Nostr notes by HeavenlyPossum

Two things can be true at the same time: - Intellectual property ...

2026-09-26T13:48:52Z

Two things can be true at the same time:

- Intellectual property is a regime of state-enforced monopolies that exists to extract value from people using otherwise non-rivalrous ideas, to the advantage primarily of the already-rich and to the detriment of a world deprived of the free expression of those ideas, and

- Under a system in which people depend on returns to their intellectual labor to survive in capitalist markets, stealing the product of that labor with impunity does real harm to those workers.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/openai-chatgpt-microsoft-copyright-legal-case-documents-revelations/

Why was the labor share of national income higher after World War ...

2026-09-12T15:53:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…qk7q
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Why was the labor share of national income higher after World War Two? Because, after the war, capitalist elites decided they could not risk another global conflict that threatened the survival of capitalism itself.

So they embarked on a massive project of creating labor buy-in to capitalism. They created welfare systems, fostered strong labor unions, redistributed land, broke up large fortunes, and established global capital controls. This was the “Great Compression,” the largest transfer of wealth from rich to poor in global history, and it created the golden age of capitalism that movements like MAGA fetishize.

This is what I mean when I say that capitalism is a system in ...

2026-06-30T20:32:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…ftws
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This is what I mean when I say that capitalism is a system in which some people own the power to permit or deny others to labor productively.

Individual capitalists are often abusive, but they rarely own the formal right to directly extract wealth from subordinates, the way feudal lords did. Instead, they must exploit through purely economic means alone—their ownership of property (physical, financial, intellectual, and whatever) that allows them to allow or deny others to labor productively.

While any one capitalist might not have that much power over you, they do, as a class, effectively own your life.

I’ll close with this passage from Friedrich Engels, who was problematic for all sorts of reasons I won’t get into here but did summarize this particular dynamic really well:

“The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence.”

10/end

The solution is not to fix or reform policing. The solution is to ...

2026-06-19T14:01:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…tekv
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The solution is not to fix or reform policing. The solution is to *abolish* policing, so that no segment of society has a privileged relationship to the exercise of violence.

If no actor has a privileged relationship to violence, then no actor has any advantage that could allow it to try to seize control of all of society. We don’t have to hope for the best and just grin and bear it when the cops decide they’re going to make up whatever law they’d like to enforce today. We can take responsibility, as a society, for keeping each other safe without risking the entirety of our freedom.

If you’re worried that the abolition of policing would create chaos and violence, with people just deciding who they’re going to hurt as they please, I’m left to ask: how would that be any worse than our actual lived status quo?

https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2018/08/15/portland-police-chief-says-she-decided-to-sweep-occupy-ice-camp-with-or-without-the-mayors-support/

Liberals* recoil from the abolition of policing because they have ...

2026-06-19T13:40:19Z

Liberals* recoil from the abolition of policing because they have internalized the idea that Achieving Good Things ™️ requires state violence. But most of them recognize that policing is monstrously awful and the cause of a myriad of abuses.

They square this circle by imagining that policing is bad now because it is run poorly by bad people for bad purposes, but the right people with the right purposes could run policing well. Get rid of the bad apples, provide them with the right training, and, through some unspecified alchemy, make them organically responsible to the body politic.

* This includes Marxist-Leninists and their ilk.