"Rawls remarks about the transition from the kind of unjust society in which we live to the one that realizes the ideals that he lays out in his theory are very limited and they're limited to mostly discussing the role of civil disobedience. Rawls says that we have to start with the simple cases of civil disobedience... and then once we're clear on the simple cases they can help us clarify the more difficult problems but it doesn't tell us how this orientation is supposed to work, if it works at all. The requirements of civil disobedience apply only when citizens are already motivated by justice, when they already want to realize the principles of justice and already acknowledge a public sense of justice. But the societies in which we live are rigged by class injustice and are societies in which the interests of a few wealthy citizens shape the dominant rules of social cooperation. So the societies in which we live are not at all like the societies in which Rawls thinks civil disobedience is required because we live in either laissez faire capitalism or in welfare state capitalism of a very bad type and these are societies where there is no just constitution".

"A sufficiently just liberal society is an illusion. The world in which we live has nothing to do with it. The earlier we abandon the illusion, the more effective our attempts to change it will be''.

Ypi (on Rawls)

"Modern psychology has shown that moderate levels of optimism, despite some distortion of reality, can be beneficial for mental health— which for Becker centers around significance-granting concepts.

Notice that in this quote he’s not speaking of a “maximally honest” perspective (which may lead to crippling anxiety/depression), but “honest enough” to avoid a self-deception large enough to be called an outright “lie”. Life has mysterious and awe-inspiring aspects—areas that we do not empirically understand. In these areas we can somewhat reasonably interpret/speculate significance-granting concepts without too obviously lying about reality. Pushed to its outmost extreme, this was Becker’s religious/spiritual “solution”, which would reduce the overall delusion of the individual by trading the big delusions arising out of narrowed/fetishized reality for an ostensibly smaller illusion involving God/divine reality. This is what he meant when he said that: “The ideal of religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of perception: this is where religion and science meet.” Becker also tried significance-granting concepts within the “maximally honest” position, but he couldn’t come up with much. This is what he called: “The quality of perception of the absence of God [without] secure answer or hope, but only a yearning that has in it elements of both love and despair…an authentic religious consciousness for our time [achieved through] Communities of the abandoned… [the possibility of] a heroic human contribution to be made to cosmic life in a dialogue with a community of one's fellows”. Becker concludes by saying: “These are gigantic problems, to be sure, and I am not claiming they are answerable in today's world. But they seem to me to be the authentic problems of a fully critical and introspective modern consciousness.”

JS

"What colonialism calls "services" are actually functions of a healthy, connected culture where people look out for one another and the earth".

 

"Decolonization begins in the mind and all settlers have an obligation not to perpetuate the systems of oppression, dispossession and genocide of our ancestors. But not only is it solidarity it is healing for our community which is traumatized without knowing it. We were indigenous once, whether English, Han or Iraqi and reclaiming the mindset, relationships and philosophy/spirituality can only do us good''.

"In the many decades we've had to reflect on our worst actions, we seem to have only retrenched further into bland denial and obstinate defensiveness. I think that our own history is too terrifying for most us to face, paralyzing our moral lives. This puts us in the exactly the right state to commit more horrors while commending ourselves for doing so''.

"My partner recently out of stress went nonverbal, and seeing her capacity to do things expand without the stress of being forced to verbalize was astounding. If she would be accommodated she’d be able to work. But most companies will not accommodate the spectrum of verbal needs especially if it is like “well she can talk some times”. She owes no one verbalization. Accommodations let us exist, and it feels like the world is telling my partner she should not exist."

"It really is astonishing to me that so many people seem to think absolute desperation to ensure basic survival needs is good incentive to work and not just a guaranteed way to completely burn people out and run their motivation into the ground. Absolutely wild thinking". 

"In fact, people are more likely to be creative, innovative, and inventive when they're not stressed to the gills and have enough free time to get enough rest and spend some off time thinking up new stuff and enjoying life. If life is drudgery, being inventive or creative is unlikely''.

"It's by design. It's a soft gen*cide of the "bottom tier" of the pyramid''.

Mattick

 Within the capital-labour relations which characterise the prevailing society, the producers have no direct control over production and the products it brings forth. At times, they may exert a kind of indirect control by way of wage struggles, which may alter the wage-profit ratio and therewith the course or tempo of the capital expansion process. Generally, it is the capitalist who determines the conditions of production. The workers have to agree in order to exist, for their only ‘means of livelihood is the sale of their labour power. Unless the worker accepts the exploitative conditions of capitalist production, he is ‘free’ only in the sense that he is free to starve. This was recognised long before there was a socialist movement. As early as 1767, Simon Linguet declared that wage-labour is merely a form of slave labour: In his view, it was even worse than slavery. “It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? ... He is free, you say. Ah. That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him ... These men, it is said, have no master – they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”[1] Two hundred years later this is essentially still the same. Although it is no longer outright misery which forces the workers in the advanced capitalist nations to submit to the rule of capital and to the wiles of capitalists, their lack of control over the means of production, their position as wage-workers, still marks them as a ruled class unable to determine its own destiny.

Paul Mattick

“Heterarchy, form of management or rule in which any unit can govern or be governed by others, depending on circumstances, and, hence, no one unit dominates the rest. Authority within a heterarchy is distributed. A heterarchy possesses a flexible structure made up of interdependent units, and the relationships between those units are characterized by multiple intricate linkages that create circular paths rather than hierarchical ones. Heterarchies are best described as networks of actors—each of which may be made up of one or more hierarchies—that are variously ranked according to different metrics. Etymologically speaking, the term is made up of the Greek words heteros, meaning “the other,” and archein, meaning “to rule.”