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—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.

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marxism is an ideology that can and does account for itself and if you think it doesn't, I'm sorry someone was vulgar about infrastructure-superstructure relations and their influence on class consciousness

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I fucking hate being transfeminized sometimes because it turns out it makes being a proletarian way harder

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I've been struggling to navigate the internet and filter through anti- socialist propaganda while looking for stats/ news on socialist countries. For example, I was trying to look into Cuban healthcare and i kid you not EVERY single article was "yeah the cubans have good healthcare but do yk they use equipment from the 50s" "yeah the cubans have a healthcare ranked at 27th overall by the GHS but at what cost??? Their doctors are underpaid!!!" "yeah the cubans have around 8 doctors per 1000 people and opposed to 2:1000 in the US but do you Know they're all stupid and uneducated??" and it's just so fucking infuriating and blatantly racist that they just CANNOT report on this news without a conspicuous "bUT lOok aT the DarK unDerBeLlY oF tHiS sYsTEM" in the headline. Anyways, I was wondering how you find informations and articles that are less "yeah X socialist country did this good thing but it's all gonna come crashing down any moment now guys i swear". I'm sorry if this wasn't very coherent

Socialist countries publish their own news, for one. If you don't want bourgeois spin, you have to go outside of bourgeois media.

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Back when i worked i spent 8 hours packaging chicken skewers and the first day i was so exhausted that i couldn't stop shaking and whenever i closed my eyes to sleep i kept seeing chicken skewers and i couldn't get the smell out of my clothes so i did my best to picture images of The Beatles instesd but they kept fading & turned into chicken skewers like in some horrible nightmare and i was miserable

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I like it when everyone gathers to celebrate whenever the Tel Aviv colony gets bombed

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You really, really don't need to be cheerleading Disney and Universal here. It honestly doesn't matter how much you dislike AI art — if the court rules in favor of the corporations, the implicit expansion of copyright law will do a million times more harm to the arts than fucking Midjourney ever could.

Like. There is no definition of copyright that does not permit AI training, but does permit fanworks. The latter is much more clearly derivative than the former. You do fanart? Fanfic? Disney's pointing a gun squarely at your head and you're cheering because it might hit the AI artists behind you too.

And beyond that, do you know what happens to AI generation if Disney/Universal win this? They aren't opposed to the technology in principle! They'll be able to use their exclusive rights to a vast corpus of art to make their own AI, for their own purposes. Who does this help? Companies who want to reduce employment costs and disenfranchise the working artist. Who does this hurt? Well, it hurts independent AI users. Congrats, your anxiety over commission prices is gone now, not that it was well-founded to begin with. It also hurts anyone who wants to make use of fair use doctrine forever, so I hope none of what you were selling was fanart of copyrighted characters.

I've never made a secret of being rather more open to generative AI as a technology than most people in these online spheres. But for fuck's sake, you really don't need to like AI to realize that this lawsuit's success would be a terrible thing to happen to art! If you've found yourself on the same side as Disney, that should be a clue that you might wanna review your thinking!

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genuinely curious but I don't know how to phrase this in a way that sounds less accusatory so please know I'm asking in good faith and am just bad at words

what are your thoughts on the environmental impact of generative ai? do you think the cost for all the cooling system is worth the tasks generative ai performs? I've been wrangling this because while I feel like I can justify it as smaller scales, that would mean it isn't a publicly available tool which I also feel uncomfortable with

the environmental impacts of genAI are almost always one of three things, both by their detractors and their boosters:

vastly overstated

stated correctly, but with a deceptive lack of context (ie, giving numbers in watt-hours, or amount of water 'used' for cooling, without necessary context like what comparable services use or what actually happens to that water)

assumed to be on track to grow constantly as genAI sees universal adoption across every industry

like, when water is used to cool a datacenter, that datacenter isn't just "a big building running chatgpt" -- datacenters are the backbone of the modern internet. now, i mean, all that said, the basic question here: no, i don't think it's a good tradeoff to be burning fossil fuels to power the magic 8ball. but asking that question in a vacuum (imo) elides a lot of the realities of power consumption in the global north by exceptionalizing genAI as opposed to, for example, video streaming, or online games. or, for that matter, for any number of other things.

so to me a lot of this stuff seems like very selective outrage in most cases, people working backwards from all the twitter artists on their dashboard hating midjourney to find an ethical reason why it is irredeemably evil.

& in the best, good-faith cases, it's taking at face value the claims of genAI companies and datacenter owners that the power usage will continue spiralling as the technology is integrated into every aspect of our lives. but to be blunt, i think it's a little naive to take these estimates seriously: these companies rely on their stock prices remaining high and attractive to investors, so they have enormous financial incentives not only to lie but to make financial decisions as if the universal adoption boom is just around the corner at all times. but there's no actual business plan! these companies are burning gigantic piles of money every day, because this is a bubble

so tldr: i don't think most things fossil fuels are burned for are 'worth it', but the response to that is a comprehensive climate politics and not an individualistic 'carbon footprint' approach, certainly not one that chooses chatgpt as its battleground. genAI uses a lot of power but at a rate currently comparable to other massively popular digital leisure products like fortnite or netflix -- forecasts of it massively increasing by several orders of magnitude are in my opinion unfounded and can mostly be traced back to people who have a direct financial stake in this being the case because their business model is an obvious boondoggle otherwise.

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violent revolution has famously never brought about change in the social relations of production. feudalism didnt emerge from slave society because of slave revolts, it emerged because slaves asked nicely to be liberated. capitalism didnt emerge from feudalism because of capitalist revolution, it emerged because guildmasters and merchants just wanted to have a new mode of production

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yeah transfem rep in the media is fucking GARBAGE...I hate hearing my gf telling me she barely feels visible, even with refreshing characters like Bridget (who she feels she cannot relate to cuz Bridget is more passing compared to her)

I get annoyed when people say trans girls get all the rep but one day I scrolled through the transgender woman character media rep out of curiosity and like, while there were a lot of characters, HALF OF THEM were caricatures or harmful stereotypes. some were headcanons if I remember because creators are too pussy to make trans women characters actually come across as normal nuanced people and not lean to hard into dangerous caricature or passing and pristine and skinny cis passing (in this case, this one is rather rare and uncommon compared to the transmisognistic caricature)

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"the south is just racist uneducated hillbilly land!!!" -the most "progressive" leftist

but in fact, I learned more about black history and a lil of indigenous history moving down south than anything up north, who only teaches the scraps of black history and liberation.

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Genuinely asking, how can you be a Marxist and a trans woman? it doesn’t logically compute for me. If you believe misogyny is real, and you can adapt dialectical materialism to the feminist framework (as you know, misogyny as opression of women by men) then can’t you notice women are being oppressed on the basis of the material reality (their genitals)? And that you can’t identify out of the opression - identify as the opressor.

So on one hand my gut reaction to this deeply disrespectful and transmisogynist ask is to respond very shortly with reference to bathtubs and car batteries and what I personally think you should do with those two items, but on the other hand this kinda vulgar materialism is unfortunately Very Common amongst marxist circles here in the US, as is your idealist conceptions of the social categories of gender and sex and your chauvinism. Only difference is that usually people aren't as needlessly inflamitory as you are. Cuz of all that I'll respond seriously, if you are genuinely genuine in your genuineness maybe it'll be of some help in clarifying your understanding of the topic and will clear up misconceptions in others who read the post. Because I'm just so niceys :D.

So lets start with that definition of misogyny/patriarchy, that it's "oppression of women by men". This is a fantastic starting definition and I would not hesitate to use this phrasing were I explaining the topic for the first time to a child in the fourth grade. Unfortunately as marxists it's our duty to be a little more rigerous about this! It takes for granted that your definition of gender (man and woman)-- humans differentiated based on genetalia (and lets include all sexual dimorphism in this just to be generous), is a reflection of material reality in any way. In actuality it is deeply idealist, proposing that there are innate Man Particles within Penises and Woman Particles within Vaginas, and even were that the case then we have to contend with the fact that categorization is entirely a human-made social technology. This definition of gender as something innate makes your definition of misogyny/patriarchy as a mode of structural oppression deeply fraught!!! No wonder you cannot conceptialize the existance of trans people if you conceptualize forces of gendered oppression fighting those of liberation as a battle for supremacy between two subspecies of humans. Such a conflict is irreconsileable. We start to see why TERFism so easily fits in with other forms of reaction if we use your faulty definition as an example. Lets get a better one then shall we?

First thing I wanna do before I write up my definition is that I reject the common division of sex and gender as seperate categories of biology and social relations respectively, I think it runs into the exact problem I have criticized you for by just offloading the biological aspects onto the concept of "sex" as a false binary. So I will do none of that-- primary and secondary sex characteristics instead act as the *percieved* (extra extra extra emphasis on that word!!!) historical basis of my definition of gender.

Gender is a form of social division of labor that arose with the advent of class society from the material basis of percieved sex characteristics that has changed and adapted through the epochs as the economic mode of production has changed and adapted to the material conditions of any given society in any given time and is enforced through class domination via gendering violence. This explains a lot more about gender than any "man=penis woman=vagina", "woman=nuturing man=strong" nonsense! Suddenly the phenomenon of trans people and intersex people existing are things we can make sense of and analyze even if we dont fully understand the science of it all! Suddenly it makes sense why our entire social definitions of gender are entirely based on the division of domestic and external labor, because historically, these divisions were needed for development of class society!

This also means we have to redo your definition of misogyny/patriarchy not as simply men dominating women, but as the system of violent enfocement of this labor division to thereby uphold the functioning of the class society that has created the current itteration of the gender division. This is done both by the domination of the "subservient" gender, by the violent weeding out of those who reguardless of intention challenge the current order of power (trans people, gay people, intersex people, polyamorous people, etc.), or by incorperating those challengers into the heirarchy (gay marriage/general "inclusive" concepts of the family, trans MRAs, etc.).

Now to get to the actual interesting part! How can I as a trans woman be a marxist is what you asked, and I think I proved the how, but what about the why? Well, because marxists should all be gender and family abolotionists is the short answer, but I have other thoughts as well.

Something very interesting has happened in the last century as we sit stewing in the epoch of the end of capitalism/rise of socialism that I believe is one of the reasons us as trans people have become more and more prevelant of an issue within society as threats to bourgeois society. Angela Davis wrote a very interesting article on it in the 80s called "The Approaching Obsolecense of Housework" which I highly reccomend reading, which highlights that the need for the division of domestic and external labor divisions is withering with the advent of new household technology and the subsuming of domestic tasks into the wider external economy (cleaning services, industrial production of clothing and furniture, industrialization of food preperation, infantcare, full day education of children, etc.). This combined with the proletarianization of women under capitalism has created a major contradiction within capitalist society: the need for the existance of the family and gender systems to uphold bourgeois rule and reproduce bourgeois society on one side and the slow withering of domestic labor divisions on the other. One of the many results, I personally believe, is the rise in societal acceptence of trans and queer identites- a glimpse of the next epoch after we collectively do away with bourgeois property relations and the need to define gender through labor division fully disappates. I fully predict that, like Cuba now, we will see existing socialist and dotp nations go through these changes significantly faster and make leaps and bounds into the future as beacons of queer rights. This is also why bourgeois society and the forces of reaction and fascism as a movement see trans people as a threat just one level down to that of communists! This is also why I fully reject any attempts to incorperate queerness into bourgeois society (that arent historically progressive of course!) and always call for a uniting of queer politics under marxism.

So yes, I am a transfem and a marxist, I was one before the other for some reason I cant really fully understand, but over time I came to realize I cannot fully be one without the other.

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In Animal Farm, the animals represent the working class, and each different species represents a different social category within the working class. The pigs — the most intelligent animals — are the professional revolutionaries, Orwell’s stand-in for the Bolsheviks. The chickens, the horses, the sheep and so on are representations of the workers. The humans represent the bourgeoisie, and the book depicts class struggle in terms of animals versus humans. [...]

In this book, George Orwell expresses aristocratic contempt towards the people, the working class. The main target of critique in this book is not the revolutionaries, but the working classes themselves. They are depicted as dumb, incompetent, incapable of reasoning, without any historical initiative — a manipulable mass lacking any capacity for political protagonism. When you analyze its narrative, only two subjects emerge as having the capacity for reason and historical autonomy: the human beings (the bourgeoisie) and the pigs (the Bolsheviks). The working class — the rest of the animals — is depicted as dumb and docile from beginning to end. In fact, about 70% of the book consists of nothing but such depictions. [...]

Orwell begins his story with Old Major, a pig metaphor for Karl Marx, who introduces the principles of Animalism — Marxism. With the exception of the other pigs, none of the animals can really grasp the depth of his theory, but they like what they hear anyway. With the exception of the other pigs, none of the animals can really grasp the depth of his theory, but they like what they hear anyway. The stage is set, and Orwell begins introducing the rest of the cast. Boxer and Clover are the first representatives of the working class that the reader learns about [...]. Orwell then goes back to Old Major and the preparation for the upcoming revolution, caricaturing Marxism as a simple doctrine where animals simply label humans as a great enemy, and insist that all life will immediately improve as soon as the humans — the bourgeois — disappear. [...]

The pigs, the revolutionaries, are said to be the cleverest. But what about the working class? [...] Orwell describes Boxer as a hard worker — excited for working, someone who believes in the revolutionary project, and also always as dumb. Boxer as subject is pure, he truly and wholeheartedly believes in the revolution and in Animalism, and this makes him gullible. [...]

In Animal Farm the process is straightforward: the animals are fooled because they are dumb; there’s no complex scheme here. You might argue “Jones, it’s not a complex book, the narrative is simplified!” Listen, I understand that the book is simple by nature, that everything is direct for a reason, but you notice this in turn: when it comes to the betrayal of the revolution, the subversion of the revolution, there’s no challenge for the pigs. Do you get it? It’s easy for the pigs, because the working class is stupid. [...]

At all times the working class is described as subjects who feel a disturbance, who sense something is off, but are incapable of even verbalizing their own dissatisfaction in a conscious, intelligible way. They can feel, but are incapable of reasoning. This is the core message of the book. The working class are, in the metaphor of the narrative, farm animals incapable of reasoning. [...]

Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book! The main target of this book’s critique aren’t the revolutionaries or communism: it’s the working class. George Orwell writes from an aristocratic ethos. “Elite theory” posits the people as incapable of self-governance, without the capacity to constitute themselves as a political subject, and therefore always the object of dispute and manipulation by vying elites. The people lack the capacity for political self-determination, cannot build a political program or engage in autonomous political action. This is George Orwell’s theory, borne out by his choice of metaphors.

Notice that the revolution isn’t lost to repression. In the book’s narrative structure, it is not the repression that kills the revolution and it is not the institution of privileges that kills the revolution. The book’s narrative structure indicates that all the processes that led to its corruption have their roots in the fact that the working class is incapable of intervening on its own behalf. For example, in the Sunday assemblies in which the direction of the revolution is debated, nobody from the working class can think for themselves — only the pigs speak. It’s not the case that the pigs manipulate the working class. When the animals undergo a literacy campaign, the working class proves incapable of learning how to read and write. This point is very important! It’s central to the argumentative and narrative structure. The pigs don’t try to stop the rest of the animals from learning how to read and write, it’s the animals themselves who prove incapable… because they are dumb. [...]

Animal Farm isn’t a critique of revolutionaries; it’s a critique of workers. It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class.

When you get down to it, the villains in the book are more meritorious than the workers. The humans are described as exploiters, but they can negotiate. They manage to hold on to the other farms and, by the end, they are happily collaborating with the pigs, satisfied that they have squelched all the potential out of the revolution. They are intelligent, cunning, and achieve their goals. Same goes for the pigs: they’re capable of fooling everyone, etc. Meanwhile, the non-pig, non-dog animals — especially the horses Boxer and Clover — are imbeciles. They have no merit outside of their kind character and ability to work. This point is crucial. The novel repeatedly describes Boxer as a hard worker of great character, and an imbecile. He explicitly gets called stupid at five separate points; there’s even an interesting aside where, approaching the age of twelve, Boxer contemplates retiring and using that time to finally learn the last twenty letters of the alphabet. In other words, the representative of the working class needs to dedicate his entire retirement to overcoming illiteracy. [...]

The pig-revolutionaries are also targets of critique, of course. Here we simply see several anticommunist myths recycled. I will spare the reader tiresome citations, but, for example, mid-way through the story Orwell ridicules the Soviet accounts of siege, sabotage, and espionage endured at hands of the imperial powers, portraying them all as Napoleon’s (Stalin’s) fabrications. The book showcases no real sabotage carried out by other farms still run by humans — that is, other capitalist countries. Orwell reproduces the myth that the Soviet Union didn’t face sabotage or terrorism, you dig? There’s no Animal Farm metaphor for the actions of England, France, the United States, Japan, Spain, Portugal. No metaphor for industrial sabotage, the blowing up of water treatment plants and hydroelectric dams, etc. Everything is a “Stalinist” lie. Whether you like or dislike Stalin is completely besides the point. Nobody can deny that the same imperialist nations which invaded Russia in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, who fueled the civil war which killed more than six million people — 17 countries banded together to invade Russia after the revolutionary war! A story where all of these capitalist countries simply stood by the sidelines and peacefully observed the growth of Soviet industry? That’s a fairytale. There’s so much documentation out there: telegrams from ambassadors, CIA reports, British intelligence reports, diaries from agents and spies, etc. all discussing systematic sabotage, assassination attempts, the organization of groups of exiled reactionary Russians to commit terrorist attacks in the Soviet Union, etc. [...]

George Orwell’s ommisions are so conspicuous they in fact qualify as a form of Naziphilia. At around page 80 (in my edition), he begins to construct a metaphor of the preliminary stages of WWII, and criticizes Stalin (through Napoleon) for the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Throughout the book, there is no literary metaphor whatsoever that captures the gravity of the Nazi menace, the dangers Nazism presented to mankind. The story is constructed such that the denunciations against the neighbouring Foxwood and Pinchfield farms are all fabricated by the pigs. This is a seriously disturbing choice. It is tantamount to whitewashing the Nazis. [...] Any account of WWII should be honest about the fact that the Soviet Union made several desperate attempts to establish antifascist alliances with the liberal imperialists, especially England, France and the US, and that these same liberal imperialists rejected these efforts because they wanted the Soviet Union to experience maximal losses warring against Nazi Germany by itself. Particularly in the US, many of the figures from the political-economical establishment worked off of the thesis that Nazi Germany would invade and dominate the Soviet Union. If Europe fell to the Nazis, the Americas would still belong to the US, you dig? The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was a brilliant diplomatic maneuver because only thanks to this pact was the rest of Europe forced to join the war against the Nazis. That deal, in fact, prevented the forging of a liberal-fascist pact against the Soviet Union. There were concrete possibilities of an alliance between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, France, England, the US, and Fascist Japan against the Soviet Union. [...]

It seems obvious to me that George Orwell was furious about the fact that the Soviet Union was not defeated in WWII. Animal Farm was published in 1945. Orwell witnessed the tragedy that Nazism brought to the world. In 1945 most people already knew about the Holocaust. People at that point were already informed about the concentration camps. People already knew what the Nazis had done in Poland and at Auschwitz. George Orwell, in this context, wrote an allegory where WWII and Nazism are depicted as nothing, where Soviet self-defense policies are depicted as sinister intrigues unrelated to liberal and fascist siege. There’s no Churchill cheerleading fascism in Italy or Spain. The gravity of this framing needs to be understood. In 1945 the whole world was shocked by Nazi concentration camps, and Orwell was asking “Sure, that was bad, but what about the Soviet Union?” It seems absurd, but this is exactly what this book describes, under cover of literary metaphor. “Sure, Auschwitz was bad, but what about Stalin?” That is this whole book’s vibe. [...] And this book, Animal Farm, is a deeply reactionary book, displaying aristocratic condescension against the people, a book in which the working class appear as imbeciles. It displays all the marks of the bourgeois genre of elite theory. Its historical metaphors for Soviet history whitewash capitalists and imperialists. The USSR is shown as self-sabotaging, while its enemies are completely absolved. This is George Orwell, and this is why he was so successful. [...] This explains all the hype, all the buzz and promotion it receives from the establishment. This book will remain famous and beloved so long as racist and aristocratic liberalism persists, until we put and end to this profoundly unequal society by waging a revolution of our own.

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i think we have to all get comfortable with losing more. the deck is stacked against us. this desire to glory in the reflected light of some or the other historic success results in the worst tendencies in left politics.