- cross-posted to:
- blackleftist@lemmygrad.ml
From what I read, and forgive me if I am wrong, Sister Souljah may not have been an explicit communist as someone like Angela Davis, but I came across this video today and found she was very on point. Solidarity to all of my black comrades. <3
She's 100% on point; and it's killing me how that Steve Carrell-looking white-hair peckerwood kept trying to yell over her to sideline her points. "Where is the white outcry...? Who are these 'white good people?' I want to see them. I want to meet them." I feel like I've been quoting her without having seen this debate for the past ten years.
Like Ture said about Marx: when you look at the world honestly, you can only come to certain conclusions; you don't need to be told what they are and once you've seen them you cannot be persuaded to think otherwise. When you hear that someone else has discovered the same thing it resonates.
Oh wow, that's an incredible quote. It concisely summarizes a point I have been trying to process in my head. That there are some things that explain everything and you don't have to hamfistedly jam in an ideology.. everything just fits.
It's extremely true. I knew about the labor theory of value ever since I worked a shitty retail job that would take in ~6x more every night than the staff's combined wages for the two week pay period, years before I was ever exposed to Marx.
It's jarring when you see it.
I remember the first time that I was sent with my own paperwork to get signed off. I'd been sub-contracted out before but the office usually dealt with the paperwork. I was paid about $10/hour at the time. The paperwork showed the end-customer was paying not only $100/hour for my services but an extra $14/hour for wear and tear on tools and equipment. They were my fucking tools! And I didn't get paid a penny extra for wear and tear. My own tools were getting paid more than I was.
At that point I knew I hated employers. I could deal with the shitty hours and managers. A combination of thinking that hard work would make me rich and finding subtle ways to take the piss saw me through that. But the difference between what I made and what I earned. That turned me. I only needed a vocabulary to explain what I already knew.
When I started to read Marx and Marxists almost a decade later, things clicked.
we all have and will continue to do so in perpetuity; history repeating itself is a constant.
I always used to follow the aphorism that history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme-- just a constant repeat is a depressing prospect; and I already got depression