• the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        35·
        9 days ago

        I remember /r/antiwork in its heydey, it was building towards class consciousness and people were bitching and memein less, rumblings about organizing more, before it got broken up. I had heard of but never knowingly experienced FUD happenin in real time until after that FOX interview when so many of the loudest voices demanded a break to /r/workreform. I loved the energy of that place before it got fedfucked… Like really thought it had a chance to be something real. Thinking about it now, i think it was a bigger blow to me than i gave it credit at the time, i started my search for a reddit alternative then.

          • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
            12·
            9 days ago

            You fell for the Fox News propaganda. They chose the most nutty mod they could find to misrepresent the subreddit. Yes in its barebones infancy the subreddit was truly “anti-work” but that was for an incredibly short amount of time and when it was sub 50k users. Realistically the majority of the subreddits history is what joad is describing.

            • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
              9·
              7 days ago

              It’s a good example of why it does matter how leftists present themselves – “if people take issue with our group as-is they were never going to get on board anyway” is poor reasoning. Choosing to go with “anti-work” had at least three problems:

              1. Gives bad-faith critics like Fox a perpetual layup;
              2. Attracts at least some people who really just don’t want to contribute, which feeds back into 1 and also impedes trying to do anything meaningful; and
              3. Takes a good impulse (alienation from one’s labor) and channels it in a frankly childish direction (“I don’t wanna”) instead of towards class consciousness, education, and action
              • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
                5·
                9 days ago

                I agree generally, but I think it’s a bit easier said than done sometimes, especially when dealing with the absurd soundbite level of things in modern high speed internet land. Anti-work in the face of a culture that glorifies burning yourself out for nothing kinda makes some sense; out of context, it just sounds unrealistic and silly, but in context, it can be interpreted as an opposition to the glorifying of labor for no other reason than because it’s labor. There are those who will take it too far, or be a poor representation, but that’s the case for any way you frame it. You can say work reform, but reform is often associated with capitulation in the context of dealing with a dictatorship of capital, so now you might get a less bad faith interpretation from critics, but might also be more apt to attract libs who are advocating nothing more than joining a union and not raising class consciousness meaningfully.

                I do think it’s worth experimenting with these kind of things and seeing what has what kind of impact. I’m not saying don’t try because it’s hard. But just that it’s more a matter of tradeoffs than a purely helpful way of doing it with no drawbacks. And at some point, you have to just be ready to explain a coherent and consistent position beyond a couple of words, which is going to be more important and stabilizing in the long-term.

  • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml
    27·
    9 days ago

    So many superhero-villain stories seem to follow this weird-ass pattern: the villain will show a sizable amount of class consciousness, but somewhere along the way will randomly break character and kill a humongous number of people for no fucking reason.

    The Riddler from Batman 2023 is such a textbook example. He kills corrupt officials to reveal Gotham’s deep corruption and rot, which is objectively a good thing. However, once Batman starts going after him, he randomly floods all of Gotham, just so the writers can show he’s ‘insane’.

    In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Flag Smashers are practically communists at the start who wanted to preserve the unity and cooperation of the world after the Snap, instead of having everything revert to the capitalist hellhole it was before. Of course, during one of their raids to get medicine for refugees, they randomly decide to blow up a warehouse with workers still inside. They eventually all get arrested or killed for being ‘terrorists’. In the end, the problems they fought to solve simply get voiced by Falcon, who uses his status as an elite black soldier just to tell a senator to “do better”.

    In Black Panther, Killmonger becomes king of Wakanda so he can provide vibranium weapons to Africans around the world. By doing so, he wants them to fight back against their oppression, doing exactly what the Soviet Union did. Of course, he’s considered crazy and has to be defeated. In the end, T’Challa decides to solve Africans’ oppression by building some shitty schools around the world.

    In each of these, the villian’s cause is righteous, but they are either portrayed as crazy or are made by the writers to do something random and crazy. Every single one of these is perfectly formulated to show the proles that they can’t take matters into their own hands because ‘they’d go crazy’. Instead, we should wait for an enlightened Lord (Batman, Iron Man, etc.) to take pity on us.

  • Large Bullfrog@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    15·
    9 days ago

    I love the way this contrasts with the corrupt official thats getting executing in China. It demonstrates what a dictatorship of the proles vs what a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie equate to in practice. The best way to determine who holds power is to look at who receives the hammer.