mind reader

Dear friends,

I have a colleague, lets call them Geoff, who has worked for the University for 15 years. They have been promoted to level C during this time, and through essentially an act of social engineering, have managed to attract both a higher duties payment and additional loading for nudge-nudge-wink-wink special services to the Institution’s senior executive over the past decade and a half. By any published academic standard, Geoff falls brutally short. Not only for a level C balanced academic [1] but for a level A teaching academic, Geoff’s entire 15 years of work, compounded into a single year performance review, should have seen them placed on performance management. Instead, Geoff recently received a new title and a raise – because they complained to management about “how hard life is”.

Each day I am astounded by the growing aura of entitlement from the (pseudo)bourgeois who reach “a certain age™” and decide: now is my time for unearned and undeserved privileges. This is particularly expressed in contemporary academia, and is often rewarded far above any real value ever produced by workers claiming “me me me!”. Such has arrived the era of exorbitant compensation for some squeaky wheels, while the next generation remains precarious, invalidated, and under extreme stress from a never before seen variety of angles. This is the culmination of the world of work globalised post-1940s, after waves of boomers have intensified work, and hoist the ladder up behind them as they cement themselves as a far below run-of-the-mill Level C somehow earning over $170,000 a year.

In conversations with our mate Geoff you would assume them to be a fairly nice human. Though, the unexamined facets of their personality join the calamity that is copious renumeration for no work. Geoff builds people up around them to do exciting and interesting work – great, there is certainly a role for creating excitement, connecting people, and fostering new ideas in the academy, or, rather, there should be. However, Geoff is actually a politician. Pumping up those around them and, in the meanwhile, undermining and invalidating them in private spaces with both management and their colleagues. If, by some miracle of human achievement, one of those colleagues they have pumped up manages to produce something exciting rest assured Geoff will be there to either claim the output, or to at-minimum co-opt co-authorship on a proceeding. In fact, Geoff’s only outputs are co-authored papers and they have never been first or last author.

Okay, poor Geoff, now receiving public scrutiny. However, I want to be clear, at this juncture, Geoff is not one person – Geoff is a lumbering behemoth collecting most academic workers over “a certain age™”. Naturally, with any generalisation, there are serious exceptions to this rule, if you could call it that – notably several women, most queer, and almost all working-class origin academics simply do not accumulate the privileges necessary to act as an unadulterated backstabber, shit-stirrer and generalist asshole in the academic milieu. This is not to suggest that queer folk, women-identifying persons, and the working-class are immune to this behaviour. In fact, they can be amongst the worst gatekeepers and reproducers of the status quo, essentially on the “I suffered this so you need to too” bandwagon.

You guessed it, I’m not quite done on this rant… If you try and engage a colleague like Geoff in conversation about the struggles of contemporary academic work or life, they’ll roll out: “oh yes, I’m really struggling too, you know the old gum at the back of my fifth rental property fell down and now the bastard tenants want me to pay costs to replace some of their furniture, can you imagine?” I am increasingly convinced that I am living in a nightmare dreamed up by an AI’s interpretation of Friedman various capitalist manifestos crossbred with eldritch horror manifest in the form of governance hegemony and a hybridisation of every fascist dictator’s personal utopia.

So, with some frustration on the table, let’s think about the role of lead paint [2] in breeding narcissism and other personality malfunctions in the current enforcement class (the bourgeois, capitalist bootlickers). Hegemony bred, for capitalist reasons, two full generations of proles and petit bourgeois as fodder directly for the mill – under the same conditions that it bred the bourgeois (qua enforcement class). The affects of lead, quite literally, were well known, yet, everything was imbued with lead – it was the PFAS or climate change of 2024. “We know this isn’t good, but we don’t care to fix it”. Lead literally led to a massive decline in compassion, introspection, and capacity for reflection and sympathy from the 1940s through almost the end of the 1960s [3]. What happens when, particularly in the bourgeois – the class, discussed ad nauseam here, largely responsible for capitalist stasis and mass inequity – are further removed from their compassionate and otherwise human abilities? We get rank narcissism.

When we apply class theory, or really sociology 101, to a group of people with (relative) power and little-to-no empathy, the affects on those around them is immediately clear. A tortured, sick and fundamentally disturbed modus operandi emerges. The petit bourgeois, then, those who were either not strong enough, privileged enough, or otherwise “fortunate” enough to capitalise off of their peers and colleagues (or perhaps those who didn’t lick the walls as much as a child) are left in the position of our friend Geoff. The mediocre and fundamentally incapable 50-something with nothing left to do but bitch and moan about how their circumstances are “equally” if not “more unfortunate” than yours. Not to worry that you’re in the middle of trying scratch a living to put a roof over your head, Geoff’s third investment property attracted slightly more tax this year – what ever will they do?

When we extrapolate this phenomenon outside of “Aidan had another irritating week at work dealing with extremely privileged mediocrity” we can see how the bourgeois – the self professedly “miraculous” group of white colonists thriving (though they’d never admit it) off the exploitation and expropriation of their peers, younger generations, and rightful holders of the land, we can begin to see the backslide of the emergent petit bourgeois into proles. This, however, is a simultaneously dangerous condition for capital and the proles themselves (the latter of which we’ll save for another day).

You might assume that a member of the bourgeois, or even petit bourgeois, who chooses to reproduce will naturally create another member of the bourgeois. However, even the parental instinct has evaporated in the lead-paint-fuelled narcissistic twist-and-shout that marred subsequent generations with mental ill-health, ill-footing, and fractious debt and social circumstance (something, again, which would be denied by aforementioned mediocre peoples). Rather, what we are seeing now is an emergence of a bloc of proles descended from the “middle class” who themselves, unless their parents die very young and have not accumulated extraordinary debt to keep themselves comfortable at their children’s expense, are now – BAM – back in the proletarian class.

The problem? Well the capitalists are deeply concerned because this “stuck in the middle with you” class of neo-prole descended from the last generation’s petit-bourgeois are educated. And with education comes activism and social transformation. Or does it? Don’t worry, the Australian Labour Party, in close collegiality with their friends in the Liberal and National parties, are ensuring – by attending the Murdoch party together [4] – that anything resembling analytical and transformative education is denied to anyone “growing up” now.

And yet people wonder where superstition, fascism, rage, and hatred emerge. Huh. Who’d have thought.

Another cheery day on the mill,

Aidan.

[1] f.n. in the Australian system, an academic with both teaching and research requirements; i.e., they must teach, publish extensively, and engage with the community of their field. We have three broad categories, and different universities deploy these differently. At my institution, a teaching academic has close to an 80/20 load of teaching and scholarship, a research academic has an 80/20 research and engagement load, and so on. Some Australian universities with these loadings prohibit “teaching academics” or teaching focussed, teaching specialist, and so on from publishing or gaining ethical clearance, this is not the case at my institution.

[2] https://www.today.duke.edu/2017/03/lead-exposure-childhood-linked-lower-iq-lower-status; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/

[3] Wikipedia would say “citation needed” here so, here’s some more citations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6450277/; https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2613157

[4] Literally, https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/lachlan-murdoch-hosts-albanese-dutton-billionaires-amid-real-life-succession-drama-20240725-p5jwk3.html

Dear friends,

Not a day goes by that it doesn’t feel increasingly painful to observe the tyranny of despots. However, I want to take a few moments, with my flu addled brain, to consider how tyranny can descend from the powerless when they take arms with the capitalist class. Naturally, you guessed it, we’re talking in abstract terms today but I will seek to illustrate my meaning where I can with concrete examples. After all, what is a modern Marxian dispatch project without strong (if imaginary) exemplars.

Australian media is comprised of predominantly corporate owned Murdoch press. While the ABC has recently risen back to the top spot for digital consumption [1] the resounding “voice of the nation” is controlled by, effectively, two corporate hegemons and the government. This leads to a narrowing of voices: journalists, reporters, investigators and so on are, by and large, required to fit editorial standards set to require complicity in mainstream capitalist thought. This is not a new phenomenon, just take Chomsky as an example [2]. However, by contrast to the USA and UK, Australia’s news media takes a strangely cynical approach to articulating everyday life and “problems” – and much of the media is -interested- in problems because it drives readership. This, I will argue, along with increasingly “depressive” conditions, has set the stage for a sharp rise in individualist despotism.

Let’s imagine a world without the internet, just for a moment. The primary source of information about current events and the world is still a print newspaper. If you’re lucky, in this country, you may have had a choice of two papers. In an ideal world this might provide a more balanced view – through hegemonic eyes, but more polyvocal. In reality the print media in this country was often divided into “soft” and “hard” news both from the orifice of a single organisation. We know, for example, from Chomsky, that the media has a large role in setting the tone of culture. Not just in terms of people’s broad awareness of events and ways of thinking about them, but also in terms of the grammar, tone and frame through which the world is made sense of. This frame, this epistemology, is right-wing and, more deeply, capitalist. Division, fracture, narcissism, distraction, these features of contemporary news are important for media outlets. They drive sales, keep people reading, and keep a level of “engaged rage” amongst the readership. “It’s just good business”.

When we triangulate, in our pre-internet world, the role of hegemonic education, we can start to see the problem for our epistemology. From around five years of age, we are fed a narrative about our country, our place in the world, our role, our capabilities, emotions and sense of belonging. We are taught “facts”, the lens for this is rarely discussed, and we are educated into a system of exploitation either to become a reproducer of the exploitative practices, or to become a worker for an exploiter. When our sources of information are a teacher, a curriculum, a newspaper, a website, and so on, we build mental models around the way we perceive the world on the basis of “fitting in”, meeting these worlds where they currently are. Ultimately, as seen in most of psychology, the goal for humanity is to belong. Conveniently they forget to tell you that this belonging means that, for 99% of us, our labour is being exploited to enable someone else’s leisure.

This pre-internet world is the current trajectory for our education systems. The phone ban, the ever increasing interest in prescriptive curriculum with no room for creativity or arts, the indoctrination of young people into a single monolithic knowledge system – these are hallmarks of contemporary fascist education [3]. The increased interest in primary and secondary education in this country as a prescriptive, fixed, and knowledge-based apparatus is driving us back to a world where “workers” are fed information by corporate-government curriculum frameworks and corporate-capitalist media conglomerates. Just think about the US’s TikTok ban, a media company with ownership ties to China is perceived as a threat to national security, because young people engaging with (admittedly often radical) perspectives might shake their unwavering commitment to “national pride” vis. wage slavery.

The problem, here, is that the media and education landscape – both critical tools in the establishment and maintenance of capitalist hegemony – are set to perpetuate the fundamentally exploitative, unequal and extractive system of oppression which simultaneously destroys human lives and the ecosystem. This selfsame media-industrial-complex will happily sell you accusations that “you, working schmo, are responsible for climate change” while deliberatively denying investigative journalism reporting on BP’s latest environmental destruction. To be clear: hegemonic control of media and education, enabled by government, is fascism. And Australia, we’re in one.

However, our story can’t end here.

Despotism is on an exponential rise. Individual citizens who are angered, perhaps in a bewildered way, misdirect their anger, their sociopathy, towards peers. Hello – another win for divisive hegemonic politics. Keep the bastards fighting each other, a tale as old as time in the industrial relations space [c.f. 4]. This manifests in a variety of strange ways, but I am going to, for the sake of our project here, collect this all under a Gramscian umbrella of bourgeoisie co-opting. In the past I’ve referred to this as “class traitors” and the concept holds, obviously the latter is more catchy, but the former gives us some theoretical territory to tread in understanding the violence this brings to civil society.

Let’s take one step back before we take two forwards. Civil society, in the Gramscian sense, is both the domain of “regular people” the proletariat, the 99%, and the domain of cultural institutions, including education, religion, the media and so on. While these cultural institutions reproduce the narratives of political society (the capitalist class, the bourgeoise) they are not, themselves, inherently members of the capitalist class – financially speaking a teacher, priest, or journalist is not compensated adequately, in control of means of production, or able to directly exploit other workers to hold such status. Therefore, the original class traitors are the class of skilled professionals who, through education and other means, are indoctrinated into bourgeoisie politics but hold no place to benefit therein, other than some “loaned power”.

So, those two steps forward… When we consider that the fallacy which is class aspiration-ism has placated the proletariat across the colonised western world for decades, we can see that the values of the bourgeoisie are infecting the working class for action towards stasis. This very statement “action towards stasis” is a contradiction of the capitalist system. The perpetual reproduction of the status quo – the reinforcement that 1% deserve the 99%’s labour – could not be achieved without class treachery, there simply are not enough members of the bourgeoisie to do the work. Moreover, they don’t do any work to begin with, they exist almost entirely as a leisure class. See also instagram influencers.

So what’s the deal with despots, can we “circle back” already? Within this milieu of education systems, media, politics, religion, and capitalists there is a great deal of harm being enacted upon the working class and the planet. This harm expresses itself in human ways. As a basic example when we accept price gouging – and we accept it, as much as we might moan about the price of tomatoes – the harm from these decisions “goes somewhere”. Like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, capitalism continuously hammers the working class to extract, exploit, and skim. This harm is, when there is enough of it, often expressed or released as working class protest activism.

Protest activism serves as a way to simultaneously draw attention to mass issues, and a space to ventilate emotion and pain by workers and those rallied to their cause. While there is power in strikes and other forms of collective organisation, protest activism – unless violent – often just signals to the bourgeoisie that there is disquiet. If this is sustained for long enough, empty dispatches are released by media outlets commenting on the struggles of the “average worker”. But withhold labour? Suddenly the extractive cycle comes to a pause, and this is untenable for the line-must-go-up capitalist bro culture; action must be taken. However, something equally sincerely anti-worker has brewed across time in the face of resistance. And this behaviour is on the rise again as pressures from cost of living, rising global climate issues, and rife inequity across race, gender and class lines surge again in the seemingly inevitable “20s depressive era” of each century. That is the deployment of despotic and sociopathic behaviours by those who, at least traditionally, belong to the proletariat turned on other proles.

I have talked about the role of management in organisations, the role of professionals and their espousals, and the role of the media and education system in manufacturing consent elsewhere. If these are, in the Gramscian sense, considered bourgeoisie deputisation of civil society’s cultural professors (in the “they profess things” sense, not specifically academics), then the despots are both these and numerous others across civil society, throughout the anglosphere – and doubtlessly elsewhere.

The mouth-foaming individualists, the rampant bullies, the backstabbers and liars, and the facetious and shallow jesters across contemporary work are, as with those in formal roles of manufacturing consent, another expression of violent extractivism at the capitalist interface. They are directed by their rage and blind faith in capital to attack others who in better circumstances could be their siblings in resistance to imperial capitalism. This group of people are, interestingly, not policed by organisation’s management, they are left to their own devices to harm and deride colleagues and former peers because this behaviour is, to the capitalist class, completely justified.

After all, every day that capitalism continues, a capitalist benefits from your labour. They recline on their private jet, make grand statements about the incapability of the working class, and have signed into legislation increasingly anti-worker rules and laws. Even when smart rebellious lawyers find ways around these, they are never enforced to the benefit of the worker, and from the legal system, through the political apparatus, and back into civil society’s printing press, or Wordpress site, the reinforcement of the sickeningly violent capitalist system continues.

So that asshole at work that keeps yelling at you, and HR (who is never your friend) and the Union (who is increasingly less often your friend) won’t help, well that’s just capitalism, baby. Welcome to the shit show.

There’s something here about Marx encouraging the proles to retain their arms at all costs. But lets not get into gun violence today. The ruling class maintains control through a combination of political society (direct coercion) and civil society (cultural hegemony); and bullies, despots, and the milieu of cynicism from the media are just par for the course.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of it.

In solidarity,

Aidan.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/about/media-centre/press-releases/abc-news-is-australia-s-no-1-digital-news-brand/104125436

[2] Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1994). Manufacturing Consent. Vintage.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/24/nsw-teachers-explicit-instruction-method-teaching-syllabus

[4] Zeitlin, J. (1987). From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations. The Economic History Review, 40(2), 159. https://doi.org/10.2307/2596686

Dear friends,

Today I have a bit of a wondering rant about the way the world has -become- and how ideology grips us so deeply as to destroy lives, livelihoods, and the fundamental essence of conscious being in modernity. This is born of sadness for my friends who are suffering, anger at the status quo, and deep disappointment in the successive failings of collective power and potential of humanity – so it’s a cheery one, buckle in.

We’ve talked about the inextricable relationship between capitalism qua ideology and capitalism qua ontology. Marx gave us sound insights into the historiography of the mode of production, tracing the development of capital in relatively modern Europe. He and Engels gave us multiple meaningful insights into the relationship between humans and productivity, at an economic level, and began to map the territory of ideology shaping human minds to a physical level. This was continued by Gramsci, whose tradition I aim to continue in these writings [1].

In this theoretical space we need to be careful not to follow the postmodern turn by allowing reality to be collapsed into variations and manifestations of human construction. While there are merits to poststructural and postmodern theorisation, the concrete analysis devoid of an understanding of an ontology – an earth, a physical world, and our way of interpreting it – risks verging on narcissistic or magical thinking about manifestation.

There is a physical world, and in that physical world is not -just- humanity and it’s fever dreams. We share this world, this cosmos, this universe with many other -things- living and otherwise. So let us not overstate the power of language, thought and people, but let us not understate it either. Collectively humanity is controlled by a tiny sliver of the population, less than 1%, these people absolutely do harness ‘discourses’ – or perhaps more accurately, propaganda – to condition the way we think, act, and produce. The latter held a primacy, a central stage, for many decades as capitalism was established as the way of doing across the colonial world.

We now live in the shadow of this system’s (production and) consumption. Its absorption and its inequality, its exploitation and marginalisation. Fundamentally we “go to work” and produce for an other – this other, with very little recognisable labour, transmutes the products of our work for their benefit. This is the basic relationship between labour power and the market. However, somewhere along the way, the accumulation of the capitalist, the other, the person who benefits from your work, outgrew a need for you. Instead, unless you work in a primary industry, there are layers of bureaucracy, management, administration, and false work – or “bullshit jobs” [2].

This is a symptom. Not in the Lacanian sense, don’t worry, it is a symptom of capital’s infection of ontology. We have, and I mean we, all of us, allowed for such a reconfiguration of human “purpose” that we collectively -live to work-. Regardless of if you personally value long walks on the beach, society still demands you to work at least a 9-5. This is the marker of your productivity, but also the marker of your value. If you do not produce, you are not valuable to society. That’s how the rationale goes. Sometimes this is manifest more softly – friends helping you “get back to work” after an incident, family suggesting you put in “110%” to get a promotion, and so on. Other times its a blunter edge. Lost your partner, but are you at work? Having a bout of illness, but what about your job?

Our very values centre work. Work for an other. As anyone who has tried to branch out “independently” will tell you, fortunate buggers, it’s not easy, and the judgement and social rules around freelancing, contracting, and going it alone are designed to put you back in your box – unless you’re gifted or otherwise socially exceptional, and even then you’ll likely burn out before you “make it”. This is simultaneously a mechanism of ensuring the survival of the 1% - as a 1%, and a manifestation of hegemonic propaganda – “get back to work for some real money” … “when you’re older you can try and branch out on your own”.

Little sayings, thinkings, and social corrections do more to overcorrect back to capitalist values than we can ever truly perceive. And this shows the infectious nature of capitalist values in the epistemological sense. Because of propaganda, because of education, because of the questions we think to ask, the problems we foresee on the horizon, the subtle social cues, and so on, we are trapped in our thinking about work, about how we can -be- in the world. But these are problems for epistemology. The physical world’s transformation by human labour as a product of our epistemology (our thinking), and the knowledge that we then have about it (ontology) – is a vicious cycle of capital – so, what role does this play?

Our physical world has been shaped by dual forces. Both evil, and both destructive. These forces have existed for hundreds of years in human “civilisation”. Many competing versions of these systems of existence have manifest, been beaten, and eventually retreated. Some of these systems continue to (co)exist today, but none are so violent, corrupting, and self-destructive as capitalism. Two of the key forces of ontic change resulting from capital are extractivism and expropriation.

Extractivism emerged alongside capital’s early forms, and was traced by Marx and Marx and Engels systematically. Moreover, feminist historians have further explored the role of subjugating women alongside this, often violent, installation of a way of life. Extractivism demands people machine-arise their work. This is not “farming” or “construction” or any one industry. Rather it is a: (1) systematic change to the way that work is done – in the literal sense, (2) thought about – in the social sense; and (3) capitalised upon – in the exchange of goods and services. Extractivism demands nature give up its balanced and robust control over ecosystems, instead “man” is the new master – and this exchange is gendered in the deepest sense. No more room for “mother nature” – now “man” is at the helm, and nature will give up its resources for (the capitalist) “man”.

Expropriation further alienates those who the combined forces of colonialism and extractivism could not, or did not want to, absorb, assimilate, and “collect”. Instead of being offered entry (read: forced into) into capitalist modes of production, working for a capitalist for a sliver of your actual value – expropriation in the most physically violent sense removes people from their land and livelihoods, and either displaces and distorts through propaganda to “other” and exclude these humans from ever returning to homelands and ways of being, or simply exterminates and jettisons humans from their place in the name of bolstering production (usually somewhere else entirely). This colonial pincer move was deployed the world over by European nations, and continues to date in colonial systems of control.

In this way the world has been shaped by values of displacement, alienation, destruction, extraction, and violence. At every turn the smallest group of people use violent and coercive means to ensure that their wealth is inflated. There are no values of care, reciprocity, respect, collaboration, futurism, and so on present here. Instead, it’s “so when will you go back to work?”

However, we haven’t quite dived deep enough. (what?!, I hear you say)

I’ve discussed in previous ideas the notion of internalising rhetoric, propaganda, and hegemonic intent. I have illustrated this in terms of the relationship between worker and manager, particularly the narcissistic and subservient role that management plays in contemporary knowledge-work. Here, today, I’d like to probe this notion in the (degradation of) comradery, commonality, and community felt by the working class.

“Workers’” political parties the world over have, in many instances deliberately, nursed an eruption of identity politics as a violent, unnecessary and disrespectful form of propaganda that, enables yes, but races to fill the void left by a lack of theorisation about the contemporary political sphere as an expropriator. Here, those that know me will know I’m discussing the Australian Labor Party, an allegedly worker-centric party interested in the proles and their issues. Instead, the ALP and its ilk have overseen the seizing of the “centre” (read: economic right) of politics as a space of identity wars for the proletariat, and a bourgeois – nay, capitalist – bloc as justiciar of identity battles.

Unsurprisingly fighting over “who even is working class” is a distraction to enable the continued exploitation, expropriation, and alienation of the proletariat. Moreover, identity politics preoccupies the thoughts of right-wing radicals. “Who is queer” and the subsequent witch hunt remains a hallmark of both Dutton’s LNP and Trump’s Republicans, and countless configurations of zombie would-be dictators and their violent right wing apparatus. Here, in common, between “who is working class” and “who is queer” is an active tribalism over belonging and inclusion. Obviously, these are at different ends of a spectrum, and the answer to the latter “who is” question, is much more likely to result in violence, particularly from the right.

At the heart of these questions is a belonging – and not an empty one. Indeed, originators of working class politics, of queer politics, are not after an assimilatory agenda, but a centring of human value as -human values- not “work”. Instead, allegiance and belonging to these values is weaponised and turned into tribes by the would-be capitalist politician. This should stoke deep contemplation from our society. They quite literally appoint bourgeois commissioners to enable continued genocide – to reinforce identity politics. The political apparatus has never supported “fringes” – and often has encouraged, enabled, or at least ignored violence against those they would rather see out of the picture. But in contemporary times, we are seeing a doubling-down (I know poker people don’t like this phrase, because it doesn’t mean that, but they can suck it!) on allegiance with fascism.

It’s the Family Guy meme of acceptable human – your skin colour, your sexual orientation, your class status – these determine your value as a human. Not your inherent human-ness. And if you are lucky enough to be, or to pass as, a bourgeois citizen, then you’re only valued as a worker anyway. For what you might produce. Just look at your mortgage – 30 years, why? You’ll “earn” an “income” for that period and thus, you have value worthy of being housed. God help you if you’re gay, disabled, or brown – the right would rather we dropped off the mortal coil.

The identity politics fight, however, doesn’t end at being a tool of bourgeois and capital reproduction through the political sphere. Actually, it only begins in those spaces. The ultimate trick of contemporary capitalist grips on epistemology means that by-and-large the proletariat have become obsessed with “identity” and fighting over special, tribal, and unique places in various spaces. Not a value of “allow self expression” but rather you either -are- or -are not- a member of, for example, the bisexual community. Regardless of if you are biologically sexually interested in multiple genders, your belonging to that community defines you and frames who you are and your social value. Yet, to another group, this might be worth lynching you over.

This is the world we live in. And why, you might ask, does this have anything to do with ideology’s connection to the physical world, to ontology? Because while the proletariat fights over tribes, communities, labels and “belonging” the capitalists continue to exploit this installed capitalist ontology to strip the earth of its value, to extinguish natural life, to control and contort your thinking through manipulation, gaslighting, and undermining you.

I cannot, in good conscience, of course, advocate ignoring identity. It is important to who we are. But, at this juncture, I deeply feel that reigniting a true intersectional and accepting comradery is the only thing that could create a better future for the 99%. That’s a deeply uphill battle, and one of the biggest problems for the left.

You can’t say “we’ll make sure you have human rights after the revolution”. But if the system granting human rights is fundamentally based on exploitation, then do you really have any rights? Well, that’s for those who are oppressed by not being granted those rights to decide. And it is in these spaces that the revolutionary communist and socialist projects failed – failing to platform and engage women, failing to platform and engage queer folks, -failing to platform and engage- because ultimately “revolution first”. This was a dark chapter for socialist uprising, but passing this hurdle is absolutely required for the survival of humanity – and at times I fear the planet.

I don’t have answers, and I won’t pretend to speak for anyone. But I think we -can- find a better way forward. It’s a matter of enough people deciding that this isn’t right, these values aren’t ours, that this world is destined to destruction, death, suffering and torment if we don’t do something about it.

Heavy.

In solidarity,

Aidan.

[1] Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart.

[2] Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs (First edition). Simon & Schuster.