Go outside, look at the moon. The moons so pretty isn’t it. Yeah. Take a picture of the moon. Oh no bad picture it looks like a weird dumb speck. But the moons so pretty????
U know ur real pretty to. cameras arnt very nice sometimes. But your still pretty. Just like moon
“Go back to your own country!” I yell at a White person. All of a sudden, their body starts to divide. 45% of their body flies to Italy. 16% goes back to Germany. 7% flies to Slovakia. 12% flies back to Russia. .45775097% leaves for Croatia. 19.5533% flies back to a Native American reserve in the Midwest.
At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances of getting another job were close to nil.
So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down. A bunch of middle-aged men and women who have spent their entire careers on the wrong end of barked orders about what to do and when to do it have seized ownership of their own workplace and their own working lives. They became their own bosses. And they immediately align themselves to principles of the purest equality possible.
“Before, I was doing only one thing and had no idea what the others were doing,” is how Dimitris Koumatsioulis remembers the factory when he started in 2004. And now? “We’re all united. We have forgotten the concept of ‘I’ and can function collectively as ‘we’.”
The other massive change that has taken place is between the factory and its neighbours. When the workers “recuperated” their workplace (to use the local term), they could only do so with the help of Thessaloniki locals. Whenever representatives of the former owners came to requisition their equipment, as a court had given them permission to do, hundreds of residents would form a human chain in front of the plant (I contacted lawyers for Viome for comment but, despite assurances, no statement was forthcoming).
When the workers consulted the local community about what they should start to produce, one request was to stop making building chemicals. They now largely manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner, greener and easier on their neighbours’ noses.
Staff use the building as an assembly point for local refugees, and I saw the offices being turned over to medics for a weekly free neighbourhood clinic for workers and locals. The Greek healthcare system has been shredded by spending cuts, its handling of refugees sometimes atrocious; yet in both cases, the workers at Viome are doing their best to offer substitutes.
Where the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they reject capitalism itself as a failure.
Chakrabortty is on a whole other level to anyone else the Guardian has writing for it tbh
Being a good person is a choice. Don’t let people fool you into believing that truly good people never have bad thoughts, are never tempted by the easier path, by the low road, never mess up or act out selfishly. Never believe a person can be good without making a conscious effort.
Every single time you do something good, you’ve made a decision to make the world a little brighter.
Goodness is not an inherent trait, it is a choice. Keep making it! I see you, I’m proud of you, and I’m rooting for you!
Emotional labor is probably not the best framework for discussing the work that goes into interpersonal relationships where mutual care and respect exists and where you help each other meet needs that could otherwise go unmet
And by probably not the best I mean like probably promotes neoliberal individualism in a way that directly harms community building and can actually make it harder to talk about coercive forms of emotional/affective labor inherent in many pink collar jobs and work that women do. As well as like inhibiting openness and community building while providing a “radical” justification for not caring about people.
Like it’s not “emotional labor,” in the same sense as stuff I do for work, when I spend time talking to a man asking for money on the sidewalk and basically treat him like a human being rather than like an undesirable part of the landscape. And for me to ignore him like many other passerby isn’t me being radical and avoiding coercive emotional labor it’s using “feminism” to justify being an ass in the exact way that society encourages.
And there’s so many other examples, treating people like human beings and expecting others to treat you like a human being isn’t unreasonable and even if it happens to fall under emotional labor it’s not inherently a bad thing to do, even if it’s something that men (and privileged people broadly) frequently neglect to do.
