wahdat al wujūd

Reminds me of this Baldwin quote: "The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."

For roughly 150 years, the socialist and communist left has organized around one foundational assumption: that our proximate fight is with capitalism. I believe this assumption is wrong, and that it explains much of our failure. Our fight is with class rule — the broader system of institutionalized relationships through which some people get others to perform labor for them without meaningful reciprocity, and in which there are thousands of different ways in which advantage and disadvantage are meted out and expressed. Capitalist wage exploitation is the most widespread and politically important form of this, but it is not the only one. Treating it as though it were has cost us dearly. The cost shows up in two ways. First, many workers benefit enough from other aspects of class rule, from gendered divisions of labor to professional hierarchies to ethnic and cultural advantages, that they are genuinely ambivalent about abolition. These advantages are tangible, and perceived as natural. Second, many marginalized workers look at the left's promise of "an end to capitalism" and correctly see it as insufficient. It says nothing about the exploitation and marginalization they experience in the private sphere, in their families and communities. So they stay away — not out of apathy, but because the offer isn't good enough. These two problems (ambivalence among the relatively advantaged, and distrust among the marginalized) are connected. Both stem from a definition of class that is too narrow: one that focuses on wage labor and ownership of the means of production while ignoring the many other ways class rule reproduces itself. If this diagnosis is right, it has major consequences for how we organize — consequences that go well beyond choosing better demands or better messaging. It requires rethinking what workers' organizations are for. Foppe de Haan, More to Lose Than Their Chains: Class Rule and the Problem of Worker Ambivalence - Beyond Meritocracy

Nuance is not a virtue of good sociological theory. Although often demanded and superficially attractive, nuance inhibits the abstraction on which good theory depends. I describe three “nuance traps” common in sociology and show why they should be avoided on grounds of principle, aesthetics, and strategy. The argument is made without prejudice to the substantive heterogeneity of the discipline. "Fuck Nuance" by Kieran Healy

https://youtu.be/DgzhqgSTtvg

https://youtu.be/_Elv8hy5yaE

https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/what-if-we-didnt-need-hrt-anymore

"we live at the mercy of large organizations whose actions determine the circumstances of our existence, such as the state of the economy and the environment, whether there will be a war or a nuclear accident, what kind of education our children will receive and what media influences they will be exposed to. Etc., etc., etc. In short, we have more freedom than ever before to have fun, but we can’t intervene significantly in the life-and-death issues that hang over us. Such issues are kept firmly under the control of large organizations." Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski

"The argument that “people now have more freedom than ever” is based on the fact that we are allowed to do almost anything we please as long as it hasno practical consequences. " Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

... and that's how muslims conquered the Jerusalem and that's the stuff that's left out of your history books. https://youtu.be/Ygi7KuSazn4

David Graeber, relationship between markets and state