Love this quote and the photo, but the quote is from like 2012 and the photo is from like the 60s. I’d prefer if the photo was more recent (or at least not black and white) so we don’t perpetuate the myth that all of the great socialist thinkers are from long ago in our past. Le Guin said this in front of Amazon executives and I think it minimizes the impact to pair it with such an old photo.
I liked your point, so I made this
Oh wow, yeah it totally does. I thought Le Guin died in like the 80s
rn i identify w the serfs in that divine right of kings system, as i resume the job hunt, just like i did last year at this time; but now i get to do it this time around with a trump enduced economic downturn.
i have difficulty imaging what life will be like when captialism is no longer so dominant. i want to image a life without the constant and completely unecessary strain of making enough money to afford life’s necessities and the trauma it invariably inflicts upon each other while doing so.
i wonder how serfs would have felt whenever they encountered nascent examples of systems coming into existence, like socialism?
would they feel about it like i do when i see the few remaining examples that remain of american’s likewise nascent socialist movements?
my job is one of those few remaining examples; it’s a union job. unions are the probably the closest things to leftist movements our capatilist system will tolerate and even then they’re forced to fight tooth and nail for relative breadcrumbs.
this job showed me the tremendous efforts that unions have to fight for to preserve these types of jobs; i can’t get over how hard they have to fight for those breadcrumbs and i wish i could better appreciate the irony that i can’t keep this job because of them, yet i remain in full support of socialism & theory nonetheless.
If you want to continue
In reality, entertainment media and news media serve the same propaganda purpose: they target not our reasoned beliefs about right and wrong, but our perception of social risks and rewards. People’s actual rationality, their ability to discern cause and effect, is far too resilient to be tampered with when their own immediate interests are at stake. People’s pride, however, is much more malleable. For communists to refuse to challenge media that makes them invisible — or, worse, aggressively humiliates them — is to surrender before the fight is even scheduled. And I genuinely believe that we do this every single time we refuse to challenge an Orwellism, or a Nietzscheanism. We have largely failed to create nourishing communist alternatives — not only in reality, as with the Black Panther breakfast program, but also as far as the imagination goes. And in the realm of imagination, as in others, nature abhors a vacuum. In absence of social-realist agitprop, Orwellism thrives.
Lenin titled his world-changing revolutionary pamphlet directly after Chernyshevsky’s beloved and influential revolutionary fiction novel What Is To Be Done? [46] Stalin took his pseudonym “Koba” from The Patricide, a heroism-romance novel that was popular in Georgia when he was a youth. [47] We could speak similarly of Mao’s esteem for Lu Xun [48] and Water Margin. [49] Assata has spoken about the insidiously grim messaging in our media. [50] Where is our revolutionary fiction today? Anarchist authors like Ursula K. Le Guin often appear the closest thing we’ve got to mainstream communist literature. I genuinely think that if one can truly imagine in fiction a viable transition from our current state of affairs into a better one, that plays a huge role in mustering the conviction to assert that it can be achieved in reality. Conversely, if we cannot even imagine what a transition might look like in our wildest dreams, any “real” organization is doomed.
