u/larryleggs

The Mormon factor, the Utah factor, the Idaho factor. These are some of the most underrated, underexplored elements of the game. If we're talking playing the game to win, which winning in this case means revolution, what do you do about them? And it's very underexplored, and it's an entire skill tree, an entire branch of the narrative that we might not see in the game currently, but if we progress the game, we're absolutely gonna have to consider how this will shape our party's stat spread, if you will

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Chingy, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg - Holidae In (Official Music Video)

Why do some Americans live in hotels, motels, inns, lodges, and whatever other word we want to use? We know what we're talking about. We're talking about housing that is supposed to be temporary, typically for a night, a weekend, maybe a week. But more and more Americans find themselves living in hotels.

Let's put those numbers in perspective. Statistics show that in America about 700,000 people experience homelessness, and at least some of those people are living in hotels, some are classified as housed. It's a grey area. But the actual hard number of people who are experiencing this is surprisingly difficult to track down, and I wouldn't hesitate to say that the statistics surrounding things like unemployment and homelessness and poverty in this country are cooked. Just the way that things are reported, and the way things are self-reported, the way these statistics are gathered, it would be very difficult to put a real number on the amount of people who are experiencing hotel poverty, hotel homelessness. Would they even be considered homeless? Some statistics point towards yes, some point towards no. And that's intentional. It would be a shame if the emperor was revealed to be wearing no clothes.

So let's put the numbers in perspective based on real-world experience. I pay 380 a week. 1,500 a month. In my area, 1,500 a month can get you a two-bedroom, one-bath, if you're really looking. But a one-bedroom, one-bath is about 1,200. So then why do I live in a hotel? It's the same reason why so many other Americans live in a hotel. The 1,500 a month is still less than the 5,000 to 7,000 you would need to secure an apartment. That sounds like a lot, but every landlord requires first month's rent, last month's rent, plus a security deposit that you won't get back. Never once have I gotten a security deposit back. One time, I paid for cleaners, paid money out of pocket. They came and cleaned, and I still didn't get the deposit back. So it's essentially an extra month's worth of rent to prove that you lived there.

Okay, so I want to go rent a two-bedroom apartment for what I'm already paying to live in the literal cheapest weekly-rate motel in this city. I'm gonna need at least 4,500 to do that. But that's not all you need, because utilities, you have to pay to get utilities cut on, you have to pay to have them install Wi-Fi, you have to pay to have them come out and cut the lights on. So let's throw another 500 on top of that 4,500, and now you're at a clean five grand to have housing. And all of this, of course, predicated on your credit score matching the minimum and on you having no evictions on your record.

You see, I've been staying at this hotel for about eight months, and I have never missed a payment. 'Cause if I miss a payment, I would be homeless. There's no "okay, we'll give you three days to get your stuff out." There's no 72-hour notice. It's: you haven't paid for the day, you have to leave. But eight months of 380 being paid consistently, that shows reliability. That shows money management. And yet, it reflects nothing nowhere. You could live in a hotel for a year, pay every week, on time, and it does absolutely nothing for your standing to change your credit score. That same credit score that may very well be denying you housing. That same credit score that is supposedly supposed to show whether you are a trustworthy person or not. That's why the landlords use it: "I'll only rent to someone with a 650 or higher."

But you have to have housing. You have to have somewhere to sleep, somewhere to shit, somewhere to shower, somewhere to put your belongings, somewhere to exist. And what other options are there? Like, let's be honest. You have the shelter system, which is underfunded, has strict requirements, and is only supposed to be temporary. And what else do you have? Maybe you could find a roommate on Facebook, but what if it's you and two kids? What if you have a dog? What if you have PTSD? What if you have, you know what I'm saying? And even then, you're trading privacy, you're trading resources, because here's the thing with the hotels: a lot of times, they're positioned closer than you would think to work. The hotel exists in the commercial district. The motel was built behind the Walmart. You work at the Walmart. The room on Facebook is 10 miles away from work. And you don't have a car because if you did, you'd be living in it. That's one of the other alternatives.

Even the roommate situation is predicated on your market material conditions. Can you find a roommate? Can you find a room? Maybe you're using something like PadSplit. But PadSplit doesn't let you have overnight guests. And maybe that complicates things because you get custody on the weekends. I mean, there's a certain level of dignity that does come with living in a motel that you don't get living in your car or living in a suburban house that someone bought and then turned into a six-person dormitory. Because that's what a lot of these cheap rooms are. I've seen rooms and looked at rooms where it's not even a room. It's a curtain that they put up in the dining room so they could fit just one more person in this home to maximize their profits. And you've got to pass a credit check for this shit too.

And yes, some of the people who live in motels are drug addicts. Some of the people who live in regular-ass houses are drug addicts. We often point to addiction and mental illness as the reason for people's inability to accelerate out of their environments. But remember, 380 a week for a room is no small amount of money to come up with. I'm not a drug addict. I work full-time and I pay my rent like any other God-fearing American. But because wages are low and because the rent is so expensive, the cycle keeps you in place. Because that's the other thing: how do you save up the four, five, maybe even six grand you need to get a vehicle to live in or to get an apartment to live in if every cent you earn outside of maybe 20 or 30 is going directly to a landlord? And for some people it's even worse. Some people get stuck in a cycle where they're paying the daily rate, where your only goal for that day is to make the 87 you need to have a house, to have a shelter, to be able to take a shower, to have dignity.

Let's think about this materially. The hotel poverty issue is only going to continue to accelerate as more people find themselves evicted due to job loss, due to being laid off, due to market downturns. That's what happened to me. I lost my job, having been replaced by AI, and for the first three months, I lived off of savings. For the next three months, I sold everything I had and lived off of that. And then you find yourself in an empty room with everything you've worked for gone, and the rent still due. The landlord never stops extracting. You could sell everything you own and give all of that money to the landlord, and he will feel nothing when he serves you the 72-hour notice on your door to get the fuck out. The only good thing about that scenario is that you'll have a lot less stuff to fit in your motel room.

The solution to this problem is, quite frankly, simpler than you think. In my city, there are about four to five hotels that are clustered within a low-income area. And these hotels have all the trappings of the type of hotel that you would imagine. I don't even like calling them hotels. They are motels in the truest sense. And so these motels end up being blights. They're not blights because of the people who live there. They're blights because the people who live there live in structurally oppressive conditions. Because if you've been paying every red cent you can get, well, you're not going to Six Flags. You're just going to buy a fucking couple of tall boys and sit outside and drink. It's just the nature of being in poverty. Your leisure time comes differently than everyone else.

So what should be done about these blight motels? The city should seize them with eminent domain. If you've been staying there, keep your room. The city should turn the motels into transitional housing. The rates should be lowered. The people who live there should be given an opportunity to uplift themselves. If you were paying 380 a month, and then the city suddenly comes in and seizes the ownership, and then the rates get reduced down from 1,500 a month to a much more manageable 1,000, maybe even 800, paying 200 a week, well, now you've got a chance to uplift yourself. Now, almost half the money you were sending to the landlord can get put into savings. And maybe even a savings that you've worked with the city to get set up. Because a lot of these people don't have banks. Everything's done in cash. They might not even have identification. They're missing documents. It's poverty life. So the city should come in and have the programs available to the people who need them after seizing through eminent domain.

When you look at the structural layout of a motel, you couldn't have a kitchen in every room, but you could have a community kitchen. You couldn't have everyone having their own private yard, but you could build a basketball court right on the property. Converting these hotels, motels, structurally; they are motels, laid out like motels, doors opening outside, but some of them have different layouts that are more akin to a hotel. The one I stay in, the doors open into the inside, but the inside is basically accessible from the outside. It's an inn. But regardless, the layout of the motel is conducive towards people socializing, people gathering in the lobby, people hanging out around outside.

And right now, because the police have quotas, police are looking for easy licks to meet those quotas. So right now, if you stand around outside of the motel room you are paying for, there's a pretty good chance you'll have to do the walk. They can arrest you for anything, even if they don't have probable cause. All it takes is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You pay more than what most people pay in rent, and yet you are treated like you're already a criminal for doing so. Some of the nicest apartments in this city for a one-bedroom are less than what I pay a month, and I could guarantee you that those people are allowed to walk outside of their home, smoke a cigarette, talk to somebody, without having to worry about the police putting them in cuffs, patting them down, and asking them why they're staying at their home. And that's intentional. Because the hotel, motel, inn setting is effectively a transitional space between incarceration.

I've been living here for eight months. The number of times I've spoken to someone who had been staying here for only a week, or two weeks, or three weeks: "Yeah, I just got out of prison. I just got released from jail. I was in jail for six months. I have nowhere to go. I'm staying here until I can figure something out." Or: "I was in prison. I have nowhere to go. I'm staying here until I can figure something out." It's a transitional space. It's one of the reasons why it's so heavily policed.

The motel, hotel, inn industrial complex is intentionally designed to discipline members of the reserve army of labor. Because, how do you fucking get 80 a day? You're doing odd jobs, you're getting paid in cash. "Yeah, I go hold the sign up outside in the heat, and I spin it around, and they pay me enough to fucking have two beers after work and a place to sleep. Yeah, I lay drywall. Yeah, I'm working McDonald's and Burger King." People who are in the bottom tier of the permanent underclass.

And then some of those people go, "Oh, well, everyone around me is an addict because I live in poverty, and I need to make an extra 200 this week to pay rent." And next thing you know, you're bagging up the zip into nickels to flip. And then, while you're flipping those nicks, the police, who are basically watching you 24 hours a day because you live in poverty, roll up, and next thing you know, the transitional state of the motel transitions you to being controlled by the state. And the landlord don't care; he just wants his money. The landlord don't give a fuck. The landlord goes out of his way to not know or care about what is happening with the people who are staying there, because that's business. That's capitalism.

There was a woman here recently. She's a homeless woman with two kids. And she decided to check into this motel because she was about to give birth. She's nine months pregnant, had a C-section already scheduled. And she's paying by the day. Not only do I live here, I also work here. And I watched this woman, nine months pregnant, sort through the change in her purse because she was ten dollars short on the day. You just gotta sit with that in those moments. There was nothing I could have done aside from maybe paying the difference out of my own pocket. And it is, at the end of the day, a business. It, like everything else in this country, is designed to make money at the expense of people. And if it did not make money at the expense of people, it would not exist. There would be another person doing it. That's why I don't see the capitalist as a moral position; I see it as a structural one.

People live in motels for all types of reasons, but the fundamental reason why they live in motels is because capitalism, especially American capitalism, has to maintain dire circumstances of poverty for a portion of the working population to discipline the rest of the population. You better lock in and work that extra day this week, because you don't want to be nine months pregnant, sorting through the purse, looking for a few quarters of hope. Many on the left will say that the college campus, the university grounds, are our best place to organize from and recruit within. But I know, based on the fact that there is a flyer in the hotel lobby right now that says "DSA Food Share, every Wednesday," that there are other places we can be organizing in.

I had a long piece prepared, and it might still go up, about the lack of endorsements from some key players in our coalition in relation to Francesca Hong's loss (remember, not endorsing someone can also be a political power move). But one thing I've been told is that she didn't purchase any TV ads, and I want to touch on this for just a brief moment.

I work a minimum wage job. There is a TV, and it plays the local news. There's multiple TVs in fact, and they play multiple local news stations. The local news, on commercial break, is always playing political ads. I am the young audience that Hong was targeting with her campaign. In my local sphere, a lot of the politicians I know are running, I know are running because I've seen their ridiculous political attack ads at work. Lots of "men in girl's sports" and "protect our kids from the trans menace" in these ads here in Florida!

If I look back on the jobs I've held, nearly every one of em had a TV somewhere on the job that played the local news. Whether that was working at Whataburger, where the front lobby had a TV playing the news so anyone at the front counter could see it, or working in tech, an office, a hotel, a restaurant, a bar, there is always a TV tuned to the local news. Even working at Wal-mart they had one in the breakroom and of course the electronics section.

The point is, you think you're not reaching people because who is watching TV? I don't watch television. I have not turned on a television willingly in some time. I just use my computer to stream, right? Why would I watch TV when I can just use my laptop? But I don't have my laptop at work. At work you can constantly hear the news playing in the corner of your ear. At work I see these political attack ads. That's how I know who's running in my local area. Despite the fact that you'd think that cable TV ads would never reach someone in my demographic.

So here we have someone running on a very pro-working class policy campaign, and they're not running ads in the place where workers are most likely to see them, even if it's just by happenstance or by chance. At the same time, the opponent is almost certainly running political attack ads on Hong on television. So now she's absent from the conversation, and the only time you hear her name is when she's under attack. With no counter-narrative, the opponent gets to define the narrative by default. The worker who is the captive audience for the cable news pundit while they work their service job is not hearing these working class policies presented in their labor environment. The message of the campaign would hit even harder when the people you're addressing standing in the very conditions the ad claims to tackle.

When we think of television ads in relation to a campaign, we think, why would we do that? Most people are looking at TikTok. Most people are going home and turning on Tubi. From what I was told, she bought Tubi ads. Like I said, you wouldn't expect these cable TV ads to reach someone in my demo, but they do because there's a missing pillar: all of the people who see a TV when they're at work, which is a lot of people. If your policies are directly speaking to the working class, think about it. Someone at a job they only keep for the healthcare catches your ad talking about healthcare, and they're going to be much more compelled to vote for you than if they're at home, turning on a Tubi movie, then a commercial break hits, they get up and go to the kitchen, and they never even see your ad because you're hitting them when they're already disengaged. At home, advertising can be skipped, ignored, muted, or encountered while the viewer is doing something else, advertising during leisure viewing is fundamentally different than advertising seen while in a labor setting. At work, the television may be part of the physical environment for an entire shift, with no individual control over programming, I literally cannot turn off the local Fox News station.

One of the reasons I even pay attention to what's on the work TV is because I'm at work. There's really nothing else to pay attention to.

Just some food for thought.

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Time under capitalism is non-linear. Under capitalism, time is produced unevenly through the concentration of material and communicative infrastructure; it moves differently depending on material conditions. "Small town lag" is the idea that what's trendy in the metropole becomes trendy in the rural areas only after it is no longer trendy in the metropole. This is because time effectively progresses slower outside the metropole.

Sexual politics are no different. Woke 1.0 existed primarily online and within the metropole. The internet, specifically capitalist social media platforms, pushes information from the metropole outward, and pulls little from the rural inward, the rural has fewer on-ramps because it essentially exists within the material shadow, the past of the metropole. Less information flows from the rural into the metropole. The internet smears time. Rather than flattening this spatio-temporal hierarchy through a supposed "free flow" of information, the capitalist controlled platforms intensify time distortion by algorithmically privileging the metropole’s content production while the rural is positioned mostly as a consumption zone for that content. This is why "America A" and "America B" exist as a memetic concept. America A often does not know what is happening in America B; we've all seen a song (maybe a country song) that charts highly but none of us have heard it. That's because we are 'tuned in' temporally to America A, and the information from America B flows unevenly. America B, on the other hand, is almost certainly aware of what culture from America A is at the top of the charts, or perhaps was at the top of the charts.

This becomes crucial when organizing in places outside of the metropole. The conditions in Seattle are going to be fundamentally different from small-city rural Florida. Since time moves non-linearly, and because more information flows out of the metropole than flows in, the rural organizer is essentially able to see potential futures in the present. They can study how specific material conditions within the metropole generated specific organizing outcomes, treating the city's recent past as a kind of laboratory. America A has robust sexual education and Christian conservatism is not the default culture. We can see how 'Woke 1.0' was predicated on those conditions. A place where it's illegal to open a dance club is going to operate with a completely different set of cultural expectations than a space full of them.

It is easy to assume that the temporal lag, the "small town lag", is an inherent disadvantage to organizers outside of the metropole, but this disadvantage can be inverted. When we think about how our disadvantage can be inverted towards new forms of struggle, we see that existing within the future-past provides unique positionality for the rural organizer.

>At certain times in the revolutionary struggle, the difficulties outweigh the favorable conditions and so constitute the principal aspect of the contradiction and the favorable conditions constitute the secondary aspect. But through their efforts the revolutionaries can overcome the difficulties step by step and open up a favorable new situation, thus a difficult situation yields place to a favorable one.

>"On Contradiction"

One can think about what futures flowed from the metropole that have already taken root in the rural, and notice how the internet transmits those futures as ghosts. You might see that consent language propagated, but the ghost arrived without the accompanying idea that sexuality is inherently rooted in trauma or that the primary political task is minimizing harm. A rural organizer can look at the material conditions of their own setting and consider what results came from dealing with similar conditions in the metropole's past. This enables you to consider futures lost, approaches not taken, misfired actions, tactics that led to poor outcomes. Potentialities are stronger in the past when you have access to the future. This is to be a hauntological necromancer, or really, a kind of Frankenstein. You're not resurrecting a single lost future whole; you're taking pieces from various dead moments and stitching them together into a new being that can walk.

Right now, in real time, we're seeing a reconsideration of woke 1.0 rhetoric. And a lot of it was honestly pretty toxic and very sex negative. When you try to pinpoint that sex negativity, it can be hard because so much of it is wrapped in therapy language. Why therapy language? Because the metropole is more academically inclined, more educated, so the discourse gets saturated with clinical and academic jargon. Much of "leftism" as a subcultural current, is downstream not from the working class, but from the lecture halls. When that language gets imported into the rural, what's arriving is already a ghost, something made for another time, another place, that has already died in its original context. It served its dialectical purpose there and now it's echoing into a place where time moves slower. Meanwhile the reconsideration is happening in the present, so we can watch the old framework being questioned while still feeling its echoes in our own space.

If you're from a place with robust sexual education, a weak Christian conservative presence, and a strong academic core, you had the necessary soil for woke 1.0 to take root. The rural zone lacks so much of that. In the place I'm organizing in, you can't even sell a vibrator; if ran a smoke shop and wanted to stock them, it would be illegal. People have tried to open dance clubs and the government shuts down the possibility ecause it violates the Christian conservative values that maintain the area. That's a fundamentally different set of material conditions than Los Angeles or New York or Seattle.

A lot of woke 1.0 rhetoric is rooted in an academically charged, trauma-based discourse where sex is treated as something inherently traumatic. "Sex is harmful because of how it exists within the relations of capital, how do we reduce the harm of that, since people are going to do it anyway?" The power dynamics have been analyzed to death in academia. So it becomes a harm reduction project. That's the takeaway from a lot of woke 1.0 language. But that framing is really counterintuitive if you try to import it into a place where the only college will kick you out for coming out as gay or lesbian, where you can't dance, where everything is much more repressed. The energy is entirely different.

Imagine Seattle around 2011. An interesting move then might have been a sex-positive group distributing sex toys: "write to us and we'll mail you a dildo, we're trying to close the orgasm gap." That discourse happened, it existed, and now it's no longer needed in that location. But that discourse has not happened here and may be deeply necessary here. The orgasm gap as a concept? Needed. Naming how patriarchal values drive sex negativity? Needed. The hauntological necromancer might see this past as a potential future, because in a place like this, the orgasm gap is a real, material issue as predicated by the socially conservative christian patriarchal values that make up the hegemony here.

A lot of woke 1.0 was sex negative precisely because it was a temporal reaction to an earlier, intensely overt sexual positivity. The dildos get distributed in 2011. Woke 1.0 congeals around 2018, 2019. Temporal distance. The conditions for sex positivity opened the door for the sex negativity of woke 1.0. It's a dialectical movement, thesis and antithesis, and the metropole is currently grinding toward some kind of synthesis, hence the current reconsideration, hence the very memetic term "Woke 1.0". If you know that's how it worked, then in a rural zone you can see what worked in that past to build sexual positivity while also thinking about what didn't work that led to the backlash. That act of translating a ghost into a living context, inherently generates a new antithesis, the local negation. The rural organizer begins entering into a new, context-specific dialectical movement. In this way the 'resurrection' becomes the means for creating the new synthesis.

This is a different world when it's illegal to dance in your county. Organizers outside the metropole are constantly intaking rhetoric from places we are not in. We can carry in some of it, but not all of it. Not all of it worked. Not all of it was successful. Some of it led to backlash. Some of it was actually reactionary. Identifying those pieces is crucial when you are seeing the future as a ghost of the past. If you live outside the metropole, you are living in the past of the metropole's future.

A lot of people operate under the idea that history is inherently, linearly progressive, so whatever happened in the past must be more conservative, and whatever is closer to the present must be more progressive. But that's not how time actually works. Time bounces between two poles. Sometimes things are reactionary, sometimes progressive; it's an ebb and a flow. If you can find the space between the ebbs, between the flows, that's where the praxis points are. The hauntological necromancer is effectively Frankenstein. Because you're not resurrecting a single lost future, you're taking pieces from various lost futures and attempting to synthesize them together into a new being. A new monster that is the more than the sum of it's parts.

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I'm sure someone else (glances at my folder of Adorno PDFs) has already written about this topic extensively but I just wanna do some low stakes ranting about it.

Here's an example: Imagine a 41 year old, firmly a "millennial", they might identify as such. There might be certain things about yourself that you associate with this millennial identity, these things are almost always consumption based. Imagine this: During a friendly discussion at the local gastropub, this 41 year old millennial laments to their friends that they'd never be able to be friends with someone who's 25, what do they even have in common? 25 years old? I bet they didn't grow up with the Nintendo 64!

See the product as identity? It's a pretty boorish example but I think it works. Now imagine that millennial is working at an Amazon warehouse with, a sizable amount of 25 year olds. They end up sticking with others in their own age bracket, after all they have things in common, they can discuss the days of yore "remember blockbuster?" again, another product. The zoomer on the other hand might bring up commodities that the millennial is unfamiliar with. How can the zoomer relate to the millennial who's never watched Wendigoon or didn't grow up watching Regular Show? Again, consumption as identity which circles back to identity as consumption. "I do X because I'm Y". On the warehouse floor you see the material reality of labor, the shared exploitation, bodily strain, surveillance management, the need for collective action, but this is obscured by that prefabricated identity. The 41-year-old and the 25-year-old Amazon workers are objectively in the same class, their interests materially aligned against Bezos. But the generational discourse gives them a superficial, consumption-based “common ground” within their age bracket and a manufactured alienation from those a few years younger.

Even without the intergenerational discourse, the division, the stereotypes, the memes, we can see clearly how these marketing labels as identity immediately break apart the working class. Do you need to be a part of the same generation to enjoy the the sight of the wind rustling through the leaves of a green tree on a beautiful summer afternoon? How much music is labeled as Gen X that's enjoyed by Zoomers? Who can't enjoy a Madonna song? What about some of the classic folk tracks? Do we need to be in the same generation to get something out of Pete Seegar? How much of the human experience is shared universally compared to how much is segregated by birth year? Do you need to be in the same generation to know you don't get paid enough, get worked to the bone, and your boss is a prick? How much of this generation as identity discourse strips us of our ability to build relations with each other as workers? If we can't build relations with each other, and our ideas about ourselves are based on consumption, then we become hyperalienated beings who repost "Look at what they took from you" memes about Pizza Hut interiors.

But the boomers you might say! Those awful evil boomers are to blame for everything! I mean, is Elon Musk a boomer? Peter Thiel? Bezos? (maybe) Is JD Vance a boomer? The ruling class is multi-generational. We have to be as well. My DSA chapter is like 60% boomer retiree aged women, could you imagine how much less effective our chapter would be if everyone who wasn't a boomer made it a problem that half the chapter is? For every boomer retiree at the boat launch here there's another 2 who are working minimum wage door greeter jobs or lined up for our mutual aid food share because living on social security is HARD. People of all ages come through that line. People of all ages work the food share. All of this is coming from a person who's been describing themselves as an "elder zoomer" for a decade. I'm not saying that breaking this mindset will be easy, even typing this I'm like "come on, they're fucking boomers it's okay to hate them!" but it's not pragmatic and it's anti-materialist. The year you were born might determine somethings but it seldom determines your relation to the means of production. The benefits that the boomers saw where only really accessible to the white boomers as well, remember, black families didn't even get the GI Bill from WW2.

I'm not saying you can't factor age into policy ie "gambling apps are targeting young men specifically", but "how do we organize millennials against gambling companies" would be a brain dead thing to ask no? You would ask "How do we organize workers against gambling companies?" This generational shit is getting old. Full stop. I'm tried of listening to tiktoks and video essays about nostalgia and shit people did when they were bought at 11. I'm tried of entire traits being put on to people based on this completely nonsense neoliberal concept. Shit has become secular astrology for some people. I think it also acts as a form of solipsism, "anyone who's younger than me has never experienced and can't relate to X" is intellectually lazy and acts to uplift your own world view as the pseudo default, everyone else is an abbreviation of it. "What do I have in common with someone who didn't grow up playing the N64/PSone?" has nothing to do with age really, if you think about it. Because you could have grown up in that era and just had a class position that was too poor to afford a console. You might just not have played video games. You might not have had consumption oriented parents. Generations are a very middle class consumer sort of ideology.

All in all, I think generations as a framework are counter revolutionary and only further the division of the working class, which is what they want.

A man enters a school with a gun. A man drops a bomb on an elementary school in Iran. What happens when the values of our nation's heroes and our nation's worst dregs are the same?

Police abolition. Prison abolition. Community justice. Deep revolutionary justice forms. These have been all over the feed as of late, and I think there's something some people are missing. The fundamental bit that I feel like a lot of people don't understand is that when you're poor, the places you live are occupied territory. The police occupy your neighborhoods. When you go to the corner store that's closest to you so you can get the three-dollar meal deal, because that's what you're eating, that's what you're consuming, that's the place closest to you, two blocks away from where you live. And when you walk into the parking lot, you get met with the police camera and the alarm and the voice. This is an automated recording. You are being recorded. This is a no loitering area. Loitering is not permitted. Violators will be prosecuted. Look into the history of loitering laws if you haven't, that history is as racial. The emergence of policing in the US is racial. Slave catchers.

So you walk to the Circle K and it's like, damn, are we in a war zone? I live here. But it's clearly not my neighborhood. I pay rent to be here. But it's clearly not my place to be. I work a job. But I can only be here if I spend my wage. I'm walking to the store to get a coffee and a hot dog. Basics. How the fuck am I getting told I'm gonna be prosecuted if I don't get the fuck out of here? By a Camera on a pole, by an automated voice, by someone at a desk pressing a button. Stick around to long and we've all seen the news reports and videos on Twitter and the promises of police reform after someone is killed. Existing as a poor person in America is actively hostile. It's hostile. It's a hostile environment.

This is the thing. I live in a motel. I live in an "inn". This isn't Skyrim, there's no porridge and songs by the fire, just poor people and laments of being trapped financially here to avoid homelessness. There is no fucking place named Relax Inn in this country that is not a cheap, crackhead-ass motel. But crackheads are people too. Crackheads might not even do crack. Crackheads might just be regular sober people who live in motels and have to wash their clothes in the shower -- that's what I do. This motel is not nice enough to have laundry on site. But if you're in a position like this, of course the drugs become an easy escape. You are surrounded by bleakness and hostility that dehumanizes you at every turn. I'm 3 tall boys deep writing this, because while I was at work, I work here, there was a pregnant woman, really pregnant, I mean about to give birth, who was a few dollars short for the day. The day. 24 hours. I waived the few dollars because I can do that but she mentioned, that her C-section was scheduled for Monday. It is Saturday night. She will be homeless Sunday if she can't pay. We feed the homeless at our mutual aid food share every week, we know how easy it is to get arrested for being homeless here. A baby born in a jail cell. The mind spirals. Abolition isn't just dismantling prisons but creating conditions where survival does not require self-annihilation. The police lights still flood into the stairwell. I live here because I can't afford a real apartment, the first and last month's rent, and a security deposit to move into an apartment. I work a fucking job five days a week. But this is what I can afford. This is transitional low-income housing, if you really wanna think about it. How much of this is predicated on the private property relation, and what do the police really protect?

And so what is everybody doing on a Saturday night? Standing outside, talking, communicating. But there's three police cars in the parking lot across the street with their lights on, looking at us. And there's a live camera in the parking lot that's alive and goes right to the police department. So everything you're doing outside of your own home, where you live, is recorded and monitored. These police are occupying your neighborhood. Maybe not yours, but they occupy mine. These police are not there to protect us. They are there to occupy us. Exploit us. Abuse us. Kill us. Attack us. Keep us alienated and dehumanized. Paranoid and in fear of our being.

You're outside on the stairwell. You are minding your business, just existing, maybe playing some Dolph on the phone speaker -- keep in mind, you're outside sitting feet away from the place that you call home, the place where all of your belongings are, the place where you sleep, the place you pay rent to live. One man's motel is another man's studio apartment. And it might be a motel, yes, but it also might be a low-income housing project, might be just a cheap apartment in general. And you walk outside and there are three or four police cars there with floodlights on, pointed at your place, just sitting there. And they'll tell you it's for your safety, but that's not how it feels. No one feels like that. You feel like you need to go inside. You feel like you are going to be criminalized for simply sitting outside, enjoying a beer, enjoying a cigarette, and existing in the real fucking world. And we wonder why we are so detached and alienated.

And what is crazy is you will sit with three or four other people because everyone else is wanting to smoke a cigarette and share a beer. And they all get the same feeling. Well, maybe so-and-so is, you know, flying a little too close to the sun. Maybe so-and-so, well, didn't that person have drugs the other night? Or didn't this person have this? It doesn't matter what the discussion boils down to. The feeling is that you are being oppressed, literally pushed down. And so the discussion reaches a boiling point and everyone realizes that it's probably better that we all go inside. Because the lights are bright, the flock camera is watching, it's a live stream right to the PD, and you haven't done anything wrong. You worked all week, you just want to exist.

There are classes of people that have this as their daily experience. And there are classes of people who have to be told about this through abstracted blog posts. And the class of people that has to deal with this is almost certainly the one that is pushing for abolishment and real, actual revolutionary reform of the justice system because all it takes is them asking, hey, can I see your ID? You got anything on you? What was their cause? You were standing outside of the place that you live. And next thing you know, oh, you got, is that a weed pen? THC? Oh, you bought it from a smoke shop? I don't know about all that. I don't know if you bought it from a smoke shop or not. I, yeah, there's a smoke shop literally two blocks away, but the cop doesn't know. And so you gotta do the walk. And next thing you know, you gotta do six months of probation and pay $5,000 in court fees. My co-worker, who lives in the same motel as me and works at the same locations as I do, is currently dealing with this! Can't make it easy to escape the poverty trap. At every turn the poor body must be extracted from, and the police are a key part of that extraction. You buy the weed pen to get the escape only to find the extraction goes deeper than the head shop overcharging. That's how it works. They take and they take and they take. It is an oppressive, extractive, occupying force. The police do not serve or protect anyone but the capitalist class. And if you think otherwise, then your interests, despite what you've been telling yourself, might just align more with the capitalist than with the workers who are living in the low-income housing, the motel, the trailer park, the fucking barrio, wherever the fuck it may be, the inner city fucking rundown shotgun houses, where you gotta walk a mile to get to the damn corner store to buy the Don Julio that's on a fucking markup. You're paying $79.99 for a bottle of Don Julio that you can't even drink on the porch or the equivalent of your porch because you live in occupied territory.