the little roads connecting german homonationalism → NATO → Palestine is certainly uuuhhh… something.

last year there was a NATO flag flanked by EU and pride flags with little hearts connecting them (LGBT ♥ NATO ♥ EU), as if being queer has anything to do with NATO, or as if the terrorist entity gives a shit about queer people.

this was fever-inducing to read. in a frighteningly familiar way, but i couldn’t remember what for.

then i realised: another n+1 article from a year ago about a techbro conference: An Age of Hyperabundance.

my mother giving me an allowance and then calling take-backsies every month because she needed it to cover the bills.

won’t even embezzle or SA interns or make me listen to their life story once a year

wow, i didn’t know we had the exact same boss.

why can liberals never criticise something without misogynistic/homophobic sexual metaphor?

for fucks sake i wish i could go one day without the triggering imagery of sexual violence being repurposed for your moralistic magical thinking exercises.

seconding Parenti, as an anarchist

is this all there is? /rh

in Europe all i ever seem to meet are:

• ‘communists’: chauvinistic pensioners, or uni trots selling newspapers
• ‘syndicalists’: workaholic labour aristocrats and manscapers
• ‘anarchists’: teenage punkers

i’m either too old or too young to hang with any of these groups, and every year i get badjacketed because i wear a mask or have a ‘funny’ accent. i spent most of today having my fashion sense and diction mocked by 80 year old crackkkers. [nb my keyboard is broken and typed the three k’s itself. i’ve unlocked Maoist English autocorrect on my pc.]

all the local orgs are either clandestine anarcho-nihilists, or radlibs adopting revolutionary language but whose praxis begins and ends at petitions and performative protests.

i like this. i think for now as a workaround: one could lock the topic and leave a comment asking the OP to crosspost it elsewhere, with grace for posts which have high engagement (as ladfrombrad suggested).

i don’t agree that crossposting works to ‘move’ posts. as far as i know: the OP is not notified when their topic is crossposted by someone else, and in that case they also won’t be ‘subscribed’ to comment notifications.

🎵 cathy don’t go to the supermarket today. cause there’s a very strange man at the checkout stand,

i’m not who you asked for, but i’ve worked a lot with people in Sweden.

first, let’s talk about options. you don’t really have any negotiating power unless you are a member of one of the big three unions, and even then: only if you’re in the union which your employer has a collective agreement with, and even then: you don’t have any say in negotiations.

there’s TCO, which is the Liberal’s Choice™ confederation of unions, ranging from cops, to office workers, to insurance scammers. within TCO is the largest: Unionen (lit. ‘The Union’), whose unofficial motto is ‘if the boss could pick’ (om chefen själv för välja). Unionen is the default character’s choice for anyone who’s ever touched a keyboard.

there’s LO, best known for their hit single IF Metall, and they’re right-wing blue-collar productivists.

there’s Saco, best known for uhhhh. and they primarily represent the elite, lawyers, quacks, and other priests (such as religious ones).

the main alternative is the Syndicalists. they’re anticapitalist, they have few agreements with anybody, and they’re a great way to get blacklisted and wiretapped. their ideology is outlined here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rasmus-hastbacka-swedish-syndicalism

the independent Dockworkers Union is a great example of a functioning union. but they’re only for one industry, and many of their members give off national syndicalism vibes.

Is it a viable method of unions getting stuff done or is it just a pacifier that slowly traps them in a state-controlled “no fun allowed” box?

it’s definitely a pacifier.

the unions primarily serve to maintain a minimum level of comfort for the middle class, while acting on behalf of employers to crush left-wing organising and militancy. they give leeway to the largest employers, while ignoring the plight of employees at small companies. they follow the party line of the socdems, which in recent years is ‘whatever the far-right is on about this week’. the general view toward salary negotiations is ‘the highest paid jobs should be paid even more, and the lowest paid jobs should be paid even less so we can pay the highest paid jobs even more’.

whenever there’s any criticism of the unions, the socdems, or the Swedish government/economy overall: you’ll get union leaders and politicians across the spectrum snapping back that ‘hEre in SweDeN, wE hAvE a ModEl’ and then passing/proposing laws to criminalise and punch down at criticisms of ‘the Swedish System’ as some kind of foreign threat. you can’t criticise or protest ‘elected’ leadership, because that’s ‘undemocratic’ and ‘strongarm’, and ‘you should just shut the fuck up and wait till the next vote’.

there’s two short English essays here (from a syndicalist perspective):

• https://organizing.work/2021/12/swedish-unions-why-do-we-suck/
• https://libcom.org/article/swedish-unions-crisis-what-solutions-do-syndicalists-offer

i appreciate your bluntness, and sorry for the vaguepost — i was venting, and i had few spoons. you did give some meaningful insight.

in the main case i had in mind: it was an internal discussion to drop principles like anticapitalism to ‘concede’ to the right in ‘good faith’, both to appeal to a larger audience of radlibs and with the idea that if the right doesn’t concede on something then they’ll look mean and extremist. i and others pushed back, and we were told our ‘uncompromising attitude is toxic’. this isn’t a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check.

but i take away from your comment that it’s probably not worth the struggle session if there’s no potential in the organisation anyway, or if the issue doesn’t need a (satisfactory) resolution to still achieve something. everyone might benefit more from an amicable split rather than an argument that leaves everyone bitter.

i think it’s a good discussion, and i agree with your interpretation and the message of her video. i don’t think either you or she did anything wrong.

i was venting frustrations about recent events in my life related to the subject, because i and others in my org have been accused of being too ‘rigid’ or ‘unrealistic’ on principles like anticapitalism, and that we’re ‘driving away’ potential membership by not being more ‘moderate’ in our politics.

this isn’t a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check. i don’t know where healthy gatekeeping ends and purity politics begins, but OrionsMasks’s comment gave me something to think about.

purity politics is a problem i don’t know how to escape. where do i draw the line?

how can i not call in someone who aligns with me socially and culturally, but then actively engages politically and economically in the very things which reproduce our collective misery (because they’re ‘being realistic’, and it’s ‘just the way it is’)? how can i not call them an asshole when they turn around and throw out a friendship because i’m ‘just a hater’ and ‘they don’t need this negativity in their life’ and say i need to ‘learn to respect other peoples’ opinions / ways of life’?

i have been extremely worn out and worn down by infiltrators, entryists and wreckers. how do i not have a kneejerk reaction at someone trying to reäctivate individualist brainworms and spreading solipsistic ideas in leftist spaces? even if they have good praxis or ideologically align with our goals: they’re advocating for ideas which would undermine our work in the longterm.

at what point does gatekeeping turn into purity politics? i am skeptical of people who complain about ‘purity politics’ and ‘echo chambers’ because i mainly hear it from the types of realpolitik liberals in paragraph one, or the types of incoherent wreckerkind in paragraph two. is it not right to call out people for being unserious, incoherent and solipsistic? why should i entertain hateful, misinformed people on the assertion that not doing so is somehow epistemically irresponsible of me? i can do opposition research on my own time; i’m in leftist spaces to discuss anticapitalism, antiïmperialism, and antixenophobia, not to discuss the possible merits of commodification, empires and racist statistics.

i’m sick of treatlords pathologising my compassion and then claiming i and other leftists are ‘alienating potential allies’ for calling out their lack of imagination and for not respecting their appeals to the status quo.

my brain is tired.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

— Mikhail Bakunin, God and the state, Chapter 2

Expertise merely refers to one’s knowledge or skill in a particular field, but my understanding of CPR or ability to bake shortbread cookies does not make me an authority over you. Other than the conflation of force and authority, this is one of the most common confusions people have about anarchism, made worse by the fact that there are some anarchists who still use authority to refer to both command and expertise just because Bakunin did. Personally, I find that creates needless confusion. If you’re using the word authority to describe everything from slavery to knowing how to build a bridge, then why use the word at all? Just use the word expertise when you’re talking about expertise. Listening to medical advice isn’t a hierarchy. Having expertise doesn’t give me the right to command you unless I hold a position in a hierarchical power structure that grants me that authority. As Bakunin himself said:

…we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exert over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial.

— Andrewism, How Anarchy Works » Dissecting Authority (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU)

I highly recommend reading in full that section from Andrewism. It’s no more than 5 minutes to read.

if you’re not sure yet if you might be an anarchist, consider Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!.

also seconding this great comment over in [email protected].

seconding a focus on sexology; we don’t need another Institut für Sexualwissenschaft incident.

off the top of my head:

• The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault 1976 – 84 + 2018)
• Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg 1998)
• Gender Trouble (Judith Butler 1990)
• Undoing Gender (Judith Butler 2004)
• Caliban and the Witch (Silvia Federici 2004)
• Black on Both Sides (C. Riley Snorton 2017)
• The Stonewall Riots (Marc Stein 2019)

including all the works of Judith Butler and Silvia Federici.

more academically:

• Kinsey Reports; The Kinsey Institute: The First Seventy Years; and any other expansions on the work of the Kinsey Institute
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Healthcare: A Clinical Guide to Preventive, Primary, and Specialist Care (Kristen Eckstrand, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld 2016)

you can probably farm the bibilographies on these.

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there’s a bot that will do this for you over on lemmy.world. i think you’d like it better over there.