Tootfinder

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism

I’ll just say this: For the very most part, the systems of our society do not reward creators. They reward people who have power over what is created.
A deep part of our society’s mythology is that we reward people with great ideas, people who make great things — and therefore those who are rewarded must somehow be great.
That is false. If you see someone rewarded, the most likely explanation is that they had power to reap rewards.
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Trump Says Putin Should Be Allowed To Keep The Land He Has Seized In Ukraine | HuffPost Latest News
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-zelenskyy-tomahawks_n_68f25d88e4b078755768316b

OMG, I didn’t think they would attempt a second pass at corporate suicide, but they are!
Grab the popcorn folks!
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@slembcke/115742185079110692

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They’re raising funds at the moment.
Please support them if you can.
Thank you!
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Framasoft (@Framasoft@framapiaf.org)
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Two families sue Meta over teens' deaths by suicide, citing 'sextortion' scams (David Ingram/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/two-families-sue-meta-teens-deaths-suicide-citing-sextortion-scams-rcna248136
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p131#a251217p131

Trump: "Tomahawks" sind sehr gefährliche Waffen
Trump sagt, die Lieferung von "Tomahawks" könne zu einer Eskalation führen. Diese Waffen seien großartig aber sehr gefährlich.
📑 https://www.

Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Trump lobt Selenskyj als starken Staatschef ++
Bei dem gemeinsamen Auftritt vor der Presse lobte Trump den ukrainischen Präsidenten als starken Staatschef. Der langjährige NATO-Generalsekretär Stoltenberg hält Gespräche mit Russland für richtig - wenn die Ukraine weiter unterstützt wird.

We desperately need to figure out how to flip this: how to lift up the creators of wonderful things, instead of rewarding whoever can acquire power over their creations.
I don’t think we know how to do this. There’s a vast spectrum of schemes for fixing this, ranging from capitalist versions of “intellectual property” to Marxist “just end capitalism” notions to various versions of “easy, society should just be different.” I find them all lacking, both in theory and in practice. This is a problem that’s existed for millennia, not decades, and I’m not convinced we have a clear solution.
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However wrong all that vibe-reading guesswork in the previous post might be, one thing is clear:
Yesterday was not what a country in the grip of an established autocrat looks like. No faits here are accompli. Nothing looks inevitable.
And that’s the most important thing: autocrats seize power by creating the widespread illusion that they •already have• seized power, that it’s inevitable, that you have to go along to survive. Yesterday made that illusion a lot harder to maintain.