Political Philosophy of Debatable Value
This section is sorted alphabetically by source name. Many of the writings listed here are not from "authoritative" sources; in fact, most of them are direct quotes from internet comment sections. This is because I am of the opinion that the source of wisdom is far less important than the wisdom's value, as previously described.
To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with [..] rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the State authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the State, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.
-Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (Emphasis Added)
idk who needs to hear this, but the capitalist plan for climate crisis and pandemics and breakdown of food supply chains and increasingly limited access to clean water is to funnel every public resource into militaries and police to prevent you from accessing what you need to survive. they do not give a fuck about you. they not only are willing to let you die, they are planning for it and investing in it.
this is why biden pushed public covid relief funds to police, prisons, and detention centers and then declared it over. US presidents enact policy to benefit capitalists, because that is what government exists to do in capitalist countries. you are not going to 'push him left.' there is no one you can elect--of any party or affiliation--that won't cave to the demands of capital. this is the system we're in.
there is no version of events where a capitalist leader of a settler state (to be clear, not just in the US) is going to save anyone. your life isn't simply a lesser priority; your life is not a priority to capital. your survival is truly not relevant when determining policies to enact, funding to allocate, etc. the plan across the board is to suppress any direct resistance or survival efforts with intensified state violence.
you need to start planning around this continuing systemic abandonment. there is no long-term survival within this system.
-tumblr user, closet-keys. (Archive unavailable due to user setting).
I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.
Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.
People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.
Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.
People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.
-tumblr user, cock-holliday. (Archive).
Imo, The mindset of the modern American reactionary is that of the estranged parent. It's a person who cannot allow themself to understand that yeah, they were a shit parent, and their kids aren't talking to them because they were a shit parent. It's the two-time wanna-be small business failure who cannot allow themselves to believe that they failed, and that there may have been consequences to their choices.
I think it has something to do with why transphobia is the popular cudgel now. This idea of the "trans cult" that took their kids away gives shape and form to the storm of negative emotions in their life. Its something to focus all their emotions on. Comparing trans people to pedophiles gives them the justification they need for righteous anger. By framing their anger as "you were keeping them safe" it allows them to feel like they were right all along.
-tumblr user, cryptotheism. (Archive).
citizen of a country where politicians are legally allowed to lie about what they’re going to do once in office in order to get elected and where the only viable political parties are, by some CRAAAZYY coincidence, the ones backed by a major media conglomerate or two: This is a democracy.
-tumblr user, lordandgodoftheobvious. (Archive).
when i see english speakers say "marijuana"...looks like somebody isn't immune to propaganda
cannabis was demonized/criminalized in america in the 30s cuz the logging industry didn't want hemp to fuck up their shit and a huge part of their campaign was connecting cannabis to mexicans and being hella fucking racist
cannabis is not even native to mexico it's from east asia. and btw if u wanna talk abt how asians have had their shit fucked up by bullshit american drug laws, opium was just criminalized in the early 20th century because chinese immigrants smoked it. the u.s. wants to absolutely fuck your shit up in any way possible if you are a person of color and criminalizing the extremely common, human activity of doing drugs is a ridiculously incidious way to do that
L + ratio + question everything + especially the government trying to control your bodily autonomy + the d.e.a. is evil and only exists because of corporate greed + examine your beliefs about drugs and ask yourself "why do i think this and who benefits from me thinking this way" + free your mind + do drugs + have fun + be anti-racist
-tumblr user, meatmensch. (Archive).
i think a lot of people need to have the concept of violence explained to them better.
like, murder and assault aren't the only forms of violence.
there are other forms of violence that people wouldn't consider violence, even though they have extremely similar reasonings and end results.
like, for example, knowingly removing a safety measure or ignoring a safety flaw from a workplace or product because the lawsuits of people hurt or killed by this would be less expensive than fixing it or implementing the safety measure throughout is a type of violence- it is a use of one's power to cause harm. it's not someone killing someone with an axe, but the result is the same.
anyways i just wanted to bring this up because people considered the concept of workers killing their factory owners directly as unacceptable violence, but refused to consider how the factory owner was inflicting greater-albeit indirect- violence on his employees.
-tumblr user, mono-red-menace. (Archive).
It is actually way better for 100 addicts to get their fix on pain pills than a single person in pain go without. I call this the "Torture is bad" principle. You should be able to get the good stuff forever after a single doctor's visit. If you're worried about addicts fund rehab centers and needle exchanges instead of torturing people.
-tumblr user, phaeton-flier. (Archive).
There is a certain type of liberal who is, more than even creeping fascism, terrified of the little voice in the back of their head, louder every day, that tells them that the bitter proles were right, that the amiable dirtbag with the apple pipe and the Tarantino posters who says that voting is bullshit, the McDonalds shift manager single mom who feels like her life is getting worse under both parties, the trans 17 year old with the red and black twitter pfp and no future plans who says that all politicians are garbage, that they're all onto something, that maybe these people who didn't attain all the signifiers of elite education and bourgeois sophistication actually have come closer to a true understanding of politics in the United States by sheer intuition and experience than they have, and these liberals, they aren't just afraid of that little voice, they're fucking furious, and they're gonna take it out on anyone who dares challenge the worldview they've sunk all that pride and satisfaction and faith into, anyone who even in a politically incoherent or naive way suggests that maybe we can't vote our way out of this one.
-tumblr user, pupyjpeg. (Archive unavailable due to user settings).
is anyone else just like. constantly filled with rage about their position under late capitalism and how we are expected to just keep playing this game that we know will literally kill us, is already killing people all over the world, and yet everyone around us is somehow fine with going about business as usual, with pretending we are free by being able to choose between different ways of being exploited. there is nothing more dehumanising than being forced to partake in a system that is actively detrimental to our survival as human beings, that is so physically, psychologically and spiritually destructive, and i don’t know how to deal with this anger anymore
-tumblr user, ratanarchist. (Archive).
Thesis: Mental health problems are (largely) due to chemical imbalances in the brain, and should be treated with psychiatric medications. (Biomedical model).
Antithesis: Mental health problems are (largely) due to harmful societal structures, from abusive relationships and the nuclear family all the way up to the nation state and capitalism itself, and should be treated by abolishing these structures. (Social model).
Synthesis: If not for capitalism, the meds would be free.
-tumblr user, regicide1997. (Archive).
[In response to a profoundly stupid message complaining about the generated output of AI:]
firstable, the art isn't stolen. it is still on the artist's hard drive/website/portfolio. complaining about digital files being "stolen" makes you sound like the RIAA.
secondly, before you start arguing semantics about how "well obviously i didn't mean they were LITERALLY stolen, just used without permission," that's not even true either. the current legal theory they're operating on (until it gets challenged in court) is that the AI's output qualifies as a "transformative work", meaning it doesn't violate the original artist's copyright. your kneejerk reaction to this might be to expand copyright law to make this kind of use illegal, but that would also necessarily outlaw a LOT of art forms/techniques, like fanart, fanfiction, collaging, sampling, etc.
at a base level, these AIs aren't doing anything humans weren't already doing - human artists have been taking inspiration from other artists since the first cave painting. anyone telling you the AI is "just mashing together parts of existing art" or whatever has 1. no idea how AIs work because that aint it and 2. no idea how copyright works since "collaging parts of existing art" (which, again, is not what they're doing) is already explicitly protected as transformative work. we don't know enough about how humans OR AIs think to conclusively say that the way one makes art is quantitavely different than the other, and trying to make ethical or God forbid LEGAL judgements based on this imaginary, unmeasurable difference is a losing proposition from the start. there are reasons to be wary of AI art, but "the way an AI views my art and uses it to generate output is fundamentally different than how a human would do it, and that difference means that i am being wronged somehow" rings a bit hollow to me.
to be clear, there are definitely valid reasons to be wary of/dislike AI art. the main one that inevitably comes up is the impact it will create with artists who work on commissions. why would someone pay $50 and wait a week to get a picture of their fursona/concept art for their video game world when they could just punch a few sentences into an AI and have dozens of pics for cheap basically instantly? setting aside the obvious answer of "because most AIs actually suck at drawing really specific things", i feel like this is akin to complaining that the invention of the camera/daguerreotype put professional portrait painters almost entirely out of business. yeah, it did, and that sucked for them, but nobody would ever suggest boycotting the camera for those painters' benefit because that's the nature of technological advancement baybee!
also not to be a communist on main but i NEED to point out the possibly insultingly obvious fact that this is an issue with capitalism, not the "integrity of art" or whatever. the main negative impact the technology has on artists is potential loss of income due to competition, which would stop being an issue if your ability to stay alive was decoupled from your ability to work/sell your labor.
-tumblr user, sexhaver. (Archive).
To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.
1/3rd of Americans are Evangelical, and Evangelical Protestantism is a cult. We just don’t think of it as one because it’s so normalized. However, it follows the B.I.T.E. model of cult dynamics.
Evangelism teaches its followers to always maintain states of bliss and ecstasy for Jesus. What this does is condition the brain to always operate out of less-evolved parts; areas that are responsible for more primal emotions like euphoria, anger, and fear. Because of how we’ve evolved to survive, the brain will actually shut down our higher functioning—including critical thinking skills—in favor of these primal emotions, when they’re active.
Always feeling bliss = never questioning or feeling doubt. Evangelicals may actually fear the thoughts that do originate from their higher brain-parts because they think it’s the devil tempting them away from their religion. They’ll engage in self-indoctrination techniques to make this stop.
This creates a cognitive dissonance so great that many Americans have no separation between how they feel and what they believe. This is really bad because their minds have literally no defense against undue influence. They’ll vote for the dude who hyped them up enough. They’ll buy into the conspiracy theory that excites them the most. They’ll side with whatever gets the best reaction out of them, and getting a rise out of people is super easy to do.
Things like financial insecurity and low employment make this worse, too.
-tumblr user, skaldish. (Archive).
'anti-civs' will so often hold that it is not capitalism & the structuring economic systems of societies that are to blame for extractivism and ecological destruction but instead "civilization" or "technology" or some vague description of "human exploitation of the environment" & yet always position this as an anti-colonialist/pro-indigenous stance -- a circle that you can only possibly square if you have constructed the exact same definitions of these terms, circularly defined to exclude the technologies & societies of indigenous peoples, as 19th century colonial anthropologists !
-tumblr user, txttletale. (Archive).
bear in mind that my perspective is just one and quite limited -- & also that i very much approach marxist theory from the lenses of anti-imperialism and cultural studies. that said, my basic recommended reading list of books that equipped me with the ideological tools i have now would look something like:
- engels, principles of communism
- marx, wage labour & capital
- marx, the german ideology
- engels, socialism: utopian & scientific
- luxemburg, reform or revolution?
- lenin, the state & revolution
- lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism
- fanon, the wretched of the earth
- rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa
- nkrumah, neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism
- gramsci, the prison notebooks
- adorno & horkheimer, the culture industry
- parenti, inventing reality
- chomsky & herman, manufacturing consent
- benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
- castro, capitalism in crisis
a lot of these texts can be found for free on marxists.org. the rest can be found for free on all kinds of cool websites if you type their name into google search with 'pdf free' at the end
-tumblr user, txttletale. (Archive).
it's so fucking crazy how the Colorado River is running dry bc of the agriculture industry but they can't just stop farming in the desert bc it'll put people out of work and it'll cause food shortages bc they can't give food away they have to produce way more than everyone could ever eat and then make sure people can't afford it and go hungry anyways and then throw it out and let it rot and they have to keep doing that forever the farmers have to produce more and more food to barely break even and the stores have to throw more and more of it out to keep the prices artificially inflated and it takes more and more water every year until the ancient river system that forged the Grand Canyon and supplies water to a dozen states dries up and all of this is allegedly the most efficient economic system that will ever be possible
-tumblr user, zoethebitch. (Archive).
gets elected on a platform of dealing with X problem
can't do anything about X problem because lobbyists
start a study to prove Y about X because lobbyists say without proving Y they won't fund my campaign
study takes most of my tenure in office before I'm not allowed to run again
now that I have the results of study Y I can actually start to address X issue
draft legislation to address X based off evidence from study Y
my maximum length in office runs out
bc I didn't address X my ideology is seen as ineffectual
successor throws my efforts in the trash, starts brand new plan to address X
You know what would be a great way to address X? If we commissioned a study on Z
Lucy lowers the football again with a smirk that would disquiet the most assured of quarterbacks
-tumblr user, zvaigzdelasas. (Archive).