cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/30028880

A community dedicated to taking back the wealth of the 0.01%, for the sake of human kind

The way the bourgeoisie see the world is purely as a zero sum game of 'most power wins'. According to them, everything, everything people do is to win 'the game'. You can't appeal to empathy because they see it as a manipulation tactic. You can't appeal to them with logic because they, again, see logic as another tactic to get ahead. Everything is a lie so they're going to be the best at it. If they oppose someone it's never because of a moral reason, it's because that person threatens their throne in 'the game'. For example, they see people protesting the genocide of Palestinians as simply people mad that they're losing. That's how warped their morals are.

They fully embrace the pseudoscientific idea of social Darwinism, no matter how outdated and disproven it is. After all, the reason they're rich is because they're special. God has favorited them, or if they're agnostic, it's simply the rules of the jungle that have chosen them. Yet, never expect them to look to close at nature and discover the nuances and success of social species that mutually work together. That won't help them win 'the game' so obviously any example of nature being nice is just some kind of trick.

To them, if people are poor, it's because they're weak and bad at 'the game'. In their eyes, losers of 'the game' are pathetic deserve to die, so being exploited as human commodities is actually kind on their part because in 'the jungle' they assume the poor would be dead. Of course, this doesn't apply to those who are like them, born of 'good stock'. If you're a billionaire and then lose some wealth you deserve some pity.

The bourgeoisie have an almost fanatical religious view of the world, approach them as you would a cultist. You can't explain that their greed is going to eventually destroy the environment and kill them too, because they will just think that you're a heretic trying to trick them into losing 'the game'. The idea that their god (greed) won't protect them as it always has is laughable to them. After all, their mastery of 'the game' allows them to commit any crime, to do things that are almost god-like, so of course it will protect them from any natural disaster.

So understand that these people don't see you as human. They don't care who they hurt, and you won't be able to shame them or reason them into reality.

Do not underestimate their dedication to this self destructive greed. This Spartan dead end. They will cling to it until they die.

I've been listening to Proles Pod, they have a new series of episodes called "The Stalin Eras" which I found extremely good for history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the end of the Great Patriotic War. Using that as a source and a few other sources, I've compiled some main points regarding the Motherboard-Ribbedcock that dispels the prevalent propaganda that it was a "Soviet-Nazi pact to expand the Soviet Union because they were bad". I've used mostly Wikipedia in the links so you can use it against libs:

1) Most of the invaded "Polish" territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called "carving of Poland by the Soviet Union" liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Sorry for the ugly map, I made it myself and it's my first attempt (I made it with GIMP lmao):

Edit: added the following map (source) showing the majority-ethnicities in 1931-Poland for further reference. Funny how, comparing both maps, the rough boundary between Polish and Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian ethnic majority seems to really overlap with the extent to which the USSR invaded Poland

2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn't agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.

Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.

3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union "carved Eastern Europe" in the so-called "secret protocol" was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don't have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nonbody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias (I have another post with many more quotes, these are just a few of them):

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)

I could go on with quotes but you get my point.

4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?

Edit 2: 5) I, the guy who wrote this wall of text, am a Spaniard. The Soviet Union is the only country which sold weapons to and supported the antifascist side of the Spanish civil war in 1936-1939. The Soviet Union not only declared opposition to fascism in Europe, it is the only country pre-1939 to actually fight it outside its borders. While the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis bombed the cities of the republican-controlled areas of Spain, the liberal west looked to the other side, and the USSR was the only country to offer material support and actual troops to the Spanish partisans. So, as a Spaniard, fuck you if you diminish the role of the USSR in the antifascist struggle in Europe.

Thanks for reading :)

This is written in response to this thread here: https://hexbear.net/post/4704476

Democratization of Capitalist Values

Democratization is a word often used with technological advancement and the proliferation of open-source software. Even here, the platform under which this discussion is unfolding, we are participating in a form of "democratization" of the means of "communication". This process of "democratization" is often one framed as a kind of universal or near universal access for the masses to engage in building and protecting their own means of communication. I've talked at length in the past about the nature of the federated, decentralized, communications movement. One of the striking aspects of this movement is how much of the shape and structure this democratization of communication shares with the undemocratic and corporate owned means of communication. Despite being presented with the underlying protocols necessary to create a communication experience that fosters true community, the choice is made instead to take the shape and structure of centralized, corporate owned speech and community platforms and "democratize" them, without considering the social relations engendered by the platforms.

As Marxists, this phenomenon isn't something that should seem strange to us, and we should be able to identify this phenomenon in other instances of "democratization". This phenomenon is what sits at the heart of Marxist analysis, and it is the relationship between the Mode of Production and the Super Structure of society. These "democratized" platforms mirror their centralized sisters, and are imbued with the very same capitalist values, in an environment that stands in conflict with those very same values. If this means of democratization of online community and communication was to be truly democratic, it would be a system that requires the least amount of technical knowledge and resources. However, those operators that sit at the top of each of these hosted systems exist higher on the class divide because they must operate a system designed to work at scale, with a network effect at the heart of its design. This is how you end up with the contradictions that lay under each of these systems. Mastodon.org is the most used instance, and its operators have a vested interest in maintaining that position, as it allows them and their organization to maintain control over the underlying structure of Mastodon. Matrix.org is the most used instance for its system for extremely similar reasons. Bluesky has structured itself in such a way that sits it on the central throne of its implementation. They have all obfuscated the centralization of power by covering their thrown with the cloak of "democratization". Have these systems allowed the fostering of communities that otherwise drown in the sea of capitalist online social organizing? There is no doubt. Do they require significant organizational effort and resources to maintain? Absolutely. Are they still subject to a central, technocratic authority, driven by the same motivations as their sister systems? Yes, they are.

This brings me to AI, and it's current implementation and design, and it's underlying motivations and desires. These systems suffer from the same issues that this very platform suffer from, which is, that they are stained with the values of capital at their heart, and they are in no means a technology that is "neutral" in its design or its implementation. It is foolish to say that "Marxists have never opposed technological progress in principle", in that this statement also handwaves away the critical view of technology in the Marxist tradition. Marx spends more than 150 pages---A tome in its own right---on the subject of technology and technological advancement under Capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital. Wherein he outlines how the worker becomes subjugated to the machine, and I find that this quote from Marx drives home my position, and I think the position of others regarding the use of AI in its current formation (emphasis mine).

The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.

---

Capital Volume 1, Production of Relative Surplus Value\Machinery and Modern Industry\Section 4: The Factory

What is it, at the core of both textual and graphical AI generation, that is being democratized? What has the capitalist sought to automate in its pursuit of Large Language Model research and development? It is the democratization of skill. It is the alienation of the Artist from the labor of producing art. As such, it does not matter that this technology has become "democratized" via open-source channels because at the heart of the technology, it's intention and design, it's implementation and commodification, lay the alienation of the artist from the process of creating art. It is not the "democratization" of "creativity". There are scores of artists throughout our history whose art is regarded as creative despite its simplicity in both execution and level of required skill.

One such artist who comes to mind is Jackson Pollock, an artist who is synonymous with paint splattering and a major contributor to the abstract expressionist movement. His aesthetic has been described as a "joke" and void of "political, aesthetic, and moral" value, used as a means of denigrating the practice of producing art. Yet, it is like you describe in your own words, "Creativity is not an inherent quality of tools — it is the product of human intention". One of the obvious things that these generative models exhibit is a clear and distinct lack of intention. I believe that this lack of "human intention" is explicitly what drives people's repulsion from the end product of generative art. It also becomes "a sort of torture" under which the artist becomes employed by the machine. There are endless sources of artists whose roles as creators have been reduced to that of Generative Blemish Control Agents, cleaning up the odd, strange, and unintentioned aspects of the AI process.

Capitalist Mimicry and The Man In The Mirror

One thing often sighted as a mark in favor of AI is the emergence of Deepseek onto the market as a direct competitor to leading US-based AI Models. Its emergence was a massive and disruptive debut, slicing nearly $2-trillion in market cap off the US Tech Sector in a mater of days. This explosive out of the gate performance was not the result of any new ideologically driven reorientation in the nature and goal of generative AI modeling philosophy, but instead of the refinement of the training processes to meet the restrictive conditions created by embargos on western AI processing technology in China.

Deepseek has been hailed as what can be achieved under the "Socialist Model" of production, but I'm more willing to argue that this isn't as true as we wish to believe. China is a vibrant and powerful market economy, one that is governed and controlled by a technocratic party who have a profound understanding of market forces. However, their market economy is not anymore or less susceptible to the whims of capital desires than any other market. One prime example recently was the speculative nature of their housing market, which the state is resolving through a slow deflation of the sector and seizure of assets, among other measures. I think it is safe to argue that much of the demands of the Chinese market economy are forged by the demands of external Capitalist desires. As the worlds forge, the heart of production in the global economy, their market must meet the demands of external capitalist forces. It should be remembered here, that the market economy of China operates within a cage, with no political influence on the state, but that does not make it immune to the demands and desires of Capitalists at the helm of states abroad.

Yes. Deepseek is a tool set released in an open-source way. Yes, Deepseek is a tool set that one can use at a much cheaper rate than competitors in the market, or roll your own hosting infrastructure for. However, what is the tool set exactly, what are its goals, who does it benefit, and who does it work against? The incredible innovation under the "Socialist model" still performs the same desired processes of alienation that capitalists in the west are searching for, just at a far cheaper cost. This demand is one of geopolitical economy, where using free trade principles, Deepseek intends to drive demand away from US-based solutions and into its coffers in China. The competition created by Deepseek has ignited several protectionist practices by the US to save its most important driver of growth in its economy, the tech sector. The new-found efficiency of Deepseek threatens not just the AI sector inside of tech, but the growing connective tissue sprung up around the sector. With the bloated and wasteful implementation of Open AI's models, it gave rise to growing demand for power generation, data centers, and cooling solutions, all of which lost large when Deepseek arrived. So at its heart, it has not changed what AI does for people, only how expensive AI is for capitalists in year-to-year operations. What good is this open-source tool if what is being open sourced are the same demands and desires of the capitalist class?

Reflected in the production of Deepseek is the American Capitalist, they stand as the man in the mirror, and the market economy of China as doing what a market economy does: Compete for territory in hopes of driving out competition, to become a monopoly agent within the space. This monopolization process can still be something in which you distribute through an open-source means. Just as in my example above, of the social media platforms democratizing the social relations of capitalist communal spaces, so too is Deepseek democratizing the alienation of artists and writers from their labor.

They are not democratizing the process of Artists and Laborers training their own models to perform specific and desired repetitive tasks as part of their own labor process in any form. They hold all the keys because even though they were able to slice the head from the generative snake that is the US AI Market, it still cost them several million dollars to do so, and their clear goal is to replace that snake.

A Renaissance Man Made of Metal

Much in the same way that the peasants of the past lost access to the commons and were forced into the factories under this new, capitalist organization of the economy, the artist has been undergoing a similar process. However, instead of toiling away on their plots of land in common, giving up a tenth of their yield each year to their lord, and providing a sum of their hourly labor to work the fields at the manor, the Artist historically worked at the behest of a Patron. The high watermark for this organization of labor was the Renaissance period. Here, names we all know and recognize, such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli were paid by their Patron Lords or at times the popes of Rome to hone their craft and in exchange paint great works for their benefactors.

As time passed, and the world industrialized, the system of Patronage faded and gave way to the Art Market, where artists could sell their creative output directly to galleries and individuals. With the rise of visual entertainment, and our modern entertainment industry, most artists' primary income stems from the wage labor they provide to the corporation to which they are employed. They require significant training, years and decades of practice and development. The reproduction of their labor has always been a hard nut to crack, until very recently. Some advancements in mediums shifted the demand for different disciplines, 2D animators found themselves washed on the shores of the 3D landscape, wages and benefits depleted, back on the bottom rung learning a new craft after decades of momentum via unionization in the 2D space. The transition from 2D to 3D in animation is a good case study in the process of proletarianization, very akin to the drive to teach students to code decades later in a push for the STEM sector. Now, both of these sectors of laborers are under threat from the Metal Renaissance Man, who operates under the patronage of his corporate rulers, producing works at their whim, and at the whim of others, for a profit. This Mechanical Michelangelo has the potential to become the primary source of artistic and---in the case of code---logical expression, and the artists and coders who trained him become his subordinates. Cleaning up the mistakes, and hiding the rogue sixth finger and toe as needed.

Long gone are the days of Patronage, and soon too long gone will be the days of laboring for a wage to produce art. We have to, as revolutionary Marxists, recognize that this contradiction is one that presents to artists, as laborers, the end of their practice, not the beginning or enhancement of that practice. It is this mimicry that the current technological solutions participate in that strikes at the heart of the artists' issue. Hired for their talent, then, used to train the machine with which they will be replaced, or reduced. Thus limiting the economic viability of the craft for a large portion of the artistic population. The only other avenue for sustainability is the Art Market, which has long been a trade backed by the laundering of dark money and the sound of a roulette wheel. A place where "meritocracy" rules with an iron fist. It is not enough for us to look at the mechanical productive force that generative AI represents, and brush it aside as simply the wheels of progress turning. To do so is to alienate a large section of the working class, a class whose industry constitutes the same percentage of GDP as sectors like Agriculture.

I have no issue with the underlying algorithm, the attention-based training, that sits at the center of this technology. It has done some incredible things for science, where a focused and specialized use of the technology is applied. Under an organization of the economy, void of capitalist desires and the aims to alienate workers from their labor, these algorithms could be utilized in many ways. Undoubtably, organizations of ones like the USSR's Artist Unions would be central in the planning and development of such technological advancement of generative AI technology under Socialism. However, every attempt to restrict and manage the use of generative AI today, is simply an effort to prolong the full proletarianization process of the arts. Embracing it now only signals your alliance to that process.

I'll link to the comments here but I'll copy-paste them in comment format below in the comments so that it's easier to follow.

THEM: original comment

ME: quick response

THEM: Russian Lib response

ME: quick response to that (was busy with work)

ME: more elaborate response to that (had more time later, actual effort-posting)

THEM: response to my quick response

ME: final response to that response (also effortposting, interesting comment)

Thanks for checking it out. I'm saving this here for reference, because many Russian opposition libs are anticommunist in nature and these are some good responses (IMO) to some of their main points, that usually disarm them through the power of the immortal science.

I wrote this in reply to this post: Fentanyl: China's Double-Dealing. (00:16:45)

China is the manufacturing heart of the world, everything you would need to make nearly anything you wanted, has to pass through, be processed in, or be manufactured by China. So how exactly do those "raw materials" find their way into the USA? The answer might come as a surprise to you: Fentanyl is smuggled into America for Americans, by other Americans. (CATO Institute, 2022; NY Times, 2024).

Not only are the majority of the traffickers American, but also "over 90 percent of fentanyl border seizures occur at legal border crossings and interior vehicle checkpoints".

When it comes to sourcing the materials necessary to make Fentanyl, you can thank organizations like the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS, and DHL for making it that much easier by lobbing to have the de minimis rule's value increased.

This change to trade policy has upended the logistics of international drug trafficking. In the past few years, the United States has become a major transshipment point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexico’s cartels to manufacture the fentanyl that’s devastating U.S. communities, anti-narcotics agents say. Traffickers have pulled it off by riding a surge in e-commerce that’s flooding the U.S. with packages, helped by that trade provision.
-- Reuters, 2024

The de minimis limit was raised in 2016, which is what created the conditions that made transporting these chemical compounds through the US so ideal. There is a clear profit motive in raising that minimum. "The rollback [of de minimis] would snarl supply chains and raise consumer prices" (Reuters, 2024). According to John Pickel, a former U.S. Customs official and now senior director of international supply chain policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, the de minimis rules do not enable smuggling, stating "traffickers would continue to sneak boxes into the U.S." even without the rule. Though, even Reuters admits that the rout being taken now by smugglers is a "streamlined system", and that this system is so dense that "just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4million de minimis parcels arriving [...] daily are inspected by U.S. Customs." This motivation is echoed by the head of the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS and DHL, stating they "want to keep the [de minimis] channel open for as many goods as possible because streamlined entry saves them money."

You can see the impact of this desirable, streamlined port of entry by looking at the stark rise of synthetic opioid overdoses (other than methadone) in the US:

This rise aligns with the 2016 rule change, which seems to indicate that a cheaper more streamlined port of entry doesn't just benefit shippers, it also benefits the manufactures of Fentanyl.

This, however, is naturally just a byproduct of a more profound problem. What drives a maintenance worker from Tucson to "[ferry] about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel", a quantity of chemicals "sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills"? (Reuters, 2024)

The New York Times seems to have picked up the scent,

A college football star was lured in by a friend after dropping out of school. A mother raising three special-needs children took the job while facing eviction. A homeless man was recruited from an encampment in a Walmart parking lot. [...]

“The cartels are directly recruiting anyone who is willing to do it, which typically is someone who needs the money,” said Tara McGrath, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. “The cartels spread their tentacles and grab ahold of vulnerable people at every possible opportunity.” [...]

One woman met her recruiter while in rehab in Los Angeles, where the two struck up a friendship [...] The woman, who asked to be identified by her first initial, M., said that her friend started pressuring her to smuggle drugs only after they spent years getting to know each other. When M. resisted, her friend flew into a rage. [...]

The job offer reached Gustavo in San Diego after he drank too much beer at a party and confessed to a friend that he badly needed money. At the time, he was the main provider for his mother in their San Diego apartment. His brother had moved out, and his parents were divorced. Gustavo was working at a grocery store, but struggled to pay the bills. “I want to be a boss,” he told his friend that night. “This job isn’t feeding me and my mom.”
-- NY Times, 2024

Yet, the New York Times has nothing to say about the conditions that drive these people to risk their lives. Each of them sentenced to jail time. M was sentenced to 18 months in prison, Gustavo spent 32 months in a federal prison. The question always seems to be "Who is providing the fentanyl?", "How do we stop the fentanyl from getting into the country?", and never, "how do we ensure citizens are not self-medicating with things like fentanyl?"

The profile of those entangled in this scheme to traffic materials and fentanyl across the boarder seems to be of the desperate and vulnerable type. Those with economic hardships, or battling their own addictions. This whole conversation about China's role in all this is moot when you get to the heart of what drives people to substances and to quick cash. It is a cyclical demand, where the poorest among us traffic the materials needed to make the narcotics that the rest of the poorest among us used to cope with their material conditions. Statistics from Addiction Group show how bleak this reality is:

• Individuals living below the federal poverty line have about 36% higher odds of developing substance abuse issues than those in the highest income brackets.
• Drug overdose deaths among adults with no college education grew from about 12 per 100,000 in 2000 to 82 per 100,000 in 2021, far outpacing increases among more educated groups.
• 85% of the U.S. prison population either has an active substance use disorder or was incarcerated for crimes involving drugs or drug use.
• Lower-Income Prevalence: National data consistently show that people in households making under $20,000 per year have significantly higher rates of illicit drug use and alcohol misuse than those earning $75,000 or above.
• Poverty Overlaps: High-poverty neighborhoods often see compounded risk factors: poor access to healthcare, elevated stress levels, and limited supportive services.
• Cycle of Financial Strain: Addiction perpetuates financial instability, as funds meant for basic needs may go toward substances, leading to deeper poverty and, in some cases, homelessness.

If China stopped being the most cost-efficient supplier of the materials needed to produce Fentanyl tomorrow, the whole trade would simply find the next most cost-efficient supplier. In a time when car loan defaults are at an all-time high, where 1 in 3 Americans say they rely on credit cards to make ends meet, 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and an estimated 29 million American adults lack the ability to pay for needed medical care, it is no wonder where the Fentanyl Crisis really comes from. It is a crisis of despair, with millions of Americans coping at both ends, creating an interdependency feed back loop, like a snake eating its own tail.

I say this as someone raised Christian.

You can, and many people do, take a progressive interpretation of Christianity, but I don't think it's the INHERENT interpretation of the faith, in fact I think taking an progressive interpretation of it requires focusing on specific teachings of Jesus and Jesus alone, which many left Christians do but they are not the majority interpretation of the faith.

And even the teachings of Jesus, I basically view it just as Millenarianism, he told people to purify themselves for a coming apocalypse, that I honestly think he thought was coming much sooner that most Christians today think it is. Yes the things he told people to do to purify themselves are mostly good things that are pretty compatible with socialism, but it is still mostly individualist charity for the goal of spiritual purification. I don't think any of that is incompatible with a conservative worldview.

I'm just saying this because I see a lot of people try and "hypocrisy own" American conservative Christians right now by pointing to snippets of Jesus' teachings, when I don't think that shits ever going to be effective, because when you take the Bible as a whole it's still overall a conservative text, making a progressive interpretation of it basically requires editing out massive chunks (like basically everything Paul said, which again a lot of left wing Christians basically throw out Paul).

I was listening to music on youtube and I got one of those low-view video recommendations for some Japanese jazz fusion band. I click it, because the genre is nice and because I like to discover new music, but right off the bat I start to get that uncanny feeling. Just a quick glance at the details in the thumbnail image and I can see the nonsensical asymmetry. The music sounds okay, but I can feel that it's just... not right. So I go to check the description, and it has a kind of micro-biography for this band, describing their motivations for creating music, the history of their coming together and their first album, the name of the music label that produced it, their inspiration, complete with each individual band member's name and role.

So I look up the band. Nothing. I look up the members. Nothing. I look up the music label. Nothing.

The band, the members, the music, the album, its cover, are all computer-generated. There is no disclaimer in the video, or its description. It's the opposite, in fact, it's all pretending to be real - to be human.

A deception, but also something worse. In this instance I was able to discern that something uncanny was going on, but I know that many people would not, and do not, the same way people are constantly falling for obvious lies in news, social media, etc.. So for those people, they're listening to a Japanese jazz fusion band from the early 90s. They like the music, the sounds are smooth and comforting but groovy, and there's a false promise that behind the beat there's a group of musicians from a time before the internet was even known to the vast majority of humanity, expertly working to express the combination of many years of practice, their various inspirations drawn from other humans and the world around them, and their cooperation with one another - their human relationships.

It's a mockery of art, and of human expression. The presentation isn't merely a lie; it's an insult. An assertion that that band, those people, their inspirations, their relationship, doesn't actually matter. And for every person that clicks the thumbnail, enjoys the music, and then moves on to the next thing without realizing it's an artifice, the assertion is unchallenged. The insult is justified.

But of course, this isn't limited to music, and it's not limited to art. Every single day, imitations replace more and more of what we see, undercutting with each manifestation the value of human interaction.

I could distinguish that this album and this band were counterfeit, but if all I had been presented with was the music - no thumbnail, no description, no fake names - I wouldn't really have been able to tell that it was pretending to be a product of human expression, I wouldn't have the comfort of being able to confirm any suspicions - I would only be left with that sense that something was wrong. And what fills me with this creeping sense of dread is that I know how much money and effort is being pumped into this technology to make it more and more convincing, and that every day more of it is generated and dumped into social media, videos, music, chats, image-hosts, even little forums like this, like garbage into the ocean. Meaning that as time passes, from now and onward, I will fall for that sickening lie more and more while becoming increasingly paranoid and distrustful of every conversation I have, every game I play, every video I watch, every piece of music I enjoy.

It's a wildfire, but no one's fighting it - and the people with the most power to do so are air-dropping accelerant into the flames.

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This is the video that inspired this post.

I'm sure some will try to pick apart the things I've said here, but just so they know: I'm not posting this to elicit any debate, I'm only sharing a newly-attained level of awareness of something that truly disgusts and unsettles me, in the way that sci-fi horror does. Invention not to benefit humanity, but to replace a crucial component of what's important about being human with something artificial.

Footnote: my browser tried to tell me "accelerant" isn't a word, so I did a search to make sure I wasn't wrong about the spelling, and underneath the definition confirming I wasn't wrong, the first link is to some AI-based site called "accelerant ai".

I have started reading the book Debt: The First 5000 years. Initially, RPGs and World Building were not topics that crossed my mind when working through the first couple of chapters. Then, the other night, I was casually watching a Matt Colvile YouTube stream, and he says this:

I heard that like, that notion of bartering as an economic model, that has never happened. What you get is, you get, it's almost like a [patwa?], its like two different cultures meet for the first time where they do bartering, I'll give you these goats for these two chickens, and after that brief period, which is probably measured in a couple of years they come up with a medium of exchange, right? And then they don't need that bartering thing anymore, and I thought oh that's interesting...

Chapter 2 of Debt is titled "The Myth of Barter". Here is the third paragraph, which I think encapsulates the problem with barter as this mythical economic model:

A history of debt, then, is thus necessarily a history of money—and the easiest way to understand the role that debt has played in human society is simply to follow the forms that money has taken, and the way money has been used, across the centuries—and the arguments that inevitably ensued about what all this means. Still, this is necessarily a very different history of money than we are used to. When economists speak of the origins of money, for example, debt is always something of an afterthought. First comes barter, then money; credit only develops later. Even if one consults books on the history of money in, say, France, India, or China, what one generally gets is a history of coinage, with barely any discussion of credit arrangements at all. For almost a century, anthropologists like me have been pointing out that there is something very wrong with this picture. The standard economic-history version has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere—where one is much more likely to discover everyone is in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.

This idea, that most historical means of exchange were handled without the use of currency, has some rather large and freeing implications for playing your bog-standard Fantasy Land™ RPG.

One of the core issues I, and many others it would seem, had when running / playing D&D5e boiled down to this:

• I never knew how much anything should cost from a "general goods" store or some "magic shop".
• I never knew how much gold should be rewarded to players for doing basically anything.
• My players never knew what to use gold for at all, or thanks to some class abilities, never needed gold for food or shelter, which was 99% of all gold sinks early on.

This stems in some ways from the relationship between treasure and progress in the original Dungeons and Dragons, published in the 70s. Much of the "how" regarding playing D&D at the time was in massive flux and wildly varied from group to group and region to region. There is a book that I very much want to read that covers these early days in detail through analysis of zines from the time called The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson. The rules as written effectively give the GM broad authority to award experience points however they want, but softly suggest they start with awarding them for slaying monsters and collecting treasure.

My understanding, and I do not have sources in front of me, is that this experience for treasure was only calculated once you returned to the "overworld". Whatever was left behind, does not count. In this way, progress was deeply tied to the extraction of gold, as in some cases you would earn 1 exp for every 1 GP you successfully looted to the overworld. This relationship made large sums of gold very attractive to players and likely dictated the design of dungeons to feature more gold than you could carry. Even then, in the early days of Chainmail and eventually D&D, there was wide and heated debate about the nature of progression. Some felt that having this "scoreboard" which generally was tied to looting and killing, left little room for your players to engage with the character they had built, and instead were simply leveraging the underlying mechanics to get a higher "score" faster. It would seem, these debates never ended, almost half a century later.

Much like every economic textbook ever written, people's lack of understanding of historical economies causes them to skip straight to monetary exchange as the primary mode of trade within our games. It would appear that we cannot escape the same kind of myth building within our little games of Medieval Fantasy. Observe the myth building as illustrated by Graeber in chapter 2 of Debt:

It’s important to emphasize that this is not presented as something that actually happened, but as a purely imaginary exercise. “To see that society benefits from a medium of exchange” write Begg, Fischer and Dornbuch (Economics, 2005), “imagine a barter economy.” “Imagine the difficulty you would have today,” write Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller (Economics Explained, 1991), “if you had to exchange your labor directly for the fruits of someone else’s labor.” “Imagine,” write Parkin and King (Economics, 1995), “you have roosters, but you want roses.” One could multiply examples endlessly. Just about every economics textbook employed today sets out the problem the same way. Historically, they note, we know that there was a time when there was no money. What must it have been like? Well, let us imagine an economy something like today’s, except with no money. That would have been decidedly inconvenient! Surely, people must have invented money for the sake of efficiency.

It, too, would seem that money in D&D was invented for the sake of efficiency as well. This notion of treasure (mainly gold) as a measure of progress for your character appears to me as reflective of deeply engrained capitalist ideology. It has a twofold character, one that is reflective of the beliefs of the creators of the game, and one that serves as a simple foundation for the masses of people who engage with the game. The more money you gain, the more powerful you are, this is known. However, this eventually leads to the development of economic gameplay that unfolds into a world of Medieval Fantasy with Modern Capitalist Characteristics. This relationship culminated with the production of the official, and farcical Dungeons and Dragons: Acquisitions Incorporated rule book, providing tongue in cheek rules that allow you to play as your very own Adventure Capitalist.

What I am just now learning, as I write this, though, is that money seems to have taken an even lesser position within the game as of the 2024 edition. In 5e (2014) "Coins" is featured on the front of the character sheet. There are several feats and class features that allow you to effectively get "free food and rooms" anywhere you travel (the By Popular Demand feature for bards, as an example). In the 2024 edition, however, coins can be found on the back of the character sheet. Features like "By Popular Demand" appear to have been removed. Though, this appears to me a result of the "epic fantasy role-play" camp winning out over the "dangerous dungeon delving and treasure hoarding" camp, where-in you need not interact with the "economy" of the world since you're all effectively "The Avengers".

I can hear you back there, wondering, "Rid Wizard, what the fuck are you on about?" So let me advance to the point. If we take what Graeber says in at least the first couple of chapters of Debt as a kind of guiding principle over the nature of the worlds we build, we can build a far more interesting and complex web of narrative opportunities, while simultaneously having answers for what to do with all this gold. Consider the quote above, specifically the final part:

The standard economic-history version has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere—where one is much more likely to discover everyone is in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.

The small communities living within the baronies borders likely live a much more communal life than how most GMs typically depict them. These communities are full of subsistence farmers, and also produce something of value that is collected by the Barron's Knights every season. The external relations the community has with its Baron is one of service. They are provided land, and in exchange are in service to the Baron. Internally, their relations are also driven by service to one another. How they are related engenders the reason for service. A squire in a life debt to a local Knight. A father laboring out of love for his family. A prisoner laboring for the community for which she harmed. Each family and person owes each other their labor for one reason or another, but ultimately labors to ensure the Barron gets his, and so the community isn't left struggling.

Between Baronies, gold is obviously the medium of exchange, and within the walls of the keep that sits at the heart of the baronies, gold takes the place of most exchanges, especially between the larger trade guilds, which are paid by the Baron in gold for the goods they exchange externally. Gold is minted and managed by the Baronies' administration, it is, after all, a product and function of the state.

Labor, on behalf of villagers and our intrepid heroes, should be the primary means of exchange that drives the adventure and story. What motivates a person to become an adventurer? Running way from debt? Seeking to repay a debt? Seeking to expunge a debt through dispatching with the creditor? Debts, in this context, are not strictly a numerical sum of goods or gold that needs to be accumulated before the debt is wiped clean. A person can owe another any number of things, and the most dire of all would be their life.

At some point, debts need to be collected, and your heroes could find themselves being those debt collectors, or running from those debt collectors. Everyone is owed something by someone, you may have to put yourself in debt to a small time thug to go after the big time boss. Perhaps, to earn your magical attunement, you had to make a pact with a Fay, Fiend, Devil or Demon. The Barony is secretly in debt to the red dragon that lives in the mountains, and it has come to collect! The Baron is secretly a Red Dragon, using his long life and political status to amount a vast hoard of gold and treasure, throwing the Baronies into war in hopes to grow its hoard.

The gold you have collected can be still exchanged, but what it gets you is far grander than a simple potion at the local magical goods store. Gold for large tracks of land, gold for your own keep on the border land, gold for a private audience with the Baron, gold for a tavern within the keep, gold for a mercenary company willing to breach the Gates of Hell. If gold is principally used to move city states, then you may have the ability to impose great influence over a city state. After all, "If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank."

What of rewards? Again, much of the above, could be the reward your party earns. A run-down tavern at the edge of a small village the party has aided. The Baron grants you the title of Knight and as such grants you dominion over a small village within the Barony as well as privileged access to the keep. A position of authority within a trade guild. Access to a personal blacksmith, who owes you his life.

And what of buying magical items? This, I think, is where we loop all the way back around to barter. While no civilization has ever had barter as their primary mode of exchange, that isn't to imply that barter doesn't play a role in many societies and civilizations. The later half of Chapter 2 in the book Debt discusses a few ethnographic accounts of barter found in the world.

What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one certainly will not enter into any ongoing relations. This is why a direct one-on-one exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It’s all made possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability in the form of shared pleasures, music, and dance—the usual base of conviviality on which trade must always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any exchange of material goods between strangers—where neither party has no particular reason not to take advantage of the other—by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case, where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.

Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: “Imagine a society without money.” “Imagine a barter economy.” One thing these examples make abundantly clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be.

Barter, then, naturally fits right into our bag of tricks as GMs. Barter, in this context, is dramatic, it can be full of tension and drama:

A party of Rat-Catchers spots the flowing smoke and flickering fire of what is clearly a campsite of another band of Rat-Catchers. The camp, always with one person on watch takes note of their presence. Neither knows the intentions of the other, and what kind of danger they represent. What they both understand, is that all rat-catchers travel with considerably more heat than your average soldier. Do they look green, or do they have the jagged appearance of well-traveled veterans? It is considered rude and often suspicious to not stop and converse, not doing so raises hairs and plants a target on your back, but doing so might just as well. The camp sends a signal, the whisle of a bird not native to this wode from the Druid. The other signals back with the same forign bird song. The members of the camp stand, and offer a welcoming gesture. The others nod in agreement and enter the camp. Greetings are shared, albet with some aprehension, as everyone settles the stories begin. Each party shares of their exploits, carefully telling the most exciting, but least interesting version of their stories. Let too much info slip, and you might become a valuable target to extort for information on a new and larger score. Have nothing to say, and you might be perceived as easy pickings, your loot for the taking. Stories of your escapades are shared over a joint meal, no group of Rat-Catchers in the night will let the other go hungry, not worth the bad reputation. Sometimes these chance meetings end with a good meal and grand stories for the bards to transcribe. Sometimes these meetings turn into a heated ritual of exchange, where one party member seeks an item of value from another. Arguments and demonstrations insue, the laying out of goods to be parted with, negotiations drive tensions. In the end, each walk away with something new or unusual, something of equal or greater value then what they started with. The fires are put out, the party continue on their journey, likely to never see the other again. It's a big world out there after all.

Be more imaginative than most economists, fill your world with interesting and complex means of exchange, devoid of copper and gold. Imagine your world complexly, even its modes of exchange.

Hii, idk why I'm writing this cuz there's probably 0 Lojban speakers here but... idk you may like my special interest writing lol and i just had this urge to start writing this. Also wanna preface this by saying this is mostly composed of my opinions (which I will try to justify ofc) and I'm just some unqualified nerd

Soo, for the last few weeks I've been learning this constructed language called "Lojban". The name Lojban is technically an exonym created by English speakers and some Lojban speakers will use it even while speaking Lojban but a better "native" name is probably "jbobau" or "banjubu'o", the latter for use if someone is pilled on algorithmically deriving Lojban words for countries, cultures, and languages from their ISO codes (I think I am lol, but I think it's also okay to have one of our own words for ourselves and use the algorithmically derived stuff for everything else).

Lojban is a in class of constructed languages called "logical languages" and the usual definition is that they are languages for people to communicate anything a natural language could but they are based on logic. Lojban itself comes out of a previous language project called "Loglan" (yes that's literally just the english words for logic and language mashed together, Lojban's name is similar but has a better justification you will see later lol) after its community became disillusioned with the slow progress of its development and that the specification did not even come close to reflecting its real use (not to mention being intended to just encode English with logical structures which many people were also dissatisfied with). Loglan's creator, James Cooke Brown, was actually threatening people with legal action for trying to improve the language by making dictionaries or specifying grammar that they were already using. So a lot of Loglan's community left the project and formed the "Logical Language Group" (the organization that actually defines what Lojban is) and created Lojban to try to improve on Loglan. For a while there was some kind of complicated legal battle over copyright between the LLG and James Cooke Brown, which the LLG won eventually but not before they had already created a new vocabulary for Lojban from scratch to avoid copyright restrictions.

It's weird but I remember hearing about Lojban as a kid cuz I think I was briefly interested in constructed languages (I even had a little one of my own I can barely remember) and cuz I was allowed unlimited access to the internet basically since I could work a computer on my own lol. I was talking with a friend from here and the topic of languages came up and we talked briefly about if a language that people speak could also be used for programming a computer or something and I vaguely remembered Lojban. So that night I looked into it again, for real this time, and discovered it's actually rly cool and I wanted to make a serious attempt at learning it.

Lojban has several "claims to fame", and not all of them are true sadly and I feel like this isn't made clear enough to newcomers. It's very cool and I love it ofc lol, but there are some things about it that I don't like and which I only learned of after I got a decent grasp on the language and the project.

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Quick intro to Lojban

In Lojban, the basic structure of a text or any speech ("utterances") is a series of "bridi". A bridi is like a Lojban sentence but the word "bridi" literally means "predication". Like in classical first-order logics and like many English sentences ("I like you", I have the relationship of "liking" you), a bridi is a assertion of a relationship between some things. Bridi are composed are 2 things: a selbri, (a predicate word or basically like a verb) which has a series of "places" numbered x1 through x[however many places the selbri has], and sumti which are like arguments or parameters that fit in the numbered places of the selbri.

So "I like you" can be rendered in Lojban like this: mi [cu] nelci do

"nelci" is a word being used as a selbri which has the English definition of "x1 is fond of/likes/has a taste for x2 (object/state)". On its own it's not very useful ofc, unless you have sumti to pass to it. I used the words "mi" and "do", which are like pronouns for the speaker and the listener, respectively. Mi and do are considered to be in a category of word called "cmavo" [SCHMA vo], which literally means "structure word" and which are small, very commonly used words used for lots of things like filling in the sumti places of selbri. There are a few other pronoun-like words defined by Lojban but those aren't very useful unless we only want to make statements about ourselves! Btw, there is another cmavo called "cu", it means that the word after it is a selbri in a bridi, the reason it's in brackets is cuz you often don't need to specify it. In this case we don't cuz it's obvious where the selbri begins and ends.

Here's one of the most wild features of Lojban that you get to learn about almost immediately when you start learning about it. There are no nouns :3

What you have to do if you want something with the function of a noun to use as a sumti to a selbri is to use a few different mechanisms that are provided for by the cmavo, most commonly the cmavo "le" and "lo" which are similar to the English word "the". They convert a selbri to a sumti like this:

le gerku cu nelci le panka (The dog likes the park, or extremely literally: all of the at-least-one described as a dog liked/likes/will like (tenses are optional :3) all of the at-least-one described as a park)

Notice in this case, the cu was necessary cuz otherwise it would be ambiguous where the first sumti to nelci ends. Lojban LOVES terminators to grammatical structures. Le has a corresponding terminator like a close parenthesis "ku". I could have also replaced the cu with a ku (the former is pronounced like shu btw, ku is pronounced like any English speaker would pronounce it hehe) and it would have also been valid. Most of these terminators can usually be dropped where dropping them wouldn't cause any ambiguity. It seems complicated at first but you do actually get a feel pretty quickly when you can leave out the terminators.

Also notice that "gerku" and "panka" look very similar to nelci. That's cuz they are the same type of word called a "gismu" :3 and you can tell easily where the gismu in a Lojban utterance are cuz they have a defined, regular form. They always have 5 letters, always start with a consonant and end with a single vowel, always contain exactly one consonant pair, and they are are always stressed on the first syllable (which is a consequence of the fact that ALL Lojban words are stressed on their second-to-last syllable).

Gerku and panku literally mean "is a dog" and "is a park" (they have more places for more info but yeh hehe)

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Intro to xorlo and bear goo

Oh, you thought the above section was me explaining a language I love so that you could maybe understand it a little better? Actually, it was all a trick to give you the context to just barely grasp the biggest Lojban struggle session that ever happened enough to understand how fundamentally cooked this """"logical"""" language is from a logical perspective :3 (/j)

Actually, I lied in the last section. "le" and "lo" don't work like that anymore. Lojban underwent a period of rapid development within the LLG from its initial creation until the publication of the official specification of the entire language in a red book called "The Complete Lojban Language" in 1997. Then development was mandatorily frozen for 5 years to see how people used this "baseline" standard language. And since then, the development of the language was left to a different committee of LLG members and Lojban users called the BPFK which was dissolved by LLG in 2018 to form the very similar committee called the LFK (I will spare you their Lojban names :3). Technically, LLG has to approve whatever the BPFK and now the LFK do, but the vibe I get is that most of the LLG members who developed the language either left or mostly checked out of further development of the language. I think the LLG bylaws say they have to meet once a year but...... not a lot has happened since 1997 tbh lol

One of the BPFK's first language reforms (maybe the first actually) was a reform called "xorlo".

You know those meanings of le and lo I mentioned earlier? Something that was very important in baseline Lojban was this concept of those le and lo words (called "gadri") having implicit quantifiers.

Like when I say "le gerku" how do you know how many dogs I'm referring to? The answer, in baseline Lojban, is that le has 2 implicit qualifiers which, if not overridden, are this: "ro (all of) le (what is described as) su'o (at least one) gerku (dog)". So, to be exactly clear, what I said was that one or more dog(s) that I'm thinking of like/liked/will like one or more park(s) that I'm thinking of lol. It can't be zero cuz that affects the hypothetical truth value of the bridi (more on that later) cuz there has to be an actually existing liker and liked in order for that bridi to be true. Another important thing is, why did I use le instead of lo? The answer, also in baseline Lojban, is cuz lo refers to things that actually are something, as in: my use of the selbri after "lo" is not restricted by my intentions. That probably sounds like nonsense lol. Cuz it is unless you know the secret thing that no one told me initially and which a lot of other people never learned about le and lo which is that they also specify sets. Before I tell you more on that, I should tell you that lo also has implicit quantifiers like this: "su'o (at least one) lo (things that actually truly are) ro (all) gerku (dog)". So, on set specifying: "le gerku" is ALL MEMBERS of the set of dog(s) THAT I AM THINKING OF and "lo gerku" is at least ONE member of the set of ALL dog(s) IN THE UNIVERSE (of discourse, maybe, lol)

Here is a very good example of the semantics of that from the red book I mentioned:

Example 6.41.

[ro] le ci gerku cu blabi
[All-of] those-described-as three dogs are-white
The three dogs are white.

Example 6.42.

ci lo [ro] gerku cu blabi
Three-of those-which-are [all] dogs are-white
Three dogs are white.

Okay, cool, cool, seems easy right? Just have to remember those implicit quantifiers

Wait...... Lojban is a logical language. Speaking extremely literally, "lo gerku" is those things which dog, as in things that are dogging. Wtf is a thing that dogs and also.... wtf is a set?

Okay okay, what about the gismu "cribe" which means "is a bear". Imagine: you're in a forest with a friend. You and your friend are trying to find lo cribe (a bear, one or more members of the set of things that are bearing). You're walking along and you come across a pile of bear goo (a bear that is a pile of goo, maybe it's a bear in a late stage of decomposition or something). Did you and your friend just find lo cribe??????????????????A???A?A???A/fd/ffd/fdflfmf.f.c? If the goo bears, doesn't that mean it is part of lo cribe?

The problem is, that from a classical first-order formal logical perspective............. human intentions are worthless. But more than that LOJBAN HAS NO COMPLETE, FORMAL DEFINITION OF ANYTHING EXCEPT ITS GRAMMAR AND IT ISN'T EVEN CLEAR ON WHAT A SET IS WHILE USING THEM

So the BPFK nerds argued about this endlessly in one of their sessions and could not come to any kind of conclusion on whether bear goo is lo cribe or not so they decided to drop almost all the semantics described above of le and lo despite the fact that no human speaker could come across bear goo and describe it as lo cribe rather than le cribe (as in goo that is bearing in speaker's idea of the goo) unless they were trying to make a point about it being lo cribe to a committee and we got the "xorlo" reform. Now you use lo for everything unless you have some specific things in mind and then you use le. And these have no qualifiers unless you add them so "lo gerku" could mean a dog, all dogs, or some dogs and "le gerku" means some unspecified amount of things I'm thinking of, each of which I describe to you as a dog.

Btw, I didn't even get into the plural quantification thing, as in there are predicates that can only be satisfied by groups of things and not by the things themselves and vice versa. Like one person cannot "gather" and a group of people cannot eat, the people in the group each eat

If you wanna melt your brain some more with that, here you go: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gadri:_an_unofficial_commentary_from_a_logical_point_of_view :3

Also, Lojban has set and "mass" gadri like le and lo that do explicitly specify masses (a group of "individual" (that has its own bad definition) things that has the same properties of the individual things which compose it and may have other properties as well) and sets (a group of things that has entirely different properties from the individual things that compose it). Like one way to interpret that is that sets of bears have cardinality but they don't have "bearness" and vice versa for sets) which, as a result, can be used to specify the stuff about plural quantification of variables in predicates (see the above link for info about "collectivity" and "distributivity")

If this all sounds really confusing, that's because it is and I'm still trying to figure out what Lojban means to me. Initially I was using xorloified Lojban cuz it's an official reform (but technically not a "finished" official reform or something that is permanently binding lol, idek, it's been 20 years lmao) and I hadn't yet realized Lojban is in the process of splitting into multiple dialects cuz, to me it seems like, people who cared about the logical aspects of Lojban are now dissatisfied with the lack of progress on better formalism and the whole language actually and xorlo and similar BPFK reforms that make the language easier to speak while reducing its semantic richness and the people who don't really care about logic in Lojban hate that stuff anyway and are cool with dropping most of it. I read some of the arguments for and against xorlo and I am using non-xorlo Lojban for now cuz I wasn't convinced by the bear goo arguments. It doesn't matter that much for communication most of the time, I feel like, usually, xorlo people will just miss out on some of the meaning of what a xorlo non-user will be saying but otherwise it's okay. Although, sometimes I legit cannot understand wtf IRC users are saying at all lol cuz their dialect is so far from the baseline Lojban I've been learning and also I cannot make their utterances parse sometimes in the computer parsers cuz its so far away from baseline lol

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Lojban myths and truths

1. Lojban is a logical language

This is true, as long as you can agree on what lo logical language ku means :3 Tbh, when I went in I rly was expecting SOME kind of real formal system behind it before I found out that Lojban is a language to speak some logic but not rly a language to do logic, I guess. Most of the parts are there but not much has materialized (yet?)

There are some attempts to formalize Lojban more, this new one is particularly impressive tbh, even though I think the approach is kinda wrong: https://brismu.systems/ (brismu: a relational interpretation of Lojban)

2. Lojban is an unambiguous language

This is true syntactically. There are real formal definitions of Lojban grammar out there based on BNF grammars and parsing expression grammers which is VERY VERY VERY NICE lol. It really helps to learn the language cuz if you're doing something grammatically wrong a parser will reject it. Semantically, I think you can be even more vague and ambiguous in Lojban (like with tanru, which are metaphors based on combining multiple gismu) than probably most natural languages but you can also be painfully, beautifully non-ambiguous with your meaning :3

So.... it's mixed

3. Lojban is somewhat culturally neutral

It's hard/impossible for me to say exactly cuz I was a monolingual English speaker before learning Lojban and I live in which I think is where most of Lojban's creators are from. It does have some very nice features though. Like there is no set word order, I didn't mention it before but you can move around the sumti places and selbri in pretty much any configuration you want so likee if you don't speak a SVO language like I'm speaking now you can totally just do whatever you want and still be understood. Also, the parts which make up the gismu which form the root words of the language are algorithmically sourced from the world's biggest languages weighted by how many speakers they have. So Mandarin is the most important source for the gismu

But at the same time Lojban's phonology (how it sounds) and especially orthography (how it's written, like with the Latin script) is quite European, although there are much less used writing systems for Lojban floating around. I should mention though that the language, while it has a very European phonology, was carefully designed so that speakers who might have trouble making some of the more difficult or culturally specific sounds can still be understood. Tbh that would be worth a post of its own but you can find details in the first few chapters of the Red Book if you're interested

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On perfection

Am getting tired now so I'm gonna finish this up before I get too tired to post it and then forget it but...

I don't want anyone to put off of trying Lojban out cuz of the bear goo stuff or anything else I mentioned. It's genuinely a very cool language project, it's just unfinished imo even if most of its original creators are done with it

There are a lot of things in Lojban I wish we had in English, like spoken tone indicators, evidential indicators (cmavo that attach to things to specify how you came to know or believe something), actually working grammar checkers, etc etc etc

Would encourage you to look into Lojban if any of this stuff interests you. You'll just have to figure out some/a lot of it on your own but if you figure out a good interpretation maybe we should all start speaking it hehe :3

I hope you liked reading, sorry if it's messy I kinda just threw this together, little energy for more elaborating rn

On Essential Solidarity With Sex Workers

"Scratch a Communist, and find a Philistine. Of course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women." - V. I. Lenin

In this I will be clarifying the essential nature of solidarity with sex workers to any serious leftist movement, especially in regards to migrant rights, women's rights, queer rights and anti-racism.

I am not interested in any discussions about personal feelings in regards to the sex trade, nor do I care about any utopian conversations about a society in which sex work does not exist. The fact is that sex work does exist, and any discussion therefor must focus on ways to protect the lives, rights and dignity of sex workers right now.

I acknowledge that there are cis men who engage in prostitution, and I have no desire to erase or ignore their experiences and marginalisation. However, statistically speaking the overwhelming number of sex workers are women, particularly migrants and people of colour, and queer people, especially trans people, are over-represented. This is due to the economic marginalisation and enforced precarity of women, racialised people, and trans people who are excluded from employment, education and institutional access to social services, especially for migrants in a border regime that creates a tiered system of access to rights and criminalises entire populations based upon their location of birth.

Part 1: Consent

Firstly I will address the term "sex work" itself. There is an oft propagated notion that defining sex work as work is somehow indicative of a glamorization of the sex trade, apologia for sexual violence and exploitation, or a desire to expand and increase the amount of sex work that happens. There is, at the same time, an argument that all sex work is inherently assault, and as such to term it work is to ignore the reality of the sex trade's exploitative nature.

"Part of believing me when I say I have beenremovedd is believing me when I say I haven’t been." - Nikita, 2017 Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International UK.

"Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker" - Karl Marx

In understanding that not every act of prostitution is sexual assault, it is essential to gauge the level of bodily exploitation that goes into all categories of work in a capitalist system.

As someone without capital, you are coerced into selling your labour to live. Without selling your labour, you would die. The capitalist then, is leveraging a threat of death, leveraging your very life, for your labour. Does that make it correct to then equate all wage labour with slavery?

In the same manner, while the prostitute is coerced economically into selling sexual labour to live, that economic coercion is not inherently equitable with sexual assault. To give an example of the ways in which a body’s services can be sold: a massage therapist is paid to provide touch. That massage therapist is performing a service that in other contexts may be considered intimate.

A clerk at a grocery store is asked to come into the boss’s office, where he removes his shirt, hands her oil, and asks for a massage. This is a clear case of sexual violation. Does this then mean that the massage therapist’s very livelihood is a sexual violation? Of course not, because the massage therapist has negotiated and consented to a level of touch prior to the massage.

Say then, that a client demands a massage therapist perform oral sex. This is, again, a clear case of sexual violation. Because the massage therapist consented to providing a massage, and not any other forms of intimate contact.

In sex work, a sex worker negotiates and consents to a set of intimate contacts. These are not in and of themselves assault. Another example: an actor agrees to a scene in which she is groped in a bar. A different actor is groped off-set without consent in the exact same manner.

The reason there are delineations between what is acceptable and unacceptable sexual or intimate contact is that they occur under different contexts and with negotiations of consent. Many people struggle with understanding this in regards to sex work, because they believe two things:

1. that every act of sex/penetration is inherently an act of domination. This is a chauvinistic and moralistic feeling that is socially reproduced in many societies, but that holds no objective truth.

2. that sex workers are selling their bodies/consent. They are not. They are not selling their bodies any more than another worker sells theirs. They are selling their labour. And they are certainly not selling their consent. An integral part of sex work and providing safe conditions for sex workers is allowing negotiation of the boundaries of consent.

This is crucial: by conflating all acts of sex work as sexual violence, you ignore a sex worker’s ability to negotiate the boundaries between what is consensual activity and what is assault. If all acts of sex work are considered sexual violence, than there is no recourse for sex workers to declare when they have been assaulted.

Every sex worker deserves the ability to determine for themself the lines of consent, and to be believed when they say that something is assault. In order to be believed when they name something as assault, they must then be believed when they assert certain acts are not assault.

Part 2: Sex Work as Work

In Revolting Prostitutes, Molly Smith and Juno Mac cite Silvia Federici, who has long maintained the link between women’s subjugation to men through housework and “wifely duties” and sex work, whereby a woman’s sexual and intimate labours are commodified and sex is work. To Federici, the only difference between a housewife and a sex worker is that a sex worker gets paid.

While organizing for Wages for Housework, in 1975 Federici wrote: “to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it.”

Mac and Smith make the argument that this extends to other aspects of work that is traditionally not considered work: by first having work accepted as such, the workers may then more easily struggle to resist or reorder such work.

In such a way, acknowledging that sex work is work is the first step in a larger struggle to restructuring society’s relations to sex work, and ultimately, to ending sex work. Asserting that sex work is work is not to say that it is good work, or harmless work, or that it has fundamental value. It is to establish that the workers engaged in the work need rights and protections as workers.

In Invisible Lives, Viviane K. Namaste shows the way that transsexual street workers are unable to access necessary hormones because the gender identity clinics don’t recognize their work as prostitutes to be real work. By refusing to acknowledge sex work as work, street workers are denied access to social services and medical institutions essential to their lives.

“The International Black Women for Wages for Housework campaign specifically linked unwaged housework to reparations for slavery and imperialism, drawing links between the subsidization of capitalism by factory wages and unwaged labor in the home and on plantations, strengthened through immigration controls and laws criminalizing sex work” (Walia, Border and Rule).

Yuly Perez, of the sex workers’ union National Organisation for the Emancipation of Women in a State of Prostitution—which was part of a 35 000 worker strike across Bolivia in protest of the closure of brothels and an increase of violent policing of prostitutes—says that “people think the point of our organisation is to expand prostitution in Bolivia. In fact, we want the opposite. Our ideal world is one free of the economic desperation that forces women into this business.”

Sex worker organization is concerned with creating the conditions under which sex workers can work safely—as Mac and Smith argue, “People should not have to demonstrate that their work has intrinsic value to society to deserve safety at work. Moving towards a better society—one in which people’s work does have wider value, one in which resources are shared on the basis of need—cannot come about through criminalisation. Nor can it come about through treating marginalised people’s material needs and survival strategies as trivial.”

While sex work is a large and diverse category that spans countless different occupations, in this I am focused on survival sex work: sex work carried out on the streets or in brothels in order to earn the money needed to live. The most precarious and vulnerable sex workers deserve to be the primary consideration in this discussion; as such, throughout this essay I employ the term prostitute as well as sex worker to ensure that it is understood that this conversation is about the trade of sex for money, and not other forms of sex work such as camwork or stripping, as those experiences are different and requiring of separate analyses in order to ensure an accurate account of the material conditions therein. These varied sex work occupations may overlap, but this essay seeks only to explore the ways in which solidarity with one of the most undervalued class of workers, who live on the margins of society and often in extreme precarity legally, socially, and economically, is essential to a forward-thinking and ethical leftist movement.

Part 3: Sex Workers as Symbols

As radical feminism distanced itself from sex workers and within the 80s and 90s began to argue for the censorship of porn, anti-prostitution became firmly ensconced in the movement, with writers such as Janice Raymond making assertions that “prostitution isremoved that’s paid for.” At the same time many pro-sex feminists began to argue on behalf of the “empowerment” offered through sex work; neither approach is helpful to understanding the lives of sex workers. They both focus on the idea of “sex as symbol,” with middle class (mostly white) women creating entire bodies of literature arguing for or against sex work as either empowering or a reinforcement and representation of the patriarchy’s domination over women. What they had in common, however, was the absence of sex workers’ voices, and a disregard for the very real circumstances faced by people on the street every day.

The debate led to the emergence of two main tropes in prostitution discourse: the Shameful Prostitute and the Happy Hooker.

The Shameful Prostitute is the carrier of society’s worst aspects. As Shulamith Firestone describes in The Dialectic of Sex, in a patriarchal society man is conditioned to associate love, affection and care with the Mother. Through the incest taboo, that form of relationship is divorced from sexuality. This can be seen as early as medieval European literature, in which knightly figures professed their loves for pure, chaste women, devoid of sexuality. The sexuality requires another outlet: this is the Prostitute. Viviane K. Namaste describes in Sex Change/Social Change the elevation of the middle class white woman during industrialisation and the early formation of the nuclear family to a place of private life: property of the husband, to take care of the house and raise the children, and removed from spheres of public life and isolated from communal relations.

The underclass however, with no property and the women working alongside of the men, represented the public woman. The private woman was the property of a single man, the public woman was the property of all. Turning back to Firestone, we see the dilemma that gave rise to the public woman. The man would choose the Mother to be his wife, to clean the house and cook the food and raise the children and provide all of the affection and care that the Mother provides. However, the man may respect the Mother, but he could not associate the Mother with feelings of “vulgar” and “base” sexuality without first degrading her. And thus the Prostitute, the public woman, became an essential outlet for this repressed sexuality. By virtue of her socio-economic status, to the man, the Prostitute was always-already degraded, and thus an object of sexual desire.

This deeply capitalist and hierarchical series of relationships is represented through the Shameful Prostitute, which to anti-prostitute feminists is the ultimate symbol of patriarchal degradation. Reducing prostitutes to a figural concept, a symbol, however, erases the possibility of their literal existence. Whatever a prostitute symbolizes to anti-prostitute feminists is unrelated to the needs that she faces in living her daily life, and to label her and constrain her with all of the baggage of patriarchal subjugation of women is to deny her agency. By demonizing and stigmatising the symbolic Prostitute, the real prostitute is further marginalised, making her susceptible to elevated violence both systemically and interpersonally.

The Happy Hooker, symbol of “empowerment” through sexual liberation, is the other side of the same coin. Symbolically prefigured, the Happy Hooker denies the literal human underneath. Sex work is not liberating or empowering in and of itself, and portrayals of such threaten to erase the very real danger, exploitation and discrimination that sex workers face. The “empowerment” that comes through sex work is economic empowerment, which would not be necessary in a society that guaranteed economic stability to all. By seeking to counter the arguments of anti-prostitute feminists, pro-prostitute feminists can fall into the same trap of ignoring the very real concerns of sex workers: for this reason it is essential for sex workers to be centred in discussions regarding sex work, and to be at the forefront of actions and organization designed to help sex workers.

This is where I think it is essential to stress that when sex workers are centred, that must be sex workers who currently sell sex. There is a trend for anti-prostitute feminists to platform and centre former sex workers as a way to lend weight to their arguments; it’s important to remember, however, that former sex workers no longer economically rely on selling sex, and so any potential changes to how society organises or relates to sex work necessarily does not impact them as it would a current sex worker.

Mac and Smith contend that the archetype of the Exited Woman becomes “the ultimate symbol of female woundedness, with the criminalisation of clients as feminist justice.” The Exited Woman shares her stories—usually focusing on visceral and uncomfortable details, especially of sexual violence and exploitation—to elicit powerful emotional responses to mobilize other non sex-workers into action in regards to sex work.

The very real violence and danger, exploitation and sexual violation faced by former sex workers should not be dismissed. However, Exited Women leveraging those stories to impact the lives of women currently still involved in sex work, to either criminalise them or to make the conditions by which they are able to sell sex and thus survive become more hostile, is not the answer. Not everyone’s experience of sex work is the same, and no stories of victimisation can be painted over sex workers as a whole, nor can people who no longer rely on the sale of sex be the forefront of discussions regarding the conditions of the sale of sex in the here and now.

Part 4: The Four Models; Model 1 - Full Criminalisation

There are two main currents of feminism within sex work discussions: carceral feminism and anticarceral feminism. Carceral feminism is that which relies on police and the state to protect women, and anti-carceral feminism is that which seeks to transform society to address harms without police. These two currents are at direct odds, not only in regards to sex work, but also to a myriad of other problems that women face, such as domestic and intimate partner violence.

Carceral feminists present two possible models of addressing sex work: the full criminalisation model, and the Nordic model.

Anti-carceral feminists also present two possible models of addressing sex work: regulation, and decriminalisation.

Before we go farther, I will give a brief explanation of the four models, however, the bulk of the focus will be on the Nordic model, as this is the model most often championed by the left.

Full Criminalisation is exactly what it sounds like: under this model, all participation in the sex trade is illegal, subject to police intervention. This is the model that is most common globally, including for most of the United States (with some exceptions in Nevada). With full criminalisation, sex workers, clients, and all third parties are in direct violation of the law, resulting in exposure to arrest, police violence, jailing, court fines, and criminal records. This model is punitive, and drives the sex trade underground, which makes it much more dangerous. For anyone who takes the stance that sex workers are the victims of exploitation, it should be obvious that this system punishes the victims for that very exploitation and blames them for their circumstances.

Expanding and empowering policing and prisons, criminalising more people, driving the precarious even further into precarity: there are no redeeming qualities to the full criminalisation model, and studies show that it has no impact in reducing the sex trade, but has a massive impact in how much violence sex workers face both from the state and from those involved in the sex trade.

Part 5: The Four Models; Model 2 - Regulation (Full Legalisation)

Regulation (or full legalisation), is sometimes presented as an ethical alternative. Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and some places in Nevada all use this model. In regulation, sex work is legal, and regulated by the state. In the words of Mac and Smith, this creates a “charmed circle.” This means that any sex work that happens outside of the regulated industry is fully criminalised, which pushes the most precarious sex workers into the same model that we just so readily dismissed as punitive.

Why would some sex workers do sex work outside of the regulated industry? By regulating sex work, the state gives power to managers, who choose how many people to hire, what wages they make, how long they must work. Sex workers know they are competing for employment, and so they can be pressured into accepting work conditions that they otherwise would not.

Trans sex workers, especially those that don’t pass, are widely excluded from regulated sex work. For instance, in Turkey they are banned from all state brothels. Migrant sex workers are by law excluded from regulated sex work. Migrants, especially undocumented migrants, make up a large portion of the sex industry. In regulation models, all migrants are still subjected to deportation, thus making them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

People with disabilities, mad people, addicts, seropositive sex workers are all also excluded in regulated sex work, and are thus in this model still living under full criminalisation. There are sex workers who may live too far from a regulated zone or brothel.

Regulation can serve only to create a two-tiered system where all sex workers outside of the charmed circle are criminalised, and those sex workers within the circle are easily exploited as to lose employment would result in having to engage in illegal sex work.

Regulation also gives the state the power to create a capitalist institution out of sex work, thus cementing it as a social inevitability, a supposed necessity that must always be done. Under regulatory models, sex workers can not work to eventually undo the very existence of sex work.

It’s clear that full criminalisation and full regulation are both deeply flawed models that punish sex workers and have no power to transform the very nature of sex work.

Part 6: Borders as Sites of Sexual Violence

Let’s discuss instead the model that gets the most support, the Nordic model. Under the Nordic model, it is the clients of sex workers and third parties (managers, brothel-runners, etc) who are criminalised for engaging in the sex trade. This model is often proclaimed to be the most ethical, as it seeks to protect sex workers while simultaneously laying the blame for their exploitation upon the clients, and reducing demand by arresting them.

The Nordic model is used in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, France and Canada.

In order to fully understand the impacts of the Nordic model, it is important to have a grounding in the ways that the state and the police shape the lives of sex workers, especially people of colour, migrants, addicts and trans prostitutes.

For many, the spectre of sex trafficking is that which haunts their decisions when it comes to the sex trade. Prostitution must be stopped in order to prevent this sex trafficking; often times the sex trafficked victim is used as a leverage to invoke policies that harm the domestic prostitute. This type of dichotomy is counter-productive: only a false sense that domestic prostitutes have fundamentally different material interests than migrant prostitutes can lend weight to this, which is based on an imagined narrative that most sex workers who wish to organize must be privileged and middle class, choosing sex work rather than engaging in the sex trade out of necessity.

Earlier it was shown that most sex workers are economically marginalised, and engage in street sex work as a survival strategy. Their networks and organisations are fundamentally and inextricably linked to those of migrant sex workers, just as domestic policing is fundamentally and inextricably linked to border policing.

This system of policing borders and cities is the backbone of the Nordic model, for under this model the police would be empowered to “safeguard” the lives of sex workers from their exploiters: the clients, managers, and traffickers. It is imperative to never lose sight of who is intended to oversee any legislation or administration of policies and laws regarding sex work.

In 1905 Britain established its first modern anti-immigration laws, the Aliens Act of 1905, in response to fears about “the white slave traffic” fuelled by anti-Semitic panic in the wake of Jewish immigration.

In the US, some of the earliest anti-immigration legislation included the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Scott Act of 1888, which targeted Chinese immigrants, especially sex workers, and led to a campaign of determining which women were coming as wives and which as sex workers. In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act limited migration based on census quotas, restricting especially Slavic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and prohibited all Asian immigration. That same year, the Indian Citizenship Act imposed US citizenship on Indigenous people., and allowed them to deport those Indigenous tribes that they deemed to be “Canadian” or “Mexican.”

In Border and Rule, Harsha Walia details the history of militarized and policed borders as functions of racial capitalism in creating populations of super-exploitable racialised workers. By leveraging xenophobia to stoke white supremacist nationalism, states are able to secure ever larger funding to increase the policing of borders and expand their militarized influence.

The formation of borders in North America served to remove Indigenous people from their lands, and the first passport system, the Birch certificates that allowed travel between America and Canada, severed Indigenous people from their traditional lands and movement patterns, seeking to divorce them from the cultural and spiritual ties to the territory.

The cementing of borders has allowed capitalist nations to control the flow of migration, which gives them incredible leverage in directing the expropriation of resources and capital. By with-holding legal access to their territories, migrants who seek to follow the flow of capital from their homes— destabilized and exploited by the Global North—are forced to make dangerous and often fatal journeys to the imperial core, where upon arrival they are either detained (sometimes indefinitely) or deported. Those who are able to enter the territory then are disenfranchised and criminalised, and must live their lives unable to access institutions, social services, or the rights extended to the citizens of that territory. Their interactions with the police and state are always coloured by a fear that their undocumented status will be discovered, and they will be detained or deported.

Borders create hierarchies determined by race, caste, class, sexuality, gender, (dis)ability and nationality. Under these dire circumstances, expanding the power of policing has life-destroying consequences for migrants.

What does it mean to expect border police to “safeguard” women from sex trafficking?

Between 2012 and 2018, detainees filed 1,448 complaints of sexual violence against ICE and 33,126 complaints of abuse between 2010 and 2016.

“In immigration detention, as in carceral settings generally, trans women are particularly susceptible to violence and report sexual harassment, strip searches by male guards, denial of access to medical care, and solitary confinement under the guise of protective custody” (Walia). Trans women also face longer detention, averaging more than twice the length of detention as cis people.

With the militarization of Mexico’s southern border, 520 000 Central American migrants were apprehended between 2015 and 2018. Another 70 000 disappeared in what the Mesoamerican Migrant Movements calls a “migrant holocaust.” 80% of the women reported sexual extortion andremoved.

Australia’s migrant detention has been shown, through a government-commissioned review, to have been guilty of sexual assault andremoved of women and minors, and to have even led to migrant women becoming impregnated by their assaulters.

In 2012 MSF treated 697 migrant survivors of sexual violence in Morocco.

Europe’s largest refugee camp, the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, which was meant to house 3 000 detainees, holds over 19 000 people, over 40% of whom are minors. The UNHRC received 174 reports of sexual and gender-based violence.

There are countless statistics about the abuses women face in the militarized borders of the world. Rather than get bogged down in unending statistics, I would like to question the logic that empowering border agencies to fight trafficking could help in any way to reduce sexual violence and exploitation.

Part 7: The Four Models; Model 3 - The Nordic Model (A Liberal Failure)

Trafficking, and thus sex trafficking, is broadly interpreted as any attempt to bring a person across a border illegally. The easiest way to address this is to remove the legal obstacles in crossing the border. People will migrate regardless of the law: this is especially true considering the imperialistic leveraging of capital that destabilizes Global South nations in favour of the North. The militarized border then serves to prevent those people from entering legally where they do not meet criteria of ability, gender, class and race. Thus people are forced to enter through dangerous and illegal means. Anyone who helps them to do this is considered to have engaged in trafficking. If the migrant, precarious and economically deprived in the new nation does sex work, that was now sex trafficking.

In the cases in which the trafficking actually is exploiting the migrant (the migrant is lied to, abducted, indebted, forced into sex work etc), the migrant can not seek help for fear of deportation and detention. Thus anti-trafficking initiatives actually serve to increase the amount of trafficking by increasing border security, and decrease a migrant’s recourse when trafficking happens. Meanwhile, people who are genuinely just helping migrants cross a border (often times even family and friends) are also labelled as traffickers, arrested, and the migrant is still detained and deported as a “rescued victim.” Antitrafficking laws are never concerned with whether or not the migrant wished to be rescued, or whether they would rather have stayed in the country they are now in (which they usually indebted themselves and risked their lives to enter).

In Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives, as well as Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, we can see the myriad ways that police in Canada and the US (and abroad) enact sexual violence on women, and reinforce systems of violence in the streets. In the US the police are much more likely to perpetrate domestic violence. Sexual assault is the second most commonly reported form of police violence. On duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population.

Countries that have adopted the Nordic model have seen what prison abolitionists like Beth Richie, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Mariame Kaba have been saying all along: the carceral punishment system does not reduce crime. Police enact systems of surveillance, violence, and criminalisation: they can not be the solution to exploitation or violence.

Rather than lower the demand for sex work, Nordic models have instead empowered police and border agencies to increase surveillance of sex workers. Sex workers must work in more precarious positions than before: their clients are afraid of getting caught, and so sex workers are forced into working in more isolated locations, or agreeing to go to second locations. They are less able to negotiate the boundaries of consent, as the client is unwilling to sit around in case of police. In the cases where there are fewer clients, sex workers don’t have less need of money. Instead they lose bargaining power, and must accept doing things they would otherwise prefer not to, or else risk not finding another client.

Sex workers are also more likely to go to a client’s home rather than bringing a client to a room she rents, as that could result in eviction, and clients know that is when they are at most risk of being arrested. Clients are less likely to agree to divulging personal information for screening, as they wish to remain anonymous so as to avoid prosecution.

Meanwhile clients, knowing that what they are doing is already illegal, are more likely to engage in violent behaviour. Sex workers have need of the money they make, and clients do not need to have sex with sex workers. Because of this discrepancy there will always be a power imbalance, and limiting the amount of clients does not reduce demand for sex work, but it does reduce the individual sex worker’s power to negotiate.

In Norway, a government report found that the price of sex work went down after the introduction of the purchase ban, showing the weakened negotiating power of sex workers and indicating that sex workers were put into even more economically precarious positions.

The Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security found that “more abuse takes place than previously. . . for those working on the street life has become much harder. . . The law on the purchase of sex has made working as a prostitute much harder and more dangerous.”

In Ireland, sex worker safety organisation Ugly Mugs says it received 1 635 reports from sex workers with concerns about violent and abusive clients in the five months following the sex purchase ban in 2017, a sixty-one per cent increase on the same period in 2016.

Migrant sex workers in Nordic model countries are still deported. The police still harass and extort sex workers. If two sex workers choose to work together for safety, they are both open to being charged as pimps, as each is considered a “third party” to the other’s sex work. Landlords are threatened by police into evicting sex workers, as the landlord is considered to be “running a brothel” if a sex worker brings a client back to her apartment.

We can see then that the Nordic model doesn’t offer any solace for the sex worker. It is based on an idea that sex work must be stopped, that through performing sex work a woman is losing something or being violated, and that therefor her clients must be punished. This is achieved regardless of the impact it has on the sex worker, an impact that is in many cases absolutely ruinous. How could the safety of sex workers be guaranteed through the very systems that makes the sex worker’s life so dangerous?

Part 8: The Four Models; Model 4 - Decriminalisation

The final model of sex work is the one most anti-carceral feminist sex worker organisations support. It is one that works within the systems of abolition and societal transformation. This is full decriminalisation. Unlike in the regulatory model, in decriminalisation, sex work is legal by default. With neither sex workers nor their clients criminalised, the sex worker is able to regain some of the power needed to negotiate safer conditions. Sex workers can work together for safety, can rent out rooms to take clients, can take out ads that allow them to clearly delineate the bounds of their consent, can screen clients, and can access social services and institutions without fear of their work being discovered.

Employers at brothels are beholden to labour laws, and sex workers can form unions for organised action. Assault and harassment can be reported, and sex workers can report exploitative managers for violating their rights. In every employment situation regardless of the type of work there is tension in the workplace between the workers and the managers; it is essential then that we strengthen the power of the workers to forward their demands and give them as much leverage against their employers as possible.

New Zealand currently operates under the decriminalization model, however it is flawed. This is the first step in a longer process of realizing the safety and rights of sex workers. Along with decriminalisation of sex work itself, it is necessary also to decriminalise migration and addiction. Border laws that create hierarchies wherein rights are extended only to those with certain papers must be ended.

“On the one hand, the decriminalisation of sex work is a protective factor against the exploitation of sex workers, since they have the right to challenge exploitation. However, the policy which prohibits migrant sex work means that not all sex workers fully benefit from decriminalisation. . . It is vital that the benefits are further strengthened by. . . extending rights to migrant sex workers who are holders of temporary permits.” - The Global Alliance Against Traffic In Women.

More than that, robust social services are needed. As long as migration is criminalised, as long as Māori, trans and homeless populations are still over-policed, sex workers have struggles ahead.

Education, healthcare, mental health and addiction services, housing: these are all essential aspects in realizing a robust reform of the sex trade. All aspects of society that marginalise and disenfranchise segments of the population, that put them into economic need and outside of social safety nets will lead to people engaging in sex work. However, every step taken to lessen the repression of sex workers and to ensure their survival is a step in the right direction. For when sex workers are lifted economically, they can choose to leave the sex trade, either through education or voluntary exit programmes that teach job skills.

Part of securing new employment is eradicating the stigma that socially isolates sex workers: the longer that sex workers are seen as workers in society, the less the stigma will persist, which will allow them to pursue other employment without having to hide their previous sex work experience.

Decriminalisation removes the police as the method of controlling sex workers, and allows instead their integration into society as full citizens. Part of abolition struggle is to remove our reliance on policing and envision new ways of organising society that don’t rely on the punitive carceral justice system. In this way, the issues that sex workers face can be addressed through the introduction of social services that help society as a whole, rather through an expansion of violent prison systems that remove people from society through incarceration or drive them to the fringes.

Part 9: Sex Work Activism

Much like with drug use, when a market is criminalized it does not prevent the market from existing: rather it creates the purest form of capitalist free market. A market completely devoid of oversight or recourse for the workers. Decriminalising sex work will help to redress the imbalance of power that sex workers face as they are able to openly organise and engage in struggle.

Sex workers deserve our solidarity in this struggle, as they’ve given so much of themselves to struggles through the years.

In medieval Europe brothel workers formed guilds and orchestrated strikes for improved working conditions. In the fifteenth century, prostitutes in Bavaria asserted before a city council that what they did was work. In 1917 200 prostitutes marched in San Francisco to demand the end of brothel closures. A speaker said “Nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her. . . They are driven into this life by economic conditions. . . You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?”

In 19th century Britain and Ireland prostitutes created mutual aid networks, sharing income and child care (a tradition that is alive in sex worker communities to this day).

When eight sex workers were murdered in Thika, Kenya, in 2010, hundreds of sex workers, including the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance came from around the country to protest police violence. Aisha, a sex worker in Thika, said, “we wanted people to know that we call ourselves sex workers because it is the wheat our families depend on.” Sixty years earlier, in the 1950s prostitutes joined the Mau Mau revolution to free Kenya from British rule.

In the 60s street trans sex workers were at the front of the charge in the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Uprisings, putting their lives on the line to battle police for queer liberation. They also were in the line of fire for the fight for civil rights.

STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), founded by two street sex workers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were involved in the Stonewall Uprising, was a network of radical street queens who worked together in community. Sylvia Rivera joined the Gay Liberation Front and the Young Lords, marched to protest Angela Davis’s arrest, and met in conference with Huey P. Newton.

In Disarm, Defund, Dismantle, sex workers contribute their knowledge on the importance of sex worker organizing in tackling violent policing and the criminalisation of racialised people.

Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is one of the oldest sex-worker-led organizations in Canada and has worked to protect street sex workers, and provide support for trans people. Their essay Sex Worker Justice – By Us, For Us: Toronto Sex Workers Resisting Carceral Violence details their work in searching for a missing Black and Indigenous trans street worker, Alloura Wells, when police refused to mobilize a search for her. They have been active in abolitionist movements, understanding the necessity of ending policing and prisons for the lives of sex workers. Their work with helping trans street workers access hormones is documented in Namaste’s Invisible Lives.

Trans rights and sex workers rights are deeply linked: trans people are frequently kicked out of homes, excluded from institutions and social services, and often work as prostitutes. 44% of Black trans women in the US have done survival sex work.

As Viviane K. Namaste says, “systemic and institutionalised discrimination against prostitutes impedes and prevents their access to health care and thus the ability of many transsexuals to live their bodies as they choose. Such discrimination is evident in numerous locations: gender identity clinics, prisons, and health care and social service agencies. It is discrimination against prostitutes that orders the experiences of many transsexuals—especially MTF transsexuals—within the institutional world. How relevant is a “transgendered” social movement that does not make the decriminalization of prostitution a priority?”

In 1974 Ethiopian sex workers joined the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions and engaged in strike actions with them against the government.

In 1975 sex workers in France occupied churches to protest poverty, criminalisation and police violence. In London, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied churches in King’s Cross in 1980.

Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement has from its inception been intertwined with the organisation of sex workers, and has stood in solidarity with them in their quest to have their labour recognised as real work so that they might demand their emancipation from such work through a radical transformation of society.

In the words of Black Women for Wages for Housework: “When prostitutes win, all women win.”

Further Reading

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide – Andrea Smith

Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis

Abolition. Feminism. Now. - Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie

Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide – Ardath Whynacht

Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism – Harsha Walia

Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics – Jules Joanne Gleeson

Transgender Marxism – ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective – ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us – Mariame Kaba

Revolting Prostitutes – Molly Smith and Juno Mac

Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present – Robyn Maynard

Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada – ed. Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby, Abby Stadnyk

Caliban & The Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation – Silvia Federici

Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism – Silvia Federici

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle – Silvia Federici

Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transgendered and Transsexual Individuals – Viviane K. Namaste

*cross-posted from lemmy.ml

sources

on the dprk

• right to housing and retirement, multi-party peoples democracy: constitution of the dprk
• power checks and balances: infographic: why the us is a dictatorship and the dprk isnt.
• welfare economy: prolewiki article about the dprk, section on economy (that whole article is generally really great and debunks a lot of western propaganda)
• democratic since inception: kim byong sik. "modern korea: the socialist north, revolutionary perspectives in the south, and unification." 1970.

on the rok

• poverty, slums: prolewiki-article on the term "hell josoen"
• political prisoners: western source confirming the existence of the national security law, stephen gowans (2018). patriots, traitors and empires: the story of koreas struggle for freedom: 'the political partition of korea' (pp. 115–116) , and the prolewiki-article on the rok, sections "national security law" and "unconverted long-term prisoners"
• widespread corruption: a lot of reporting can be found on this topic, even in western media. lets just take the government-sanctioned prostitution and sex trafficking as an example, though there is other equally horrific stuff, including the usage of disabled people as agricultural slaves.
• worlds second highest suicide rate: katrin park (2021-10-5). "south korea is no country for young people" doreign policy.
• tyrannical history: prolewiki-article on the rok, section "history" warning: very bleak read

debunking of anticipated liberal comments

norf korea no food

malnutrition was in fact a thing during the 1990s, though the portrayals of this time period, the so called "arduous march" in westen media are usually exaggerated. mostly omitted by american-allied media is the fact that those difficulties were caused by the inhumane and terrorist western sanctions and embargo against the dprk, as well as the cia-backed illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the ussr. nowadays problems regarding food security have pretty much ceased to exist in the country.

hermit kingdom

first of all, the term itself is nothing but racist, orientalist nonsense, but whatever... the dprk is in no way a kingdom, its democratic model of governance, while obviously imperfect and worthy of (constructive) criticism, is explained in the constitution and infographic linked above.

furthermore, the county is neither "reclusive", nor internationally isolated. the dprk enjoys very friendly relations with fellow aes china, cuba, laos and vietnam, as well as anti-imperialist nations like iran, russia and palestine. the reason you dont hear much from inside the country is due to western press not wanting to report the truth.

no lights, no electricity

the famous "no lights"-photo is a photoshopped fake initially circulated by a southern far-right tabloid. here is an actual image of east asia, including the korean peninsula:

haircut police

unlike south korea, the dprk never had such policies. here is a very entertaining video debunking that myth.

Many of you may or may not wonder what software to use. People may provide walls of text as a response, but you may just want something to reference without having to look into how the software works. I hope this can be that reference for all of you and anybody else who stumbles upon it. This is up for discussion and change, but I hope this can be a good baseline, as I myself have been making the changes to FOSS for a long time now, and it would be a good idea to have a recommended software/services page on Hexbear.

(The [*] marks the better option)

Workstations:

• OS: Linux, I reccomend Fedora with GNOME (for a new, but efficient and simple feel) or KDE (similar to Windows with more customization), but I know some people like Mint for new users. Install as much software as possible on flatpaks.

For maximum anonimity and safety, use Tails. Runs on USB, wipes data when removed.

• Browser: Firefox with Arkenfox, Tor Browser (For reliable anonimity; DO NOT ADD EXTENSIONS TO TOR BROWSER)
• Browser Extensions: Ublock Origin (add Adguard URL Tracking Protection and Easylist Cookies blocklists), Libredirect.
• Office Suite: Libreoffice, OnlyOffice
• Password Management: Secrets on GNOME, KeepassDX on KDE. DO NOT REUSE PASSWORDS OR IGNORE THIS STEP!!!
• Music Downloading: Nicotine+ (Soulseek Client), make sure to use VPN
• Music Listening: Gnome Music (GNOME), Elisa (KDE)
• Network Permissions: Flatseal on GNOME, System Settings on KDE (search for "flatpak").
• BitTorrent: Fragments (GNOME), Qbittorrent(KDE)

Mobile Devices:

• Phone: Google Pixel + Graphene OS*, Divest OS
• Browser: Vanadium*(Only on GrapheneOS), Mulch, Tor Browser* (For reliable anonimity; DO NOT ADD EXTENSIONS TO TOR BROWSER)
• App Stores: Fdroid Basic*, Aurora Store (Google Play replacement, use as needed)
• Password Management: Keepass DX, DO NOT REUSE PASSWORDS OR IGNORE THIS STEP!!!
• 2-Factor Authentication: Aegis (Android, 6 digit codes), Hardware Keys ($$$). SMS Verification is better than nothing, but avoid it if you can. DO NOT USE GOOGLE AUTHENTICATOR OR MICROSOFT EQUIVALENT
• Music Streaming: Harmony Music
• Music Listening: Auxio, Fossify Music
• Network Permission: Graphene OS is the only OS that has this functionality, find it in permissions settings.
• Camera: Graphene OS Secure Camera*, OpenCamera
• Notes/To Do: Fossify Notes
• Weather: Breezy Weather (Fdroid Version)
• Navigation: Organic Maps
• Voice Recordings: Fossify Voice Recorder
• Keyboard: Helioboard
• Lemmy: Jerboa
• Youtube Front End: Libretube, Poketube (Web App)

Proprietary Apps (Social Media, Banking, etc.) are best used as Web Apps, as privacy and security benefit from the browser sandboxing.

General:

• Search Engine: DuckDuckGo (more consistent, proprietary), SearXNG (open-source, less consistent).
• Chats:
  • Large Groups (Like Discord, DO NOT USE DISCORD): Jami, Matrix
  • Small Groups/Individuals: Briar* (only on Android), Signal (Struggle Session on Signal, I know there might be something wrong but at the same time Signal seems to encrypt everything)
• Email: Proton Mail + SimpleLogin Aliasing, try to avoid email as much as possible, Chat options are more private and secure.
• File Sharing and Syncing: Syncthing, but don't forget that you can directly transfer files from devices with usb-c and usb-a cables.
• File Storage: Store files locally, sync between devices with Syncthing as needed. If you really need cloud storage, use Proton Drive.
• VPN: Proton VPN for free, keep an account for each device as the free tier is limited to one device, Mullvad VPN* at a premium for reduced hassle and faster speeds(5 Euros per month)
• Social Media: Cut down on big social media as much as possible. Relocate to the fediverse, and be careful with what you post, it's still public. Do not post too much identifiable information, do not dox yourself.
• Front Ends: Invidious (Youtube), Poketube (Youtube), Redlib (Reddit), and many others for a ton of different websites, all avaliable with the libredirect extension. I feel like the "datura.network" are pretty private and reliable, with a rotating IP to bypass blockage.

Got a lot of my info from here privacyguides.org, though some of this is based on my own experiences and suspicions.

If anything can be added, let me know! Love you all

Let me know if there are any more suggestions. Regarding certain role changes, please suggest a way to make the changes accessible. I'm not going to add any more walls of text, so the changes should be user friendly and understandable without the text.

Before 14-03-2024 7AM

Before 13-03-2024 11AM

Original

[Part 1]

Chapter six of the Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea lays out a fairly straightforward democratic (parliamentary) process whereby:

1. The Supreme People’s Assembly is the highest power in the DPRK, with meetings convened yearly or bi-yearly and national elections every five years (SPA member term five years), and is composed of elected workers/peasants (deputies), with the majority representing the Workers Party of Korea but with the Korean Social Democratic Party and Chondoist Chongu (religious) Party also present to a sufficient extent. The members are “elected on the principle of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot”, and have the authority to amend the constitution and introduce major laws.

2. The Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly consists of members whose term limit is also five years, they can convene meetings, handle day-to-day affairs of the SPA, and are elected by the SPA members.

3. The State Affairs Commission (completely accountable to the SPA), which functions as the representative of the state and handles regular state affairs, consists of a President (currently Kim Jong Un, hence the “supreme commander” title since he is the major representative of the state of the DPRK), the Vice President, and other members.

4. The Cabinet (member term limit of five years), has members elected by the SPA and handles day-to-day affairs of the state (SAC).

5. Local People’s Assemblies (covering multiple municipalities), which are made up of local worker’s deputies that are “elected on the principle of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot”, approve the local budget for the people's area which it represents. Regular sessions are held once or twice a year according to the Local People’s Committees which:

6. -Functions in the same relation to the LPAs that the SASPA functions to the SPA. Consists of members elected by the Local People’s Assemblies whose term is also no more than four years.

As in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, there is no campaign lobbying, and democracy extends to all levels (the Taean Work System functions along the same lines but is not relevant to the discussion). However, the Constitution, some have said, is another matter to reality. The Wikipedia page for “Elections in North Korea” states for example, “Voting against the official candidate, or refusing to vote at all, is considered an act of treason, and those who do face the loss of their jobs and housing, along with extra surveillance.”

This idea stated matter-of-factly is cited from an Al-Jazeera article titled “Foregon Result in North Korea’s Local Elections”, which relies completely on quotes from a total of two sources. Firstly, a reporter in the Republic of Korea, who has no inside knowledge of the country (he cites no actual evidence) and is forbidden by law from extolling the DPRK’s system[1]. Next, a ridiculous conjecture-filled rant from a so-called “expert on North Korea”. The retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel cites no evidence again and relies on nothing but his own imagination. The citation offers no actual person with the relevant knowledge and experience to prove their position, and it may be discarded very simply.

A Time Magazine article entitled, “North Korea Elections: A Sham Worth Studying” is equally baroque. The author writes, “voting is mandatory and there is one option on the ballot.” Of course, there is no available evidence that voting is mandatory except for the large voter turnout as compared to capitalist nations. Comparatively, Vietnam had an even higher voter turnout for its 2021 legislative election. The author makes reference to reported narratives in state media and yet does not provide the relevant links even though all NK state media is publicly accessible online. The above narrative attributed to two random speakers is now apparently a common thread among NK defector testimony, which has its own issues[2] (of course a citation to verify this would be too much to ask, as the article provides no citations whatsoever except for the relatively publicized execution of Jang Song-Thaek). Perhaps this constitutes “studying” to the author?

“In November, 1946, North Korea held its first general elections, to approve or disapprove of what the provisional government had done. By this time there were three political parties: the North Korean Labor Party, which was by far the largest; the Chendoguo and the Democrats. These parties formed a ‘democratic front’ and put up a joint ticket, the ‘single-slate ticket’ so criticized in the west.

“I argued with the Koreans about it but they seemed to like their system. Ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote, and everyone with whom I talked declared that there was no compulsion but they came because they wanted to. I discussed the question with a woman miner. ‘Did you vote in the general elections?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The candidate was from our mine and a very good worker. Our mine put him up as [a] candidate.’ I explained the Western form of elections. What was the use of voting, I argued, if there was only one candidate. Her vote could change nothing. It would be a great shame for the candidate, she replied, if the people did not turn out in large numbers to vote for him. He would even fail [the] election unless at least half of the people turned out.

“… ‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him,’ she concluded. ‘The political parties held meetings in our mines and factories and found the people's choices. Then they got together and combined on the best one, and the people went out and chose him. I don't see what's wrong with this or why the Americans don't like it.’

“She paused and then added, with a touch of defiance. ‘I don't see what the Americans have to say about it, anyway!’ Voting technique was simple. There was a black box for ‘no’ and a white box for ‘yes.’ The voter was given a card, stamped with the electoral district; he went behind a screen and threw it into whichever box he chose. The cards were alike; nobody knew how he voted. Were any candidates black-balled? I learned that there were thirteen cases in the township elections in which candidates were turned down by being thrown into the black box. This fact, which westerners may approve as showing ‘freedom of voting,’ was regarded with shame by the Koreans since it meant that ‘the local parties had poorly judged the people's choice.’ In one case a candidate was elected but received eight hundred adverse votes, organized by a political opponent. He at once offered to resign, as he had ‘failed to receive the full confidence of the voters’; the three political parties all jointly urged him to accept the post. The Koreans are familiar with the competitive form of voting also. This was used in village elections and in many of the township elections in March, 1947. These elections were largely nonpartisan, nominations being made not by parties but in village meetings. Secret voting followed, choosing the village government from competing candidates” (Strong, 1949).[3]

This firsthand account illuminates firstly the process of the Democratic Front (DFRF) candidate selection which involved surveying and holding meetings among several worker groups that anyone could attend. Then the selected candidate who was chosen via said mass meetings would be voted in through a confirming election which verified the success of the mass assemblies and the work of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland (and thus you have political agitation phrases such as “let us all vote in agreement”).

Actual experience elucidating the obfuscated “one candidate” situation as a democratic centralist worker-oriented candidate selection process abruptly does away with the focus of the majority of the critiques from ignorant fools. For example, when Anna Louise Strong protests that the Korean woman’s vote could have no effect, the woman explains that if the candidate receives less than half of the voting pool, they are rejected and a new candidate selection process begins. Even though the Korean perspective is that a rejected candidate means a select failure of the DFRF mass meetings, candidate rejection in some cases does at the same time show that voting was not rigged in favor of what foreign opposition nations would denote as “party selected candidates.” That candidate rejection occurs much less often now only serves to demonstrate the increased effectiveness of the mass assemblies.

Very well, one might say, but we mustn’t forget that this account and subsequent ones took place prior to the Korean War. Isn’t it possible that a “shock” of that scale could transform the political process into something entirely different?

Leftists are supposed to be anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. The DPRK is one of the remaining actually socialist countries on this planet. They are sanctioned by the Global North–that is the global capitalist hegemony in the West–to a point of desperation. The people are living in harsh conditions not because of the Juche “regime”, but because of the atrocities by the United States and its satellite states.

Thinking that the DPRK is somehow a hereditary monarchy is simply ridiculous. It also means that you are furthering Western Capitalist propaganda.

If you believe in the lies of the capitalists, you are hardly a leftist. You are simply another chauvinist helping the cause of the bourgeoisie and Amerikan imperialism.

---

Further reading:

The constitution of the DPRK: https://www.kfausa.org/dprk-constitution/

The reason for the support of the Kim family in the DPRK: https://www.visitthedprk.org/north-koreans-revere-kims-understanding-north-korean-leadership-objectively/

Myths & Misconceptions About North Korea, by a non-socialist creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhaHiht50AA

---

Please open your eyes.

This thread will deal with myths and realities of People's korea, of the puppet illegal occupied bourgeoisie state of south korea, defectors, society, aggresion agains it, international relations, e.t.c .

This thread will be edited and updated regularly. If any of you comrades have some info not added, or think that some sections to this thread should be added, feel free to tag me.

Long live DPRK, long live the anti-imperialist struggle!

:kim-il-young:

Socialism and democracy in DPRK

There is a huge notion in the western left (obviously), that DPRK is not socialist, but a state capitalist fascist monarchy.

We know how the western left is mostly racist and chauvinist towards china, dprk, vietnam etc, as it was previously with USSR and the eastern bloc.

Most of this western left is still against the USSR, but at least marxist-leninists and many anti-imperialist anarchists acknowledge them today. Many western leftists still remain in the same position against china or DPRK, however. We will address those points below.

Democracy and socialism

• DPRK is a socialist country, and the party is designed to protect the workers and peasants, and to oversee the ultimate victory of socialism
• Socialism and democracy in DPRK
• Lalkar: The democratic structure of the DPRK
• Understanding DPRK in the light of the marxist tradition
• Mass protest in DPRK against UN propaganda
• Democracy: US vs DPRK
• Local elections in DPRK, 2019
• The parliamentary System of DPRK
• the taean work system
• The peoples Bomb!
• Elections in the juche state
• Something the developed countries would envy: DPRK's healthcare system
• korea resilient: Socialism in democratic korea
• Towards a concrete analysis of the DPRK
• The myth of the Kim dynasty
• Human rights in DPRK
• Politics of DPRK
• DPRK view on nationalism
• Bruce cumings on the North korean economy
• DPRK: A champion on the fight against climate change
• Juche in Nigeria
• "north korea medical care is one developed countries would envy" World health org
• The origin of DPRK
• disabled people in DPRK
• Socialism in Korea: A case study
• DPRK officials go to china to study reforms
• My socialist country - youtube video
• Why does the DPRK have nukes? Look at Libya. — if you need more examples, look up pictures of Muammar Gaddafi‘s mutilated corpse and the open air slave markets that now fill Libya’s cities.
• Parenti on DPRK

International solidarity and anti-imperialim of DPRK.

DPRK - Cuba relations

• A quick history of DPRK - cuba relations
• Korean propaganda poster of the 60s
• Miguel diaz canel and Kim jong un holding hands
• Cuba was one of the only nations which boycotted the 1988 seoul olympics for solidarity with DPRK.
• DPRK declared 3 days of national mourning for the death of Fidel Castro
• DPRK sent Hundreds of Weapons to Cuba during cold war without charging a cent

Black panthers connection

• Black panthers turned to DPRK for fight against US imperialism
• Juche in the US: Connections of Black panthers and DPRK

DPRK - Angola relations

• DPRK and Angola discuss public security cooperation
• DPRK assisted Angolan rebels in the fight against apartheid. 3000 korean soldiers and advisers were estimated to have fought in the side of the angolan people during the war
• Angola - DPRK relations considered excellent

DPRK - Syria relations

• Kim Jong un offers support to assad
• Kim jong un praising baath party in its 70 years work
• Bashar al-Assad thanks DPRK for its support of the syrian people
• DPRK special forces in Syria
• Syria supports dprk, condemns sactions

DPRK - Algeria relations

• Algeria defends ties to DPRK despite pressure from US
• DPRK and Algeria vow to grow stronger ties

DPRK for the Palestinian struggle

• DPRK arming palestinian liberation fighters for decades
• DPRK never recognized Israel. It stays loyal to the palestinian cause, and holds that every inch of israeli territory is illegal, and an imperialist satellite.

Part 2 in comments