This thread is an exemplary case of how “we” (that is, liberal-minded minions uncritically parroting the talking points of the bourgeoisie) inhibit any social and class consciousness from sprouting in the proletarian mind. The original post, titled “Nothing worth having in life comes easily”, goes as such: >Yes it does. Yes it fucking does. For SOME people. >Some people were born into rich families. Money is worth having, and money came easily to them. >[…] >Some people are born white. Not being discriminated against must be nice. >I could go on. You get the fucking point. >Why do people on Reddit keep repeating this blatantly false platitude? There are countless of examples of people in this world who didn’t have to work for shit, yet many things came easily to them. As you might expect, the comments went on the offense to discredit OP’s sentiments, in different manners. The first category of comments involves invoking “life” as some natural order of things which is beyond human control, ergo it must be accepted. >I get what you mean life is unfair sometimes. >Life sucks and then we die. >Life is 100% unfair. Full stop. Get used to it. This defeatist attitude just dissuades any doubts in one’s mind regarding the viability of the current system. The second category includes comments that deny any exteriority to OP’s sentiments and focus on their own personal ailments: >Some people get so fixated on being victims of society that they seem to give away their own power to change their lives. >This post is somewhat delusional. Highly suggest to not compare your insides to other people’s outsides or you’ll always come away with a distorted perception. There are so many false assumptions in here I don’t know where to start but if you wanna pity yourself and put others on pedestals - knock yourself out. >Being mad and jealous, letting negative emotions permeate through every facet of your mind will make it better. Keep going. They’re basically saying: “the world is fine, the problem is you; and you should feel bad for feeling otherwise.” The third category involves comments that dilute the importance of wealth and socioeconomic status: >Every privilege you mentioned comes with its own set of problems. >It might not seem like it, but everybody has the same amount of issues as everyone else. >Dating, money, and privilege aren’t the meaning of life. An obvious case of blatantly gaslighting people struggling to survive when they realize the unfairness of capitalism. And an honourable mentions goes to those talking down white supremacy and systemic racism! >Agreed except for the white comment. Every race gets discriminated against, just in different ways. >Oh good more hatred of White people this will surely solve this loser’s personal problems. >Oh, if you are born white don’t worry, there will be plenty of people who will discriminate against you. One of the major political parties sanctions it. It’s socially acceptable. There’s plenty of people like you. You get the point. >Well white people get discriminated against and this is all very victim mentality based. There are many other arguments, but you get the point. They all share the same motive: the annihilation of any hint of social consciousness. It is tragic because, more often than not, it is the oppressed who are gaslighting themselves and not the bourgeois and capitalists. The latter outsource even the labor of propagating their foul logic and arguments to the proletariat.
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression
This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.
Bluesky civil war shows free speech is harder than it looks
Last week, a joke familiar from X circulated on rival platform Bluesky: “(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??” It was obviously a jab at the moral intensity that now seems to define the site, and indeed much of the rest of the social media landscape. On most platforms such a [...]Read More...
Neoliberal Fascism as the Endpoint of Casino Capitalism
This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. Â More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements. Author Biography Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World
In a series of mock lesson plans and a "program of study" Galeano provides an eloquent, passionate, funny and shocking exposé of First World privileges and assumptions. From a master class in "The Impunity of Power" to a seminar on "The Sacred Car"—with tips along the way on "How to Resist Useless Vices" and a declaration of the "The Right to Rave"—he surveys a world unevenly divided between abundance and deprivation, carnival and torture, power and helplessness. We have accepted a "reality" we should reject, he writes, one where poverty kills, people are hungry, machines are more precious than humans, and children work from dark to dark. In the North, we are fed on a diet of artificial need and all made the same by things we own; the South is the galley slave enabling our greed.
Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives.Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations is recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socioeconomic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged—and at the limit enforced—as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Bill Clinton's welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
Why The Rich Think The Poor Are Lazy
Do the disadvantaged legitimize the social system? A large-scale test of the status–legitimacy hypothesis.
"Violence Has No Place In Politics" OH REALLY?
The Inner Life of Liberalism - Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
The practices that make your life better are the same ones that sustain a free society. It's time liberalism took that seriously.
The Souls of White Jokes | Stanford University Press
A rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humor, and a damning argument for when the joke is not just a joke.
Praxis on Twitter / X
I think Eduardo Galeano in this piece does a great job pointing out how society tolerates inequalities. More importantly he exposes the sanitized terms we use to justify them. He juxtaposes concepts that our political and ethical dictionary would never allow together. When a++ pic.twitter.com/XJsvSNUxVY— Praxis (@praxiss) September 25, 2026
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Every one knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. This traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the Y. M. C. A. will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
At a time when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, we should be living in a utopia of public discourse. We're not.
npj on Twitter / X
Schumpeter in a nut shell:— Capitalism forces “rationalization” and the rationalist worldview, which just ends in an almost nihilistic skepticism that corrodes everything traditional that it touches: in particular “family life” and the aristocracy.— The traditional… pic.twitter.com/hThnUJ6jNE— npj (@TiltingatM3) May 28, 2026
the viability of many right-wing intellectuals and intellectual spaces is enormously dependent on the largesse of reactionary billionaires and foreign governments, who help them circumvent a marketplace of ideas where they would otherwise post extraordinarily poor sales
Don Moynihan
Its fair to ask if Orban's successful cultivation of the Western right wing intellectuals reflected that their networks were already dependent on patronage. Rod Dreher was funded by a weird billionaire, and when he stopped paying his salary, Orban did. Dreher already looking for a new gig.
if there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either
Leonard Pierce
Adding to this thread: it’s a common mistake (I’ve made it myself, many times) to think of the motivations of the capitalist elites as essentially mercantilist: that is, that they are largely still motivated *entirely* by profit and loss, selling product, etc. This has not been true for a while.
