people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.
i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)
at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)
i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production
(payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.
this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.
to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.
now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?
the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?
the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.
the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.
what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.
what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.
that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.
the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.
the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.
when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”
every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.
we train young girls to ignore their hunger, to walk and stand and sit like ladies, to paint over or cover their pimples and stretch marks and cellulite, and then we are shocked when they grow up and become women who are alienated from their own bodies
People can do this if they want but no one should be judged for not doing it
this is not an appropriate time for choice feminism.
What I mean is that girls can fill up and wear make up if they want but they should always remember to live the life they want and ember that no one has claim over their bodies other than them
and what i mean is that these behaviors are enforced as part of beauty rituals and “wanting” to engage in them arises not from some intrinsic desire on the part of the girl but from the social rewards she knows she will be deprived of if she eschews them; to frame any kind of female beauty ritual as “chosen” is to obscure the social forces creatig and enforcing it; these pressures are potent and not in need of reinforcement via choice feminism; and furthermore, the behaviors cited in this post are inherently unhealthy and really don’t have positive, fun aspects we ought to be encouraging.
A white: but saying Asians are naturally smart is POSITIVE discrimination:)))
Me: The model minority myth was invented by whites as a tool of antiblackness to create divisions between communities of color and prove that ‘anyone can succeed in America if they just TRY hard enough!!1!’ thereby implying that antiblackness is black ppl’s own fault for not TRYING enough. Additionally, it relies on false interpretations of data and hurts the opportunities of all Asians, particularly less privileged ones, and dehumanizes Asians by furthering stereotypes of us as some kind of innately robot-like monolithic-minded hive, devalues our individual accomplishments and uses us as a tool to further antiblackness
i love this post
As a teacher, I can say with certainty that “smart” stereotypes are absolutely not positive for my Asian students. A few things I’ve heard repeatedly:
- Asian student gets the highest grade on a test; other students say, “Well, of course he/she got an A.” Any work the student did is minimized because it’s assumed perfect scores come naturally.
- Asian student is in a class for lower-performing students; other students question aloud whether he/she is really Asian and/or in the right class.
- Asian student gives a wrong answer in an advanced class; other Asian kids say, “You can’t be on our team anymore.” White kids say, “You’re one of us today.” Jokes ensue.
- Teachers complain that Asian students did poorly on district or state tests. Actual quote: “With a name like that, he should have brought up our class average.”
Those are just some of the most common comments, but there are many others. There is no way this stereotype is positive for these kids.
As an Asian,I can confirm that all those things listed above is something I’ve heard of or experienced way too many times despite my ability and capability to perform academically.
YO we literally just covered this in my race class!!
There’s a great book on the matter: “The Asian American Achievement Paradox.”
Coupling Asians/Asian Americans with academic success has a ton of negative consequences, many of which are listed above: putting down “less desirable” minorities with the individualistic fallacy of racism, devaluing individual achievement, unfair pressure on children/individuals, narrowing of success frames, excessive expectation leading to mental illness, social ostracism, lower self esteem for Asians who aren’t “smart” and for non-Asian children, erasure of individual Asian cultures (by grouping all cultures together, and saying academic achievement is the result of culture), and a lot of others.
In short: No such thing as a positive stereotype. Also, “Positive” stereotypes are way more difficult to combat than blatantly negative ones, while still causing a ton of the same consequences personally and socially.
I just did a project on this, so let me add the summary I wrote for it to this post: “Robert Lee’s thesis is that the model minority myth was invented by the United States in the Cold War era to impose assimilation and control onto minorities both within and outside of the United States. The idea is that by holding up Asians, a minority, as an example of being culturally able to become one of “us", that other minorities (homosexuals and blacks especially) will follow suit and be assimilated into the model of exemplary behaviour, “On the home front it sent a message to ’Negroes and other minorities’ that accommodation would be rewarded while militancy would be contained or crushed” (146). Model behaviour in this essay is outlined as a political silence over rights despite marginalization, a lack of demands on government for economic needs (self sufficiency), lower crime rates, a stable nuclear family structure, and patriotic acceptance of American ideals of democracy and sexual norms. Moving the target from race to cultural behaviour was especially pertinent, according to Lee, after the Holocaust, the Japanese Internment camps, growing civil rights unrest, and the general crisis of racial policy that happened within the government of the United States following WWII which made the concept of race itself an outdated and contentious model. It was also important as a way of fighting against Communism by showing that the United States’ democratic model can be inclusive and adoptive for all people as an alternative to Communism both politically and economically. The argument’s originality lies in its ability to make visible, through deconstruction, the reasons why this model minority “stereotype” is really a negative for both Asians and other minorities through a multilevel approach. On one level the model minority is a construction that inherently empowers and furthers the agenda of the white majority who coined it by writing over the history of Asian relations with the United States to make the state seem positive, accepting, and encouraging of the Asian minorities. However this rewrite was meant to send the message to the already marginalized Asians that their compliance and silence with this narrative will be the only thing that is tolerated, and that their attempts to seek recompense for any wrongs incurred them will be struck down in law, in culture, and in policy. This allowed the state power to create their own narrative of Asians, that while positive seeming, are really ones that causes political, economic, and the cultural harm both to Asians and other minorities, while placing the State’s vision of what’s acceptable at the forefront. The active interference by the American government into Chinese American lives with the United States’ new spectre of Communism during the time of the creation of this myth is especially important in its parallels to the government interference in ordinary Japanese American lives during WWII through their forced relocation and incarceration not even that many years past. When that is connected to the flip-flopping on the sentiment of which type of Asian is acceptable and which isn’t within the context of the United States based on political reasons outside of Asian Americans’ control (like the several external wars the United States engages in during the time, and the subsequent changes in policy that lead to social ramifications), the imposition of this model minority myth not only incurred deeper distrust and trauma, but also had quite the chilling effect on Asians living in North America. ”
Additionally, it’s only South & East Asians that are scoring well / getting paid more than whites. Why? Because immigration standards chose the cream of the crop after 1965 (before then, there were a lot of immigration bans against Asians due to the perceived yellow peril of the laborers they had already let in and underpaid). South & East Asians are hyper-selected professionals whose education attainment is already higher than the average in the country they come from.
Grouping all Asians together harms Southeast Asians in particular, who have a larger group of refugees and remain in poverty today.
It’s purely selection bias. Don’t trust aggregate “Asian” statistics. We’re a ton of groups with different history and circumstances.
I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)
Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).
It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.
whoa yeah I’ve never really thought of it this way but mainstream (liberal) feminism really is about “learning to enjoy patriarchy”
How is that?
this might be difficult to explain from scratch so to speak but liberal feminism is essentially based on the idea that femininity is devalued and generally under attack. this is opposed to 2nd wave feminism (which is what most of my feminism is routed in) which states that women are under attack and femininity is an oppressive construct intended to keep women subordinate.
the idea that it’s femininity which is under attack implies that femininity is inherent to women, and that women are oppressed for our femininity. again, this is opposed to the idea that women are oppressed with femininity.
this ends up leading to ideas like ‘masculine privilege’–butch women oppress & have power over feminine women, and butch women reject femininity due to internalized misogyny (since they’re supposedly rejecting their nature). I’ve actually been accused of the above by a liberal feminist.
2nd wave feminism would state that “masculine privilege” doesn’t exist, because masculine women are still oppressed for being women under patriarchy and are punished in various ways for rejecting femininity (the tool meant to oppress them). only male privilege exists, and masculinity is only rewarded in males.
the foundation that mainstream/pop/liberal feminism has built itself on is why there’s a huge emphasis on ‘weaponized femininity’ (think ‘eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man’), enthusiastically embracing femininity, far more sex-positivity than sex-critical discussion (leading to ideas like “criticizing porn is anti-feminist”, “criticizing bdsm is anti-feminist”, etc.), a general distrust of butch or gender non-conforming women (“trust no butch”), “feminist” articles about what type of lipsticks stay on best while giving blow-jobs (I’ve actually seen this), body-positivity that centers around ‘all body types can be beautiful’ rather than ‘women do not have to be beautiful and should not focus on it’, etc etc etc. I hope this was an ok summary even though I’ve really oversimplified the whole thing lol.
describe yourself using three fictional characters i’m gina linetti from brooklyn nine nine, roger the alien from american dad, and tom haverford from parks and rec
