chapotraphouse

Watch what the Israeli army did to my home in northern Gaza. It destroyed my life and my family's. 😞💔

Sometimes I have like manic episodes, for lack of a better term, in which I fixate intensely on a topic and I'm suddenly extremely motivated to learn as much as possible (i don't think they're real manic episodes and I'm mentally fine so dw), but for the first time I want to actually follow up on this momentum and learn about the topic I'm fixating on. Behold my ramblings:

What books should I read to learn about the stuff below? If no such books exist, I'll write one.

Overall question: what are the mechanisms by which capitalists extract surplus value from labor? And how can the working people of the world dismantle these mechanisms?

• I use the phrase “what are the mechanisms by which” and not the word “how” intentionally, because I know that the answer to “how” is “by violence or the threat thereof.”

• The question I want to answer is more in the financial “nitty-gritty” of the process. It is obvious that, for example, a coffee farmer in Ethiopia, stevedores in various ports all over the world, and a barista at the Starbucks in my neighborhood all produce value which is extracted by the Starbucks corporation as well as other companies involved in the production process of a cup of coffee (international shipping companies, the companies that make the plastic cups used at Starbucks, etc.). But how, precisely, does that extracted surplus value turn into wealth (not just money in a bank account but wealth in the broadest sense of the term) for the people who own those corporations?

• The most obvious answer is in the dividends paid to shareholders and the increase in the stock price of the various companies involved. But what else? Surely there is a huge obfuscatory architecture of financial tools that hides the true extent of the wealth of the haute bourgeoisie.

  • Examples that jump to mind include: money laundering via fine art (e.g., Salvator Mundi), off-shore bank accounts, and shell and holding companies

  • What do the “bank countries” (Singapore, the Cayman Islands, the City of London, etc.) have to do with this?

• Of course, the final question to ask is: how can we destroy these mechanisms? What are their greatest vulnerabilities? Taking control over any given state seems like an insufficient response, since international capital has numerous bases from which it can operate to hide the extent to which the haute bourgeoisie are hoarding wealth and there’s no indication they can’t create more if we did manage to destroy one. How can the proletariat take control of international finance?

Background reading

• What do the Panama Papers tell us about this question? What other work has been done so far to unravel the obfuscatory architecture mentioned above?

• To what extent would Marx’ Capital provide a framework in which to answer this question? What about writings by later Marxists?

I apologize if this makes no sense at all

Death to America

Aya Mohammed is her name

She’s a Palestinian from Gaza who Is still there and reached out to me to post her go fund me

She decided to make an account here purely based on curiosity

Here’s her account

I think it’s still waiting approval

Crazy that we might have 3 Palestinians here

She says she forgot the password

If any of the mods see this ,please tell us so that she can activate it and we will change it later

EDIT: She actually had a screen shot lol

Mr. Bloomberg, who is 82 years old and has an estimated net worth of $105 billion, is the second largest disclosed individual donor to Democrats in this election cycle, after the investor and philanthropist George Soros. But publicly, Democrats observed that Mr. Bloomberg was donating nowhere close to what he had spent during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The $47 million he had given in federally disclosed political contributions during this election cycle, before his new nonprofit donation, was less than half of the $95 million he disclosed to help Democrats retake Congress in the 2018 midterms.

Look at this "journalism"...

When Mr. Bloomberg ran for president in 2020, he spent $1.1 billion in a real-world experiment on whether enormous money could buy votes. It couldn’t. He got creamed in the Democratic primaries.

A creepy, unelectable billionaire spent a zillion dollars and lost is proof of nothing. And to say in general that money doesn't influence elections is insane.

Report Finds You Should Get To Retire After, Like, 6 Years Working Full-Time Job

LOS ANGELES—Calling the findings of its comprehensive survey of American workplace practices “total bullshit,” the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment issued a report Monday concluding that you should be able to retire after, like, six years of working full time. “We evaluated the data around current U.S. employment rates, and our research shows that it’s basically crazy that we have to waste our whole damn lives working before we can retire,” said report co-author Sarah Middleton, who explained that six years is actually a really long time and that it sounds like more than enough labor for one person. “Our research found that people have to work and stuff or else nothing would get done, but anything more than half a decade or so seems cruel and excessive. That has to be hundreds of hours of work, right? And after consulting with experts across the field, we determined that six years was a totally reasonable amount of time to pay your dues before you get to kick back and chill. After that long, people are so broken down they barely contribute much anyway, so this seems like a good compromise. Maybe if you’re part-time you work 10 years or something. I mean, when are people supposed to do things that they like? We heard that’s how they do it in Europe already anyway.” Middleton confirmed that the findings were based on a full-time workweek of five-hour days, four days per week.

This will be the Democrats' strategy to avoid another Bernie being in the primaries.

I think it's called New York City?

FFS

But have you considered that the economy is doing great?

Surely the incumbent party won't get bit by this at the polls

Anecdotally my org is set to give nearly 30% more food in 2024 than last year

What i said was thoughtless and wrong and deeply offensive to the Council of the Wise and I have realized that I was in the wrong.

...

Could you please turn me back in to a person now?

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Literally noone in the US or the entirety of latin America knows what’s going on in PR atm but I’m almost certain PIP will win the governorship for the first time ever.

And then it will all be credited to this dumbass hurrdurr

Bearsite seems very energetic this weekend. Maybe we can channel that energy into something helpful?

I can't help but think there's a late 20s lanyard dork who posts on r/neolib and has a Twitter handle with a Taiwan flag is in some semi-influential position in Harris' campaign who slipped that in as an "epic own" to us "Bernie Bros" who "harass" him online.