dunno, i forced myself to read through capital v1 because of org educational requirements and still got a ton out of it. admittedly i'd already read a bunch of capital illustrated, capital abridged books before that, which made it easier imo and of course there is a ton that i didn't get and ill have to re-read w/ footnotes, patience etc, but i was actually surprised that a quick read of capital is a) possible b) worth it. now hegel on the other hand...

on the real though what are these rich motherfuckers doing with this water exactly? are they filling up their own private oceans or something wft

paintings are great and all but statues are better for this sort of thing imo

oops i guess ill live shorter dammit and can confirm the fattening part

part of loving yourself is refusing to perfomatively flagellate yourself (or shit on yourself, beat yourself up) out of an understanding that it does not advance communism or your own mental health one bit and does no one any good including yourself. constructive crit/self-crit is different. what makes it constructive vs not is actually identifying, rejecting and removing classist, racist, national chauvinistic, homophobic, transphobic (or if you are in an org may involve addressing deviations from line) behaviors and ideas from your brain and replacing these with correct or better ones. if you have good comrades and are willing to work on yourself that tranformation can happen but its also a long process

if you read what i wrote i did not defend them. i called them reactionary and scabs and i do think the extra money they make vs uber drivers makes them that way and makes them more likely to be that way. we should definitely focus more on the uber workers than them in terms of trying to get them class conscious. earlier i wrote a post that I edited out that basically said the same thing and said these accounting categories aren't super useful sometimes but what is important is class consciousness and that there are reactoinary layers of proletarians as well so we have to be careful with these definitions and who we try to organize with. anyway i wanna back away from hexbear for a bit to do some IRL stuff but i think we can agree on some things and disagree to degree on others so ill leave it here for now

right but you run into the contradiction that the uber worker by that classification is also bourgeois

also, many people can't afford to get into debt to buy the car either, so that makes them bourgs as well i guess, that's a barrier of entry right there and is kinda arbitrary

i also am not placing a moral category on them i just don't think marx even dealt with the question of piecmeal work in this way either and also i think these definitions are lacking if we walk ourselves into an argument that uber workers that ofen make below minimum wage are bourgs because they own the means of production and dont get paid a wage. owner operator truckers are just a more contradictory example of the above, so if we are classing one group of them as workers we should the other and the quantitative difference in the price of the tools doesn't matter

hopefully the unionization wave hits that shop too soon

actually marx talks about this in terms of piecemeal work. there were plenty of tailors for example that owned property for their work that they wouldn't have used personally unless they personally wanted to work. they were still considered proletarian but they owned their own tools. at what amount of money for the tool is the qualitative difference in your mind between personal and private? also a big part of why they were proletarian is because that mode of work ultimately drove prices for labor down and they screwed themselves in the long term and so could never become bourgeois.

most of these owner operators will never own a business where they exploit other truckers. that might be their dream but most of them are stuck being workers for a few companies doing long hours with no benefits and labor protections whether they like it or not. there are also many "classical" workers that are scabs and reactionary and don't see themselves as workers, they have more in common with them than they care to realize

its an expensive tool for work, similar to owning your own tools as a journeyman in any trade. the tools are more expensive but its the tools needed for the job. and its different from renting because they are actually putting in the labor that generates the value, unlike with renting which is passive income for the owner. are they small business owners that exploit their own labor? technically yes, they are sole proprietors but if they effectively move things for the same companies anyway and have no choice about the matter they are basically reduced to being workers with no labor benefits that have expensive tools

you can be a truck owner and be basically in the same position as an uber driver, who i guess could also be classified as petit bourgeois in terms of tax accounting and labor law but neither of them necessarily can pick up their car/truck and have a job elsewhere than from the limited number of businesses and platforms they can have contracts with, which puts them in effectively the same position as anyone else on the labor market with limited employment options. i think owner operator truckers that are reactionaries are working class but are basically the same as scabs at any other job site and have mistaken their class interest. it doesn't help that more and more employers are turning to apps and skirting labor regulations by misclassifying workers as small business owners and it also isn't helping it that some workers are buying into the fantasy.

oh i've done that for a living a while back, its actually a lot of work both in the field and in the office. it was pretty fun because we got to go to different parts of the city every day and measure shit then use cad software to draft it. only issue was of course i was not getting paid the full amount because i didn't have the degree necessary to practice it so i eventually gave up on it. not a bs job though at least

yeah, that particular definition is shit too imo. that said, when it comes to these types of things the amount of agency varies extensively, depending on the conditions you are facing. when i say self care i mean doing what is necessary to secure the bottom rungs of the maslow hierarchy more or less. if you are not able to get food, clothes, shelter, meds, sleep etc your agency even over your own mental state become severely reduced and because most people attempt to acquire those things through selling labor or getting SSI/SSDI checks that may not pay enough for that to happen. capitalism literally robs many people of most of their agency and its a downward spiral from there on and can lead to maladaptive behaviors like drug abuse etc.

liberal outlets that promote hedonism as self care only make this worse. solidarity and mutual aid can help us break through some of that but mostly we are left to fend for ourselves, which is why i am not against a better definition of self care that can be more useful if still very limited in its ability to meaningfully increase agency for many people. much of psychiatry and self-help coaching is similar to be honest, it only works for a small subset of people and is much more likely to work if socioeconomic factors have been guaranteed to begin with, which is not a safe assumption in our system of capitalism

not so much on the self-care is shit part. i think anyone who has been involved in any kind of revolutionary organization has figured out that self-care is an important element of it if you expect to have any longevity. self-care and solidarity (or mutual aid if you wish to use that terminology) strenghten each other. anyway based on the other comments here it seems you have changed your tone so i won't harp on that but if you have had experience with people who have a deep "learned helplessness" due to decades of poverty and the system failing them and have tried to help them you will know that the rhetoric you were using is both ineffective and heartless but i'll stop at that.

if you are able to educate, agitate, organize working class organs or even the beginings of a party today, then do that but don't shit on other people who are not ready because honestly the vast majority of the working class, whether disabled or clinically depressed or not is simply not there yet either.

just screaming "organize" at them won't work. it might work for some people who are in a similar headspace as you but being hyper online is hardly the only way to isolate yourself from real people, you might be a in a party organizing and still have zero ability to connect with other workers on a real level, so think about why that might be

also, i didn't read the article, but self care is good, actually. you can't maintain any level of discipline without it. breaking down your ability to do self-care is one of the first things you do when you want to break a human and its something that capitalism does naturally through alienation and overwork and inducing disorders by demanding ways of thinking and living that are not good for us in order to have pliable workers and inducing massive amounts of stress by forcing us to either pretend or otherwise convince ourselves that we can make a broken system work.

revolution doesn't only take disciplined cadres, it also requires conditions where the working class will be ready for the necessary unrest, conflict, violence and discipline. the conditions for revolution will come when the conditions are so bad that the working class in the imperial core can't be lied to anymore and cannot take it anymore and has given up on the defanged unions and is ready for street fights and illegal mass strikes and is aware and ready to fight the counter reaction.

that does take disiplined cadres that will assist and guide in that process and but that sort of cadre work is not for everyone. under those kinds of conditions the little sects that we call "parties" today will either show themselves relevant or not and we'll just have to see if your favorite sect or mine will have any relevance or not or whether its someone else or maybe even the fascists that will win. the profit rate of the imperial core nations keeps dropping and the climate crisis keeps deepening, so we will see those conditions happen in our lifetime

i work with other high payed people too and the best i've managed to do is get them to join a secret chat where we talk about what we hate in the company but most were not interested in organizing and basically felt they had a sweet thing going so why try to change it. i work for a nonprofit now and its a similar dynamic. all the frustrated energy that could get directed at capitalism gets discipated into inter-departmental little catfights and passive-agressive nonsense. i've legit given up on trying to organize at the workplace because of that but hopefully the rising labor unrest hits the IT sector at some point.

that's cool (the first part). well another thing you could do is tell that person the same thing about pulling their weight with other workers around (but no managers) in the same room or meeting. it would even help if those people are ones that you have some solidarity with in the frist place but even if you don't that person will have to squirm a little more and will be harder for them to just say nothing in that situation since there are other people seeing it.

yeah my brain is screaming "quit playing dumb and give me an answer you little shit" on that one but i would never actually say it like that

that said, that only matters if the job is not a bullshit one and if there is a consequence to you not doing the work, either

also, in my experience people who have worked non-bullshit crappy jobs at some point in their lives tend to understand this concept of pulling your weight a little better but it doesn't really translate well to the bullshit-job world because there nothing really matters, at least until material conditions get bad enough that these jobs will cease to exist

personally i take notes if someone is teaching me something so i don't have to bother them again. i've found that if I keep having to teach people the same things its better to just write it up as a doc and link it to them or copy/paste and not engage with them further.

true, he was probably grifting some investor anyway tbh

we all knew his business had no chance of surviving too (and it didn't) and it drove him insane that we knew it, so he would lash out by timing our bathroom breaks, having three strikes rules about being 1 minute late to work, writeups for using a different text editor, writeups for looking at social media, underpaying and other shit like that. the particular day that he was screaming at me i had basically let him know its not a big deal that we had a production outage because we have no clients anyway so who gives a shit but now that i think about it his clients were the investors he was grifting.