Juice
@Juice@midwest.social
- Comment on Well, I guess that settles it 1 day ago:
Publish this everywhere to get musk dumped on day 1
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 4 days ago:
Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.
Its gonna be a crazy ass decade
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 days ago:
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.
So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.
This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 days ago:
I really wanna read that book, maybe this year :) I almost stole it from my wife’s cousin at Thanksgiving this year
I don’t think what you’re saying contradicts me, I agree my explainer is one view, one which addresses political economies, and the GrabGrow view is another more anthropological view. Unfortunately Marx never finished his anthropological works although there are a lot of notes from the end of his life that are worth parsing.
Saying it’s this one thing, when it can be scientifically understood as either or both things, is more like orthodoxy which I try to avoid. Both views help to understand a complicated topic made of historically shifting dynamics and changing aspects.
What your explanation doesn’t address that mine does, is what is the “social power” that congeals into these forms? It takes different shapes throughout history, but can be understood coarsely as “wealth”, which is the accumulated value of human labor. My explanation better reflects the class character of the state. However if we are to try and actually affect the world for the better, as we should, we would be better equipped with both views (and likely a few others) with which to determine truth in the functioning of political economy, than one or the other alone.
- Comment on Reading into something that is said 5 days ago:
Wealth is pinned to production and currency is pinned to wealth. You fundamentally misunderstand what wealth, money, and power are and how they function in society. Alienation from society and idealism distort the nature of these subjects. You’re right to question the way these things function, but you’ll not get much further than MMT or other idealist cul du sacs. If you want to understand how wealth operates as a basis for society, they you’ll need to start to study https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 days ago:
The state is formed by the historical mode of production, its like a contradiction that is the resolution to all of the other contradictions present in market social relations. In other words the state is based on how stuff gets made, and who accumulates the value inherent in the stuff, which is in essence the congealed work that went into making that stuff.
Politics and culture is always a factor in what shape the state takes, since politics and culture are social structures and sources of power themselves, bug politics is downstream from production
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 days ago:
You have to have an advanced degree, wealth and celebrity in order to publicly proclaim something that an introspective 12 year old would yell at his friends at 4 in the morning after completing a dare that he could gulp down a whole cup of sugar without coughing or puking
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 days ago:
This is clearly a completely natural phenomenon, like the weather !
- Comment on Depressing awful town 1 week ago:
I mean to be clear I’m from altoona and I’ve never seen pizza like this.
- Comment on The things you can buy on amazon 1 week ago:
Indeed
- Comment on The things you can buy on amazon 1 week ago:
Chlorophyll doesn’t immediately put you to sleep! Also it burns to inhale, from what I have read.
- Comment on I like Genesis 2 weeks ago:
Thank you! I can’t dance is cheeks, and they have so many good records
- Comment on And I will have my vengeance, in this file host or the next. 2 weeks ago:
I never noticed this before but why is Russell Crowes helmet the MFDOOM mask??
- Comment on I like Genesis 3 weeks ago:
Of all the great Genesis records, this meme goes with the single for I Can’t Dance. Jesus Christ get a grip.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 4 weeks ago:
I have around 1700 hs in Destiny 2, and close to the same in Bloodborne. Over 1000 hours in the last 2 monster hunter titles. I’ve replayed resident evil 4 and castlevania sotn dozens of times.
So those are my most played games
- Comment on Love her or hate her, she’s spitting facts 5 weeks ago:
Put a ring on it immediately.
- Comment on Enshittification only hurts product itself, not users. 1 month ago:
Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 month ago:
I haven’t played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.
It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there’s no plan for a 3rd season
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 month ago:
I played the first two
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 month ago:
I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked
- Comment on Feral Science 1 month ago:
Crucial supporting NPCs in Monster Hunter
- Comment on pump up the jamz 1 month ago:
That would sound amazing
- Comment on pump up the jamz 1 month ago:
So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys
- Comment on She-Ra Lives! 1 month ago:
*more than
- Comment on Nostalgia and remake culture 1 month ago:
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
This is garbage why the fuck should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.
Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don’t read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I’m the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn’t with the intellectuals though, it’s that there’s not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.
This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is “all these smart people stopped studying Marx” and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there’s no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, “all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so.” This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.
Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I’m so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
I did neither of those things, literally
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
Wow 70 years of history is so flat, it just folds right up in your pocket like that, stunning. Its possible you’ve left a few details out
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
So no, no one understands it.
What was the last nail, exactly? I don’t see how swapping out neo-liberal drivel with “scientific Marxist drivel” would be any improvement
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
Does anybody understand what this meme is trying to say? I feel like its pretty obvious
