There’s a particular kind of person who imagines themselves as a principled leftist, or opponent of capitalism, or critic or tyranny, or whatever, right up until you criticize their pet aspect of capitalist modernity.

Last time, it was landlording; some “mom-and-pop” types absolutely lost their shit.

Tonight it was intellectual property and taxes, of all things.

Folks, all of these things—literal rents collected by a landlord, taxes collected by the state, profits collected by a copyright holder—are all fundamentally aspects of the same phenomenon.

You can’t separate them from each other. They are all claims to your labor, backed by the threat of violence, by someone who claims some sort of sovereign ownership of *something* you’re using—your home, a song, your community, whatever.

I don’t really care if you can imagine ways in which collecting those rents might be useful to you, or could be put to use in service of some higher purpose. That’s the logic of the capitalist, not of liberation.

@HeavenlyPossum

The thing that's always frustrated me about anarchists (from what you've written, I'm assuming that's you) is that you imagine groups of people will just *do* things, collectively, for the betterment of all. And that will work. Humans have way too much of the "what's in it for me?" gene for that to work on any kind of scale. I mean, hell, sit through any HOA meeting ever held...

@ScottSoCal

You have watched circus tigers jumping through a hoop to evade the whip and concluded that tigers will only jump when whipped.

@HeavenlyPossum

And you have become insulated in your little bubble, and imagine it's the world.

@ScottSoCal

Cool, thanks for dropping by to shit on me unsolicited

@HeavenlyPossum

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