In my place I’m seeing communal polarisation increasing. Or it is becoming more evident. How would one oppose that in a populace where religion and caste hold good sway, without the opposition giving it more power accidently?

That is a very difficult question to answer! You may already know better than I do, being embedded in your local context. But I can suggest some things to consider.

The first is that religion is not a simple good or bad thing when it comes to organizing. It is another consciousness that can compete with or work with a liberation project. It will depend on its structure, how it exerts powers and who it antagonizes vs. helps. There are two big negative forms of political religiosity that are dangerous to liberation. The first is the obvious reactionary conflation of religion with tradition and factionalization, where it is used as a way to create a societal rift and oppression on the basis of religion. This is largely a distraction from the material basis of oppression, but is it very effective and harmful. The second is when religion is used to “check out” of struggle. For example, I know a local religious leader that tells people that it’s okay that so many children are killed by Israelis in Palestine because they are martyred in heaven, the only thing that really matters. While this soothes some of the pain, it can also lead to a form of material apathy and turning away from action. With that said, there are also things like liberation theology and working with religious groups towards liberatory ends. It’s something that has to be navigated on a case-by-case basis. It is not wrong to, for example, adopt the position that X group is copptonf Y religion and that this should be rejected, even if you do not personally subscribe to religion Y in the first place. You will be more powerful if you (as in, any organization you may be in) find a group that focuses on religion Y from an angle that is compatible with yours and for you to keep each other safe and strong.

Regarding caste, does this mean you are in South Asia or otherwise interacting with th concept of caste as derived from it? This is also a very challenging thing to consider and there are very good points to be made for addressing caste first vs. class first and how they overlap and are different. If you are in India, I would focus on how you might oppose Hindutva from an angle that is caste-critical and whether there are people in your area that are interested in opposing both. People who have been assigned a lower caste will be more likely to see the injustice and be able to act in their own favor and build momentum, though you can also find and make good use of “caste traitors”.

Anyways your question is really about communal polarization. This is not something you can simply prevent as its own quantity. What you can do is build towards the better factions within that community and push your own projects. Our enemies create this polarization, they create and maintain fascists and the false consciousnesses that divide us against ourselves. We can’t create unity that centers those false consciousness, is what I’ll suggest. Class consciousness is at least a correct consciousness that opposes this division and if you include the additional valid liberation struggles you’ll be able to build from firm ground.

I should say that this is not the kind of thing anyone can do alone. All of this would only be realistic to discuss as part of an organization to which you would be contributing your efforts and knowledge. So my real advice is to see if you can identify an anti-capitalist group in your community that seems at least 70% good and see if you can join it. And please do so as safely and securely as possible (in-person communication is best, do not use Whatsapp or Facebook etc).

I’ve seen leftist n leftish organisations being affected by this.

Lefty orgs are basically always in some form of drama or crisis, so this isn’t necessarily an odd thing, haha. I can’t give a useful opinion without knowing more about how they’ve been affected, though.

Thank you.

Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.

Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.

There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you’re really interested in, in particular.

I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It’s simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.

There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.

Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson’s Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it’s the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.

If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won’t be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx’s main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich’s summary and then Michael Roberts’ commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you’ll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.

I’ve been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don’t have the foundation and context(didn’t understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.

That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It’s a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren’t like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It’s a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren’t making a lot of sense.

Are there any books that you’d recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?

For the skills I personally don’t think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven’t read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it’s a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just… not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it’s the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you’ll end up in jail or something.

Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.

As has consistently been the case for people in our position, our power comes from our ability to organize and take collective action and to develop the question you asked even further and for the conditions in our own countries. This in contrast to what our rulers tell us gives us power (in reality, they give us instructions on how to maintain their power), which is usually some kind of institutional cooption, like joining an NGO or nagging people to vote for their oppressors or doing some slight participation in a milquetoast political party.

Increasing our organization and choosing good actions to take is not an easy process, though it is often surprisingly simple to describe. To be more organized we have to meet with one another, we must gain the skills to convince others to join up with us, to compile the information needed to contact interested parties, to strategically work in coalition with other organizations, to train each other regularly in the core tasks or running any organization. To choose the right actions to take, we must read political theory and history, teach this to each other, and understand how it applies (or does not) to our current situations. The political theory that is the most useful is that which is usually not taught, not even to criticize, but is glossed over or told stories about - it’s the political theory of the left and a fearless critical reading of history.

Because our institutions educationally neglect us so severely, particularly when it comes to the tools for our own liberation, it can take a while before you might feel like you are confident or ready to go. That is okay and normal. There’s nothing wrong with taking some time to read or to simply try things out a little first.

So I would recommend two things.

The first is to begin reading the political theory of the left and history. There may already be great authors and movements where you live, or there may have been some in the past. They can help you get an idea for who our enemy is (the ruling class) and what different movements have attempted (successfully and not) in the past. Try just one book at first. I often recommend that people start with Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti, as it is a good primer in what we all need to unlearn, or at least take a skeptical lens to, when it comes to the mass media telling of history and politics vs. what actually happened. The value of reading is that it will help you and everyone you talk to choose good actions to take collectively. Those who do not understand the nature of the system we must fight will choose the wrong actions and may even hurt our interests. So education is not just a good thing in itself, it is a tool of political organization.

The second is to get involved with an organization that does mass left politics. There are certain kinds of organizations I would recommend avoiding and I’ll explain more if you ask about it. But most organizations that take a proper ground-up approach and are not an NGO will probably be a useful experience for you and your ability to politically organize. It will likely be useful even if you eventually leave that group for another!

Don’t have a genocidal sundowning segregationist nominated without a rank-and-file voting process with multiple candidates. Or accept that you are not really in charge of any of this when it comes to The Democratic Party and therefore you should place your political focus on ways to build and wield power that do not depend on it.

Use something like rclone (that can use file change deltas) when you just need to copy files to remotes and feel free to combine it with an incremental backup solutions like Borg or restic or some custom rsync scripting. Example: keep a Borg repository of your laptop or emails or whatever with whatever retention policy you want. Then copy your repository anywhere with rclone or similar.

A single hand pie filled with brown sits in the center, slowly crumbling to bits

Sure but I’ve gotta ask: why not write 7 paragraphs of run-on sentences like a true proletarian!?

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don’t.

This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.

As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a “Mexican” regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.

But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?

At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.

It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon’s Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.

So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!’ crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).

Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I’ll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.

Thank you for the reflection and acknowledgement! That is a rare and good thing and a very good thing to cultivate. Nobody is perfect and I also try to engage in this as early and often as possible. Eventually, it becomes something that is preemptive rather than reactive and you won’t have to look back on things very often and say, “I don’t like what I said” (something I’ve had to do many times myself!). I also think that online environments cultivate a maximalist approach to personal agitation even when it is a situation where that shouldn’t need to happen, so cultivating reflection like this helps us remain socially adept here and elsewhere. We also lose resolution of expression in this format.

In terms of resources, left perspectives on abolition are actually about as old as a discernable left re: capitalism. Early works took sex work being negative for granted and extended their analysis of marriage to include this commodification of (usually women’s) bodies, synthesizing an early form of feminism. Marxist analysis - from Marx and Engels themselves - of the family under capitalism describes the core of this idea of commodification and of women as a marginalized subclass whose marginalization serves a function within capitalism and is therefore maintained by it (and has mores that were invented by it, despite the pretense that “traditional” views towards interpersonal relationships are ancient). It is actually quite revealing to look into even just how relationships among European serfs worked differently.

So there are a few ways to begin approaching this issue and diving down into it further and further. If you prefer to build “from the ground up”, which is better for understanding what these positions are referring to because they use Marxist and anarchist language, you’d want to start with Marx, Engels, Goldman, etc as background and then look at their writings on women, families, and prostitution. For example, Engels’ On The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, while flawed, will lay out some key concepts and the angle from which this was and largely still is approached. Reading Das Kapital is challenging but would provide this with very useful context. Instead of going straight into Das Kapital, for most people I would recommend a companion guide like that written by Heinrich, you could read it side-by-side with any Marxist work and it would be helpful. The ideas expressed there constantly reappear under Marxist feminism (and not all “Marxists”, to their shame, have been feminists!). You will find the same core logic presented in later socialist projects. There are many examples, but Sankara was particularly outspoken about this and women’s liberation more generally, and seeing how it embeds in the conditions of Burkina Faso are revealing.

From the angle of a “liberal-friendly” introduction: there is a somewhat liberal but still materially-embedded abolition organization that lays out the core ideas borrowed from this left tradition here: www.demandabolition.org. As an NGO it suffers from tying one hand behind its back in terms of taking action and hiding any semblance of radicalism, but it has many of the ideas and presents them in a “liberal-friendly” way.

From the angle of a modern article summarizing the position (though citing no sources): https://medium.com/@ihla/on-the-necessity-of-sex-trade-abolition-as-a-revolutionary-marxist-line-2516bb9516db

From an anarchist perspective: Emma Goldman’s On The Traffic of Women. Anarchists who cite this work will often go in the same direction. Unfortunately this is less common in the West in modern times, as the label of anarchism itself has often become diluted into a vulgar horizontalism that doesn’t know its real theoretical and historical grounding. But there are still real anarchists out there that do actually read and know these things and will cite these works.

You’re making an argument against sex work so assuming you expect others to be convinced by it, I think it’s fair to expect a rational argument.

I gave a very basic intro to the idea that there are leftist feminist abolitionists out there. I’m not trying to convice you, I simply offer a path forward for those with curiosity and good faith. You expect things I never offered and brought a combative approach, despite clearly being very new to this topic. Unfortunately, you blame me for this state is things, even though you won’t even attempt to process the basic mind-expanding example I originally provided and have reminded you of twice. It’s hard to move forward when the simple things are turned into roadblocks.

It doesn’t have to be mathematical, but at least rational and honest so I don’t think it’s absurd to point out what I see as a dishonest persuasive technique.

There is nothing I’ve said that’s irrational or dishonest. I just took note that you’re appealing to logical fallacies where it simply makes no sense to attempt the application. You are guaranteed to find some “error in reasoning” if you rely so heavily on this category error, funnily enough, even though no actual errors have been made. It is, very obviously, just defensive behavior. Appeal to emotion? For what thesis? I have no thesis, I merely introduced a basic concept to you.

Given the discussion seems to have devolved now into accusations, I don’t think there’s much more to be gained for either of us. From my perspective, your assertion that sex work is a form of rape is not justified

I didn’t say sex work was a form of rape. I think I’ve explained the related concept 3, 4 times?

simply asserted and then you use that as a basis on which to argue.

Yes this is what introducing people to concepts looks like. You describe the idea and how it relates to some other ones. As I have mentioned 3 times now, you are free to educate yourself in this topic at your leisure. I have never projected the pretense that I was interested in demonstrating the veracity of the entire position from first principles.

A broader appeal to the nature of work under capitalism is simply a non sequitur.

It’s literally just a comparison to get you thinking and questioning. It does not contain the structure of an argument. How could it be a non sequitur? These terms do actually mean things, you know.

You have to show that the impact is similar if you want to make a valid argument here as to why they should be considered the same.

I haven’t done any equating, so your depiction of my claims is false. You’re trying to find flaws in a series of positions you’ve now imagined. I again invite you to go and actually read about this topic rather than pretend I’ve presented a formal argument. At the moment, I believe I’m still trying to get you to acknowledge that forced labor and rape is something you’d think of as worse than just forced labor. Unfortunately you are trying to fight rather than acknowledge the obvious. Or maybe you don’t think it’s worse? Who knows. Can’t seem to get a straight answer.

If you have no interest in doing so, that’s completely fair but you can’t expect anyone to be convinced.

I expect curious people to read up about it or ask questions. I have been fairly plain in presenting this as a very basic description of a position held by leftist sex trade abolitionists. Not a “I’m going to argue the case to everyone” kind of situation. You can tell, in part, because I keep suggesting you self-educate and because I didn’t make arguments.

Just because I do not agree with you, does not mean I don’t take what you say seriously or am refusing to engage with it.

That’s true. It’s the refusing to engage with it that is refusing to engage with it. We’re still stuck on acknowledging the basic meaning of the first thing I said. And discussing a series of invented positions and misidentified logical fallacies. Confusions multiply from thin air while the basics go ignored.

Your efforts would be better served showing that abolishing sex work would reduce harm, rather than attacking me.

I think I’ve explained fairly well why your current behavior is the main barrier. I’ll note that you didn’t address the vast majority of my previous response. Ask yourself why that is.

You can just answer this simple question yourself: is it more harmful to have a system of forced labor or to have a system or forced labor and rape?

If you say it’s the second one you will now have an idea for why it is singled out rather than lumped in with all labor.

Re: things like “appeal to emotion”, that is absurd. This is social theory, not modus tollens. It will all be about impacts in humans, systems, harms, basic empathy, and challenging yourself. There is no equation or deduction. The mere idea is philosophically outdated by at least several thousand years.

You are free to read the literature on this topic or to take this seriously enough to actually engage with it. So far we haven’t been able to get past the very first thing I said, a simple comparison, seemingly stuck on the difference between a comparison and equation. I think you’re perfectly capable of understanding it and then moving forward. But I’m not going to force knowledge into a combative person’s head. You’d need to pay me for that.

I didn’t mean to misrepresent what you were saying so I’m sorry that I have. When I said you suggested imagining the difference I was referring to the statement you made asking me if I thought sex work was uniquely harmful compared to other work. I interpreted that as you asking me to imagine what harm a sex worker might experience. Are you able to clarify that? It seemed to be the core of your argument from what I could tell.

I’m asking you, by analogy, to consider the difference between a forced laborer and a forced laborer that is also subject to rape. Think of it as part of the same coercive system. Historically, it has been.

The leftist feminist consideration looks at work under capitalism as its own coercive entity. Not identical to slavery, but still having its own coercive nature. If one must work to live and one’s sexuality is to be sold (and in a heavily gendered way), it is different than online working to live. It is a commodification not just of one’s labor, not just of the body, but also one’s sexuality and with downstream detriments due to its embedding in a patriarchal society. These things are not separable. “Men can also be X” also does not change this calculus, it just provides another facet that differentially impacts a minority.

The commodification of bodies for sex is also the driver of human trafficking.

The issue I have with your last argument which I articulated is that it does not apply to sex work, but all work. Should we abolish all work given your reasoning or is there a specific reason why sex work should be targeted?

The left anti-capitalist position is the end of capitalism itself. It is not simply a reform within the capitalist system that leaves the fundamental driver of this social context intact. Left advocates of abolition may offer reformist policies but they understand them in this other context.

Hopefully this plus the prior answer addresses the question. There is also plenty of abolitionist literature from communist, anarchist, and syncretic perspectives.

The trafficking aspect is not an issue with legalisation of sex work. It exists whether sex work is legal or not.

Under this framework, trafficking emerges from the aforementioned commodification. Legalization is considered expansionist under this framing, it opens up the labor pool and normalizes this commodification, even telling kids and young adults that this is a profession to pursue rather than something harmful to them. A larger sex trade. More brothels. More “massage” parlors.

Abolitionists tend to advocate for keeping the behavior of “John’s” illegal, making the industry itself illegal while not punishing prostitutes.

To me this is akin to saying people are trafficked for slave labour therefore we should abolish labour. Unless I am missing something, it doesn’t seem follow.

Per this framework we should abolish the capitalist labor system. Abolishing the patriarchal sex industry is something that can be achieved as part of this movement. Same as child labor was abolished (although not for everyone). We punish the employer not the child. We know that the right position is to provide economic support to families and children, not to legalize sending children to the abattoir where we know undocumented immigrant children work.

This is not an argument against sex work, this is an argument against all work under capitalism. Fair play, but not what we are discussing here.

I have, in fact, pointed out the core argument for the abolition of sex work made by leftist feminist organizations.

If you want to make an argument against sex work you need to provide a justification for selecting it specifically over other work.

I already did. I made a comparison that you’ve avoided thinking about. You declared it an invalid comparison based on absolutely nothing, but it isn’t.

I don’t think you have really done that other than to suggest imagining the toll sex work must take on an individual.

Who said I was imagining? You seem to be taking a lot of liberty with my thoughts.

Do you have any way to show that it is particularly harmful or any other reason why it should be singled out?

I already did and already pointed out the trafficking aspect. You seem to be interested in avoiding what I’ve laid out. Perhaps you should do some self-criticism as to why you are uninterested in approaching this in good faith.

Yeah of course I oppose those things but I don’t see it as comparable at all. Something being included as an option in the job market is very different from forcing people to do it.

Under most anti-capitalist conceptions it is well understood that you must either work or die, and there is naturally an element of coercion. Wage slavery isn’t just hyperbole. Capitalism drives down wages to bare subsistence and even below. The exceptions tend to be in imperialist countries that provide a relatively higher income by extracting from other countries’ workers and resources. But even then we all know you have to work or die, in the end. You are always threatened with the example of the difficult lives of the unhoused. They help remind you of how little you have to back you up. Housing is the first to go. Or maybe health.

This naturally makes it comparable, as there is the element of coercion. We are left to argue about the extent of the coercion.

A very serious topic worthy of discussion in it’s own right but I don’t see how that’s related. If anything this would be a good reason to legalise and regulate wouldn’t it?

I invite you to familiarize yourself with how trafficking works. Just guessing in the dark does not do the people affected justice.

EDIT: also important to note that people of any gender can work in the sex trade.

Cool well leftist feminist organizations still often the abolitionist perspective I mentioned. This is because women are far more impacted by the sex trade and other organizations tend to have bad positions or no positions at all because they are ignorant. Let me know when other organizations have as developed of a political like on this, as I know of none other than ruling communist parties that were influenced by the women within them.

Employees and employers are always in a war of information. Employers work together with their crony class traitors (like HR) to come up with plans to increase profits and mitigate losses based on what they can glean about employees. They are asking you all these questions as a form of intelligence gathering. Maybe they’re trying to get a handle on where they most need to begin recruiting. Maybe they’re trying to get a handle on why people are leaving. Maybe they’re using the information gathering privilege to intimidate people. Maybe it’s something else.

Either way, it’s rarely in an employee’s interest to provide accurate information like this to an employer. If they were actually worried about people leaving they could just raise salaries and figure out if there are specific working conditions to improve like getting rid of abusive managers or changing work responsibilities. But those aren’t the questions they’re asking.

The only question is how to avoud questions or lie. Avoiding is best. “I hadn’t really thought of that. What is your opinion?” is a good default. Or, “have other people been talking about that?” If they try to force an answer, just lie. You see yourself there in 15 years, whatever.

This may be a sign that they feel weak in their labor market, though. I think this is actually a good time to ask for a raise and promotion. It’s also a good time to start looking for other jobs, as a big exodus of people that they’re not handling appropriately means everyone’s working conditions are probably going to get worse. They seem to be in complete petty tyrant mode.

Think of how you look at it when the coercion is overt.

I’m sure we both oppose forced labo rand rape (overtly coerced labor, overtly coerced sexual contact). Do you think one is more harmful than the other and takes a unique psychological toll? Edit: what about for a person who endures both?

There are some subtleties due to the different kinds of content that count as porn, but hopefully this explains why many left feminist organizations advocate for the abolition of the sex trade.

In addition, remember that one in seven people in the sex trade in the US are trafficked.

Everyone has the choice to not consciously oppress other people.

Cops have both individual and systemic roles in oppression.

If you do work irl the cops will eventually use their violence on you.

lmao

Every “good cop” is one that looks the other way when the bad cops do bad cop things. Or they are actively in the process of being harassed out of the department for “making trouble”.

Though it should also be said that the modem anti-cop movement comes from the correct understanding that their primary purpose is to protect private property interests, not your safety. Even the theoretical “nice” cop is spending their time, effort, and focus on store break-ins and broken windows and harassing homeless people that a business owner calls an “eyesore” or worse. But again, if they don’t carry water for the rest of their gang members that “nice” cop is getting kicked out of the department.