Game-stonks

Today, the American hegemony basically told a lot of its most loyal Collaborators:¹

Sorry, money is just for spending.

You don't get to earn any.

As a result, I'm seeing people who own MAGA hats talk about the "power of the proletariat." The rhetoric is close enough to what I heard at Occupy Wall Street to give me deja vu.

And the leftists around me…

…I haven't heard most of them even acknowledge these events yet.

There's a concept Marx put forth, that I can't recall well enough to quote, but, it says that the proletariat do not need the language of Marxism, because they live the experience.

As I see it, a bunch of traditionally non-Marxist proletariat are using Marxist language to voice themselves, while criticizing the capitalist investor class and taking what could be argued as the most powerful form of direct action available to a population that lives in townhouses and condos doing white collar work; e.g. without any accessible praxis except financial activity.

And the Leftists who are normally very keen to engage in The Discourse are… discussing the hypocrisy of Marjorie Taylor Green?² If they have the energy for that, they have the energy to reach out to those with awakening class-consciousness and relate stock manipulation back to leftism.

Good praxis is taking advantage of opportunites. As as example, if my racist uncle starts calling himself the proletariat at holiday dinner, I'm not going to ignore that to talk about the clam dip with my aunt. My uncle has provided me with an opportunity for communication.

Most legacy social media platforms are currently full of folk saying "We are the 99%," but the leftist presence in those places is acting like today is any other day.

And most of the Leftists who are acknowledging these events are exclusively trying to gatekeep radical praxis to that which supports anarcho-communistic models of revolution. I think it's a mix of fear, prejudice, and I'll even speculate: a little jealousy.³

Fear? I've seen a lot of misinformation about how hedge funds and the stock market work, that could be fixed with some self-teaching. Instead, working class folk are accusing other working class people of trying to steal their retirement. First off, you should ask why they're feel the need to steal from you, and see if you can't address that. The alternative is preventing the theft with regulation and that's literally policing. Second, retirement funds are bad, too, just like hedge funds. They're all based in interest-bearing debt, which is evil.

Prejudice? White guys in white collars are racist, there's no doubt about that, but remove the power system and the white collar, and suddenly they're just bigoted. That might not sound like it, but that's a big step toward equality, and a lot of these folk trying to game the stock market are doing it to break the power system. Folk have to make room for these people as accomplices, not reject them simply because yesterday they were Collaborators. We all are, in our own way.

And as for jealousy? As I was writing this, I heard that today the White House was discussing stimulus checks, something which previously wasn't immediately on the table. (The executive actions so far have been to prepare for the establishment of work programs, the Green New Deal). But as of today, apparently, there's an urgent interest in distributing, what I heard, $2,000 a month.

And the only reason a hedge fund didn't go bankrupt is because two other funds gave them the money they needed.

That's more harm to Wall Street than Occupy Wall Street ever did, and even before last week I've seen a couple dozen people talking about using their "meme stock" profits to pay off loans, help with family medical bills, etc. Compared to setting up GoFundMes and paying into bail funds, it's really hard to argue that the meme stock stuff is radical.

The question is simply whether it's accelerationist, revolutionary, or insurrectionary. And that's a question that our actions help dictate the answer to.

I'll end by recommending "On the Concept of History:"

No [one] but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the [vessel] of historical knoweledge.