2y ago

General Discussion Thread - Juche 112, Week 31

Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!

We have a Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space.

Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.

13 comments

DDR born Gen Xer hot takes from today:
Gorby was actually alright cause he let the people vote for "none of the above."
DDR bad cause your bachelor's thesis topic was assigned to you and you couldn't choose where you worked.
So did hexbear federate with us or what?
A bunch of really valuable young workers are quitting at my employer because the owners flat out refuse to respect us workers. With the way things at this place have already been falling apart with a handful of good people on board I'm really excited about what the future brings.
- Organise them!
  
  I'm carefully dropping breadcrumbs. It's just tricky because the owners are physically present and obviously vehemently anti-worker, and due to some, let's say familial relationships in the company, me obviously leading a union drive could backfire into my personal life.
So I started my job at the Union this week. So far I'm liking it. It is a weird mix of being a progressive org while at the same time being stuck in the 80s it seems.
- being stuck in the 80s it seems.
  In what way?
Just about to finish reading 'Survival of the richest by douglas rushkoff', it's a decent contemporary tech critique but oh boy i have to put down the book sometimes because of the cringe idealist comments made by the author. Really makes me appreciate Lenin writing style more and more.
- because of the cringe idealist comments made by the author
  Any bangers?
  
  He mentions capitalism a lot during the book (also some subtle anti-china rethoric like any self respecting liberal of course) but he not once mentions anything related about relations of production, he just criticizes the infinite growth property of capitalism and ties it a lot with the contemporary tech industry. The usual shallow criticism coming from libs who know about capitalism just from the osmosis of living on it and haven't really made any real study of it.
  This paragraph is just peak pseudo-intellectual liberalism lmao, not technically his take but there is no debunking of the comment later which makes me think he actually believes it
  Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead thought cybernetics would prevent fascism. For where fascism depends on the fragmenting of knowledge and oversimplified direction from above, cybernetics would engender holism and serve as “a kind of vaccination against fragmentation.” - 💀

13 comments