thoughts from how to kill a zombie - strategising the end of neoliberalism by mark fisher

It's like leftists are fish living unhappily in the ocean who could grow legs and crawl out but they are unaware of their ability to do so.

Political Journaling mid-June 2025

First, I want to credit @ismatu.gwendolyn for the idea of political journaling.

Last night at 7:50PM, Donald Trump made a post on Truth Social revealing that the U.S. had dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear sites, claiming to have destroyed their nuclear abilities.

ICE deportations continue across the U.S. CBP cracks down on entry to the country by foreign nationals, searching the personal cell phones of those entering the U.S., threatening fines and imprisonment. A Norwegian man was recently denied entry to the United States and subsequently sent back to Norway after ICE agents searching his phone discovered a meme of VP JD Vance with a bald, egg shaped head (MSN.com).

Trump today claimed having struck a ceasefire deal between Iran and Israel following U.S. strikes which the president claimed to have destroyed Iran's nuclear abilities. The escalation marks a continuation of this administration's pattern of military interference w/o congressional approval. 

The State department has issued an advisory on June 22 to U.S. nationals traveling abroad globally:

The conflict between Israel and Iran has resulted in disruptions to travel and periodic closure of airspace across the Middle East.  There is the potential for demonstrations against U.S. citizens and interests abroad. (state.gov)

The world is seeing the U.S. continuing its decades long insistence on global capitalism, continuing an emphasis on free trade and United States hegemony. The world is watching our country continue to destroy ecosystems and exploit workers across the globe through its foreign policy and economic initiatives. The proletariat of the planet can't take much more. The people united will never be defeated.

62,214

62,214 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023

On October 7th, 2023, 7,000 militants lead by Hamas, an extremist group in Gaza, broke out of the barricaded Gaza strip and killed a total of 1,200 people in southern Israel. Of these people, 736 were civilians, and 21 were children. 

Following these horrific attacks, many nations denounced Hamas' actions as terroristic in nature or as a dangerous escalatory tactic. To be clear, Hamas' actions were in no way justifiable. Violence is violence and violence is wrong. Given the long history of occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel, these attacks represent a boiling over of resentment towards Israelis.

The Israeli response to the attacks which occurred on October 7th has been immense. People around the globe have debated over the past year and a half whether Israel has the right to defend itself, a question whose answer I'm still not clear on. However, Israel's violent siege and systematic starvation of 2 million people in the Gaza strip is clearly wrong and there is no excuse for such violence and cruelty. We all have a responsibility to first and foremost to put pressure on lawmakers in the U.S. to stop sending arms to Israel, who has been and continues to carry out a genocide in Gaza, and to call for the opening of Gaza to humanitarian aid.

On June 1st, 2025, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian civilians and children trying to obtain aid from an Israeli-U.S. backed aid distro site. A UN humanitarian agency has described Gaza as the hungriest place on Earth, and has accused Israel of denying crucial food and water to 2 million people in dire condition. Starvation is wrong and clearly goes criminally beyond "Israel's right to defend itself."

The tragedy in Gaza is overwhelming, but what is worse is the external world's response to these atrocities. A ship named the Conscience carrying much needed humanitarian aid across the Mediterranean was attacked by what is presumed to be Israeli drones. The West continues to supply Israel with weapons to carry out its genocide. The President of the United States mocks Palestinian deaths by laying forth plans to take control of Gaza and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East."

Awareness is the first step towards action, and I want everyone to be aware of the atrocities that are taking place.

Children are burning. 

All eyes on Gaza.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Update as of March 28, 2025

Free political speech is under attack.

International students and faculty from several universities, including Georgetown, Columbia, and Tufts, have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the past few weeks. While courts in Massachusetts and New Jersey have ordered freezes on deportations, and even prohibited them, ICE and the Trump administration seem to have willfully ignored these orders, transporting the students to detention centers across state lines without proper notice, and shrouding further actions regarding the students from the public. 

ICE began targeting pro-Palestinian demonstrators on March 8, when they arrested Mahmoud Khalil, who is a student activist and was one of the main negotiators at the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University. His detention represents a broader expansion of deportation efforts from the Trump administration, which initially focused on undocumented migrants from Latin American countries. The administration has shifted its focus to legal visa or green card holding political dissidents. While the administration has claimed that their deportation efforts focus on students who go beyond marching–implying that their greatest concern is students inciting violence against Jewish students–after the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk over an op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts Daily, its clear that the arrests are not aimed at improving our safety but at intimidating us and discouraging us from voicing our opinions regarding the U.S. government and the State of Israel.

Pro-Israel groups on college campuses have begun working with ICE to identify protestors seen a demonstrations on campuses. Efforts to identify and target these students has "blurred the lines between public law enforcement and private groups." Students, rightfully so, are worried about their legal status, and the outsourcing of surveillance occurring in the administration, and thus are foregoing speech altogether. 

The concealed identities of ICE officers, the legal gray areas surrounding searches of personal devices at the border, and the unchecked power of ICE as an agency are all calls to action. While until now the courts have done their job in protecting those targeted by ICE, it's time for communities to step up and do the same. Even if the courts begin to challenge efforts made to target students, judicial review is seldom a speedy process. In the mean time, they will continue to unlawfully deport people. They will continue to abduct people from our streets. They will continue to target political speech. It's up to those of us who are lucky enough to be safe from ICE and the Trump administration in the mean time to fight for the rights of those who are not so fortunate.

Know Your Rights! Keep ICE Away!

 

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/immigrants-rights#police-or-ice-are-at-my-home

Trump's claims about buying Greenland, annexing Canada

Whether Trump's claims about buying Greenland or bringing Canada into the U.S. are viable or not, they should be considered serious. However, these claims are most likely a political tactic to distract the public from the atrocities that will occur as soon as Trump takes office and begins the largest deportation initiative in U.S. history. He has already suggested using the military in his deportation campaign and creating large camps to hold migrants within the U.S. before their deportation has not been confirmed by the incoming president, but seems likely as a logical step in a campaign to deport between 15-20 million people. 

These people which Trump seeks to deport are at least an important part of our labor force, but beyond that are people with stories like any other person. Some have left harrowing conditions in Mexico or countries further afield such as Honduras or El Salvador for a chance at economic opportunity or at least a refuge from violence in their own countries. It is important to note that a large part of the political instability that exists in the Latin American countries from which migrants come from was driven by U.S. government programs to combat Communism under the Truman Doctrine which invited the U.S. government to intervene in elections (often through the CIA) to promote leaders who were opposed to left wing ideals. In Latin America, these programs along with the advent of neoliberalism have instilled lasting economic instability in which foreign investment worsens living standards.

It is important to remember that often Fascist dictators use encrypting rhetoric to hide their atrocities from the public because they know that their policies will not be popular. As Trump takes office, America's eyes should remain aware of his territorial ambitions, but should remain exceptionally vigilant of his deportation campaign and the human rights atrocities that will undoubtedly come from it. 

What's better: cash or stake? An analysis and critique of The Wealth of Billionaires: Where It Came From, Where It Is, and Why It Matters from The Heritage Foundation

Link to: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/the-wealth-billionaires-where-it-came-where-it-and-why-it-matters

Here are the three takeaways that the article presents:

The great wealth of America's richest people came from the businesses they created, not inherited wealth.

Ok good to know I guess. The richest people aren't always nepo-babies. But where does wealth and value in a business actually come from? It comes from the value of the goods and services which the business produces. The net worth of a business is the value of the goods and services produced minus the cost of production. To increase net worth, a firm will try to either increase prices (doesn't usually work) or decrease factor costs (labor). Thus, the wealth of American billionaires rests on the backs of employees - perhaps why large firms like Amazon try to prevent their workers form unionizing.

Billionaires' wealth is concentrated in company stock, and their companies' value lies mostly in ideas and processes, not cash and physical property.

Here is the question that prompted this post: is it better for society for the wealthy to hold value in stake in their own business or to hold cash? From a capitalist's perspective, it's better to hold stake in one's own business because then the value of their assets is dependent on their own actions and their own efforts to gain profit. What does it really mean that "companies' value lies mostly in ideas and processes[?]" Essentially, this means nothing. Valuing assets that are just ideas is not a steadfast way of determining the value of a company.

The economy depends on some people having more than they need to consume, as their investments of capital fund business operations and private lending.

Ok sure but the capital-owning class wants to maintain their wealth and accumulate more of it. I guess this idea is coming from Bill Gates and the idea of philanthropy, but in reality, the vast majority of "investment in the lower classes" is not effective in improving the material conditions of those who need it the most.

The rich became rich by creating companies and products that investors and consumers value.

What if I wanted to become rich? Let's look at maybe a not-so-realistic scenario. Starting from nothing, I decide based on market research that people value laptop computers, so I start a business that manufactures computers. I start by buying a small factory and hiring 100 employees to produce a small number of computers per week. I sell them for $1000 per unit while the cost to create them is $900 per unit. This means that my profit is $100 per unit. I sell 10 computers every week, so my weekly profit is $1000. This comes out to $52,000 per year. This is not really sustainable, so I decide I need to increase my profit. This can again be done a couple of different ways, but I decide to reduce my employees' wage. This is detrimental to their wellbeing, but does increase my profit and improves my material conditions. But does this not amount to stealing from the workers? The value of their product did not decrease, nor did the number of hours they worked. So essentially, I am extracting value from the workers by not giving them their fair share of the wealth that they are creating. Perhaps the problem is not the fact that rich people get rich by creating things that people value, but that the fact that in there process of creating these things, they often extract wealth from the laborers who are producing the products. The problem is not the products themselves, it is the way in which they are produced. 

 

What is Anarchism?

"But if all the wealth is the product of labor, then why does it not belong to labor?" -Alexander Berkman, What is Anarchism?

This week, I’m trying to understand anarchism. Here are my notes from Berkman’s book.

Is making a profit really stealing? What is a profit? According to Merriam-Webster, profit is defined as a valuable return, or a gain. In a market, this means selling a good for more than it cost to produce it. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. 

But how do we increase profits? We can increase the markup of the good, selling it for more of a margin than it cost to produce. This path is generally not attractive, because people will buy less of a good at a higher price. So what is the alternative? We can try to reduce factor costs. In macroeconomics, we learned that these include land, capital, enterprise, and labor. Land and capital are generally difficult to manipulate, since the markets land and capital are less exploitable. Labor, on the other hand, is relatively easy to change the cost of. A company can lower wages. Sure, employees will quit, but soon enough they will realize that they need to make money to survive and will return to jobs at lower wages. Perhaps money really is instrument of control in capitalism. We are forced to work because we need money to buy food and pay for a place to live. Without money, it is literally impossible for us to do these things.

Now that we have figured out that lowering wages will increase our profit, we have successfully increased profit. But wait… the value of labor has not got down. After all, the goods are still being sold for the same amount, or marginally less. The fact that lowering wages increases profits is one that should be disturbing. How can it be that workers are paid less than their labor is worth? This idea would not generally be accepted in other aspects of capitalism, or in other factor markets. We can’t just pay the farmer less for his wheat––he will provide less wheat according to the law of supply. 

But why are we able to extract value from labor so easily?

Welcome to The Blackboard

Why did I start this blog?

As of November, 2024, the U.S. has elected a federally convicted criminal as president for the next four years. Through Project 2025, the incoming president's administration has vowed to dismantle the institutions that are vital to secular democracy in the U.S. Something that I believe is incredibly important in resisting an administration and a government with fascist tendencies is writing. Freedom of the press has been a value of this country since its birth in the 18th century., thus a value that I hold true to is an independence of journalism and a freedom to express and develop ideas in public. 

This year, I've been reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. In this book, Fisher argues that since the late 20th century, capitalism has extended itself beyond any previous bounds. It has become all-encompassing. He argues that today's young people are not able to imagine a viable alternative to capitalism, something that I find incredibly fascinating and real in my own life.

As a result of Mark Fisher's influence on me, I began reading his blog "K-Punk" and exploring the blog space of the early 2000s. In this exploration, I found an internet void of algorithms, ads, data brokerage, and dopamine. This lack of an ability to capitalize on a large scale form content produced on the early internet means that dissent from the system is more viable. The capitalist system of the internet in 2024 means that only what sells will be seen. In the early internet, there weren't as many ways to sell content, thus far the content was more freeform and separate from the general controls of a market.

I hope to use this blog as a breeding ground for ideas, a home for research, and a space for commentary. I hope to use it to share my influences and maybe discover new paths of learning to venture down.

Tonight, I will end with a quote from Capitalist Realism which many readers see as a call to action:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.