exploitedamerican

joined 4 weeks ago
 

Hello comrades,

I want to get my younger half brother a good book to read on the subject of leftism/socialism and the true workings of economic oppression we live in.

However I have a contentious relationship with my family. My wife and I currently live in a dilapidated rv in my mother’s driveway. When i was sixteen she moved us into a house with her at the time boyfriend whom she met at her job where I also worked as a teenager It turned out this guy who had pretended to be my friend was really an abusive authoritarian. Not so much violent abusive but definitely emotionally and psychologically. Several memories i have after we all moved in together are one time we were arguing in each others face and a little bit of my saliva escaped my Mouth and as a response he literally hocked a lugie and spat in my face. That was the most extreme and looking back I wish i had responded differently, as in called the authorities because no adult should spit in a teenagers face ever. but even before that the hypocrisy was making itself pretty evident. Before we moved in together I had a rather autonomous existence as a socially active developing 16 year old. I had issues with authority and had dropped out of highschool after my sophomore year.I was someone who got good grades however i didn’t often do homework and just coasted along on high test scores and my sponge like memory. After dropping out I was in a punk rock band with 40 year olds who i met through one of my mother’s best friends. She bought me beer for my birthday, took me to a heavy metal concert where we smoked cannabis together. At that time my mother and i had a close relationship and a tight bond. Things changed after they started seeing each other once he had even asked me to get pot for him before we moved in when he couldn’t get any. But even after that, there was one day when i came back from a camping trip in Maine with friends and i asked to buy some from him since he sold at the time and he said “im not selling weed to a kid” then after we moved in together it became a hellscape of “my house my rules, im the man of the house” authoritarianism. I could not smoke even outside of this house on the property and had to go walk half a mile away to a nearby cometary to smoke unless i asked permission and offered to smoke with him. Then they would search my room and once found some mushrooms I had in my dresser and claimed to have flushed them although a month or so prior they both had purchased a quarter ounce from me. All this motivated me to move out as soon as i could. Luckily they allowed me to leave several months before I officially turned 18. But this was 2007 and it was possible to live a decent life on a low wage even after the market collapse in 2008.

I was not very socio/politically conscious at the time. However i was aware of the hypocrisy of our society. Just not entirely aware of my socio/political ideals as being far left/ socialist until the end of my twenties.

My half brother is just about to turn 17. He has virtually no autonomy. Besides a part time fast food job he only recently acquired and his learners permit it seems he doesn't have the ability to take a piss without asking for permission. And it also seems that while we are living in a 40 year old rv in the driveway with no access to electricity and having to spend $30-45 weekly on propane so we and our pets don't freeze, that we are obviously persona non gratis. I just recently started communicating with my brother through a messaging app after last thanksgiving and he has encrypted the chat so that gives me an idea of the environment he lives in as being repressive.

I want to develop a relationship with my half brother but i feel as though i am walking on eggshells. This last thanksgiving we talked and joked while his father was not present but on christmas he was present so my brother was a completely different Person when he was there. I just feel really awful knowing how he tried to control me as a teenager despite myself being unrelated to him in any way and I can not even imagine what its like for him being directly related.

So i want to get him a book on socialist thought. I was thinking something by michael parenti could help to open his eyes to the reality of this world we live in. And that would also be easier to give to him as it wouldn't be something so overtly and obviously controversial as something by Marx/engels or even noam chompsky whom my opinion of is somewhat torn considering his past associations with jeffery epstien have given me some serious ick.

What do you all think would be the best book to give to a heavily repressed 16 year old on his seventeenth birthday in a few months?

Thanks for any suggestions and for reading my deluge of over sharing my personal family issues.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

I don't disagree, the writing could definitely be better. But i think the general idea and the title have some merit. Fred hampton has become a symbol of power against corrupt authority and if mangione is truly the one culpable for the killing of Thompson then that act should be seen as a symbol for what happens when you manipulate the public for 50+ years, nullify the progress made by prior leftist movements using any and all means possible against your own citizens and remove true leftist policies from the mainstream while amplifying far right ideologies.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Amen, that is definitely the RIP Hampton deserves. On the flip side Brian Thompson and the rest of the capitalist wall street military and prison industry profiteers who have bought our political system and own the media they deserve to Rot in piss along with the feds and pigs that extrajudicially murdered this king.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

He was a threat to the ruling class regardless and although he was non violent and only advocated using the threst of violence in self defense he was still murdered violently by the state, I see his murder as a state sponsored assassination.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

The only thing predictable is the pro capitalist propaganda points coming from you The ccp is not communist, its state owned capitalism. And russia hasn't been the ussr since 1989 but it is authoritarian. But so is the usa.

You sound like a billionaire bootlicking propaganda fountain.

Any crimes of humanity you use to demonize communism and socialism i can name far worse criminality perpetrated by capitalist regimes.

How many millions of children go without dinner every night in America alone? Capitalism aims to deprive people of resources so a small few can live in opulent luxury and spend more on weekend vacations than you could earn in a dozen consecutive lifetimes. And you are incorrect i have endured food insecurity. But yay america and capitalism because anyone can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they can just allow themselves to be treated like a disposable automaton to earn peanuts while being degraded so someone can take in passive income on their back.

Also fascism is inherently anti communist. What are you going to tell me next that the Nazi’s were socialist because they had the word socialist in their description? Who were the first group of people hitler vilified and sent to the labor camps? Oh right! The communists 🤣 fascism is primarily marked by the intersection of economic and military industry in control of the governing and media apparatuses. With characteristics such as the suppression of labor power, the protection of corporste power, sexism, obsession with national security and militsrism, unification around a common scapegoated enemy, disdain for intellectuals and artists, disdain for human rights, religious ideals intertwined with government, militarized police, obsession with crime and punishment, blatant cronyism, nepotism and corruption. The only one of the traits of fascism that America can claim plausible deniability on is fraudulent elections but anyone witj a brain can see our whole political system is owned by the wealthy. A princeton study showed unequivocally that the amount of influence a person has on policy is directly related to their economic status with a vast majority of the population who arent multi millionaires having a statistical near zero effect on any issue regardless of how popular or unpopular it may be to the boting general public.

And at least stalin wasn't murdering and starving innocents to increase shareholder dividends.

Authoritarianism is bad but if i had to choose ill take the one where the regime makes an effort to ensure the citizens needs are met, as opposed to maintaining high profits so billionaires can buy more yachts and lobbyists to bribe politicians legally. whats the homelessness rate in cuba today? Oh yeah it’s virtually non existent meanwhile the us has the highest rate of homelessness and suicide since the gilded age and great depression. And also cuba such a socialist shithole as you would undoubtedly claim, still managed to innovate a vaccine to prevent lung cancer that is so effective the US had to begrudgingly admit it existed and work with the researchers who developed it to bring it to market in the usa where it is currently undergoing clinical trials (at a snails pace since the American capitalist health insurance cartels have zero interest in providing a cure for any cancer)

Everything in capitalism is commoditized including the suffering and death of those who are adversely affected by a system that rewards greed and lacks humanity. One of many cases in point being the war on drugs which has turned America into a fascist police state. We are conditioned to believe prohibition is continuing to erradicste the supply and demand of narcotics. Meanwhile the supply and demand have only grown since the war on drugs began and in reality the only things these laws do are increase the black market value of narcotics making them more profitable for socially elite bulk distributors, while commoditizing the poor mental health issues and suffering of those living in our capitalist system who are seeking escape and relief through self medication, to keep prisons at maximum occupancy and increase the profits of prison industrial profiteers. While the public are propagandized to support these blatantly authoritarian fascist laws that make things worse so more resources can be diverted to the police force who maintain racist attitudes mainly due to these drug prohibition laws which were all built upon the most racist and ignorant ideas of the early 20th century. And it also leads to the evolution of the market so now the majority of the illicit opiod supply is tainted with fentanyl analogues because its easier to smuggle something uktra potent and that reduces risk, so thank you DEA for the increase in overdoses and all the fentanyl in the black market supply. All of this is not only absurd and mindless its blatantly unconstitutional and illegal for several reasons. But again America is a capitalist empire in decline exhibiting severe symptoms of fascism.

Plus You had nothing to say of burkina faso and libya which were both successful until western capitalist powers assassinated their leaders and installed far right capitalist regimes. So much for “socialism always fails” if that were the case why is so much spent to ensure its failure? And all that man made famine you speak of, you fail to leave out who were responsible for the lack of food resources resulting from insurgent action by capitalist aggressors

And I understand feudalism. Its a system where the ultra wealthy act as landlords for an arbitrary amount of the crops and goods produced on their land but then that devolved into paying rent and if not one was charged as a criminal for stealing the resources of the land they lived on. Capitalism as it is today ultimately eroding all the socialist protections fdr legislated through the FLSA of 1938, has devolved into a system of neo feudalism. It is a fact that it cost more to purchase and maintain slaves under chattel slavery than Americans earning mininum wage anywhere in the country today are currently compensated.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

And the massive amounts of resources expended bu capitalist super powers to ensure those awful economic conditions isn’t the reason for them? 🤡 What about lybia, burkina faso and cuba before the ussr fell? Youre seriously just parroting anti socialist propaganda. Capitalism came to be the domination economic model in the 1600’s took control of half the world and immediately began searching for new markets to exploit while perpetuating warfare for profit, slavery to maximize profits and genocides to stifle any resistance or perpetuate the values of eugenics and racism but yeah communism is bad because of famine and people aren't allowed work really hard to become wealth hoarding billionaires while a large subset of the population live in squalor to support such opulent lifestyles of luxury

Break down the word capitalism and it tells you all you need to know. The intransitive verb at the root, to capitalize, is synonymous with “to exploit” and “to take advantage” the only time American capitalism ever allowed the working class to thrive was a brief moment of 4 decades after FDR legislated socialist policies to protect the working class from severe limitless exploitation and now legislation has been passed since that has rendered that progress irrelevant.

Also fascism is capitalism in decline and monarchy is irrelevant because we are talking economic models. And monarchies that were not capitalist were feudalist which is just a less refined version of capitalism.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Capitalism is the only system that promises people the ultra slim a d unlikely chance to become as wealthy as those who exploit the poor. what systems, besides capitalism in third world countries are worse than capitalism at its core? Where greed and ruthlessness are praised above virtuous ethical pursuits

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 14 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Thats something i wonder too. My answer is that many of the unwilling participants within capitalism are delusional and believe that they are capitalists when being a capitalist means you would have capital so that means these people are nothing more than exploited workers with severe Stockholm syndrome. People like this writer believe they are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 26 points 1 week ago (18 children)

When your entire career is nothing more than licking boots i guess eating glue is an improvement 🤷‍♂️

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago

So you can have a dumpster fire in your dumpsterfire while you grill a glizzy on a dumpster fire!

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Then you probably haven’t been using it the last year. I got ip banned for a comment pointing out international law relating to indigenous defense against occupation. That was 6 months before reddit nuked accounts posts and comments it didnt like regarding the luigi mangione/uhc ceo debacle.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

Ask if they have a bush or tree you can urinate or defecate on lmao.

[–] exploitedamerican@lemm.ee 14 points 2 weeks ago

Whenever i see one I have no choice but to yell out “elon musk is a fucking cunt” at the top of my lungs. And it really sucks because i hate saying that chud’s name and prefer to call him “space karen”

view more: next ›