Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 24
Race isn’t merely a color or a phenotype, but an asset. In the US, being white has made it easier to buy land (or receive it for free!!) and expand west, as provided by the Homestead Act of 1863. It has meant having higher wages in public-sector jobs, as Jim Crow era laws mandated. It has meant qualifying for federally backed home loans in the New Deal. Today, it means living in neighborhoods that-all else being equal-have higher home values merely because white people live there, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses for Black households.
✏️ Race as an asset 📖 (Page 24)
Page 44
We live in a world where money and resources are hoarded by a wealthy few. Yet we’re told that it’s under socialism that hard-working people will have their money seized to benefit lazy strangers. If there is one thing that amuses me most about capitalist propaganda, it is its ability to convince people that what we see capitalism doing isn’t actually what we see it doing. While a few multinational companies control the media we consume, the music we listen to, and the food we eat, it’s socialism that supposedly lacks choice and freedom.
✏️ The points made to discredit socialism are things capitalism already does in spades. 📖 (Page 44)
Page 45
Black Panther Party leader Assata Shakur put it simply: “[A]nything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.”
✏️ quote 📖 (Page 45)
Page 56
… communism and socialism are not, in fact, implemented to deny people’s freedom and independence. To the contrary, it is capitalism that has made masses of people dependent. Associating freedom with capitalism is in the old bourgeoisie playbook. But the “freedom” that capitalists have historically advocated isn’t really about freedom for the average person. Freedom meant “free trade, free selling and buying,” to benefit capitalists, per The Communist Manifesto.
✏️ Debunking the myth that socialism is about lack of choice. 📖 (Page 56)
Page 60
these myths - that socialists want everyone to struggle, own nothing, and apparently sew our own clothes - have legs for a reason. They likely came from a misreading of Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, the prolific duo called for the abolition of “bourgeoisie private property,” which has been shortened in popular discourse to simply “private property.” This has been misinterpreted to mean the abolition of any and everyone’s personal property. This, my friends, is the socialist-to-capitalist game of Telephone. Marx and Engels even knew that people would confuse what they were advocating for (and they were right). We’ll get into the housing issue in Chapter 5. But before that, here’s what the duo actually said about private property: “We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence. “Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.” Marx and Engels didn’t advocate for abolishing personal property; they saw capitalism as doing that all on its own.
✏️ Debunking the myth that socialism means giving up all your private property. 📖 (Page 60)
Page 70
As sociologist G. William Domhoff argues, “the class conflict that went on in the 1960s at the legislative, regulatory, and factory levels… was rendered all the more volatile and difficult because white pushback against the integration of neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces was at the same time weakening the unions at the ballot box.” Domhoff continues: “It is this defection by white trade unionists from the Democrats, not the alleged sudden organization of the corporate community, which explains the right turn in the United States on labor and many other issues.” Like capitalists who benefited from the anti-Black racism that grew salient during the abolitionist movement, capitalists in the 20th century were aided by backlash from white workers who opposed the calls for integration.
✏️ Racism in the US did seem to contribute over and over again to splitting people up and having them fight against each other, instead of united and in solidarity against the capitalists and the systems. A handy and much-used tool in the toolbox of systems controlling the people. xref with how they pit us against each other in recycling 📖 (Page 70)
Page 81
We want a socialist workplace to be a place of learning, of creativity, of people developing and changing. In this vision, you don’t work in order to live. In a socialist community, we’re going to sustain you to live in any case. What we want is for you to be a creative, enthusiastic, interested person. And therefore, developing you is the best thing we can do for all of us. And that’s why the workplace is going to be a completely different experience from the horror you live through now.
✏️ Economist Richard Wolff discussing Worker Self Directed Enterprises. Great quote about not needing to work to live, but rather working to help the community. Living is being covered. 📖 (Page 81)
Page 81
Spain’s Mondragon federation of worker cooperatives as an example of how this works. It’s the seventh-largest corporation in Spain and has more than 100,000 workers. As Wolff shares, the Mondragon Corporation is a “family of about two hundred co-ops that are all under one corporate umbrella. They are all closet socialists. They’ll tell you ‘we try to avoid getting too much wrapped up in politics.’ But when they say that, they wink. If the workers are not happy with the supervisors, they have meetings, and they can decide whether to keep the supervisor or not. In other words, the supervisors don’t hire the workers; it’s the other way around. “Managers aren’t paid more than six times what the lowest paid worker makes, unlike our current capitalist system in the US where the average gap between a CEO’s pay and the median worker is 670-to-1.”
✏️ Discussing spain’s Mondragon Corp. A healthy example of socialist workplace. 📖 (Page 81)
Page 93
… the USSR was arguably not socialist-some would say it wasn’t even communist.
✏️ This needs to be addressed and nipped in the bud clearly. followup questions 📖 (Page 93)
Page 98
He [reporter Allan Chase] also dropped this dime about how scientific racism came about when religion was being used less frequently to blame people for their problems: “Scientific racism did not, obviously, invent the reluctance to pay living wages and taxes for the promotion of the general welfare of an entire nation’s people. It did, however, appear at a critical turn in history when the classic scriptural excuses for greed, selfishness, and poverty were fast losing their traditional credibility… [so scientific racism] became the rationale in the rapidly industrializing nations of Europe and, shortly, North America.”
✏️ Science as a tool for control and racism 📖 (Page 98)
Page 173
As political scientist Lee Drutman observes, “rather than seeing government as a threat, [corporations] started looking to government as a potential source of profits and assistance.” This is the essence of neoliberal capitalism.
✏️ quote 📖 (Page 173)