erik_houdini

joined 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I really should start an anti-Entrepreneur channel. Listen folks, even if you make every single piece of art yourself, your tee shirt company? You aint selling without significant capital upfront. Can you drop 30k on an IG ad? I sure as fuck can't that's what I make in a fuckin' year. That nets you a single ad with 100k likes on IG, keep in mind likes =/= sales. Can you write compelling blog posts? Can you establish a personal brand? Do you not realize how soulless it is to have a "personal brand", to commodify yourself?

You know how much I make from my site a month? Less than $200 a month, and that's with a blog, a website, branding, a discord, networking with other artists, leveraging influencer friends, etc. I once donated 100% of my profits to my friend's trans healthcare fund, a whopping $150 dollars!!

This is peak neoliberalism though, extreme atomization, individualism, the idea that anyone can "be a business owner". It's bootstraps to an extreme. I often tell people if we didn't live in a capitalist hellscape I wouldn't be selling my art on tee shirts, I'd be content with just making the art. My goal has always been to link up with other artists to create cool art, and artists are getting fucked raw right now. 1099? Nah, here's a an upfront check cut to you for a single commission at a time. How the fuck do you even organize that? For all the failures of the situationalists, we are long gone from the days of collective art movements, it's every motherfucker and his dog for himself.

The entire thing creates a contradiction internally for me. I want to make art, I want to make art people can enjoy, I spend hours and hours learning my craft, and for what? To peddle tee-shirts while the world burns? It's fucking wack dude. Maybe it's the booze tonight but man, this one hit home. I have had this internal debate so many times, does it make me less of a Marxist to sell tee-shirts? Am I going against my own principles as I attempt to make my name know as an artist? Even if I attempt to carry a revolutionary spirit within my art, do these actions not negate that? Can one truly detourn a super structure as deeply capitalist as a "brand". I do not know, but I know that rent is always due, always increasing and things are ever bleaker.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Trump's narcissism is more or less a wild card.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I was gonna post this here but figured it would be better in r/maoism but that's a dead sub so check it out https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4247798

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

love to see it

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

That military victory against true guerrillas is possible seems doubtful on the basis of modern experience, barring the use of methods approaching genocide,

War of the Flea, pg 26

"Clear and hold" operations, patterned on the French oil-slick technique, failed to remedy the situation, for the obvious reasons. The "clear and hold" strategy is always doomed to failure because the government, while strong enough to clear any given area temporarily, cannot hold many such areas without dangerously scattering its forces. In the face of a determined "clear and hold" drive, the guerrillas simply withdraw and redouble their activities elsewhere.

War of the Flea, pg 86

All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.

Mao - "Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong" (August 1946), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 100.

Take the Ultra pill, reject reformism. You have been watching a force of teenagers in adidas track suits with RPGs handling the most well funded and well equip military in the world, in urban warfare. You should be taking notes, Gaza is the climate plan, Cop City = Gaza Strip.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

This type of thing is something that legitimately disturbs me and concerns me because I've written some pretty heavy-handed shit on my own platform and I'm pulling in you know four to seven thousand views visits a week, which aint much but I get a little paranoid about that

I've brought this concern up to some comrades in the past. Like, hey, you know, I live alone. I don't really have a lot of comrades IRL. You know, putting my voice out there, just something to think about. And usually their response is, "it's not that deep. It's not that serious. You're being paranoid, or they don't do that type of thing anymore." Which concerns me because some people don't realize what happened to our previous leaders. Or have we become so comfortable within the system that we forget that we're against it in the first place?

I'm not saying my reach is some fantastic amount of reach, but they visited people over less, and I honestly wouldn't even know what to do if the FBI came knocking on the door, they'd probably shoot my dog.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Insanity. "Write your representatives" The representatives in question:

Here's what we should do:

take the video, when he pauses to think, cut in footage of the victims, then bring the main video back when he talks again. There's so many horrific videos that can be used for this. The juxaposition would be jarring.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Read Revolutionary Morality

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Anarcho-Maoism

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, death squads would absolutely be spun up. Keep the military from getting their hands dirty.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

someone with a serious disdain for abandoned bicycles

 

For convenience of exposition, I shall deal first with the universality of contradiction and then proceed to the particularity of contradiction.

 

Look man, I ain't gonna lie. I'm sitting here in my bed, and I'm finna to start a new job, right? I'm finna to start a new job, that's gonna pay me a lot of money. And this is, in any other scenario, a year, two years ago, I would be all about it. But man, all I can think about, you know, I get older, I have a kid, that kid gets a little bit older, he gonna ask me, he gonna go, "Pop, where were you when they was killing all them kids in Gaza? When they was dropping all them bombs. What were you doing?" And you know what I'm gonna have to say to my son? I'm gonna say, "I was stacking paper, son. I was getting some bread."

Could you imagine, it's Nazi Germany, and somebody said, well, they sending them to the gas chambers, train by train by train, day after day. I keep seeing them get loaded up on the news, but shit, I gotta stack my paper, I gotta get my bread. Sounds a little bit ridiculous, don't it? It sounds a little bit ridiculous. And it's got me thinking about a whole lot of things. And part of me almost feels like this job, the money that this job gonna pay me, okay, this money is a bribe. It's the system saying, hey, look, we know you don't like it, but here's some good money, man. You wanna get that paper, don't you?

Brother, I wanna get that paper more than anything I want to break the cycle. My kids ain't growing up ina dusty ass FEMA trailer park. That's all my life has been about. I remember selling snack cakes in middle school. I was selling test results in high school. I was selling whatever I needed to sell, okay? Doing whatever I needed to do. Things I can't tell you. I was working two full-time jobs before covid, 80+ hours a week sleeping in my car some nights.

But I've seen things in the last six months that would make a grown man weep. And that just is something I cannot stop thinking about. Like, what am I doing? What are we all doing? I saw a toddler melted, no skin, just sinew and burns. White phosphorous is only made in America, only in Arkansas. We did that.

We did that man.

You know, I run a website. I got a platform. I get like 5,000, 6,000 views, sometimes even 7,000 views a week. I've written article after article and I don't feel any less hollow than I did when it first started, when I first started seeing them videos. I've spread the word, I've gotten my social medias have been banned for spreading the word, but it's not enough. It's not shit. It's internet shit. That's not real shit. That kid, if I told him, well, you know, I look, I wrote an article about what they did to you. You think you feel better about what they did? It's many a nights I lost sleep thinking about the things I done seen. And I know the people who are doing these things, they sleep in the sound as a motherfucking bear in the wintertime.

 

Constantly trying to thread the needle of "my target audience is not other communists but "vibes based" leftists, punks, skaters, goths, etc.

Yet I am definitely not afraid to speak my mind, to be openly and unapologetically political. Yet I fear this will only end up alienating more than it will agitate or educate. We lack time, we lack will, so we need space, we can't build will without space. Space means culture, culture has been entirely co-opted by the system, thus you need to create a line of flight to the space (Deleuze), we can do this by working towards deterritorizing the "underground" (counter culture). In this way the 'brand' super structure itself can be detourned, re-worked into a rhizome, ergo "HOUDINI".

But thats all pretty heavy shit and I worry that the openly political nature of the detournément will alienate before the rhizome can grow. For example someone I consider to be one of the most important voices in the gaming space as it relates to the medium as an art form, that person offered to write some articles for the brand, to grow the rhizome so to speak.

This person is not openly political and I wonder to myself, does he not see the level of political discourse I attempt to engage in? If not, will learning of that push him away, limiting the growth and shrinking the space, thereby lowering the will?

 

If you've ever given plasma because you've been out of food in the pantry, brother I can relate.

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