[-] duderium@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 55 minutes ago)

I worked as a dishwasher in high school and college. My first job was as a bus boy, and the restaurant owner said, after the first two days, that these days had been an unpaid training period, something she had not mentioned until then. She stole my pay from those days, and then I quit. This was an excellent introduction to capitalism, although it took me another fifteen years to figure out that this system was actually the problem. I think the difference between me and a lot of westerners is that although I'm a slow learner, I do actually learn. Westerners don't seem to learn anything at all, except how to wag their tails when their bourgeois masters toss them a bone from the capitalist banquet of stolen labor.

Anyway

I worked overseas in East Asia as an English teacher and university instructor for years. Started a family and we made the huge mistake of moving back to the USA (I was still a lib). My spouse is a nurse and ended up getting a good job after we were both unemployed and living on our savings and family assistance for a year. I was already a Berner by then but it was definitely radicalizing to go from having excellent universal health care in East Asia to having no fucking health care at all in America (with two small kids) while hearing constantly from white liberal boomers on Facebook that universal health care is wrong and terrible and evil and impossible. My whole family had been using it for years by then!

I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I've discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.

I was unemployed and publishing novels that made no money for years, trying to get a teaching job based on my extensive experience even though I don't have the qualifications the state requires, and anytime an employer googles me they see that I hate the police thanks to a few articles written by a couple of shitheads in our wonderful local family neighborhood newspapers. I worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic and really enjoyed it. The kids were actually great, only some teachers were weird (the principals are often unbearable in countless ways). Last January I ended up taking an oil burner technician class, among the hardest experiences of my life. It was free and paid for with covid money. I made it through the class and got a job, and have been doing this shit for seven months now. I'm days from getting my journeyman's license, and have hundreds of pages in a book I'm writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It's still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit. All of these fucking oil boilers and furnaces should be dismantled; instead, my job is maintaining them. My coworkers refuse to unionize even though all the oil companies around here are desperate for workers, so that's cool. Once I have my journeyman's license, I can do everything except installations (which I don't want to do anyway since they are so amazingly unethical), but this also makes me nervous because a lot of the work is really advanced for me. My employer has been honest and fair so far (as much as capitalists can be) but my pay is still pathetic (I'm supposed to get a raise to $24/hr in a few days) and I really, really don't want to do on-call work, so I might end up changing employers soon. I would rather just work for myself, since that's where the big bucks are, but I still need help from people who know so much more than me, and my license also requires a master to sign off on it. The feudal guilds live on!

9

I've been reading Capital off and on for months and this is a seemingly pretty important difference that I don't understand. Is there a difference between surplus labor and profit, and if so, what is it? Any explanations, links, or chapters in Capital I should check out are appreciated.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 2 points 1 hour ago

"Actually the recording is fake or Epstein was just saying that to sabotage Trump."

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 4 points 22 hours ago

My friends absolutely will not budge on their liberalism so I barely talk with them anymore.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 23 points 2 days ago

My job requires me to visit people’s homes every day. At least once a day someone remarks on the niceness of the weather. It takes so much self restraint on my part to just be like “yeah.” Halloween where I live is always noticeably and sometimes even shockingly cold. Not today.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 29 points 5 days ago

The trotskyist who helped a lot to radicalize me (I later became an ML thanks to hexbear) got a good job with the teamsters and is now just a standard liberal as far as I can tell.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 18 points 6 days ago

I think all of us were assuming that Biden would lose in 2020. I know I was.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 42 points 6 days ago

Harris is already exterminating every last person in Palestine. How can Trump exterminate them more?

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago

Gotta get me some BRICS bux.

51

My money is on Harris supporters because all of the craziest Trump supporters were thrown in prison after January 6.

There will definitely be public tantrums, plus people doing pointless email campaigns to convince electors to change their votes. I do have to wonder if liberals will do their own Stop the Steal…

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

I feel like if all he did was film himself working at McDonald’s from now until election day he would win in a landslide.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I used to be like this in 2016 too. I listened obsessively to the 538 podcast and read everything on their website. Then, on election day, Trump won the electoral college while Hillary won the popular vote. 538 had never covered this possibility. I know because I really did follow them obsessively for months. This world of r/politics headlines has only the most tenuous connection to the actual material world. If you follow liberalism closely, sooner or later it leads you over a cliff.

[-] duderium@hexbear.net 32 points 1 week ago

I laughed when I saw trump at McDonald’s at first but then I realized that it was a pretty good move from his campaign (it makes him more relatable) and probably the first time he has ever worked a real job in his life.

7
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/videos@hexbear.net

Discovered this guy’s music a couple of weeks ago and have been listening nonstop ever since. This song is called “Bosat el Reeh” on streaming services. He wrote three hundred songs, sings beautifully, and is also a beast on the oud.

37
Title (hexbear.net)
submitted 4 months ago by duderium@hexbear.net to c/main@hexbear.net

New hexbears be like: where’s the cool zone I miss it so much

Old hexbears be like: I bring the cool zone wherever I go

53
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

I’ve had people laugh. Others just stare. One or two people murmured some kind of critical response that I couldn’t hear. I find it strange and just wanted to know if this is an ordinary experience. It’s rare for someone to agree. I live in a rich white area.

55
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

Haha take that commies.

I was masked in a hardware store. A guy who looked like Tom Skerritt from thirty years ago but taller and thinner looked at me and started ranting about communism with his employee. Did you know that communists want to get everyone dependent on the government? That’s their plan!!

He also said that he had read Marxists and recommended that his employee do so.

This guy also wears some kind of uniform with an American flag on the shoulder every day. I always got bad vibes from him but never really heard him speak. Until now.

I didn’t say anything because I go to this place all the time for work and I see him there constantly and suspect that he may be the owner.

50
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I've spent more than a few hours chatting with "the guys," and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I'm extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the "good" ones that provide their treats. (They're also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we "really needed" a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has "made some money" through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA's future (and climate change) and has said that he'll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It's wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that's a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.

What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from "collectivist" to "individualist." Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers' political views much easier to understand. They're individualists. They don't like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they're happy to be rich (at everyone else's expense) and to have the same police protect them.

As an aside, I've been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you'll see that I'm a communist, which means that it's impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I'm writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there's so much money in this field and I'd like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There's tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it's more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I'm interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.

21
Is this real? (hexbear.net)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/art@hexbear.net

Honestly seems too good to be true. Google didn’t really turn anything up and I don’t speak Russian, despite what internet liberals tell me.

The logo in the bottom right might be a clue.

I think the star is also in the wrong place.

9
submitted 7 months ago by duderium@hexbear.net to c/main@hexbear.net

The world has "fallen" to communism. The last liberals and fascists on Earth flee to Puerto Rico (sorry) and basically turn it into another Taiwan for a few months or years. The ruling class there maintains that it has suffered only temporary setbacks at worst and that victory is at hand. And besides, if you like communism so much, why don't you move to [the rest of the world]? And they aren't even real communists there anyway because they have not instantaneously transformed the planet into paradise. They're just befogging the masses, who are too stupid to understand that the best days of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy lie ahead!

I'm just thinking about this because of the Yankee cope I'm seeing all over the place. Ukraine just needs more weapons and European soldiers, then it's bound to prevail against Russia, which is collapsing anyway. China is a heartbeat from balkanizing. Haiti is just run by a bunch of cannibal criminal gangs. Palestine can't possibly win. Etc.

39
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by duderium@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

Dude took off his shoes and then put them back on again twenty times before walking into his own home. When I was a kid I thought his show was fucking boring. I think libs are just pretending to love him because he was a civility republican. CMV.

PS: what the fuck is the deal with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along?

21
submitted 7 months ago by duderium@hexbear.net to c/main@hexbear.net

So I felt like I was following the genocide in Gaza pretty closely but apparently these images are at least a few days if not more than a week old. I found them on tiktok as well as a telegram channel called Gaza Now in English. I honestly couldn’t believe what I was looking at, but once I found this poor kid’s name I saw that his death had already been covered by establishment media. You can find these images and articles by googling his name (Yazan al-Kafarnev) and honor him by doing whatever you can to stop the genocide. I’m a parent and have trouble writing this but we failed this kid, our protests failed to save him.

14
submitted 8 months ago by duderium@hexbear.net to c/main@hexbear.net

I used to think that people focusing so much ire on boomers was anti-Marxist because the main contradiction in American society is class (settler / indigenous, bourgeois / proletarian) but I’ve started to wonder if this profound and really ubiquitous age-consciousness (ageism) is actually just a step toward class consciousness? Like I’m guessing most people who hate boomers don’t really have a problem with homeless boomers?

I’m thinking also of how women in South Korea are refusing to get married or have kids and how this will basically destroy South Korea (albeit slowly) if trends continue. Women in South Korea are objectively correct in identifying men as their oppressors, but is this awareness of the patriarchy a step toward class consciousness and revolutionary thought or is it a dead end? I guess it depends on the person as well as circumstances.

It still seems like, regardless of how hard the bourgeoisie pushes the idea that only individuals exist and anyone can rise to the top if they just work hard and smart enough, large numbers of people are possibly developing nascent class consciousness, which can lead toward an understanding of historical materialism and scientific socialism. This is basically an extended “is it gonna be barbarism or socialism?” meme but I just thought I’d post it here to see what people thought.

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duderium

joined 4 years ago