It’s not a blog or anything, more like some sort of text library, but it currently only has a few select texts on it. Please link to it, it has no ads so I’m not trying to make money. Thanks!
So, I work at a certain popular fast food chain. One that is considered of higher quality (for some reason) than many of the other chains. Well, I work on the front lines at this restaurant. I am the cashier. I take your order and give you your change. I’m the first one the customer sees and the only they really have any contact with. It’s a horrible job. It’s even more horrible when it’s crowded.
Though, there is something I’ve learned. If I am rude to the customers I will be put in a better situation. I don’t plan on getting a raise or a promotion, simply because they don’t really happen to any of my fellow employees, so customer complaints are not something I’m entirely concerned about. As long as I am not too incredibly rude, most people won’t complain, especially since they would have to go through me to get my manager.
Anyways, by being rude and disrespectful to the customers I am really participating in sabotage of one of the commodities that my company sells. A sort of sabotage that makes less people want to come to the restaurant, therefore it will be less busy, and therefore making my life far easier.
There’s my rant for the day.
Draft #1
Youth around the world are fed up. They are slowly joining a movement and developing their criticisms of the modern education system. They are beginning to realize their grades are simply arbitrary letters or numbers which show little of one’s education. They have come to the conclusion that students aren’t learning anything in school. This movement has no leaders. It has no politburo or newsletter. The movement is one composed of autonomous individuals and loosely organized groups.
The Committee for the Creation of an Anti-School makes no attempt to represent the interests of students everywhere. They make no attempt to guarantee liberation. They will not lead the oppressed masses to freedom. We make no promises, we only have dreams.
We have no official membership rolls. No official websites. No official headquarters. We are but a banner taken up by discontented youths everywhere. We are an idea which students are free to embrace. We are a dream.
Theses of the Committee for the Creation of an Anti-School
1. Students are oppressed everywhere in their schools. Their voices are not heard. Society is ageist and the hierarchy in schools only reinforces this. The interests of the students and the interests of the administration are opposed to each other and will remain so until the administration has been destroyed, schools dismantled, and anti-schools created.
2. Compulsory schooling and the nature of modern education has ruined the child’s natural trait of curiosity. School has made students hate learning. They no longer enjoy doing something they are forced to do. Only the destruction of school and the creation of an anti-school can once again renew a child’s drive to learn and understand.
3. The school is increasingly becoming a tool of the capitalist state. Students aren’t educated anymore, they are trained for their future jobs in the commodity-spectacle economy. Schools function practically as workplaces, just the workers (students) aren’t paid. An anti-school would be inherently anti-careerist.
4. Students are increasingly turning to escapism, such as alcohol, promiscuous sex, drug abuse, self harm, etc. The nature of school has spawned several “disorders” such as ADD, ADHD, depression, social anxiety disorder, etc. and students inflicted by these “disorders” are being prescribed drugs which only serve to make them more passive.
Okay, well I just had a long post that I was going to make but somehow that got lost. So here’s a consolation, cat pictures that I made.
So far it seems to be the only rational way to approach the subject of religion, at least for me.
I suppose you could call myself an agnostic, since I don’t believe one could know whether a god exists or not. Though I certainly do not call myself an agnostic.
In fact, I’m opposed to the idea of believing in a god, any god. Throughout the history of man, there have been numerous different conceptions of a god. Some of them have died out and are now forgotten, others are still going strong. To me, none of these religions have any more validity than another. They are all on an equal level, none of them have proof that their’s is the right one to follow.
The story of Scientology may seem farfetched, and it certainly is, but no more farfetched than the stories of the Bible. The Bible just appears more credible because it’s been along for so long.
With so many religions out there, I don’t bother choosing one, since if there is a god, I would probably choose the wrong religion.
Fuck religion.
I’ve never had a drug addiction per se, but I do have some thoughts I would like to add to the topic.
I prefer not to use the term drug addiction, I find chemical dependence to be a much more accurate and fitting description. By it’s very definition, the human body has a chemical dependence to many substances.
Let’s take iodine for example. The human body needs iodine. If for any reason you don’t get enough, you will begin to suffer iodine withdrawal. Such withdrawal effects include mental retardation, goiter, something most people would prefer not to have. No one would call this an iodine addiction, it is however a chemical dependence.
A drug is much like any other chemical, only these are not present in the body, with the exception of DMT. When someone puts a large amount of a certain drug into a body, a chemical dependence may occur, or what by some people is referred to as a physical addiction. Fulfilling this “drug addiction” bears resemblance to one taking their daily iodine supplement if they would need one for any reason.
Now, a psychological addiction is certainly different. Though psychological addictions can result from any number of habits or practices, and are not exclusive to drugs.
This is going to be a rather short post on a pretty important topic.
The compulsory nature of schooling.
Schools in modern society are compulsory no because the government wants to “educate” the youth, but because schools are a training ground for capital relations. In fact, some of the greatest thinkers of our age dropped out of school.
However, I don’t necessarily encourage youth to drop out of school. I believe you should only drop out of school if you feel it interferes with your learning. Those in such a situation will know what I am speaking of. If you find yourself failing classes because you are constantly reading books on astro-physics and Greek history, then maybe you should consider dropping out so you can better pursue your education. After all you learn best when you enjoy what you are learning out and you can let your passions drive your intellectual urge. Visit getfreedropout.tk for more information
In a post-capitalist society, education wouldn’t need to be compulsory. Education would be unavoidable. We would always be learning, and often in the most untraditional settings. Compulsory schooling in a non-market society would serve no value. Kids would come to a “school” if they felt like it, or they could pursue their desires through some other outlet.
Education of some sort has been around since the dawn of man. In the early days knowledge was informally passed down generation by generation through experience. In ‘ age “education” takes place within the confined limits of a school building. Learning is ordered around conceptual activities and not experience.
Though, in a post-capitalist society, how would schooling take place? Certainly the early experiential model is rather inefficient and outdated for today’s demands. And current schools are little more than prisons where children are sent off to be emotionally tortured. Schooling as we know it know would not exist in a post-capitalist society.
So, how would we be educated. Certainly things would take place in a voluntary and non-coercive manner. There would be little formal distinction between instructor and pupil, after all there is always something we can learn from each other. Students would take control of their schools in a revolutionary time. Bureaucrats (administrators, disciplinarians, etc.) would be run out. Teachers, people knowledgeable in a certain field, would be welcome, but would have no more authority than the students. In fact, we would all be teachers, learning from each other.
In an effort to create a new nation with free culture the FreeNation Foundation has begun to build a community of supports in their efforts to actually purchase an island, proclaim their independence, and perhaps even start a little country. At the very least it will serve as a home for The Pirate Bay servers, which are under constant pressure for violating intellectual property rights.
This was first posted by me here.
I prefer to use the terms excluded and included as an alternative to proletariat and bourgeoisie for several reasons. It corresponds more to qualitative life changes rather than simply changes in the means of production.
Excluded and proletariat are similar, often synonymous, but not identical. The included are those who benefit from the capitalistic commodity/spectacle economy. The excluded, are those who not. They are at the butt end of the stick, those who are exploited and oppressed. The excluded includes the proletariat, the lumpen-proletariat, students, children, and various other marginalized segments of society. The included includes the bourgeoisie, most of the petty-bourgeoisie, bureaucrats, politicians, celebrities, etc.
These two terms can also apply to nearly every historical epoch and can be used in a large number of situations, another reason I like to use them. For instance, let’s take soviet Russia. Without going into a big discussion, it’s pretty evident that soviet Russia was not communist, and was not classless. It had both an included and an excluded. The bureaucrats, politicians, communist party officials, etc. were all members of the included. The general population comprised the excluded.
I’m not the only one who uses such classifications. Alfredo Bonanno, who is currently a political prisoner in Italy, has made many contributions to anarchist theory (more specifically insurrectionary anarchist theory) and often uses these classifications. In fact it was him who I first got the idea.
Two reservoirs of the revolution
The excluded and the included.
The first are those who will remain marginalised. Expelled from the productive process and penalised for their incapacity to insert themselves into the new competitive logic of capital, they are often not prepared to accept the minimum levels of survival assigned to them by State assistance (increasingly seen as a relic of the past in a situation that tends to extoll the virtues of the “self-made man”). These will not just be the social strata condemned to this role through their ethnic origin—today, for example, the West Indians in British society, catalysts of the recent riots in that country—but with the development of the social change we are talking about, social strata which in the past were lulled by secure salaries and now find themselves in a situation of rapid and racial change will also participate. Even the residual supports that these social strata benefit from (early pensions, unemployment benefit, various kinds of social security, etc) will not make them accept a situation of growing discrimination. And let us not forget that the degree of consumerism of these expelled social strata cannot be compared to that of the ethnic groups who have never been brought into the sphere of salaried security. This will surely lead to explosions of “social ill-being” of a different kind, and it will be up to revolutionaries to unite these with the more elementary outbreaks of rebellion.
Then there are the included, those who will remain suffocating on the islands of privilege. Here the argument threatens to become more complicated and can only be clearly situated if one is prepared to give credit to man and his real need for freedom. Almost certainly it is the “homecomers” from this sector who will be among the most merciless executants of the attack on capital in its new form. We are going towards a period of bloody clashes and very harsh repression. Social peace, dreamt of on one side and feared by the other, remains the most inaccessible myth of this new capitalist utopia, heir to the “pacific” logic of liberalism which dusted the drawing room while it butchered in the kitchen, giving welfare at home and massacring in the colonies.
The new opportunities for small, miserable, loathsome daily liberties will be paid for by profound, cruel and systematic discrimination against vast social strata. Sooner or later this will lead to the growth of a consciousness of exploitation inside the privileged strata, which cannot fail to cause rebellions, even if only limited to the best among them. Finally, it should be said that there is no longer a strong ideological support for the new capitalist perspective such as existed in the past, capable of giving support to the exploiters and, more important still, to the intermediate layers of cadres. Well-being for the sake of it is not enough, especially for the many groups of people who, in the more or less recent past, have experienced, or simply read about, liberatory utopias, revolutionary dreams and the attempts, however limited, at insurrectional projects.
The latter will lose no time in reaching the others. Not all the included, will live blissfully in the artificial happiness of capital. Many of them will realise that the misery of one part of society poisons the appearance of well-being of the rest, and turns freedom (within the barbed wire fences) into a virtual prison.
