internet forum posted:

There is a guy that stands outside all day near my office. His job is to stand by traffic in a statue of liberty suit all day with a sign for the local tax service.

I go up an extra intersection light each day on the way to work just for him. He makes me laugh. He does some crazy dancing that is so damn funny, it puts me into a great mood.

Do you have any strangers you see each day that are funny or interesting?

driving down route 1 today i saw this kind of young adult, except he was not dancing. he actually looked really dismayed, as if someone had thrown a beer can at him 5 minutes prior. and he was just standing there in the suit eying the cars suspiciously, embarrassed. i asked my self what the fuck. how can you lower yourself this far. where is your dignity, i thought as i drove on in my minivan leaking transmission fluid everywhere. where is it?

this brought to mind Marx for some reason and how i desperately needed to pose this question to the rhizzone forum. the question being: what would marx say about this? what would he say to the quote above. what would he say if he heard two old gossips arguing about this child, trying to make a buck, in this terrible way. one would undoubtedly congratulate the Good Kid who's staying away from Bad Drug, making a living, probably buying Good Things with the money. the other would say: where is his dignity. can't he do somethign better with his time.


there thats my attempt at a rhizzone thread

thirdplace posted:

to say "the customer is always right" is to proclaim that employee's dignity is for sale.

this. you cant have the american dream without this. we're thoroughly fucked, and marx would prob say something similar. you cant uproot this aspect of our thinking without undoing the whole ideological construct of what it is to be american

thirdplace posted:

do you really think we need two million servers in dis country just to bring food from point a to point b? really not hard to run a restaurant from a counter, all you need is a PA and the ability to count

do you have any idea how high those counters are? how am i supposed to reach my food when my ass is physically bound to my mobility scooter? ableist scum

gyrofry posted:

jools posted:

im pretty sure trying to create some unidimensional Axis of Oppression like that is fucking stupid tbh

what are you, some kind of postmodernist

this but for societies

thirdplace posted:

isn't that pretty much just Arendt's take on power vs. violence

Arendt sucks. She says that violence is the opposite of power rather than it's base without explaining why (or rather, her explanation sucks). She doesn't really address any of the great theorists of violence and power: Nietzsche, Gramsci, Fanon, Foucault, De Sade (imo) and her philosophy is juvenile. Another figure who would have been completely ignored if she didn't serve the interests of America.

parabolart posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

You should also not lie about the violence behind the system, and realize people like those who make a miserable, under minimum wage worker dance for his amusement is the enemy.

ya but how would you address the wage worker. how would a Marx in a Marx dream that was doing hte liberty tax dance address himself the morning after? and if that's the bottom of the ladder, how do u draw the Dignity Line

I dunno I've never had a problem talking to people about how much work sucks and how it's all a problem with the system. Just remember the lessons of the 'zzone: it's all about aesthetics, don't be an anxiety ridden diaper-wearing person.

babyhueypnewton posted:

thirdplace posted:

isn't that pretty much just Arendt's take on power vs. violence

Arendt sucks. She says that violence is the opposite of power rather than it's base without explaining why (or rather, her explanation sucks). She doesn't really address any of the great theorists of violence and power: Nietzsche, Gramsci, Fanon, Foucault, De Sade (imo) and her philosophy is juvenile. Another figure who would have been completely ignored if she didn't serve the interests of America.

heh then why do you sound like her

swampman posted:

Liberty Tax Services, the company in the OP, caught my attention for another reason, they have sent someone to walk up and down the streets littering the sidewalks with little folded pieces of paper that look like fifty dollar bills on one side, and on the other side is advertisement for their services. they are usually in groups of fifteen or twenty, blowing about and getting trampled into the muck. advertisements are beginning to behave like sperm in a fallopian tube

a 99.999999% failure rate?? haw haw!

parabolart posted:

how can you lower yourself this far. where is your dignity, i thought as i drove on in my minivan leaking transmission fluid everywhere. where is it?

i don't understand this feeling, i never have this feeling. where is their dignity??? what do you for a living? is this some internalized isht? i always just feel like, goddamn things must be fucking ROUGH for them right now.

also on how to speak to low/minimum wage workers. i think it's empowering, esp for the all the fast food workers who are currently being organized around the country, to know that millions of americans depend on them all day. lazy ass franchise owners depend desperately on them. without the accessibility of fast food, coffee, and cleaning on demand, large portions of the U.S. would go nuts. corporations will find scabs and stuff like they do with janitor strikes but it inconveniences people to such a degree that they actually think about the wage being disputed for the walk out/strike.

tpaine posted:

i feel sorry for people and i understand that why they are what they are is not entirely their fault but god damn are the abused and disenfranchised people in this country not fucking filth, they'd be just as bad as the rich given half a chance

https://twitter.com/_FloridaMan

babyhueypnewton posted:

Making it into a generalized concept of political economy is stupid. I think it's important to appeal to retail workers, waiters, minimum wage kids pointless jobs that exist only to humiliate (like standing outside as the statue of liberty) on an emotional level with concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism in Marx. However it doesn't take away from the general capitalist world system of uneven development and labour aristocracy and that the first world is not revolutionary

you really need to work on this contradiction and what it means for political activity because if you can only look at minimum wage workers and see them as labour aristocrats then your conception of imperialism is wank

like obv imperialism has a systemic effect on an economy in terms of how its shapes itself re: the rest of the world but this is a concrete phenomenon that exists through particular points of production and capital and how they come to lye in the final instance in the imperialist states its not just a blanket subsidy given to every single man women and child in an imperialist state

babyhueypnewton posted:

You should also not lie about the violence behind the system, and realize people like those who make a miserable, under minimum wage worker dance for his amusement is the enemy.:

are you saying here that the proles are the enemy?

AmericanNazbro posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

You should also not lie about the violence behind the system, and realize people like those who make a miserable, under minimum wage worker dance for his amusement is the enemy.:

are you saying here that the proles are the enemy?

if you read bhpns sentence it says that the people who make them dance for their amusement, are the enemy. ???