I agree, they are, but Graeber’s the type of dude to prioritize making a playful argument over making a rigorous one. Debt has a whole chapter arguing that Muslim banking is better than European Banking because it obeys Abrahamic usury laws. He then included a footnote basically saying “I know it’s still capitalist, I mostly wrote this chapter to troll evangelicals.”

Like, he has brilliant insights, but not necessarily brilliant analysis. Take him as a supplement to your theory, not your main meal.

He is, read Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.

This analysis isn’t wrong, it’s just partial. There’s stuff like labor exploitation, gendered hyperexploitation, etc. But there’s also something where desirable jobs have less bargaining power because the labor pool is flooded (Firefighters are an example of this). Graeber’s argument is a non-structural articulation of the same phenomena. In the case of teachers, the amount we pay them is very much a decision made fairly arbitrarily. It’s mostly a matter of public investment, the decisions around which are massively over-determined to the point where you do have to talk about things like subconscious decision-making and cultural values.

If your issue is with taking the subconscious into account in your analysis, then you’re putting yourself in opposition to incredibly influential Marxists like Adorno.

“Through every diplomatic means possible”

I.e. he’s gonna ask nicely

Hockey men make me feel gay as hell, so there might be something there

BUt also!

San Jose has no fucking buisness having a hockey team. There’s no ice. A hockey team on the west coast is just a flex that your city has at least 1 billionaire from the Midwest living in it.

Okay but can we talk about hot pink 9mm pistols? When you want to kill but you want to he femme about it

I used to work for a sports merchandise store and I regularly had women ask me if it was okay for their husbands to wear teal jerseys.

Like

1. Your husband will not explode if he puts on a Jaguars or Mariners jersey.

2. I love that my queer ass is the authority on cis-het masculinity. Like, yeah dude, teal is a manly color now. In fact, no one is talking about it, but so is fuchsia. Have you considered buying him a breast cancer awareness jersey?

Watching the Biden admin is wild. At one minute he’ll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine and Palestine, but the next he’ll be funding the NLRB and addressing the housing crisis in a way that improves walk-ability.

It’s like, he has two settings: “actually useful moderate” and “KILLKILLKILLKILL”

Unfortunately, this makes him the best US president since carter

Getting people to live in offices is good because it brings people back to walkable, urban cores.

Participating in a study group as prerequisit to joining this forum, just like PSL

Yeah, there have. I saw one person get up voted for saying that decolonizing Palestine required ethnic cleansing. I saw another say that Jews need to “pack up and leave” Israel. Both upvoted. It’s not the mainstream but it’s out there.

More common though is vague language that probably applies to settlers / likud or whoever but could reasonably be interpreted to mean “jews” by someone not on the same page as the hexbear mainstream.

To be fair ive never had a productive conversation with a jewish person who wasnt already a communist

I feel like I’ve met maybe one Jewish person IRL who wasn’t pro Palestinian liberation. Even the Israeli dude I worked with wanted to vote out Netanyahu and work towards two states, which is admittedly liberal but like, a massive improvement over the status quo.

GG Allen, is that you?

I don’t care if anarchists organized this or local teens organized it. Either way it’s working class self activity. We aren’t some special group floating above the working class and directing it, we’re workers fighting for our own interests.

This kind of thinking about the left as separate from the class comes from the professionalization of politics and while it’s sometimes neccesary to pay staff, we should not do it uncritically.

I think there’s a thin line between the opportunistic and and the political in working class politics. The goal of looting is to improve the lives of working class people. The goal of striking is to improve the lives of working class people. They both do it by taking from the profits of buisnesses and by disrupting norms like working-for-a-wage and purchasing-commodities.

When anarchists organize looting as political protest, they’re pointing out just how thin that line is.

The part about not assigning blame helps a lot of people get out of the trap of tallying favors and grievances. That said, he sells his books by pyramid scheme, dresses it up in pseudoscience and is needlessly dogmatic.

No, they’re the funders, they’re the mark.

I swear you can have the worst takes and if you say “material conditions,” then hexbear will upvote you 50 times.

You want materialism? The current level of meat consumption in the US is propped up by exploitation of migrant labor and an extractive mode of agriculture which is unsustainable and relies on external inputs like fertilizer which are themselves the product of other extractive industries.

We could dramatically reduce meat consumption without any technological changes by:

–Paying meat packers a living wage

–Organize Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, driving up meat cutters’ wages

–Stop subsidizing meat

–Stop subsidizing feed crops

–Switch to permacultural farming practices

Banking on a tech breakthrough is ideological in the sense that it protects the status quo and marshals venture capital into mostly speculative assets.

Additionally, convincing people to go vegetarian is not idealist. Mass media has a huge effect, and using it to encourage vegetarianism is a material process. So either, we can take material measures to encourage vegetarianism, or you don’t believe we’ll ever wield power. Based on your defense of lab meat (a vc grift similar to tech start-ups), I think it’s the latter.

Wait, we’re not conservatives? Then why have we been celebrating our big wet boy?

I see Lincoln as being a lot like Lenin, a problematic figure who ultimately oversaw an important and mostly liberatory project

If we can get it, they’re still in bargaining and the Stellantis proposal was basically “fuck you, suck my nuts”