Are you serious? Europeans colonised and enslaved most of the world, pick any genocide at random and more likely than not it will be commited by Europeans.

Not to mention there’s a genocide ongoing right now with full support of the EU.

It was all about Marxism: productive vs unproductive labour, unequal exchange, unequal development, dependency theory, ecological debt. My questions were purely theoretical though, any excitement for revolutionary change came from DeepSeek, which is what I found so funny.

I told it it doesn’t mince its words because when asked about unequal exchange and labour aristocracy in the Global North, it outright stated that “Northern workers are bought off by imperialist plunder” (emphasis in original), and in my experience ChatGPT would never put it so bluntly.

The point is, that’s the only kind of liberal there is.

this can’t be real with the goatse image

It’s un fucking believable the biggest cartoon release in history is censored in the UK and Europe. Fucking freedom, can’t event take the little one to see a cartoon cause it’s about underdogs rising against their oppressors.

Pain, hunger, and cold are physical too!

I guess the party Corbyn is cooking up is the only hope now

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

Exactly what I meant!

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.

Eton Mouse

This is amazing, thank you comrade!

I added their radio sets to the post. :)

Obligatory (and, sadly, real):

“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?

Yugoslavia and Libya disobeyed and were destroyed. But the US is failing to destroy Russia. That’s what matters.