only covers a few years (1848-1851) but the 18th brumaire of louis bonaparte is the most obvious one, and its a really great and entertaining read too (with incredibly obvious parallels to the recurring pratfalls of bourgeois electoralists ever since)
heres a decent twitter thread with some linked articles - one of the articles is from a more marxist perspective too although the arguments are very similar
i think theyre definitely right about the charity trap and the need for such groups to keep their actual aims front-of-mind, but i think my counterpoints would focus on:
even if it isnt a threat to the state itself, an explicitly socialist mutual aid group is potentially able to pivot to support activities that are a threat to the state. e.g. feeding striking workers to prolong their ability to strike, which your local salvation army sure as shit isnt ever going to do. i think that kind of support work is potentially more valuable than just extra numbers on the pickets.
in times like these where the left is small and fragmented, its hard to do praxis that leads to substantive meaningful change anyway. bringing together and building community networks among like-minded leftwing people is real and important work right now, just about as much as anything else is, and mutual aid groups are great ways to build and reinforce such networks
the skills and knowledge and logistics for how to feed a whole group of people (or whatever other activity) cant just spring up overnight - its not as straightforward as people might think, and its a valuable set of “institutional” skills and knowledge. its a good way to ensure such skills are prevalent in leftist communities, and help communities “hit the ground running” if/when times get really dire or suddenly spicy
it promotes vegan food as normal and good, and food as a right for all, and provides a vision of what a better world might look like as an antidote against the crushing weight of capitalist realism
all of this stuff is in the context of an activity that also feeds the hungry, which is a solid, concrete good even if it turns out to be useless from a pure political praxis perspective. and apart from being good in its own right, just doing something objectively good and useful is a valuable antidote to burnout from activism that so often ends in failure and that voice in your head saying “whats the point of any of this?”
very disappointing to read from peter gelderloos of all people
there are quite strong anarchist critiques of food not bombs and similar service-provision mutual aid groups because they walk such a fine line with being functionally indistinguishable from bourgeois charity rather than part of an actual radically political program (i should note that these critiques are not saying that charitably feeding the homeless isnt a good thing to do of course, just that theyre not political praxis). i dont 100% agree with these critiques and i think food not bombs is a really worthwhile group (that ive also had some involvement with), but they raise important points that i think need to be kept front-of-mind. and if youre going to try to walk that line, you absolutely cant abandon your core principles just because its a bit more convenient
the height of hypocrisy to label yourselves with a group that is even named for its opposition to unnecessary violence, and then feed people food thats full of unnecessary violence
i call for your aid, drylomyr fythlestoon first of his name of mine own noble house lymplethorpe, i hath become entangled in the washbucket
yes but have you considered: national socialist party
mic drop
good post! and i dont at all disagree, but i do think some people use some quite different definitions of neofeudalism, and im just gonna go on a bit of a tangent to talk about how david graeber talks about neofeudalism in bullshit jobs, which is something very different and i think worth considering. id also emphasise that while capitalism is the dominant mode of economic relations, it has never been the only one in all spheres of our society so i think its very possible for some parts of the global economy to operate in a way thats more characteristic of feudal society even if capitalist relations predominate in most spheres, and it doesnt have to be all-or-nothing. and i absolutely acknowledge that individuals overwhelmingly interact with the economy in a proletarian manner - hiring out their labour time in exchange for money that they use to purchase the commodities required to live, as opposed to any sort of taxed/enslaved subsistence or anything like that.
we talk about service work but you can draw a distinction between different types of “service” work, and i think the distinction can actually very crudely be drawn along blue-collar/white-collar lines. service jobs like retail worker, cleaner, restaurant worker, delivery driver, warehouse worker etc etc are all absolutely and concretely a necessary part of the process of production and distribution of commodities (or commodified services) even if they arent directly involved in commodity production in the same way a factory worker making coats out of linen is. and a lot of white collar workers are too - there is certainly plenty of actual need for people doing the logistical organisation of complex supply chains and management both for legitimate purposes of ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction etc and the less legitimate purposes of cracking the whip to maximise exploitation of actual workers, etc etc. all this very neatly falls into the sphere of capitalist relations that are well described by the ltv etc
one of the main points that graeber argues is that a huge and increasing proportion of (predominantly) white-collar jobs dont fall into these categories, and perform no real useful service even to the company/organisation theyre part of. its not that theyre evil jobs and society would benefit if they didnt exist, its that the company itself is paying them to do bullshit and the company would benefit (profit-wise) if they didnt exist. capitalists can and will work them as hard as they can, but they wont really actually get any surplus value out of it because theyre not actually creating any value (unless you argue that since every company believes that making mud pies is necessary, therefore their useless labour making mud pies becomes part of the socially-necessary labour time involved in commodity production, but im not sure i agree that argument quite works). graeber argues that the ltv doesnt really explain these jobs and their proliferation, and i tend to agree. capitalist logic would fire all these people instantly for the sake of efficiency and profits, but instead these roles proliferate. his counterargument is that internally within company bureaucracies, a lot of the market rules dont apply, and that the explanation that best accounts for this is the internal development of feudal-like fiefdoms amongst the managerial classes playing their own little games of crusader kings trying to expand the power and prestige of their own departments with bigger budgets and more hangers-on and engaging in petty internal squabbles over what bit of stuff is each departments de jure territory etc. and a lot of the grunts at the bottom fall more into a category of nonproductive labour like household servants or feudal retainers - though this might be obscured, paid as a retainer for the personal edification of the employer rather than as a means of generating profit. this might just sound a bit cute, but given that some of these companies have huge numbers of staff and revenues bigger than actual countries and a lot of people spend a large portion of their lives inside these structures, i think theres some justification for suggesting this could be considered a real kind of internal neo-feudalism as graeber does. perhaps feudal-like social relations rather than feudal-like economic relations, and acknowledging that the wealth that pays for all these people to be paid to do fuckall of use comes from the very capitalist exploitation of the labour of productive workers, mostly in the global south (who would effectively play an equivalent of the serfs here). theres a real structural dynamic at play here that doesnt play by the normal “rules” of capitalism and that i think we need to account for because it affects so many workers in western countries in particular. i felt like this was possibly the most important part of the book, which got buried in the discourse under the “we should work less” side of things, and i wish he or someone else had expanded it further.
and then of course the finance/insurance/real estate sector that has exploded under modern neoliberalism, which are much more m-m’ rather than m-c-m’ with very often nobody doing anything that could be described as c in the middle. as solaranus discusses they very well could be described as like a feudal rentier class. but also because theyre large employers of people in the west and also make tonnes of money without having to really worry so much about the actual productive labour like industrial capitalists do, their ability to generate these useless feudal-like internal hierarchies is much greater than other organisations.
and theres a real question of “yeah so what does this matter?” and apart from the tremendous waste of labour and time, to be honest im not sure. for one, that we maybe need to be careful in trying to understand these jobs through purely capitalist market lenses. and certainly, as the sense that youre involved in “production” becomes ever more distant in these structures, the possibility of people ever identifying as a “worker” looks ever more remote (the pmc types i know would be very offended if you called them workers). and as they see less difference in what they do and what the parasites at the top do, its much easier for them to identify as a class with the bosses rather than with other workers (remember theyre closer to feudal retainers than to serfs). but also i think as contradictions heighten and companies struggle to maintain profit, while such people will absolutely get fired and have their pay and conditions cut etc, because their employment is operating under such different logic, the dynamics of this can potentially follow very different patterns from that of productive workers. maybe theyll be the first to go, but i suspect (as we have been seeing) that theyll often be closer to the last. and if nothing else this has the potential to really undermine solidarity even further. certainly my attempts to organise pmc types has been a struggle and a half, and i think this extra distance from “normal” capitalist relations makes it even harder to get them to see themselves as workers or exploited.
sorry this is a bit of a ramble, but this is one of those things that doesnt really get talked about much and i thought it was worth bringing up
i think more than anything else, watch dominion to remind yourself why its so important (cw: incredibly graphic violence). remember it if youre ever tempted to fall off the wagon again, missing out on a bit of cheese or whatever pales in comparison to contributing to this horror
agree with everyone else here saying not to focus on replacements but to make things that are delicious in their own right. this is my favourite recipe website, it has so much good shit. and ive cooked plenty of them for groups of omnis to very positive reviews. people are genuinely surprised that vegan food is tasty as fuck, but if you cook them imitations theyre just gonna focus on "it doesnt really taste like "
also i used to be the “i could never be vegan, i could never give up cheese” guy, and then i gave up cheese and literally never even think about it any more