#impoverished workers

[meetingboy]

Jeff Bezos says he plans to give away most of his $124 billion fortune “but not until I finish impoverishing everyone who’s ever worked for me.”

[sentientsky]

just a friendly reminder that, just because slavery was formally "abolished" in the so-called united states* in 1865, enslavement itself is still ongoing in the form of incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people

(*i say "so-called" because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy) recommended readings/resources:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

"How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended" by Daniele Selby

"So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist" by Mariame Kaba

"The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism & Decarceration" from Democracy Now! [VIDEO]

[liesmyth]

by the way. there's no conceivable universe in which the FTL fleet that left Earth in NtN didn't have it incredibly rough.

I've said this before, but it bears reminding: they jumped blind, using untested technology, with NO supply lines back to earth and no concrete plans for a colony. they took ships that were supposed to stack 11 billion people canned in like sardines and nothing else and stocked them full with enough resources to live on for generations and somehow found a settlement, and that was before they had to rush the schedule because John was making noise about transparency and mask their actual launch as a trial run.

it wasn't a comfortable journey. I'd be very, very surprised if the total passenger count was higher than 10k people, for space/resources allocation reasons as well as for secrecy reasons. Every person on board was a mouth to feed, and their descendants, and their descendants. I've seen some people in fandom say stuff like "Of course they'd bring along servants! Rich wouldn't do chores!" and IMO that fundamentally misses the point.

This wasn't the space equivalent of a cruise liner, or the Titanic crossing the Atlantic with first-class quarters and third-class decks. This is the space equivalent of climate refugees crammed in 500 in a tiny fishboat crossing the sea with a non-insignificant chance of dying en route, after emptying their savings to pay for the trip. The fact that the people on board the FTL ships were once insanely rich doesn't mean they travelled in comfort.

This was a desperate last-chance trip, destination "anywhere but here", chances of survival unknown. Their privilege got them on the ships, but the moment they left Earth, that privilege ceased to exist; there was no way to enforce an existing social structure. This is why, again, I think there were no luxuries on board and absolutely definitely no servants - if you're about to willingly enter into complete social collapse, you don't WANT to bring people you regard as less than yourself, knowing that they will be your equals tomorrow.

I'm still convinced that half the fleet at least didn't make it out, and those who managed to found settlements were nearly wiped out multiple times at different points in history.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

some of you being like "any civilian killed in war time is a war crime" do not actually know what the legal term "war crime" means, but more importantly you seem to only care about certain causalities, whereas the poor Thai migrant farmhands getting slaughtered can go fuck themselves, apparently, because how dare they travel far from home, which is always a rural and poor area of Thailand, so that they can earn money to send back to their families, in most cases so that their children can go to college and escape the cycle of poverty.

but no! only one hash tag at a time as a thought in your brains.

[bayesic-bitch]

Standup comic, after saying the single most offensive thing you've ever heard in your entire life: Man, tough crowd tonight :/

[blueiight]

Lestat getting pissed at the tenor is his most sympathetic & most relatable trait ever cuz the shit i see called good music these days is unacceptable. the industry needs a culling whenever u ready& u out ur bog body comatose like state monsieur de lioncourt!

[curiousorigins]

So we all know about the older generation freaking out about the birth decline right? And that one of the reasons has been that they're worried about not enough people around to care for them in their old age.

(Hence one reason why supposedly there was a push to revoke Roe V. Wade because that would magically solve it. [even though lots of women died of birth related complications prior to Roe and now people are literally getting themselves sterilized to prevent that fate.])

But anyways, I have a new theory, it's about real estate. If people are truly dying faster at a significant rate than people are being born, then one, a lot of us will be inheriting property. Two, there may be an excess of real estate very soon, if birth decline trends continue.

What is one of the hardest things in a person's life to attain, property a place to live. Which has definitely been used to control people.

There's also a fact that real estate up until fairly recently was considered one of the safest ways of investing money. Most people would rather sell their home than not pay their mortgage.

What are the two ways that rich people make money without labor or control their workforce (if they're even business owners at all.)?

In interest, via people paying for their mortgages and in owning and renting property. Who's going to bother renting if there's a bunch of houses? How worthwhile will their many acres be if there's a ton of empty houses? Their land won't be gaining value just by existing in their names anymore.

If a true excess of houses happens, then the main money in real estate ventures will actually be in repairing them, maintaining them, and customizing them. All jobs that would be considered blue collar work that actually requires real labor.

The rich people paid various analysts to say that a declining birth rate would make the old people not get care (Which makes sense because the party that serves the richest also tends to be voted for via old people.) So they chose a fear that most of their voters would care about to take advantage of...

But yeah, it's about real estate and banks and not making interest anymore for doing nothing but holding onto resources. Also obviously the less people there are, the more valuable all laborers would be too. When there's more people than jobs, that's an employers market, right? They can lowball their workers and the workers have to go for it because they need a place to live and eat. Where there are more jobs than people, that's an employees market. Where the main negotiation actually favors them, because they are hopefully empowered to know that the company needs them more than they need that company.

[boysnberriespie]

“I don’t care that you broke your arm” but “I don’t care about your brand”

[sayruq]

Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabah reported on 5 May. The Provincial Directorate of Security's Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports. Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana. During searches at the suspects' residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized. Israel has long been at the center of what Bloomberg described in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.” The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.” The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed. Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2009, Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs. The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs. "'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied," wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location. Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man's body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets. Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives. The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place, but claimed, "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer." Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs. On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza. According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them. On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”

[caeliflammae]

i think it is absolutely wild how out of touch most americans are in terms of personal responsibility. the idea that your actions as an individual have absolutely no consequences???? absolutely insane to me. the perpetuation of individual responsibility for climate change has obviously been pushed by mega corporations who contribute far more than any of us as individuals, but that doesn't remove any responsibility you have as a westerner. like yes, all of us switching to metal or paper straws is not going to save the earth. does that mean you as an american no longer contribute to climate change? absolutely not. americans make up a very small fraction of the global population, and yet we create the vast majority of consumer waste. i really do think that a lot of young activists think that we just need to make corporations recycle more, when in reality the american/western way of life will need to be almost entirely eradicated if we want to reverse climate change. you don't get to have your consumerist society and eat it too, to put it poorly. electric cars arent going to fix everything, redesigning our infrastructure and drastically altering our way of lives is what is necessary. but yall are all so fucking comfortable that the idea of sacrificing any of these consumer goods to materially enrich the lives of people in the global south is unimaginable. for example, my mom is a pretty left leaning person. she really dislikes single use plastics, harsh chemicals, etc. yet when i tell her that her 10 amazon packages a month are actually harmful and she would be creating positive change in the world by simply going to the (very nearby) store and buying it, she almost short circuits. convenience is the devil.

[txttletale]

it is kind of disconcerting when self-proclaimed "leftists" adopt a fully liberal position on sex work where everyone is having the just-so fictional mutually beneficial transaction central to capitalist mythmaking. idk a lot of radfem propaganda is basically positioning themselves as the last bastion of real structural critique and i think you are just doing their work for them when your argument for why sex work should be legal is "well it's consensual because the sex worker is just choosing to have sex in exchange for money which is a win-win for everyone :)".

your defense of e.g. legal protections and destigmatization for sex workers (& your corollary critiques of legislation targeting them) needs to come from a position of demystification and desensationalizing sex-as-innately-different-to-all-other-forms-of-activity and treating them as what they are, which is workers who are being exploited and are in need of protections and safe working conditions. this is not incompatible & in fact should be perfectly compatible with recognizing simple marxist truths like that consenting to have sex when the alternative is starvation is inherently coercive--in the exact same way that all other wage labour is coercive.

acting like it is incompatible is literally just buying into the reactionary SWERF worldview that accepting that fact should lead you to support oppressive legislation and the intervention of the bourgeois state in ways that demonstrably impoverish, endanger, and immiserate sex workers & it is dismaying when people who self-identify with "the left" (whatever that means but thats a different conversation) cannot formulate a (vital & necessary!) defense of sex workers and their interests and safety without falling back on obviously untrue liberal truisms.

[lafemmemacabre]

The most marginalized of white people will often be some of the most embarrassingly, vitriolically racist ones, even if they refuse to admit so to themselves and see their own racism as somehow Radical and Common Sense.

This isn't only about white trans women at all. Anyone who's followed me for a while knows I have a tremendous soft spot for anyone disabled, with an emphasis on those of us who're physically disabled, very much including disabled white people, and I've seen this pattern perpetuated by them as much as any other group of considerably marginalized people who happen to be white.

It's like you all know whiteness is your only lifesaver within our current social structure and instead of using it to help bring as many people to safety like an actual ally would (the only safety that would guarantee yours too long-term), you use it as a last ditch attempt at ingratiating yourselves with less marginalized fellow white people.

This is a historical pattern. White gays do it, white trans people do it, white women do it, white disabled people do it, ethnic white people do it, impoverished white people do it, white substance users do it, white sex workers do it, fat white people do it...

It's why poc keep saying that in the end, white people are white first and anything else comes after. It's not because there's a bridge impossible to cross or like white people are biologically incapable of not throwing poc under the bus.

It's that, 9/10 at best, marginalized white people will choose to lick the boots of white power for a thin and often delusional hope of climbing the power hierarchy ladder, instead of extending a hand in solidarity to people of color who're similarly oppressed, let alone people of color they don't have something in common with.

It's futile, though. Kissing ass to more powerful white people might save you for five minutes, but since you're not gaining your safety by addressing the root cause - instead gaining it by throwing those who should be your comrades in struggle under the bus - once all of those similarly marginalized poc have been sacrificed for a taste of safety or status, who do you think they'll come for next? Who do you think they'll direct their misogyny/transphobia/ableism/homophobia/etc towards once you're the only targets for it left?

I hope you're ready for it all once it inevitably happens.

[apas-95]

i think ultimately it doesn't matter how you personally feel about these people dying. socially they are our enemies, and socially the rescue effort towards them was a demonstration of the stratification that exists between them and us. at the same time the navies of the capitalist nations mounted massive expeditions in favour of a handful of their ruling class, they also consigned hundreds of impoverished global-south workers to a cold, watery grave. we can all wish that if we were lost at sea, there would be rescue sent for us, but their rescuers are not meant for us. as a human, the idea of any person suffocating in a dark metal tube horrifies me, and I'm sure their families weep. but again, it doesn't matter how I personally feel - this isn't personal. on a societal level, on a *class* level, these people are our enemies. let our enemies commemorate them, and let us work to stop them from killing more of us.

[mikakuna]

the fact that jason shared food with other hungry and homeless people when he was catatonic makes me feel so many emotions.

for one, it's so true to his character as a compassionate boy who gets so rightfully angry about the struggles impoverished communities have to continually face due to society's failures. this is the same boy who was homeless for about three years of his childhood, had to steal to survive, probably went long periods without food, and knew firsthand what it's like to actually be lonely. he's the boy who got mad at bruce for even insinuating he would drop jason off with the cops or social workers because he knew their true natures and how they treated poor kids, people, like him.

jason has always been about protecting and defending children and the defenceless to the point of disregarding moralities. we see this in his 80s robin run, as well as in utrh and lost days. his unmoving stance on their well-being is what's so captivating about him. he kills to protect children and easily agreed with/excused a woman who killed a rapist when he himself was only around 12-15 yrs old. sure, a bunch of people would agree with jason's reaction but it's especially important because he's a kid who grew up poor. he witnessed firsthand how many women have to suffer sexually at the hands of men to get by.

this is the real jason todd that so many comic writers now fail to capture in their comics. they completely turn him around and have him do things that in no way make sense to his character (not surprising since some literally admitted to hating him/not knowing enough about his robin run). jason todd is insanely compassionate-- that's his thing. he's empathetic to a fault. why erase that core part of his character?

[qweerhet]

so much criticism of anarchist mutual aid frameworks rests on the idea that we're actively arguing for a switch. that we're saying we should, right now, tear down the global supply chain ourselves, that we're arguing for a morally-obligated societal shift motivated by revolutionary forces. i won't deny that there are those out there who have that framework, but to be entirely honest, that's much more common as a framework in state-communist and liberal povs than it is anarchist ones.

most anarchists heavily involved in establishing mutual aid networks are saying society as we know it will fail. not that it should, not that it's our ethical responsibility to force it to fail, but that it simply will.

we cannot rely on the global supply chain forever. we in the imperial core cannot rely on extracting resources from impoverished and colonized nations forever. pandemics will happen, natural disasters will happen, violent uprisings will happen; the way we extract and distribute resources is dangerously precarious, it's resting on horrific amounts of oppression and violence and a lot of carefully-stacked factors any one of which could go catastrophically wrong at any moment, and it will fail eventually.

the global supply chain will be disrupted. mining operations will fail, disease will throw wrenches in the cogs of industry, workers will organize, slaves will violently revolt, waterways will be blocked, climate change will change when and how it's even possible to do physical labor. eventually, the supply chain will be disrupted permanently, or in ways that we cannot come back from. it is an inevitability.

anarchists in the imperial core want real, on-the-ground, local solutions to resource production and distribution because we need those if we don't want our neighbors to die when this happens. we want to make insulin and distribute it in the same twenty-mile radius because we don't want diabetics to die when the global supply chain collapses. we want to sew and distribute clothing locally because we don't want children to freeze without winter coats when the global supply chain collapses. whether it happens in 10 years or in 200 years, we want to protect as many people as possible.

don't you see? don't you see? when you mock "bathtub insulin," you're mocking the only way the diabetics of the future have a chance of surviving. i'm disabled, i rely on daily medication, i know the thought is terrifying, but if our way of life breaks down in my lifetime, i will be lost without local under-the-table medication manufacturing. don't you see? we love you. we want to you live. we're begging you, help each other live.

[rainesol]

Neige is so based it’s unbelievable. He saw the VDC and thought ‘How can I make this about blue collar workers?’

This dude grew up impoverished, got famous, sung a deeply culturally significant song about the working class to a live tv audience and then donated ALL OF THE WINNINGS to charity. He was so real for that.