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#i just keep thinking about engels’ explanation of social murder
palms-upturned · 1 year
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#meg talks#suicide tw#nearly everyone i care abt rn is like so very suicidal rn and it’s making me. ghghfh#(IMPORTANT NOTE this is not me saying ‘’don’t talk to me abt suicide rn’’ i do not ever mind talking abt it ever ever#i am not ranting rn about not being able to handle the subject or complaining abt ppl talking to me abt it that’s not what this is i prommy)#im just. the realization that there are ppl who go their whole lives without ever thinking that much abt suicide#and then there’s those of who are disabled and/or queer and for us it’s just. a constant#for ourselves for our loved ones for ppl on the periphery of our circles like everyone we brush shoulders with#the amount of time we have to spend talking ourselves and others into just staying a while longer#bc it’s so fucking hard to conceptualize a future for ourselves for so many reasons#and even harder to make that future viable bc it depends on other people helping us#it just makes me want to fucking. idk! break something!#like how do you make people understand this if they’ve never been through it#and how do you convince them that it’s worth it to try and understand where we’re coming from#when their default way of thinking abt it is that you only get to this point if u do smth wrong or just don’t try hard enough#or are some kind of moocher trying to exploit ppl who ‘’work harder’’#i fucking hate this so much#i just keep thinking about engels’ explanation of social murder#and getting so angry i feel fucking ill#people are fucking killing my friends and it’s like all i can do is like…#try my best to plug whatever wounds i can manage meanwhile the killer is still fucking stabbing them over and over#anyway. god. again none of this is to say i don’t wanna hear abt suicide or anything#i like to know and be able to talk abt it frankly#especially if there’s even the smallest thing i can do to help#im just like. suddenly hit w the disbelief of how many ppl go their whole lives without having these conversations#while me and my friends are having them multiple times a day bc it’s so fucking bad out here#insert disco elysium quote about the mask of humanity falling from capital as it kills your sweet courageous friends here i guess.#i just. wish things were better. how can people not wish that
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dagwolf · 6 years
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Well I mean, any organization and ideology, whether political or otherwise, (not just unions) is all about supremacy. Otherwise how could they ensure their stated goals are met and maintained, and that they themselves maintain and keep enough power to keep their goals achieved? So first and foremost they're concerned with their own supremacy. And usually greed of money to keep and maintain it. If you support any kind of political party, or organization, or ideology, then you support supremacy.
1. Well I mean, any organization and ideology, whether political or otherwise, (not just unions) is all about supremacy. 
No. I think you might want to start (here) and then go on to study the history of ideology as a concept. The entry on “Law and Ideology” at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I’ve linked to is pretty good. I’m an anarchist but come from a Marxist background and so I really connect with something like this:
[F]or Marx and Engels, it is the exploitative and alienating features of capitalist economic relations that prompt ideas they dub ‘ideology.’ Ideology only arises where there are social conditions such as those produced by private property that are vulnerable to criticism and protest; ideology exists to protect these social conditions from attack by those who are disadvantaged by them. Capitalist ideologies give an inverted explanation for market relations, for example, so that human beings perceive their actions as the consequence of economic factors, rather than the other way around, and moreover, thereby understand the market to be natural and inevitable. 
I think you might be interested in Althusser’s work on “The Reproduction of Capitalism”. For me, Althusser’s writing on ideology was important. Although I agree with parts of it, I don’t like where he ends up, which is arguing for the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat to replace the ideologies and apparatuses that produce the bourgeois subject with the ideologies and apparatuses to produce communist subjects. I am anarchist in this way, not believing nor theorizing that we need to replace one state with another. In this way, you might begin to understand why I would completely disagree with your choice of words. Ideology and organization is not all about supremacy. 
For anarchists, this is important. Our organizing principles are well-considered and sometime complex (you’ll have to know your history, for sure,) but to participate in class struggle requires a willingness to participate in direct action and to cooperate with others in a way that maintains a consensus (about class struggle, the abolition of property and class) that permits social difference (at this time, many of us like to debate about what the society we’re planning will look like, wages or not, money or not, work or not, et al.) We also don’t like to socially imagine the communist subject via a heteronormative and patriarchal lens. Cooperation leads us to grapple with racism, nationalism, gender, xenophobia. We are into anti-hierarchical and anti-elitist modes of organization. Anyway,
2. Otherwise how could they ensure their stated goals are met and maintained, and that they themselves maintain and keep enough power to keep their goals achieved?
I don’t know what you imagine class struggle looks like, but I don’t think you’ve spent a lot of time considering what you imagine in context with some of these concepts: ideology, supremacy, power, and goals. Your claims about organization, on the other hand, say a lot. You imply that social groups possess “their own supremacy”. That’s utterly shit. It’s offensive shit. Working people, as a class, do not have their own supremacy; when workers organize in unions, they are not meeting the demands of their own supremacy. Workers are organizing in attempt to achieve what they earn through labor. Usually, this is a wage that permits them to afford to reproduce the daily conditions at work that their employers demand each day but also to afford food, shelter, health, and family. The power workers have in a union is that labor is the sine qua non for surplus value, investment, production, and so wealth. Working class power is unfortunately expressed in relation to the employing class because power is expressed via social relations. I hope I don’t have to continue with this, but when workers organize in a union, they are struggling for the basic necessities, throughout history, to be able to work. When the employing classes organize via the state against workers, they are always in a better position with more power because the workers in a union must rely on employers to come to the bargaining table. If they do not, the state has historically supported employers and the workers begin to individually suffer because they’re poor. Of course, we organize to better meet our goals. This is a practical matter, though, and has nothing to do with supremacy.
3. So first and foremost they’re concerned with their own supremacy. And usually greed of money to keep and maintain it. If you support any kind of political party, or organization, or ideology, then you support supremacy.
First and foremost, capitalists organize to more efficiently hoard wealth while workers organize to survive. I have no clue what you’re trying to get at with “greed of money” but let me remind you that the vast majority of the working masses have no money through which to express greed and to take working peoples’ desires to live happier and compose those desires of greediness or covetousness is fucking gross, never mind a conceptual error. Oh, and it’s ideological. Here’s some facts about social reality:
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The end of your response seems to find you calling for us to occupy a fictional middleground where we all can get along in spite of the existence of oppression. Class struggle, organized labor struggle, struggle against patriarchy, racism, nationalism, whiteness, heteronormativity, xenophobia, gender binarism, and so on, are all about overcoming oppression for the benefit of us all; on the other hand, struggle for the maintenance of power among the capitalist class and wealthiest members of society and their state apparatuses is not just about supremacy. It’s about the justification of bondage, slavery, racism, genocide, murder, imperialism, colonialism, police, and property. 
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