Who are the non-westerners and why are we against westerners?
What does this title have to do with the image?
If 40 countries in Asia, Africa, even S.America would form a treaty against NATO, would that be automatically something to support?
Shouldn't we be a bit more critical against false binaries and polarization?
Comrade Manning Marable said on the last US elections "the choice is between a neoliberal nightmare and a neofascist disaster". It is such binaries we are becoming used worldwide in the last 2-3 decades, trying to choose what will cause the least amount of damage, the least of all evils, and can't see a ray of light in the dark era capitalism has sentenced humanity and the planet.
Anti-Trump, anti NATO, anti-EU, anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-electricity (why not?), anti global-warming, all those fronts that are all so manageable within capitalism, without much else changing, even if the fronts were victorious and won their battle. The warriors of those fronts at the end, tired and in ecstasy due to their victories, go home back to good all capitalism as usual.
The thugs that took over and sucked Russia dry after 91 were cornered, isolated, and forced into a situation that the west forced them to. Still with enormous personal gains unlike the millions of Russians and Ukranians wasting their lives and their land, so BP can sell oil and gas out of Azerbaijan for a multiple of the profit predicted before war. And the US military machine can sell protectionism to puppets of their game such as the insignificant and dismantled capital of social-democracy. The Swedes are handing over communists to the Turkish butchers to execute or burry in a dirty prison. This is what is left of "socialist Sweden". The glass-front of European anti-communism of post-ww2 Europe.
ACAB without further political content is empty and useless. Whether it is an army of repression in the hands of the rich and powerful, a tool to enforce and maintain social/economic inequalities by force and threat of violence towards the underclass is a reason for ACAB. Whether in every class/social mobilization cops are always on the side of the rich and powerful to maintain inequality and injustice (even though they are legal) is a reasone to state ACAB. Not because they are a different breed of humans with a biological determinant to be unjust and cruel.
So be ware of content free ACAB and Antifa rhetoric that can be misleading towards a meaningless cop-hate. It is very much a class issue that cops are hated for a very good reason and for a long lasting history of grounds to be hated.
Both money and power can corrupt people to do great injustice for personal/individual gains and for providing the service as a role to the bosses. Whether it is a state sponsored official force to repress or an unofficial repression group of fascists, they both ultimately serve their masters well.
Apolitical ACAB/antifa is as dangerous as political apathy.
I just realized you are also Spanish and I have a funny old story for you. Some decades ago the woman I was with had a mother who was Spanish, father was from a Caribbean island and they lived in the US. The mother was born in Tangir Morocco from Spanish parents, I knew of this for a while but didn't think much more of it. At some period elections were coming up and between joke and casual discussion the mother said she was and will always vote republican (the more conservative of the two conservative parties dominating US elections). I dared asked why and she said my father was republican so I am a republican too. Republico in Spain in her father's time meant he was against fascism and Franco. To confirm how much of a republico he was she explained that his friends (fishermen) called him Rojo. So I returned and I said that not only was he an anti-fascist he must have been a communist. She went crazy and didn't want to hear about it, but she said the entire family and many relatives were exiled from Spain because they were "republican".
The youngest son in early teen age, somehow paid extra attention and found this discussion interesting, so I offered to bring him books or what to ask for in library. I guess because he never met his grandfather but had his name became overly interested on what all this really meant. A few years later he has a music group playing songs about class war, filling up his school and neighborhood walls with graffiti about class war, and dedicated his life to radical anti-capitalism.
I had a cat named rojo for a while and many times I thought of this story when I used his name.
Rojo Vive no struggle is ever waste ... it travels through time and generations, it is a seed that grows and replants itself and will never be uprooted.
Realities vary so much from different parts of the world, in some social situations it would be a shame not to be one due to the history of the family, the community. Although in many such realities many people were communist without really deeply knowing what this meant, and had many contradicting practices between what they claimed and what they really were. There were religious communists, communists who did nothing else in their life than enterprise and devise ways to make more money (and exploiting everyone around them), some were family abusers, cheaters, cons, etc. To make things worse some were even racist and ethnocentric, while defending their communist identity. But there are such places, social situations.
I had even witnessed an entire village of communists calling the cops to do a massive blockade of a beach and arresting and fining young people for free camping, because they owned campgrounds and rented rooms to tourists and this was bad competition, to be camping free near "their beach".
Hopefully, since it is by choice and not by birth or origin, you will take your new public identity with more respect and live accordingly.
I am not sure of what you mean of a dialectic relation, whether it exists or not between them. As long as you can categorize them, you can realize conflict of interests, and friction between groups, there is a dialectic relation. Whether it is explained fully by traditional Marxist class analysis or not is debatable. In other words, it is not the dialectic's fault the theory is incomplete or wrong, or Marx can't be held accountable for future fragmentation of the "working class" into internally struggling sub-classes.
In the old days, in industrial settings where capitalist model of production was based on, people more or less entered production as equals. There wasn't much schooling needed or available to the working class, and many entered industrial work as teens. With seniority and good record of obedient hard working people who gained experience and displayed high aptitude on the specific work, would get elevated as supervisors and trainers of younger workers. Imagine people being engaged in industrial manufacturing from 12 or 15 till the age they just dropped dead in the assembly line. Very few ever reached the current age of retirement, and there was no retirement benefits, private or government provided.
After ww2 especially, the working class had attained the right to have access to education, laws in many industrial countries to prevent children from working, and vocational/trading schools becoming more of a norm than someone dropping off school at 15 and getting a factory job. Also universities and colleges became more and more accessible to the masses, and sometimes affordable by the working poor's children. This provided industry with a way to distinguish entry level ranks, and a managerial class was born. People who had never worked before, due to a certificate or degree would be placed higher up in hierarchy than people who had worked for years. This provided them a false class consciousness, they weren't workers, they were managers or administrators because of their education. They behaved very differently than an aged experienced supervisor who started from 0 and knew what it was like, and saw himself as a worker, not something different. The owners saw a benefit of this fragmentation, this "managerial class" would develop owner like consciousness and would become very conscious of the very fact that it was manual work exploitation that produced profit, and out of that profit was their position necessary. The higher the exploitation and oppression they would exercise the higher the profitability, therefore their job security.
I believe generally the left and traditional syndicalism, because of the theoretical constrains of traditional class analysis never knew how to deal with this. They were eager to get more people registered to the union but had no theoretical tools to learn how to discriminate against management. In many cases those same internal class enemies would make it up to the top ranks of union hierarchy and help in diluting struggle to maintain "peace" with the owners, seek negotiation instead of clash, and further serve the interests of owners to prevent strikes. In some horrible moments of union history they were the same responsible for splitting unions up in terms of race, gender, or just varying interests of different ranks of workers. See hospitals for example, especially in countries where private health care was more the norm than exception, physician unions, nurse unions, non-medical hospital workers, one boycotting each others' actions, and rarely acting as a unit. The owners learned all too well to play this game against them, set one group against the other.
I remember this long term massive strike within UPS (US private parcel shipping company) that brough the largest transportation company of the country to its knees. Management, who did not strike, some had commercial licenses as to improve their chances of getting a job there, had 0 experience, and offered to drive when drivers and warehouse workers were on strike. Within days there were trucks overturned, wrecked, lost, destroyed. From this strike FedEx and DHL were born or became giants overtaking what UPS lost. UPS caved into financial world demands to sell itself in the "markets" and stop being a "family owned business". The market lost has yet to be recovered. It also became less competitive due to backling to union pressure and allowing some of the demands to become policy. This an Eastern airline strikes were pretty much the end of a long history of union struggle in the US. Ever since the movement became so fragmented and owners became armed with systems specifically designed to defeat mass movement and strikes.
There have been Marxist scholars, some of m-l tradition, who argued that high/higher education role in the US specifically was to provide fragmentation criteria among workers for bosses to exploit. At work, very little of what is learned in school transfers. One thing that does is subservience and obedience to those above, and an elitist attitude towards those below. Ask anyone who went through grad school if there were 22-25 year old grad.students mistreating 40+ yo clerical stuff who had to do work "for them".
Why was Pol Pot shooting managers, experts, highly educated people in the head? Why were they perceived as an enemy to farm workers? Cruel and nasty, but he may have been right about some things.
Think of a biologis, working at a lab, wearing a white robe and being in a nearly sterile environment, alalyzing sample after sample. They are not managing anyone, neither is their opinion on other workers weigh in firing, demoting or promoting anyone. A teacher or professor on the other hand is managing students, and can be abusive due to the power she/he holds on them (pass/fail them).
A plumber, or an electrician can work alone, they are self employed (meaning they work for a different boss in every site they go to work at) but are they above workers, maybe industrial plumbers working for a large manufacturer/constuction co. In some repair work due to the nature of the work one may need an assistant because 2 hands are not enough, or are not long enough, .. (AC installations).
So what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace. The higher in hierarchy the more their interests are closely resembling the owners', the lower they are the more likely they are to be in alliance at least with workers struggles.
I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.
The difference between "blue collar" "white collar" is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn't matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.
In some work settings those who are "managers" and oversee others' work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don't like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.
There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.
Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don't expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?
Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is "out-sourcing" for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don't respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.
There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don't have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.
NATO expansion to any ex-East-block countries is a violation of a treaty signed back in 91 (?) and Ukraine and Belarus were the last two on the list to blockade Russia from Europe.
Other than oil and gas that Ukraine has to pass to western oil companies to exploit (BP and Shell were already exploiting E.Ukraine deposits, and Biden's son was an executive to the largest Ukrainian oil company, Ukraine is also a significant grains exporter. Russia among others depend on this export, which under NATO command it would be weaponized and sentencing Russia to famine under the blockade.
Ukraine also would pas its water rights of Black Sea to western oil companies effectively minimizing Russian presence in the Black Sea economic zone. A global attempt to convert international/public waters to privately owned and managed territories.
BP has been pumping nat.gas from Azerbaijan to Europe outside Russian control and benefit. The war pretty much guaranteed maximum flow and profit through this new pipeline (TAP)
Then there was an issue of inability to defend its own water ways outside the black sea. With the black sea becoming practically a NATO lake, it would be non-sensical to expect the UN or other international organization to defend Russia's merchant fleet access to the Med.
Was Russian oligarchy and tycoons willing to lose Ukraine to their western adversaries? I don't think they had much of a choice and it was too late to revert the damage done 10-15 years ago with EU/NATO proposed induction, through political means and influence. So this war had become inevitable and unavoidable for the Russian oligarchy to maintain control of Russia. Russia would have lost any sense of sustainability when this last move in the chessboard would have been made. To avoid check mate, Russia should have invaded as it was the only real option and hope to revert the damage while maintaining some dignity.
Having said all this, Putin just represents a 19th century type of elite through an pseudo-democracy , an isolated Russian capitalism, Russia's prevention of accessing global markets for as long as Putin is alive at least has drawn a very ugly picture for its future.
US liberals in particular tend to dig a tiny hole on sand during war that other liberals started, and pretend there is no war.
Sand is supplied freely by Saudis together with loudspeakers to emphasize oppressive Chinese social policy and human right violations.
If it wasn't for liberals capitalism would have ended long ago.
Most linux is open source, right, meaning packages of distros are also opensource. You can edit fedora packaging and build modified versions and get fedora to boot and run with runit, or s6, but to say Fedora allows choice is a lie.
This is not facebook, smartass comments like this have no place other than the trash capitalist anti-social cannibals network. Did you not understand something in specific ask.
Any possible recipe that can have systemd/elogind in it now has it, the problem is that some who don't have it have sources to default to systemd if not otherwise specified. This has forced users by more than 90% to use gentoo's default recipe instead of playing with configurations all day try to compile without it.
In all my years I haven't seen sources to say enable-openrc or sysvinit or runit or s6, it is ONLY systemd/elogind
For ages people used gentoo because it was the safe way around systemd, and gentoo leaders decided to sell them all out to IBM. People use computers for other reasons than be building software all day getting nothing else done.
If you are to build a gentoo installation without IBM's trojan you may as well create your own distro, what do you need gentoo for? To alert you of upstream updates? You can do this otherwise without gentoo, and if you are reconfiguring recipes on your own, you might as well.
Those IBM checks must be sweet, even with a "left" mask on!
I can understand English not being your native language, and it doesn't really matter if one doesn't speak a language well, as long as he/she honestly makes an effort to communicate.
BUT, "imma hop to another distro" is pushing peoples patience a little too much, don't you think?
Gentoo turned to crap ever since they decided to adopt IBM's trojan horse, elogind, and abandon consolekit2 and seatd which are active and adequate alternatives. But IBM must be paying well the heads of some distributions so they can become their little puppets.
If using openshot is the reason to use linux, are you aware it is offered for windows 11 too?
Reducing public land, that is access by poor people to land, increases their dependency for food to markets. This nearly makes revolutionary tendencies become suicidal. You subject yourself to slavery or die starving.
Are you now for the state that mandates people to starve than violate market stability?
I admit I do not follow China's development much, and I also understand not having time to engage too, so I agree to stop, but I had to bring this little detail into it for other readers to understand my perspective as well. Maybe others would be willing to continue this.
You are absolutely right about inheritance, I was referring (in my mind) on the transition period between capitalism and private ownership to socialism and collective/communal property.
The populist anti-communist propaganda has been built around this sensitive issue where "the evil communists will come and take the little property you have away". This has to be clearer and understood better for the enemy not to have grounds to base their propaganda on.
The recent development world wide has had public land (and water/sea) be rebranded state property, and under this state property label it is easier for the masses to digest that instead of raising taxes the state sells off "its assets" as state property. This is a violation of any constitution in robbing human rights from public land/sea and converting it to "real estate" owned by the state, which in turn flips it over to private interests for exploitation at gift like symbolic cost.
So now we are left with all land and all sea be in a way private. They took desserts and converted them to solar panel lots for the industry, which may eventually fail and be converted to casino centers, who knows. They took hills and mountains and handed them over so windmills/generators can be installed, all private enterprise, the management, roads, water supplies, pylons to carry electricity were all placed in mountain areas, forest was wiped out, and the protection of this infrastructure is now enforced by private interests.
The general left had nothing to say about all this, because simply the autism of public land and state property has not yet been theorized upon, and therefore neither have human rights and access to land and water been theorized upon. So it was all ok, because humans are slaves of either capital or the state.
But the propaganda on taking someone's hard earned and constructed cabin, a little lot with vegies fruit and flowers, is private property that will be banned in communism.
This is ideology at the verge of bankruptcy and should either be re-examined or be sentenced to the slow death new-capitalism has sentenced it to.
Who are the non-westerners and why are we against westerners?
What does this title have to do with the image?
If 40 countries in Asia, Africa, even S.America would form a treaty against NATO, would that be automatically something to support?
Shouldn't we be a bit more critical against false binaries and polarization?
Comrade Manning Marable said on the last US elections "the choice is between a neoliberal nightmare and a neofascist disaster". It is such binaries we are becoming used worldwide in the last 2-3 decades, trying to choose what will cause the least amount of damage, the least of all evils, and can't see a ray of light in the dark era capitalism has sentenced humanity and the planet.
Anti-Trump, anti NATO, anti-EU, anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-electricity (why not?), anti global-warming, all those fronts that are all so manageable within capitalism, without much else changing, even if the fronts were victorious and won their battle. The warriors of those fronts at the end, tired and in ecstasy due to their victories, go home back to good all capitalism as usual.
The thugs that took over and sucked Russia dry after 91 were cornered, isolated, and forced into a situation that the west forced them to. Still with enormous personal gains unlike the millions of Russians and Ukranians wasting their lives and their land, so BP can sell oil and gas out of Azerbaijan for a multiple of the profit predicted before war. And the US military machine can sell protectionism to puppets of their game such as the insignificant and dismantled capital of social-democracy. The Swedes are handing over communists to the Turkish butchers to execute or burry in a dirty prison. This is what is left of "socialist Sweden". The glass-front of European anti-communism of post-ww2 Europe.
ACAB without further political content is empty and useless. Whether it is an army of repression in the hands of the rich and powerful, a tool to enforce and maintain social/economic inequalities by force and threat of violence towards the underclass is a reason for ACAB. Whether in every class/social mobilization cops are always on the side of the rich and powerful to maintain inequality and injustice (even though they are legal) is a reasone to state ACAB. Not because they are a different breed of humans with a biological determinant to be unjust and cruel.
So be ware of content free ACAB and Antifa rhetoric that can be misleading towards a meaningless cop-hate. It is very much a class issue that cops are hated for a very good reason and for a long lasting history of grounds to be hated.
Both money and power can corrupt people to do great injustice for personal/individual gains and for providing the service as a role to the bosses. Whether it is a state sponsored official force to repress or an unofficial repression group of fascists, they both ultimately serve their masters well.
Apolitical ACAB/antifa is as dangerous as political apathy.
I just realized you are also Spanish and I have a funny old story for you. Some decades ago the woman I was with had a mother who was Spanish, father was from a Caribbean island and they lived in the US. The mother was born in Tangir Morocco from Spanish parents, I knew of this for a while but didn't think much more of it. At some period elections were coming up and between joke and casual discussion the mother said she was and will always vote republican (the more conservative of the two conservative parties dominating US elections). I dared asked why and she said my father was republican so I am a republican too. Republico in Spain in her father's time meant he was against fascism and Franco. To confirm how much of a republico he was she explained that his friends (fishermen) called him Rojo. So I returned and I said that not only was he an anti-fascist he must have been a communist. She went crazy and didn't want to hear about it, but she said the entire family and many relatives were exiled from Spain because they were "republican".
The youngest son in early teen age, somehow paid extra attention and found this discussion interesting, so I offered to bring him books or what to ask for in library. I guess because he never met his grandfather but had his name became overly interested on what all this really meant. A few years later he has a music group playing songs about class war, filling up his school and neighborhood walls with graffiti about class war, and dedicated his life to radical anti-capitalism.
I had a cat named rojo for a while and many times I thought of this story when I used his name.
Rojo Vive no struggle is ever waste ... it travels through time and generations, it is a seed that grows and replants itself and will never be uprooted.
You make it sound as coming out of the closet :)
Realities vary so much from different parts of the world, in some social situations it would be a shame not to be one due to the history of the family, the community. Although in many such realities many people were communist without really deeply knowing what this meant, and had many contradicting practices between what they claimed and what they really were. There were religious communists, communists who did nothing else in their life than enterprise and devise ways to make more money (and exploiting everyone around them), some were family abusers, cheaters, cons, etc. To make things worse some were even racist and ethnocentric, while defending their communist identity. But there are such places, social situations.
I had even witnessed an entire village of communists calling the cops to do a massive blockade of a beach and arresting and fining young people for free camping, because they owned campgrounds and rented rooms to tourists and this was bad competition, to be camping free near "their beach".
Hopefully, since it is by choice and not by birth or origin, you will take your new public identity with more respect and live accordingly.
I am not sure of what you mean of a dialectic relation, whether it exists or not between them. As long as you can categorize them, you can realize conflict of interests, and friction between groups, there is a dialectic relation. Whether it is explained fully by traditional Marxist class analysis or not is debatable. In other words, it is not the dialectic's fault the theory is incomplete or wrong, or Marx can't be held accountable for future fragmentation of the "working class" into internally struggling sub-classes.
In the old days, in industrial settings where capitalist model of production was based on, people more or less entered production as equals. There wasn't much schooling needed or available to the working class, and many entered industrial work as teens. With seniority and good record of obedient hard working people who gained experience and displayed high aptitude on the specific work, would get elevated as supervisors and trainers of younger workers. Imagine people being engaged in industrial manufacturing from 12 or 15 till the age they just dropped dead in the assembly line. Very few ever reached the current age of retirement, and there was no retirement benefits, private or government provided.
After ww2 especially, the working class had attained the right to have access to education, laws in many industrial countries to prevent children from working, and vocational/trading schools becoming more of a norm than someone dropping off school at 15 and getting a factory job. Also universities and colleges became more and more accessible to the masses, and sometimes affordable by the working poor's children. This provided industry with a way to distinguish entry level ranks, and a managerial class was born. People who had never worked before, due to a certificate or degree would be placed higher up in hierarchy than people who had worked for years. This provided them a false class consciousness, they weren't workers, they were managers or administrators because of their education. They behaved very differently than an aged experienced supervisor who started from 0 and knew what it was like, and saw himself as a worker, not something different. The owners saw a benefit of this fragmentation, this "managerial class" would develop owner like consciousness and would become very conscious of the very fact that it was manual work exploitation that produced profit, and out of that profit was their position necessary. The higher the exploitation and oppression they would exercise the higher the profitability, therefore their job security.
I believe generally the left and traditional syndicalism, because of the theoretical constrains of traditional class analysis never knew how to deal with this. They were eager to get more people registered to the union but had no theoretical tools to learn how to discriminate against management. In many cases those same internal class enemies would make it up to the top ranks of union hierarchy and help in diluting struggle to maintain "peace" with the owners, seek negotiation instead of clash, and further serve the interests of owners to prevent strikes. In some horrible moments of union history they were the same responsible for splitting unions up in terms of race, gender, or just varying interests of different ranks of workers. See hospitals for example, especially in countries where private health care was more the norm than exception, physician unions, nurse unions, non-medical hospital workers, one boycotting each others' actions, and rarely acting as a unit. The owners learned all too well to play this game against them, set one group against the other.
I remember this long term massive strike within UPS (US private parcel shipping company) that brough the largest transportation company of the country to its knees. Management, who did not strike, some had commercial licenses as to improve their chances of getting a job there, had 0 experience, and offered to drive when drivers and warehouse workers were on strike. Within days there were trucks overturned, wrecked, lost, destroyed. From this strike FedEx and DHL were born or became giants overtaking what UPS lost. UPS caved into financial world demands to sell itself in the "markets" and stop being a "family owned business". The market lost has yet to be recovered. It also became less competitive due to backling to union pressure and allowing some of the demands to become policy. This an Eastern airline strikes were pretty much the end of a long history of union struggle in the US. Ever since the movement became so fragmented and owners became armed with systems specifically designed to defeat mass movement and strikes.
There have been Marxist scholars, some of m-l tradition, who argued that high/higher education role in the US specifically was to provide fragmentation criteria among workers for bosses to exploit. At work, very little of what is learned in school transfers. One thing that does is subservience and obedience to those above, and an elitist attitude towards those below. Ask anyone who went through grad school if there were 22-25 year old grad.students mistreating 40+ yo clerical stuff who had to do work "for them".
Why was Pol Pot shooting managers, experts, highly educated people in the head? Why were they perceived as an enemy to farm workers? Cruel and nasty, but he may have been right about some things.
Think of a biologis, working at a lab, wearing a white robe and being in a nearly sterile environment, alalyzing sample after sample. They are not managing anyone, neither is their opinion on other workers weigh in firing, demoting or promoting anyone. A teacher or professor on the other hand is managing students, and can be abusive due to the power she/he holds on them (pass/fail them).
A plumber, or an electrician can work alone, they are self employed (meaning they work for a different boss in every site they go to work at) but are they above workers, maybe industrial plumbers working for a large manufacturer/constuction co. In some repair work due to the nature of the work one may need an assistant because 2 hands are not enough, or are not long enough, .. (AC installations).
So what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace. The higher in hierarchy the more their interests are closely resembling the owners', the lower they are the more likely they are to be in alliance at least with workers struggles.
I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.
The difference between "blue collar" "white collar" is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn't matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.
In some work settings those who are "managers" and oversee others' work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don't like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.
There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.
Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don't expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?
Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is "out-sourcing" for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don't respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.
There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don't have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.
NATO expansion to any ex-East-block countries is a violation of a treaty signed back in 91 (?) and Ukraine and Belarus were the last two on the list to blockade Russia from Europe.
Other than oil and gas that Ukraine has to pass to western oil companies to exploit (BP and Shell were already exploiting E.Ukraine deposits, and Biden's son was an executive to the largest Ukrainian oil company, Ukraine is also a significant grains exporter. Russia among others depend on this export, which under NATO command it would be weaponized and sentencing Russia to famine under the blockade.
Ukraine also would pas its water rights of Black Sea to western oil companies effectively minimizing Russian presence in the Black Sea economic zone. A global attempt to convert international/public waters to privately owned and managed territories.
BP has been pumping nat.gas from Azerbaijan to Europe outside Russian control and benefit. The war pretty much guaranteed maximum flow and profit through this new pipeline (TAP)
Then there was an issue of inability to defend its own water ways outside the black sea. With the black sea becoming practically a NATO lake, it would be non-sensical to expect the UN or other international organization to defend Russia's merchant fleet access to the Med.
Was Russian oligarchy and tycoons willing to lose Ukraine to their western adversaries? I don't think they had much of a choice and it was too late to revert the damage done 10-15 years ago with EU/NATO proposed induction, through political means and influence. So this war had become inevitable and unavoidable for the Russian oligarchy to maintain control of Russia. Russia would have lost any sense of sustainability when this last move in the chessboard would have been made. To avoid check mate, Russia should have invaded as it was the only real option and hope to revert the damage while maintaining some dignity.
Having said all this, Putin just represents a 19th century type of elite through an pseudo-democracy , an isolated Russian capitalism, Russia's prevention of accessing global markets for as long as Putin is alive at least has drawn a very ugly picture for its future.
US liberals in particular tend to dig a tiny hole on sand during war that other liberals started, and pretend there is no war. Sand is supplied freely by Saudis together with loudspeakers to emphasize oppressive Chinese social policy and human right violations.
If it wasn't for liberals capitalism would have ended long ago.
Most linux is open source, right, meaning packages of distros are also opensource. You can edit fedora packaging and build modified versions and get fedora to boot and run with runit, or s6, but to say Fedora allows choice is a lie.
You mean in the historic documents their ideology is based on or on the actual rhetoric they use now (past 30-50 years) ?
Finally, I thought I was left alone in the universe for a day or two.
This is not facebook, smartass comments like this have no place other than the trash capitalist anti-social cannibals network. Did you not understand something in specific ask.
Any possible recipe that can have systemd/elogind in it now has it, the problem is that some who don't have it have sources to default to systemd if not otherwise specified. This has forced users by more than 90% to use gentoo's default recipe instead of playing with configurations all day try to compile without it.
In all my years I haven't seen sources to say enable-openrc or sysvinit or runit or s6, it is ONLY systemd/elogind
For ages people used gentoo because it was the safe way around systemd, and gentoo leaders decided to sell them all out to IBM. People use computers for other reasons than be building software all day getting nothing else done. If you are to build a gentoo installation without IBM's trojan you may as well create your own distro, what do you need gentoo for? To alert you of upstream updates? You can do this otherwise without gentoo, and if you are reconfiguring recipes on your own, you might as well.
Those IBM checks must be sweet, even with a "left" mask on!
Yeap, all new comers to linux should first try Gentoo, if it fails, then try LFS. After that, KISS linux should be a breeze
openshot on debian must be about 3 years behind arch
I can understand English not being your native language, and it doesn't really matter if one doesn't speak a language well, as long as he/she honestly makes an effort to communicate.
BUT, "imma hop to another distro" is pushing peoples patience a little too much, don't you think?
Gentoo turned to crap ever since they decided to adopt IBM's trojan horse, elogind, and abandon consolekit2 and seatd which are active and adequate alternatives. But IBM must be paying well the heads of some distributions so they can become their little puppets.
If using openshot is the reason to use linux, are you aware it is offered for windows 11 too?
Reducing public land, that is access by poor people to land, increases their dependency for food to markets. This nearly makes revolutionary tendencies become suicidal. You subject yourself to slavery or die starving.
Are you now for the state that mandates people to starve than violate market stability?
I admit I do not follow China's development much, and I also understand not having time to engage too, so I agree to stop, but I had to bring this little detail into it for other readers to understand my perspective as well. Maybe others would be willing to continue this.
You are absolutely right about inheritance, I was referring (in my mind) on the transition period between capitalism and private ownership to socialism and collective/communal property.
The populist anti-communist propaganda has been built around this sensitive issue where "the evil communists will come and take the little property you have away". This has to be clearer and understood better for the enemy not to have grounds to base their propaganda on.
The recent development world wide has had public land (and water/sea) be rebranded state property, and under this state property label it is easier for the masses to digest that instead of raising taxes the state sells off "its assets" as state property. This is a violation of any constitution in robbing human rights from public land/sea and converting it to "real estate" owned by the state, which in turn flips it over to private interests for exploitation at gift like symbolic cost.
So now we are left with all land and all sea be in a way private. They took desserts and converted them to solar panel lots for the industry, which may eventually fail and be converted to casino centers, who knows. They took hills and mountains and handed them over so windmills/generators can be installed, all private enterprise, the management, roads, water supplies, pylons to carry electricity were all placed in mountain areas, forest was wiped out, and the protection of this infrastructure is now enforced by private interests.
The general left had nothing to say about all this, because simply the autism of public land and state property has not yet been theorized upon, and therefore neither have human rights and access to land and water been theorized upon. So it was all ok, because humans are slaves of either capital or the state.
But the propaganda on taking someone's hard earned and constructed cabin, a little lot with vegies fruit and flowers, is private property that will be banned in communism.
This is ideology at the verge of bankruptcy and should either be re-examined or be sentenced to the slow death new-capitalism has sentenced it to.