An afterlife. Might be nice.

But that already happened? Oh, that’s the joke.

Yes, obviously.

Yes, Egyptians eat it with a spoon. When I was there we used bread because we shared this and other stuff and I enjoyed adding more carbs, because I was very hungry.

I always liked how Koshary has all kinds of carbs: rice, pasta, lentils and you even eat it with bread (and your hands). It tastes great and with the typicall serving size, it’s impossible to be hungry afterwards.

You’re out of touch with reality with this idealist conception of wages as a result of knowledge. The value of labor is the cost of its reproduction. Capitalists pay workers exactly as much as they need to for them to turn up again the next morning. Knowledge does not directly factor into their calculation. Don’t expect to be rewarded for the work you put into your education - the system isn’t fair and doesn’t work like that.

Instead, wages are the result of a collective power struggle between labor and capital. High wages occur either when labor is strong and capital weak or when you betray other workers and aid capital in their exploration.

Now expert knowledge is one of many things that might help by increasing bargaining power in the struggle with capital, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. For example an automotive engineer might have just as much knowledge as a chemical engineer, but where I live, chemistry earns you about 50% more, because the chemistry union is stronger.

So union power, strikes and social movements are a big factor. Others are location, the average rent, international competition, the reserve army of labor. At any specific time, the boom and bust cycle of periodic crisis strongly effects wages.

The organic composition of capital plays an indirect role: If the degree of automation suddenly rises, this will lower workers bargaining power short term and lower profits long term which increases pressure on wages.

So if you want a career with stable, high wages but don’t want to help exploit others, look for sectors with a long-term chance of a strong bargaining position for labor.

Twain also wrote often about meeting annoying US tourists on his travels and going out of his way to avoid them. For example in “A Tramp Abroad”, after describing a particular annoying interaction with one he writes:

And away he went. He went uninjured, too—I had the murderous impulse to harpoon him in the back with my alpenstock, but as I raised the weapon the disposition left me; I found I hadn’t the heart to kill him, he was such a joyous, innocent, good-natured numbskull.

Many plastics (thermoplastics) would actually be recyclable, if they didn’t put so many additives in, like for UV resistance. But then the color would get a slightly yellow tint after some years of exposure to sunlight. And who would want that? /s

Private space. I used to share one room with my siblings. It was alright as a child, but I don’t want to go back. And I know that many families around the world have very little space for two, three or four generations living under a roof.

If reddit and hexbear (to a lesser degree obviously) have anything in common, it’s that they both desperately need perspectives from outside the US to be heard more. I mean just knowing what is meant by “foreign”, shouldn’t happen. Like foreign to which country? Oh of course the global hegemon again… Why is this the default on an anti-imperialist site?

Yes and this also means it can happen given an economic crisis or crisis of legitimacy, proper organizing and the right balance of power between classes.

it isn’t a spontaneous thing that occurs once a certain threshold of suffering is reached.

Absolutely! It’s weird how often this simplistic “threshold of suffering” view of revolutions is just assumed without any theoretical basis. It explicitly goes against Lenin who rejected spontaneity and insisted on organizing.

A historic materialist analysis of revolutions does not rely on anything as subjective as suffering. It is concerned with objective contradictions inherent in the mode of production, class analysis, class consciousness and organizing. And no, suffering alone does not suffice to create class consciousness. Without organizing it can lead to despair, passivity or fragmented resistance.

In a successful revolution, seeds of class consciousness lead to political action which leads to more class consciousness which leads to more action and so on.

And those seeds are planted right now in the boring everyday struggle. In every strike, protest and action. And organizing them builds structures and alliances from which a revolutionary potential might someday emerge.

Capitalism is not sustainable and keeps producing crisis and moments that can be captured. History is full of those moments when the ruling class seemed invincible - right up until they were overthrown.

It’s remarkable how there are uncountably many non-normal numbers, yet they take up no space at all in the real numbers (form a null set), since almost all numbers are normal. And despite this, we can only prove normality for some specific classes of examples.

It helps me to think, how there are many “totally random” or non computable numbers, that are not normal because they don’t contain the digit 1.

I wonder why US propaganda pushes hating on French people so much. Maybe, because they actually have some class consciousness and often do general strikes.

Do they offer that much for information on any murder? Or does it depend on your class? (rhetorical questions)

There is one right there?

It sounds similar to [citation needed], which is often used on Wikipedia.

Thanks, that was a great explanation! I really should read it then. I might not deserve all this credit though, because I already listened to some talks of Harvey on reading Marxs capital on YouTube. It wasn’t in a geography context, but something still might have rubbed off. Still your kindness is really appreciated!

I’m wondering about something that’s more a political/history question about the field: So I often hear about how geography was the first modern science. Apparently it fueld many advances in how science is organized, including in other fields. The first modern scientific institution is supposed to have been the national geographic society in Britain. And many learned people at the time at least new some geology. For example the first science fiction writer Jules Vern packs his journey to the center of the earth full of geological lingo, that his intended readership was expected to understand or at least associate with a feeling of modernity and progress.

So I wondered what’s special about geography and geology (why weren’t engineering, physics, biology etc. first to get big). And I wonder if the following take sounds plausible: that it was important for colonialism and imperialism, but even before that and more significantly for the enclosure of the commons. Many land surveyors were needed for primitive accumulation.

If you want to take people’s communally owned land, which there was a lot of, and divide it up and sell it, you need to be able to point on it on a map. So many surveyors needed to learn the trade and got send out to every last village, forest and field to steal people’s land, which they needed to live. Of course, thereby at the same time providing the initial funding for capital and also creating a vast army of hungry and newly landless people migrating to the cities to become workers. And to teach the surveyors, you needed professors and institutions and state funding and all that. And this spilled over to newer fields of the natural sciences and replaced the centuries old focus on theology (and law) at the Universities.

And that’s how geography helped to start both modern western science and capitalism. And that’s why it was always intertwined with the capitalist hegemony from the beginning. And it still is, isn’t it? Then again, there seem to be more Marxists among geographers then in other technical fields. I wonder why.

If Marx was alive today he would finish capital 2 and 3 and write part 4 on the history of economics like he always planned to do. Then, if he had a third lifetime, he would start on the rest of the many projects outlined in his “Grundrisse”. He would finish them in his fourth lifetime and then in his fifth lifetime start to condense everything down into something more readable and put it into modern context. He would finish the project on economic theory in his sixth lifetime.

Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.

Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.

People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.

Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.

Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:

• ghosts 👻: aging, death, old people
• vampires(folk believe): plague, infection
• vampires(literature): landlords, feudalism
• zombies(modern): alienation, capitalism
• witches: women who stand up to patriarchy
• Frankenstein’s monster: the proletariat gaining class consciousness (no seriously)

I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.