Posted by sarahZedig on Apr 07, 2022
hello comrades!
damn, that already feels a lot better than "patrons." every time i begin a patreon update post with "hello patrons" i imagine i'm talking to a Venician banker who’s definitely had at least one other would-be patrician assassinated for joking that his taste in frescoes was about as dynamic as his taste in chaperons. "comrades" feels more appropriate, more in line with what i'd prefer of a crowdfunding community --or any community, really.
i was going to crosspost this public update from my patreon announcing my presence on Comradery, but after writing up what follows i figured it’d be more expedient to just link that post here and jump right in. the short version is: for now, i’ll be treating patreon and Comradery as identical platforms. anything backer-exclusive will be crossposted. this will change eventually, but not for a long time.
anyway, in my first attempt to write this post i went off on a free-associative tear about crowdfunding under the current iteration of capitalism. consider this a taste test of the sort of rhetoric i’ll be tossing around in the near future.
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the promise of ThE rIsE aNd GrInD lIfEsTyLe of being a gig worker is that you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck, that you get to make your own hours, that YOU get to be in control of your career. having worked at grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants for most of my adult life, i certainly find my current “job” a whole hell of a lot less taxing on me, at least in the immediate sense. but beneath that shining veneer is a catastrophically unsustainable lifestyle resultant from an insulated political class whose idea of “work” hasn’t been updated since the 1980s. i often wonder how different things would be if the selfsame incompetent nincompoops driving us headlong towards extinction had even the slightest hint of foresight or curiosity about the developing nature of work in the digital age twenty or more years ago. they like to cover their asses with “government moves slow and that’s just how it is,” but that government sure as hell doesn’t have a problem jumping into sixth gear with a firehose hooked up to a money spigot every time the military scaremongers that a dark-skinned orphan dared go unbombed in the middle east. there’s nothing secretly conspiratorially nefarious about it though, it’s just good old fashioned greed & laziness. the complacency of a ruling class reveling in the end of history. we did it, everyone! mission accomplished! now nothing ever needs to change ever again for the rest of time... or else.
what move-fast-break-things-type corporation wouldn’t hungrily lick its lips in the face of that kind of regulatory neglect?
society as constructed by the labyrinth of bureaucratic economic systems we call government has altogether abandoned anyone who aspires to becoming anything less than the next CEO of apple. if your wish is to live precisely at your means, to make things without the eternal looming threat of the profit motive, well... good luck! to live in America is to live in a gachapon made of gachapons. rather than the supposed entrepeneurial ideal of cutting out the middleman, our fintech data analyst wall street business boy leadership seem quite content with an economy composed exclusively of middlemen. no transaction untaxed, no platform unpoliced. if you can imagine a bridge to a more stable future even just for yourself, you can be sure an entire football teams' worth of trolls will line up to charge you for the pleasure of crossing it.
it’s no mystery how we got here. think of the veritable smorgasboard of easy poltical wins that the democrats seem completely disinterested in here on the eve of the 2022 midterms. you think they don’t know how popular prison abolition, police defunding, cannabis decriminalization, and medicare for all would be? of course they do. they just don’t care. the voters may get them elected, but it’s the lobbies who pay their bills. and the truth is that if you decriminalized cannabis, defunded the police, abolished prisons, and gave everyone free healthcare without significant transformative interventions at virtually every level of economic and bureaucratic existence, the American economy would crumble under its own weight like a paper tiger in monsoon season. which, imo, wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen! “economy” as a measure of a nation’s health is a fundamentally capitalist framework, and despite the wives’ tale of some “invisible hand of the market” there is in fact nothing natural or normal about economics. it is, as all supposedly infrastructurally necessary things become when left unquestioned long enough, an invention unduly deified.
in simplest terms, giving people what they need to survive with no strings attached is a distrastrous fiscal policy when your entire economy relies on no one having anything they need to survive unless they first string themselves marionette-like unto the cross of some war crime doing corporation or other. a “good job” in this country is measured exclusively by its benefits, its perks, like healthcare and sick leave. if everyone had good free healthcare, what would employers have to hold over their employees heads when exploitation inevitably comes calling? if Americans weren’t drowning in endless medical debt, they could afford to work less hours and spend more time doing something about how shitty their lives have become. if our horrifically gargantuan prison population were freed and our police force commensurately reduced, you’d have a whole hell of a lot more people putting pressure on politicians to do their jobs (there’s a housing crisis on after all and those former prisoners need a place to stay) and a whole hell of a lot less fascist yes-men waiting around to use chemical weapons on them (under cover of law, anyway). if the class war seems louder than usual these days, it’s only because those in power can’t afford to let the quiet part go unstated a single second longer.
nothing belongs to the working class anymore. your job is a gift from your boss, your apartment a gift from your landlord, your education a gift from your loan servicer, and they all expect repayment with interest in some form or other. raise a stink about this and you will be called ungrateful by people who've never even had to clean their own toilet, who think a "problem" is when you want to buy a second boat but you have to wait until the next fiscal quarter for tax reasons. nancy pelosi will die peacefully of old age worth more money than what 99% of the people who voted for her will ever make in their lives --not that you'd need to be that rich to cross that bar considering the abject destitution of the American working class today, but it's an illustrative comparison regardless. it's been the case for a long time that American politicians see their constituents largely as percentages on graphs, as immutable facts and figures whose material realities are only hypothetically true and ultimately a subjective irrelevance to the “objective” data. nevermind that data must be interpreted to have meaning, and there will never exist an interpretive framework without tangible ideological bias. the difference for liberals is that they pass their ideology off as invisible, natural, default. the invisible hand of culture, as it were. this is the unhinged logic that divines a pandemic "response" resulting in the deaths of well over one million working class people, most of them people of color, of an easily preventable illness. this is the logic that says a pandemic can be eradicated by arbitrarily altering the metrics by which it is reported instead of helping any of the people materially effected by the disease. it's embarrassing, really. embarrassing, heartbreaking, and horrible beyond words.
“pandemic of the unvaccinated”! we sure do love eugenics in this country don’t we folks?
the first two years of the Biden administration constituted nothing less than a million-strong blood sacrifice to that dreadful god Economy, as demanded by the opiated oracles with business degrees we colloquially refer to as “economists.” and this is just an appetizer compared to what fortune has in store for us next if we continue marching on apace.
whatever illusion our leadership granted us of a true democracy was summarily cast aside in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings of summer 2020. it's all well and good for the rabble to believe they have freedom when they're running the machine no questions asked, but as soon as they're of the mind that they get to dictate the terms of that freedom (or, god forbid, insist they should get to own any part of said machine) suddenly the working class is a delusional cadre of unruly children led astray by uh uh uh [checks notes] the red menace! yeah, that's it-- things aren't bad, it's just Putin and Xi funding secret anarchist hoards to make it look like things are bad! nevermind that every major domestic news source is owned by the very same billionaires and corporations that launder spectacular sums of money into the pockets of every major politician irrespective of party alliance, nevermind that the working class have practically zero interface with any lever of power or representation outside of twitter, nevermind that communism in Russia has literally been dead for longer than most milliennials have even been alive! no, it's the poors who are wrong, and we know this is true because we said it was true and then The New York Times said that what we said was true was true because we said that it was true! that’s the paper of record for christs sake, what more do you want!! why are we even still talking about this anyway, don’t you know the midterms are coming up? you’re only even still alive in the first place because we need you to vote for us, so vote, damn you, vote!!!
[nancy pelosi voice] i’ve had it
they couldn't afford to let us persist under the presumption of having any actual say in the lives we get to lead, so now we are in an era of labor discipline. man, did you see that clip of Jen Psaki reacting to the successful unionization of the Staten Island amazon warehouse? everything you need to know about the American ruling class might as well be written in blinking neon lights directly on her face. our elected leaders hate us. they hate that we have the gall to expect them to do their jobs. they hate that we don’t unconditionally worship the ground they walk on. for the democrats, the line between corruption, vanity, and laziness is nonexistant.
that’s why the gig economy has been allowed to barrel us end over end into the fucking catastrophic labor crisis we’re in now. in the absence of any support from our leaders, we eagerly flocked into the open arms of corporations that promised us an alternative to traditional work that, wouldn’t you know it, just happened to be entirely unregulated. we did this because we saw for ourselves that “bad” jobs kill your body while “good” jobs kill your soul, and because we knew deep down that life should be more than that thing you get to do between shifts. now there’s no difference at all between life and work, which is why any given ~content creator~ knows more about the DSM designations of personality disorders than most practicing psychiatrists.
anyway, hello comrades. everything sucks and i think we’re all more or less on the same page about that. and while it’s true that they’re almost certainly going to get worse before they get better, i do genuinely believe that they are going to get better. two years ago, when Bernie seemed all but certain to win the DNC nomination, a friend of mine said that “this is the strongest the American left has ever been in our lifetimes, and it’s the weakest it will be from now on.” given the beautiful bounty of unionization pushes and powerfully successful strikes we’ve seen in all sorts of industries over the last year, i’m inclined to think that friend was correct. but there is no victory so good that we can afford to let it be our last, and unions are only one step on a much longer path.
we must believe that we can make this world a better place. our leaders are making the gamble that they can pull a bargain bin Vulcker Shock and squeeze blood from the working class to stave off “inflation” which, you know, i’ve been in furry circles for long enough to have come around on inflation, it’s not really as weird as- [puts hoof to ear] i’m being told that economic inflation is a different thing, but regardless, we’re being told to “tighten our belts” and expect prices to go up, expect treats to vanish, expect things to get harder.
the Volcker Shock “worked” the first time around because organized labor had, in the decades prior, won huge protections for the working class. there was ample copper to be stripped from those walls, welfare programs to gut, wages to slash-- it was a firesale on the wealth of the working class, and it caused immense suffering & led us directly to this moment when the American government seems utterly incompetent at anything other than bombing foreign countries. but now, as the democrats aim to attack the all-but-certain oncoming recession with tactics pioneered by the fucking Reagan administration, the question occupying my mind is: how much copper is there left to be stripped from those walls? what does the American working class have left to give? most of us have already burned through what little savings we might have worked up through the pandemic and now find ourselves in even more debt than we were in before. what social welfare programs are there, what store of wealth, what free time, what’s left???? there is no reserve army of labor left, certainly not now that over a million working class Americans have been killed by neglect-- most of whom were the very POC who historically always wind up having to do the jobs the rest of us think we’re too good for.
there is no difference between the democrats and the republicans, nor pharmaceutical companies and weapons manufacturers, nor corporate news media and the disney company. they are all fingers upon the hand of a chthonic nightmare called Capital, working its will through nothing less than the simple desire to make a profit at literally any cost. is that a hyperbolic framing of the situation? i don’t know. considering the literally apocalyptic nature of capitalist excess, quite frankly i think it’s foolish to see it any other way-- specifically because, by treating them as separate entities with wholly indepedent interests (which, on paper, they are), we grant them a wholly unearned credulity. listen not to what they say, but what they do. see how their actions sync together, how their anti-worker fixation on profit above all cumulates naturally into an across the board oppressive and anti-human environment. does it even matter anymore whether the collusion between government and industry is explicit when the effects are this dire? yes, each finger needs to be approached with specially-tailored tactics, but i say again that there is no victory so good that we can afford to let it be our last. whatever complicated mechanisms by which capitalists have laundered their theft into climate catastrophe, it can never be left unsaid that the root of all this evil is the profit movtive. more dimensions exist and must be addressed on a case by case by case basis, but only when the Thing itself is dead and its memory salted beyond glorious nostalgia can we declare any revolution a success. don’t let yourself stay distracted by the complications, comrades. we create the value the capitalists crave. we’ve won against the impossible before, and we will do so again. we must.
the only future for humanity is to make profit a thing of the past.
that’s my opinion anyway, but i’m literally just a goat. thanks for reading.
take care of yourselves.