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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2606 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 25, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It might be because I came to the US from a semi-subsistence based farming community in central America (we grew most of our own food, but also raised cattle and exotic hardwoods for sale and had some amount of tourism.)

Going from there to Socal and seeing that people actually worked harder and had shittier lives has kinda made me suspicious of the entire neoliberal enterprise: if shit is materially better for people in a town with no electricity, no municipal water, and one phone line just because they aren't participating in the modern capitalist economy; it seems like the whole system fails to justify itself.

Having gone from one to the other, I can say it's not the stuff. The stuff is great! Cellphones and hamburgers and the internet and all that shit is fucking wonderful.

And it also can't be a monoculture. We had black Caribbeans, white expats, and the mestizo locals all living together and speaking different languages/having different religions.

And it can't be all that gay shit, because nobody gave a shit if somebody wanted to have sex with the same sex or trans their damn gender; people just shrugged and moved on like "Well, it makes them happy and we have spend hours at the pilon husking rice by hand so who gives a shit."

So, if people are sadder and have shittier lives, it has to be everything else.

Not to dump my personal political journey on you down thread, but I've been ruminating on why I have the opinion that I have since you posted your first comment.

No I'm actually quite interested in your perspective, I appreciate you laying it out here.

Can you expand on what you think consists of 'everything else?'

IT's hard to say, because it's a lot, right?

But if I had to bet on one thing it would alienation; both in the Marxist sense (from you labor) and in the common sense (from communal living.)

That seems to be the main difference. Two examples: We had really excellent avocado trees on our property, and everybody near us knew that. So, when they wanted good avocados for some reason, they'd come to our house, yell up the path, and bring us some baked goods/coffee/a fish they caught/ some nails/ whatever.

Nobody tracked the value of exchange, everybody just kinda had a feeling of "our ledgers are more in X's favor, better bring them some chicharron from the pig we just slaughtered."

The thing that makes this different from similar structures in the VERY capitalistic USA is that this would happen with people you barely knew or had only met once, because the community was actually a community. You can't get this in any way other than actually living communally I think; no amount of church groups will replicate it.

If you want the benefits of communal living, you have to be a communist in a literal sense type of thing. It isn't enough to attend a reading circle once a week, you have to be willing to put someone's cousin who you've never met up in your house for the weekend because the river flooded and he's stuck on your side.

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