Red_Scare [he/him]

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  • 472 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2020

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  • One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption

    The value of producing algorythms vs producing servers themselves is hugely overblown, there’s value transfer from one part of the global population to another.

    We don’t create value by shopping online, algorythms training by observing our behaviour does not change that.

    the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator

    It’s not, that’s the whole point. The money flows don’t reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.


  • Thank you for correction about transportation! By marketing I really meant ads, I had no idea marketing departments also design aesthetics of commodities.

    “Unproductive” is not a judgement, it doesn’t mean a worker is less revolutionary or lives under better conditions. It’s only needed to understand where the value is created and where it is consumed. It’s important to understand global value chains, value transfer from the Global South to the Global North.


  • You are totally right but that’s not what Yanis means by “cloud capitalism”, which is what I was referring to.

    “Cloud capitalism” is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you’re talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced “unpaid labor”, none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.

    In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital:

    Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.

    The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algorithms. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.

    From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent.


  • “Cloud” is servers, energy required to run them, building housing them, etc.

    Information in it can be freely copied and has no real exchange value (it does has use value but that’s not something Marxism deals with).

    Edit: to clarify, for Marx workers directly involved in creating commodities capitalists sell create value, while workers involved in circulation, marketing, sales, logistics, transport, security, etc consume value created elsewhere, this is the difference between productive and unproductive labour for Marx. Unproductive labour is necessary to realise the value created by productive labout, but it does not generate new surplus value.


  • This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”. Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.

    The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.

    For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their “content”, doesn’t mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.

    All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it’s easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.


  • Of course people who live under capitalism have to adapt to it, I’m not critisizing her lifestyle.

    My point is that Guardian presents it as some alternative to participation in a capitalist society, which it simply isn’t. She’s as “moneyless” as any housewife, she doesn’t pay a rent but she lives in a house someone bought with money or rents with money, the products she gets for favours someone else buys with money, and so on. Supporting the kind of lifestyle she has this way is only possible for privileged people living in well-off societies. It’s not an answer to literally anything, it’s just white liberal navel-gazing, as inconsequential as kibutz “communism”.

    (Edit) Not to mention guilt-tripping less privileged people:

    Like, you can buy something at Kmart that’s cheaper than buying it from an op-shop, and I get that people just want to spend less money, but where’s that money going?

    Those people genuinely don’t comprehend that many aren’t able to fulfill their basic needs even at the cheapest shop and have to make sacrifices. They see supermarket chains packed with customers and think to themselves, “what do those people even do with all that money they save by not buying in an ethical, vegan, bio-certified, co-op farmers market like I do?” Literally this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw



  • Obviously they paint this as a conflict between fascism and western liberal feminism. It’s all about Silicon Valey “gendered roots”, “male power” etc. Nothing about the economic basis of the rise of fascism, about tech firms crushing labour movements, about their need for rare minerals mined in the imperial periphery to push cheap hardware, their need to keep the periphery destabilised so they can superexploit the workforce to assemble said hardware, and charge exorbitant fees for software developed in the imperial core, etc.







  • Red_Scare [he/him]toMemesKnow the difference
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    21 days ago

    “Everyone should do as they please” is such entitled bullshit.

    People were provided homes, jobs, education, healthcare, maternal leave, holidays for children in pioneer camps, and so on and forth, in a poor country that didn’t benefit from imperialism and didn’t exploit other nations.

    To achieve that, able-bodied people were expected to contribute and parasitism was not tolerated.

    (Edit) You probably grew up in a capitalist society so maybe you just have trouble imagining a different one.

    Under capitalism, the most vulnerable people end up homeless and unemployed, but in the USSR nobody was left behind, vulnerable people were provided homes and given jobs they were able to perform. People with mental health issues were treated, as a matter of fact Western propaganda painted the high number of hospitalised people as an example of how repressive USSR is, instead of recognising that in the West many of those people would be homeless, freezing to death in winter and suffering all kinds of abuse.

    Hospitalisation was not the first thing to do either - USSR had a huge “sanatorium” industry, with entire towns built in beautiful locations like seaside, mountain ranges, etc. Workers who were suffering from stress, anxiety etc would be sent there by their doctors to rest and rehabilitate from entire USSR in hundreds of thousands - someting only the rich could afford in the West at the time. Of course now those huge sanatorium complexes are mostly empty ruins, one of the most striking examples is Tskhaltubo in Georgia (https://wander-lush.org/visit-tskaltubo-travel-guide-tips/)

    If people were unhappy with their housing situation they could apply to change it and enter a queue for a new accomodation, similarly those unhappy with their jobs had all kinds of free evening education courses available, re-training schemes, and so forth.

    Laws against vagrancy and parasitism didn’t victimise the vulnerable, rather they existed to control the criminality. If you didn’t work legally, where were you getting money from? If you didn’t live under your registered address, how did you get an unregistered accomodation?





  • Lenin

    Lenin walks around the world.

    Frontiers cannot bar him.

    Neither barracks nor barricades impede.

    Nor does barbed wire scar him.

    Lenin walks around the world.

    Black, brown, and white receive him.

    Language is no barrier.

    The strangest tongues believe him.

    Lenin walks around the world.

    The sun sets like a scar.

    Between the darkness and the dawn

    There rises a red star.


    Ballads of Lenin

    Comrade Lenin of Russia,

    High in a marble tomb,

    Move over, Comrade Lenin,

    And give me room.

    I am Ivan, the peasant,

    Boots all muddy with soil.

    I fought with you, Comrade Lenin.

    Now I have finished my toil.

    Comrade Lenin of Russia,

    Alive in a marble tomb,

    Move over, Comrade Lenin,

    And make me room.

    I am Chico, the Negro,

    Cutting cane in the sun.

    I lived for you, Comrade Lenin.

    Now my work is done.

    Comrade Lenin of Russia,

    Honoured in a marble tomb,

    Move over, Comrade Lenin,

    And leave me room.

    I am Chang from the foundries

    On strike in the streets of Shanghai.

    For the sake of the Revolution

    I fight, I starve, I die.

    Comrade Lenin of Russia

    Speaks from the marble:

    On guard with the workers forever

    The world is our room!


    By Langston Hughes



  • You’re right of course. I just feel angry, powerless, and guilty.

    What I do genuinely support though is this: Western imperialism must end. Capitalism must end. Environmental collapse and slave-like exploitation suffered by the Global South can’t be allowed to go on. But as capitalism falls more and more into the state of disrepair, the Global North slides deeper and deeper into fascism. They won’t let go of their parasitic position without a fight.

    This means liberating oppressed nations, and oppressed classes, will require bloodshed, including “noncombatants” - whenever slaves revolt, some “peaceful” slave owners die.

    How much death and destruction should be wreaked on imperialists? As little as possible of course, but that’s just another way of saying as much as it takes. So, if some form of what I described above is necessary for the rest of the world to finally be free of Western imperialism and capitalism, that’s very unfortunate but so be it.

    I wish I could live in the pre-Gorbachev USSR, where I grew up. I wish I could live in a place where everyone lives in dignity and is free of fear over basic necessities, where people are taught internationalism and the country spends its resources to support liberation struggles around the world, provide free education to countless third world students so that they can go back and improve their homelands, rather than brain-drain poorer nations, and so on. But that’s all been destroyed and I’m an immigrant living in the UK, paying taxes that buy depleted uranium shells that will be used to shoot up the land I grew up in and poison it for decades to come, causing huge increase in birth defects, cancer rates, and so on.

    Corbyn will launch a new left wing, class based political party this year, I’ll join it and bring in whatever small family I have here, in hopes he can end forever austerity and forever wars, take us out of NATO, liberate us from the US domination, support the liberation of Palestine, and so on. But looking at how Melenchon got couped by Macron and the Frenchies didn’t do their thing, I’m not too optimistic Corbyn will manage to achieve much more with Anglos… And if people don’t follow Corbyn en masse, fascists will take power because at this point liberal Western democracy has lost all credibility and neither Labour nor Tories can stop the rise of Reform UK.

    And if Anglos choose fascism… I hope somebody liberates us at any cost. But I fear the opposite will happen and the UK will use its vast resources to cause orders of magnitude more suffering around the world than anything that could potentially happen to their tiny island.

    Sorry for the rant.


  • Czechia and Slovakia weren’t separate entities the way Soviet republics were.

    Bandera cult is horrific and Banderites get the wall, but calling the whole country Nazikraine is really shitty, especially considering all the death and destruction brought on Ukraine by Western meddling and coups and local compradors. Do better.

    [Very late edit]

    Calling WW2 Ukraine “Nazikraine” is completely ahistorical, you could just as well call WW2 Belarus “Nazirus” because under Nazi occupation, Nazi collaborators were in power. Ukraine is not like Hungary or Romania, it was never allied with Nazi Germany. It was invaded and occupied as part of the USSR.

    Ukraine was one of the primary victims of Nazism along with Belarus, over two million Ukrainians enslaved and sent to German industries for forced labour, over five million slaughtered, entire villages razed to the ground, mass rapes organised by Nazi officers, mass shootings by SS death squads and Banderites, things Western education mostly glosses over. Even the 30s famine has nothing on the destruction Nazis wreaked on Ukraine.

    I doubt you can imagine the generational trauma people raised in the USSR have. Look up Babi Yar, I grew up not far from there and still remember school trips there. Watch “Come and See” and understand we were raised by people who lived through this (https://youtu.be/zjIiApN6cfg). Liberation from Nazis is not a laughing matter for us, which is why the Ukrainian grandma with the red flag resonated so deeply with so many ex-Soviet people (https://youtu.be/DfeflkpcOi4).

    Ukraine was a founding member of the USSR, Ukrainians were the largest ethnic group in the Red Army after Russians, with 5.3 million serving (https://i.imgur.com/62j4OYo.jpeg) - 21 times more than around 250 thousand total serving for the German military under the Nazi occupation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany#Collaborating_organizations,_political_movements,_individuals_and_military_volunteers). Marshall Zhukov said, “We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it”. It was the Ukrainians who did the liberation, and now the West is destroying them in a proxy war against Russia, after putting Banderites in power.

    The role of the West is not accidental here. After WW2 the West immediately went on to put Nazi generals in charge of NATO. In Ukraine, despite the CIA support (operation Aerodynamic and others), remaining Bandrite gangs were eradicated by the early 50s, but Canada nurtured them in the following decades in hopes they can be transplanted back. All this simply because Nazism is an organic outgrowth of European settler-colonial project (same as Zionism), it’s the ugly side of Western liberalism.

    Again, Bandrites get the wall, but I won’t stand for equating Ukraine (or Russia) with Nazi Germany.