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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • Feel free to not take this advice, but I feel it wouldn’t be negligent if I didn’t at least share this. For me, the way I got over any despair over personal circumstances or difficulties, a very long time ago, was to focus entirely on the social root causes, not any individualised approach. The issues you talk about with employment, cost of living, even the nuclear family, are rooted in capitalism and class society. I don’t distress about my struggles with these things; I focus my time on communist organising and am at peace knowing I am doing all that I can do to change things. If things don’t get better for me personally, I have the hope that they will be better for the next generation, or generations down the line, and I know I have lived a life of dignity and self-respect by resisting. I read the book Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, when I was a teenager, and found the concept of, and Huey’s explanation of, revolutionary suicide to be very good at articulating all this.

    Of course, this is quite particularised advice if you aren’t already inclined towards far-left politics. But this is why I have never seriously entertained the thought of suicide since I was 12, and it is what I would’ve needed to hear/know at that age, so I figured I’d share. The whole “it gets better” bullcrap never worked on me cause my life was objectively awful due to societal factors, so if I had only followed conventional advice for these kinds of issues I would definitely be dead by now. So maybe this more unconventional advice will help someone. If you want it in more conventional terms, you could think of it as “live for a cause, not for yourself”, but I think it’s important to recognise how it is also to improve your own conditions and the conditions of people like you.



  • communism@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlOn prison abolition
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    5 days ago

    We don’t replace prisons, because putting people in cages is bad. There’s nothing to “replace” them with. If I wanted to “replace” prisons I wouldn’t want to abolish them. That’s like asking what you’ll replace slavery with, how on earth are we going to get cheap labour otherwise.

    Bourgeois law should be abolished too. I have no respect for “the law”.








  • I read it as a jokey community and maybe you took it too seriously. Regardless that’s a kinda silly comment to leave. That’s a community for, ironically or seriously, hating Linux, so obviously it’s not in the spirit of the community to leave a serious comment defending Linux.

    I see a lot of Windows hate on Lemmy. If someone made a post here complaining about how much they hate Windows, and a Windows fan replied explaining why Windows is so great, I would say it’s kinda heavy-handed but not totally ridiculous for a mod to ban them, since a Linux community is probably not for this person.


  • Well, fundamentally capitalism involves the deprivation of the means of subsistence and production from one class so that they are forced to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class in order to obtain the means of subsistence. You could define that as “mistreatment” or not I guess, but whether or not you do, personal treatment by your capitalist does not change the form capitalism takes. Workers’ power comes from combining. Capitalists are already combined—they work together to keep wages low and prices high. Unionising only levels the playing field in that regard.

    I’m not saying that you should always focus on unionisation in every situation—sometimes there is more important political work to be done. But if you have nothing else to do, it’s often the most accessible starting point.