Morning Comrades.
As per usual there are multiple thoughts floating around my head that I am trying to put together in a coherent structure for you and your time but rather than focusing on a specific topic and after another 14hr shift, today is a good moment to take a step back and attempt to look at the broader picture. For spiritual and material realignment.
A few housekeeping and cultural notes to start: With everything that is going on in the social media world, this place here, substack, has developed many tools that might make this place more interesting for you to engage in. For one, there is a substack app for both android and apple users that I can only recommend. It is one of the few features from this platform that I use extensively.
Secondly, for those of you that are interested you can listen to these dispatches rather than reading them- there is a button that looks like a set of headphones that generates an audio version of these emails. There are heaps of other features that involve this platform out now, other than the email that might make your experience more worthwhile, considering the heap of shit social media has become. Additionally, there is a Black Lodges Telegram group that I share links to all of this on too, in case that is something you use.
With that out of the way, a rare pop-cultural comment: I rarely, if ever have the time to engage with the above, however, over the last two days I have started watching the latest Star Wars “Andor” series. I am 100% team Star Trek, for full disclosure, and Star Wars is what it is, however, this latest series is blowing me away, mostly, because I am utterly surprised this made it past the Disney and U.S. Government censors. It is as if Gropius/ Mies van der Rohe were allowed to designed an alternate universe based around Hannah Arendt’s “ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” to ever make it to a TV script. Holy shit, I am only a few episodes in and utterly fascinated at the shows ability to project the fictitious reality of fascism’s banality in evil. Obviously, a direct take on our reality but nonetheless, breathtaking.
On Hungry Dogs
A little while ago I came across a quote from a U.S. capitalist called Jon Taffer - and whilst it is not often that I spend any time on these bastards, it was one of those rare “masks off” moments that got me thinking. The entire quote goes as such:
They only feed a military dog at night. A hungry dog is an obedient dog.
With that, a few steps backwards. I do not subscribe to the age old conspiracy theory that there is a some sort of group of evil villains, in our case, capitalists, that sit together to systematically plot the oppression of the world’s working classes not only for their profit margins but their enjoyment. Aside from the anti-semitic tropes this lights up, it is also fan fiction of the worst kind and simplifies the realities of our existence to the level of a comic book ( and I enjoy those, comic books that is ). No, if anything, the most recent take over of twitter by Musk, the incel’s favourite fan boy genius business man should prove to anyone that these capitalists, if anything, are semi-good at understanding the inner most mechanisms of finance capital - which at the best of times are equivocal to the the straight-edge bro-core HC scene - and utterly dismal at actually understanding, let alone managing reality.
Nevertheless, the quote struck a chord. Taking the above into account I do believe that the capitalist class ( class being the key word here ) truly do understand that their profit margins and bottom line depend on a subservient working class. That’s you and me, and yes, you do keep “us” dependent and subservient through controlled desperation. I am in no state to discuss and reference various Marxist’s theories of alienation at this point but if you have been here for longer than a week you know what I mean.
It is without a shadow of a doubt that the continued increase of profit and unnatural growth concept of capitalism does and can only exist on the premise of us being hungry and precarious enough to do what is demanded of us, without the hint of revolution on the horizon. This is the systemic reality of capitalism. The oppression we experience is systemic and to clarify, that means that the oppression is systematic and has historical antecedents; it is the intentional disadvantaging of groups of people based on their identity while advantaging members of the dominant group (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, language, etc.)
The detrimental aspect of this systemic oppression is that we, due to the alienation enforced, believe that this is an individual problem, and, or fault.
Utterly, it is not. On the contrary and without giving into the fascist, right wing dog whistles of conspiracy theories, the manufactured reality that systemic oppression is an individual fault is manufactured on purpose to stop us from getting together and putting an end to this dictatorial, minority rule of the capitalist class. Think of all the bullshit even in our lifetime, from the total erasure of privacy under the post 9/11 Patriot Act to the logical conclusion of 40 years of neoliberalism: everyone is broke, in dept, working 2-3 jobs, highly medicated, frustrated, scared and one step away from voting in another fascist dictator to make it all go away. We’ve been here and are on the best way to repeat history, just with a live stream on tiktok.
If anything, what I am trying to convey here is this: Know Your Enemy.
None of this insanity we call freedom, and it is anything but that, happened by accident, and no, it is not some vast conspiracy theory that only exists to channel your existential fear into minority focussed fear-mongering. It is, however, the systemic progression of capitalism that is man-made, and thus, is not only reversible, but changeable.
With that, know this, understand this, take this awareness into your struggle and keep your molotov’s prepped.
Yours,
V.