ghostOfRoux();

I’m a newbie but one piece of advice I wanna give is embrace the meat substitutes like Beyond or Gardein. Shop around and see what you like and add those to your meal rotation.

Textured vegetable protein and tofu are also so cheap compared to beef and chicken. TVP especially works well in tacos or spaghetti sauce. Air-fried tofu has been my best attempt so far at duplicating how the local Thai places do tofu. Marinade however you like and toss it in the air fryer for 20 or so mins.

I decided to suffer from work-related anxiety most of the weekend.

We took the kids to the local Pride festival and that was actually a lot of fun. Then I ordered a man purse that I hope will help me get more organized and keep my ctlutter-stress in check.

Oh and I finished the book I have been trying to get through so now I can jump back into theory.

Something that has been on my mind as I have been diving more into theory is what will happen to those that choose not to work “after the revolution.”

I feel like at the time of Marx or Lenin, it was understood that manual labor war paramount to a productive society and the automation of the time made production more efficient with less manpower needed. But there was still this emphasis on how everyone will be a productive member of society in order to “earn their keep.” The USSR, of course wasn’t able to be 100% automated. So, I get that.

But we are in the early stages of an era of automation where there are going to be a lot less jobs needs that not everyone will be employed. But I also think that is a good thing. It’s, imo, the obvious path our society needs to be striving for. Fewer people working, and less work needed due to fully or nearly fully automated systems of things like food or clothing. After all, we won’t be striving for that infinite growth factor anymore.

The only thing I think I have seen that is close to an answer is that we will be working less so we will have more time to create. But that suggests that we will all still work but only, say 16 hours a week instead of 40-60. I think this definitely opens the opportunity for those that choose not to work, but do we call those people “parasites” and shun them? I don’t think so. But I also don’t know if this idea is fully realized in any text. At least not in any I’ve read yet.

Maybe this whole thing is just naturally lumped in with the old state “withering away”? Sorry for the sort of stream of thought comment btw.

This sounds really good thanks! I got it pulled up in my phone and will grab an epub of it tonight for my e-reader.

From the wiki:

In the book Lafargue proposes the right to be lazy, in contrast to the right to work, which he deems bourgeois.

This definitely sounds like what I was wanting to explore. It’s just been heavy on my mind and I was pretty hopeful someone had written about it.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard of Lafargue before. Thanks for the rec.

I had a weird conversation with a older friend that is involved in local politics last night. She’s a dem and I, of course am not. So I try to meet her and my other older dem friends a bit in the middle but mostly where they are at with political discussions. Mostly on topics of women’s rights, or worker reform, and other things that tend to run parallel with our respective camps of thought.

But China got brought up and I had mentioned I wanted to explore their political atmosphere more. She dropped the whole “China is an authoritarian regime” bit. I said something to the effect of how the US “is fairly authoritarian dontcha think?” , and her retort was freedom of speech in the US, which I feel is mostly a thinly vailed means if keeping the masses sedated at this point. We have some freedom of speech but we also have antifa members getting shoved into vans at protests. I said as much and she acted like there isn’t any such thing happening.

I think what mostly bugs me about her saying this is that we marched together at the woman’s rights protest when RvW was overturned. I feel like that should be some sort of push for her to realize that we don’t have the freedoms in this country that we are told we do when your right to bodily autonomy can just be taken away from your but a majority vote fro the SCOTUS.

This is mostly me just venting.

She definitely is old enough to have lived through the 60s so that would have been the height if the Red Scare, Vietnam, Civil Rights Movement, etc. But she also does that thing that most libs these days will do and say she’s “about as liberal as they come” which I think meant something different in a time now passed.

The major frustrating part is that I am the local Democrat’s Club acting secretary(long story short, they needed someone that could use computers and I was friends with some of them already) but the rhetoric lately since we all live in a very red city in a very red state is “how can we get more people involved?” and every time I say they need to move more to the left. It just seems to fall on deaf ears. It’s like the have this unwritten understanding that everything is wrong about Capitalism except for the capitalism part.

I keep telling them, they need go to the 2 local colleges and help reboot the clubs there. Last night I even mentioned there is a new resurgence of Christian deconstruction that is ripe for the picking and they didn’t seem to care. And I know there is one because my wife is a Christian leftist. We’ve talked a lot about it. I’ve suggested I can reach out to the local DSA club and every time they are like “ewww socialists?” I mean they don’t say that exactly but it feels like that, you know what I mean?

And I am the young guy and they keep asking me if I have any friends. I do but guess whats, they are all either radicalized, closet leftists, or are Zoomers and Millennials that can barely survive because the economy is shit, housing market is shit, the price of eggs went up 8x in a year and no one can afford anything so they all pass the time by sharing gaming memes on discord. Like, give them a reason to care, y’all!

I was trying to figure out how to say what you said so I’ll just piggy back. I agree that moving from proprietary to foss is definitely one aspect of the “withering away of the state”. Engels didn’t explicitly write about software for obvious reasons but yeah lol.

I think, and this is probably preaching to the choir, but one thing that we can keep doing is just supporting foss and try to get more people to use and contribute. Regardless of if the revolution were to happen tomorrow, we’ve definitely seen a big uptick in open source being used over the last 20-30 years.

I’ve seen people bring up that Lemmy/Mast/kbin are open source and my thoughts is always “as it should be”. We are living through what I think might be a software revolution as more people get fed up with data harvesting and proprietary services. Will this era last? Who knows but I hope it does.

Funny enough, Linux and foss were what actually started my radicalization to the left. Back when I was using Ubuntu 9.10 I just kept asking why this wasn’t this the norm? I mean Linux growing pains baggage aside that is.

Depending on your level of tech knowledge, my rec is Arch or Linux Mint. Linux Mint is practically good to go OOtB. Pop!_OS is another one that has gained popularity over the last few years. NixOS I think is the new distro that is getting a lot of buzz right now but I’m gonna wait to see where it goes and how it matures before looking at it. I’ve settled on Mint and have been using it for about 5 years as my daily driver now.

Way back when I was using it, I believe Manjaro and Antergos were the 2 biggies with GUI installers. I had heard that Antergos was stopped and just looked up RebornOS and damn it if it isn’t Antergos lol. That’s pretty cool.

I keep fence sitting on possibly switching to Arch-based full time because of the AUR or over to proper Debian. Might end up looking at Reborn in the near future. It wasn’t even on my radar.

I signed up! Our DSA chapter has gone radio silent basically. Been thinking about switching membership over to CPUSA but there is literally zero presence where I live. Idk how active I could be from afar.