theory of value and surplus value.

The clock is set according to the dictates of value production – the drive to conform to the socially necessary labour time that it takes to produce a commodity on the world market. No matter who you are, worker or capitalist, the law of value confronts you as a person apart, as an ‘alien spirit’. As a result, the effort to achieve reconciliation with the political community breaks down – as does the quest for recognition in the earlier section on self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is because capitalism is governed by an abstract form of domination, abstract universal labour time, which can hear no apology. There can be no recognition between an individual and an impersonal time determination that employs them. The moreabstract becomes capital’s dominance, as all aspects of work and everyday life are compelled to conform to socially necessary labour time, the harder it is to achieve even the pretense of formal recognition. In a word, the logic of capital ultimately undermines its contractual form of appearance.

…while the proletariat remains the universal class, insofar as no other class is capable of resolving the contradictions of civil society, it is not the universalsubject.

[milkboydotnet]

Christians for National Liberation Statement on International Labor Day

Renmin Malaya | Spokesperson | Christians for National Liberation (CNL)

May 01, 2024

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”

2 Corinthians 4:8-9

The Christians for National Liberation (CNL), the underground revolutionary political organization of Christians, salutes the world’s working peoples as they struggle against multiple crises including neoliberal attacks on livelihood, nature, and sovereignty, state fascism, wars of aggression, and environmental destruction. We commend the efforts of the proletariat in their fight against imperialism and all forms of reaction. In the Philippines, we celebrate their courage and determination in waging the national democratic revolution with a socialist perspective through protracted people’s war. Workers and other toiling people battle against US imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and feudalism.

The worsening crisis of world monopoly capitalism has brought never before suffering on the proletariat and other oppressed peoples. The inherent contradictions within capitalist and monopoly capitalist systems lead to the destruction of productive forces and the need to conquer and exploit new markets. Especially in the global South, this has meant a race to the bottom for wages, the destruction of trade unions, and greater immiseration for the working class.

The looming threat of the US-China conflict casts a shadow over the Filipino people, who already face worsening economic conditions due to the chronic crisis of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial system. Farmers struggle against land monopolies and encounter armed security forces and goons hired by the landed class. Amid the drought induced by El Niño, the government’s utter neglect of farmers’ needs leads to widespread water shortages and hunger.

Workers endure exploitation through illegal dismissals and flexible working arrangements to extract super profits from their labor; and repression, including extrajudicial killings. Wages remain low while the prices of basic goods and services soar. Jeepney drivers face challenges from Public Utility Vehicle (PUV) modernization, which threatens their livelihoods.

But these persistent crises, this same monstrous imperialist system—fueling exploitation and oppression—engenders revolutionary resistance led by the proletariat. The inherent contradictions within capitalist and monopoly capitalist systems (social character of production against the private ownership of the means of production) create conditions and opportunities for workers and other marginalized groups to rise against the status quo. The worsening conditions of exploitation and oppression not only make the armed revolution just and necessary but urgent. Painstaking efforts must be made to recover hard-fought democratic rights and trade unions destroyed by state fascism, neoliberalism, and local reaction.

CNL as an allied member organization of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, conducts and supports all efforts to bring church people and other middle forces to embrace the cause of the proletariat and their historic mission of defeating capitalism and building socialism.

CNL contributes to strengthening the worker-peasant alliance by influencing the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie to form a strategic alliance in the revolutionary united front. Members champion workers’ rights and promote political work within reactionary institutions. Members stand against US imperialist warmongering and militarization advocate for the lives of the Filipino people, and organize in support of the liberation struggle. Members stand against China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea.

In the words of the great proletarian revolutionary leader Prof. Jose Maria Sison, “In the continuing era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution, the role of the proletariat is to turn imperialist wars to revolutionary civil wars and build socialism cannot be underestimated and should be upheld and carried out by the broad masses of the exploited and oppressed peoples. The upsurge of anti-imperialist and democratic mass struggles and the perseverance in people’s wars for national and social liberation are the prelude to the resurgence of the world proletarian-socialist revolution. In this decade and the next decade, the proletariat and its revolutionary forces must work and fight for this resurgence.”

As we reflect on International Labor Day, the revolutionary determination of the Filipino working class remains strong. Fight until total victory!

Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army! Long live the National Democratic Front of the Philippines! Long live the Christians for National Liberation! Long live the National Democratic Revolution with Socialist Perspective! Long live the proletariat and the workers movement!

[jaijaicontextualstudies2001]

Statement of Modernity Graphic Design Project

I have taken a few aspects from 'The Communist Manifesto' (Engel and Marx, 1984) in terms of the development of a capitalistic system for my graphic design project. Additionally, I am going to convey the changes the industrial revolution formed landscapes - the increase in urban dwellings to rural - and in some aspects how the 'Proletariat' have been affected by this change (Engel and Marx, 1984). For this piece, I want to depict my idea through silhouette stop-motion animation; a sort of animation Lotte Reiniger pioneered in the early 1920s.

The animation starts off with a cat sitting on a fence, looking at the farm it works on. The cat jumps down from the fence when see hears a rat squeaking. As her duty being a farm cat, he chases after the rat thinking nothing of it. Little does he know that this isn't a rat he normally finds on the farm, but a city rat! When she does capture the rat, he is outside a city, something he has never seen before. Being a cat, he gets curious to what this place is, and decides to explore. It doesn't take long for the crammed and noisy streets to overwhelm the poor farm cat, and in desperation he runs into a factory. The animation cuts with the cat left inside, his fate unknown which leads the viewer to form their own outcome of her story.

The farm cat is symbolism for the farmers and other workers that lived in rural lands. When the cat chases the city rat it is metaphorical for workers from the countryside going after work that is in the city (which lead to an increase in population in cities during the course of the industrial revolution, and in turn increased the size of cities, spilling into what was once countryside). What is interesting about my piece, which may go unnoticed, is when the cat captures the rat it is foreshadowing for her own capture in the factory at the end of the animation. One can argue that her fate left unknown in a factory mirrors the foreboding, misery and oppression the Proletariat workers endured when the Bourgeoise 'reigned' over them(Engel and Marx, 1984).

[disgruntledexplainer]

20th century commies be like "WE WILL START A WORKERS REVOLUTION TO OVERTHROW THE OPPRESSIVE BOURGEOISIE, AND MAKE EVERYONE EQUAL!" only to replace the bourgeoisie with an equally oppressive hereditary political elite who get luxury apartments and all the food they could want when the actual working class starve.

21st century commies be like "WE WILL START A PROLETARIAT REVOLUTION TO OVERTHROW THE OPPRESSIVE BOURGEOISIE, AND MAKE EVERYONE EQUAL!", but then inexplicably redefine proletariat to exclude blue-collar workers and farmers.

is it so much to ask for the supposed "champions of the workers" to actually care about workers? 'cause so far all i'm seeing is a level of hypocrisy which would make a southern baptist preacher blush.

[daffodilhorizon]

thinking about when i read Das Kapital how Marx was just like Uhh so animals are just lifeless tools basically, the same as how the Bourgious want to treat the proletariat btw like it’s right there it’s literally right there the animals are literally just our comrades who lack speaking ability and have different physical forms than us They can’t be commodities because marx calls commodities “things without power of resistance”, but living animals have to be dehorned and chained to be forced into those pens. they chained the animals first to make them worker slaves, how can you ignore the parallels? They don’t care if you’re living or dead, human or nonhuman, child or adult, they will find a way to exploit you. Actual quote from Das Kapital: “That in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited” Wow, literally exactly what happens to animal bodies over and over he describes how the cheapest labour (”unskilled”, women’s, childrens) must be used for capitalists to wring the most $ from their investments in the means of production but somehow ignores the cheapest slave labour of all, that of nonhumans And since capital can only be accumulated via exploitation, that means by DEFINITION every single animal product is unethical and should be avoided, because it’s made with the very worst exploitation. Are you really a communist if you’re reinforcing the suffering instead of stopping it? This isn’t a case of being forced to buy a good to live. This is a choice of buying something (more expensive than beans, i might add) the World Health Organization tells you to avoid because it’s a health risk and came at the cost of immense human and nonhuman suffering, including literally death. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony, of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole” - Das Kapital Stop supporting Animal Corpse Profiteers. Actual medical experts agree corpsemeat is a carcinogen and most people are actually lactose intolerant, yet these companies are so powerful they just hide all the science. They hide the fact that 77% of our agricultural land is being used for just 18% of calories from animals. We could reforest the earth and start healing our habitats, but that wouldn’t be profitable to them. They hide that their corpse farms produce twice as many emissions than crops do for human consumption. They hide that farmers have legal exemptions to bestiality laws because what they’re doing to animals is legally rape otherwise. They hide the fact that they place polluting animal farms in sacrifice zones, which are mostly marginalized areas. They pretend honeybees need help, when the honeybees are actually the ones crowding out much more efficient native pollinators like native bees and bats. They lie and say vegans are somehow destroying the agave plant when people have been using agave for tequila for far longer than agave has even been marketed to vegans as a plant based sweetener. They even paper over the fact that they’re destroying indigenous protected amazon rainforest for meat capitalists and taking away actual human homes to feed you dead bodies. And instead of pushing back, “communists” believe these corporate propaganda! From companies whose explicit goal is simply to take more money from your pockets regardless of the cruelty or pollution involved. Communists should know, the only thing companies care about is Capital. And yet, you’re literally giving them money instead of hitting them where it hurts.

[abramsjahki]

Fieldwork 10

Karl Marx seen the evolution of the social class as worker and boss. In which he called Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, believed that the capital class was in possession of everything needed to succeed such as factories, land, and tools. With everything being owned by the capital class this left the working class with nothing and the need to work for the capitalists. The Bourgeoisie would pay wages to the Proletariant in exchange for their labor. This article talks about how after getting their independence, farmers are barely making to stay up float. This unfortunately led to hundreds of thousands turning to taking their own life.

When I heard Max Weber ideology of prestige in social class, I instantly thought of the royal family. Weber believed the higher your reputation and influence, the higher you were in social class. The Monarch of England has been around fro hundreds of years, they are biggest in prestige and have access to resources easier than "ordinary people" do not have access to. This article talks more about how the royal family and what kind of pedestal they were held at.

Pierre Bourdieu believed that the education system did not push for equality amongst students in regards of their social class but instead recycled the same wealthy families within their institutions. We see it in movies where the dumb rich kid is in a pristine school due to their families wealth or prestige. This is not only seen in movies; the rich really do use their money to put their kids through college and other private schools. As any parent wants they want their kids to get the best education, but I'm not pointing the blame towards the families, the blame gets thrown to the schools that disregard equality and boundlessly take the rich's money to fill their pockets. The seat someone who really deserves it may be taken by the rich, or maybe the rich seats were already reserved.

[pinnockarulan]

Class and Inequality

Karl Marx

Karl Marx believed that there were only 2 distinct classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie refers to the upper class in society who own the means of production (factories, machines, financial capital, etc. needed to produce things). While the proletariat refers to the working class who sold their labor (to the bourgeoisie) in exchange for wages. Marx recognized labor as the "key source of value and profit in the marketplace" (Cultural Anthropology 3rd edition). Not to be confused with the concept of rich and poor, Marx's 2 classes simply distinguish between the owner of means of production and the working class. For example, small business owners and farmers would be considered bourgeoisie, because they own means of production. The article that I found discusses a group of call center workers who decided to go on strike. These workers experienced unfair wages and working conditions, claiming that their pay was too low and the workload was too stressful. The workers expressed that they were far more than just call center representatives, and explained that they played multiple roles including counselors. One specific worker described a very tough call that she received in which the customer expressed her intent to commit suicide, therefore displaying why they deserve higher pay. This strike is an example of Karl Marx's theory because it demonstrates the proletariat (call center workers) using their power (labor) to receive fair conditions in the workplace. Although the proletariat may seem like they have no power in comparison to the bourgeoisie, when they do things such as go on strike, they leave the bourgeoisie no choice but to listen to their demands. If the proletariat stop working, how will society succeed?

Max Weber

Similar to Marx, Weber had the same views in regard to economic stratification, but with his theory added the concepts of power and prestige. Weber recognizes the idea that the influence that people may have on others due to their reputation or occupation. Max Weber's theory focuses on the 3 P's: power, property, and prestige, if an individual has one of the P's, it is relatively easy to obtain the others. The article that I found is about our former president, Donald Trump, who is an example of a person whose occupation allowed them to have a huge influence on others. In multiple instances, Donald Trump used his presidential powers to coerce his followers to do certain things, in this case, storm the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021. This article discusses the way in which Trump urged his supporters to storm the capitol and to "fight like hell". Considering Trump's large influence due to his presidential power, his supporters took his words quite literally, as the rally transformed into a violent mob. Trump's action of inciting an insurrection represents a powerful individual abusing their power to influence others, therefore proving Weber's theory.

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu's theory has three main concepts: social reproduction, social mobility, and cultural capital. Specifically, with the article I found, I will be focusing on the element of cultural capital. Cultural capital refers to the "knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from the family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society" (Cultural Anthropology 3rd edition). According to Bourdieu, there are three types of cultural capital: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. The article that I discovered focuses on an example of embodied cultural capital, one's accent/dialect, and how it affects them regarding job opportunities. Through research, it has been found that individuals with foreign accents typically face discrimination at job interviews. Not only does a certain accent affect your job opportunities, but also the heaviness of your accent as well. Those with heavier accents are more likely to be disqualified from positions, such as those which require public speaking or general verbal communication. One's accent may also cause hiring managers to underestimate an individual's qualifications for a job, regardless of their true abilities. The findings of this article prove Bourdieu's theory regarding cultural capital, as it plays a role in one's status/power within society.