for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
obligatory mentions for tengger cavalry, nine treasures and SULD
labor aristocracy work for people but the people they work for are sufficiently subsidized by global imperialism that they can compensate the labor aristocracy in a manner that would be equivalent to the bourgeoisie anywhere outside of the imperial core. the labor aristocracy understand this at a base level and thus tend to align their interests with the interests of imperialists and global capital accordingly. hence the fascist base comment.
from zak cope’s divided world, divided class.
on class:
…class denotes a dynamic social relationship corresponding to the system of ownership, the organization of labour and the distribution of material wealth as mediated by ideological, cultural and political institutions and practices. Above all, class is the product of political practices, with the relationship between the state and class struggle revolving around the issue of class domination.
cope explains:
The bourgeoisie is that group in society which directly (through full or part ownership of the means of production) or indirectly (through being paid super-wages ) depends upon the exploitation of workers for the maintenance of its income. The working class is that group in society which sells its labour-power in order to make a living. The proletariat is that section of the working class creating values under industrial (urban or rural) conditions which owns none of the means of production and is forced to subsist entirely upon wages equivalent to the value of labour-power.
The labour aristocracy is that section of the working class which benefits materially from imperialism and the attendant superexploitation of oppressed-nation workers. The super-wages received by the labour aristocracy allow for its accrual of savings and investment in property and business and thereby “middle-class” status, even if its earnings are, in fact, spent on luxury personal consumption.
The labour aristocracy cannot, however, be wholly equated with the middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Although the labour aristocracy forms part of the middle class, the middle class also encompasses self-employed property-owners, shopkeepers, small businessmen and professionals whose income largely does not derive from wage labour and whose characteristic ideology is bourgeois.
and lastly:
Ultimately, however, the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, that is, the creation of a middle-class working class, is a political question centred on increasing superexploitation. That is the explanation for the appearance and continued existence of a wealthy working class in the world s core nations. Imperialist national oppression is both the most crucial “historical and moral element” of global wage differentials and the sine qua non for working-class conservatism.
you invest it in (foreign) right wing radical organizations bent on overthrowing their democratically elected government. that way, when these groups eventually succeed due to your generous contributions they will allow you to swoop in and buy up their country’s previously nationalized natural monopolies at bargain bin prices through local intermediaries at which point you can cut costs and inflate prices for the citizens of the entire country and receive many orders of magnitude ROI
it’s win-win so long as you propagandize enough people about how this specific thing that you’re doing is actually defined as democracy, they’ll be totally ok with it and won’t suspect a thing
authoritarianism is when you do things and get results, the more results you get the more authoritarian it is
true democracy is when so much nothing is happening that everyone is stochastically dissolving into elementary particles like it’s the heat death of the universe
you realize that the uptick in frequency of these ‘provocations’ only started in response to the pelosi visit? the incident that had a considerable portion of the entire chinese population howling for the cpc to shoot down the plane and engulf the world in nuclear fire? this is the cpc’s way of appeasing its very large and very rabid nationalist constituency (who are very disappointed that they have not died in a nuclear armageddon, btw) and it is a meme on the chinese internet that despite all of its rhetoric, this pathetic level of ‘not touching you’ fuckery is somehow the lowest that the cpc is willing to stoop to when faced with a de jure violation of its sovereignty.
entity with the time, resources to try to sway public opinion
why would any foreign political entity waste its valuable english proficient resources on astroturfing an online backwater filled with politically illiterate nobodies? peak liberal solipsism
this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.