silent_water [she/her]

yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.

no, we don’t have downvotes on hexbear and this is what they looked like when we did. it means bad post.

nah, it was a politically conscious choice to set up something like reddit, outside the control of capital and the state. the devs have written about it.

nah, they’re just good at posting. up your game.

unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.

this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.

oh interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. thanks!

scaling sort thing? do you have a link describing what you mean?

the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans, suppressed decolonization movements, then partitioned it to form Israel. during the formation of the Israeli state, Palestinians were slaughtered and driven out of their homes in an event known as the Nakba - which translates as “The Catastrophe”. since then, there have been a series of wars resulting in the slow but steady encroachment of the Israeli state - look ip maps of the region over the decades - and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. in such an atmosphere, nothing but mutual hate is possible.

lol the US security apparatus is bad but it’s not that bad. you might get put on a watchlist though.

nothing shitty about it. controlling nukes ends the occupation. Palestine is the greatest concentration camp on earth. there is no price too high to pay to end that. it must end.

unironically, nothing would end Israel’s belligerence faster

https://hexbear.net/comment/4080366

so to be clear, when Israel bombs schools and hospitals, when they cut off food, water, and electricity, those things should be done to Israel?

I mean it will wind up warmer than Siberia is now.

a gift economy is also an exchange of goods but it’s decidedly not capitalism - no one earns any profit and there’s no flow converting money into capital and capital back into money.

there’s a balance. arming up and prepping without organizations is pointless - the paramilitaries will crush a lone homesteader. community defense requires a whole community.

it’s a cycle that keeps escalating so long as profits get squeezed tighter and tighter. at some point the whole system breaks and the only question is who seizes power when that happens. if we have orgs and can channel popular discontent, it will be us. if not, we’ll be posting from the camps. the future is not yet written - projecting the present forward into the future is good at telling you what will happen next week but it’s a shitty approximation before you even get out to a year.

acting like you were there and know what happened when you actually sat at home on your ass so you could post about it is peak whiteness.

imagine realizing this and going “they should ban queer people” instead of “banning politics is impossible because there’s no such thing as an apolitical stance”