/lit/ - Literature

Simply being physically present at or near the scene of an illegal assembly already constitutes grounds for arrest and detention. When you are sitting on the subway train or the bus home, you never know whether riot squads will storm the vehicle and proceed to beat the life out of everyone on board, whether vigilantes have tipped you off to the cops or are following you home, whether the triads will be out in force where you live late at night. Partisanship renders you into a body that can be maimed, tortured and—it appears—killed by those whose acts are authorized in the name of “order.” As the guardians of order make clear, we are “cockroaches,” pests to be exterminated and disposed of so that business can proceed as usual.

In addition, professing sympathy for the struggle could very well leave you unemployed if you work for a company that has longstanding ties with the Chinese market. Consider the high-profile case of Cathay Pacific, the upper management of which demanded a list of members of a union that had participated in the movement or helped to leak flight information of the police; this company is carrying out a thoroughgoing purge of partisans among their staff, directed by careerist snitches among the crew.

Teachers at school who tutored you in algebra just a few months ago could aid in your arrest; principals and heads of departments stand idly by as riot squads seize you and your friends outside your school building. This is the reality that protesters are becoming rapidly habituated to. As a consequence, networks of mutual assistance have rapidly formed to address the situation, offering employment, shelter, transport, and meals to those in need.

In short: the future, as a horizon of foreseeable advancement, an itinerary of fulfillable and forestalled plans and projections, has collapsed, and we are left consulting, moment by moment, the live maps drawn in real time by volunteer cartographers, telling us which stations to avoid, which roads to take a detour around, which neighborhoods are presently being gassed. Daily life itself becomes a series of tactical maneuvers, everyone having to exercise caution about what they say at lunch in cafés and canteens lest they are overheard and reported, experimenting with different ways to ride the subways for free without being too obvious about it, inventing codes to use on instant messaging or social media that evade quick decryption. It is quite extraordinary that so many are willing to forego the craven comforts and conveniences of the metropolis, the enjoyment of anonymity as they go about their business. It is necessary to find and maintain clandestinity in other ways.

It is impossible to deny that through it all, a sense of invention and adventure saturates the minutiae of our waking lives.

https://fr.crimethinc.com/2019/09/20/three-months-of-insurrection-an-anarchist-collective-in-hong-kong-appraises-the-achievements-and-limits-of-the-revolt

>>13814662
listen little dude. you were born into a hell world where everybody is a whore selling themselves to one another. i know its hard to accept but that where we are right now.

you and me are nothing but white plantation niggers. this is whats up. we are not our own human beings. we are whores, zeks, we wake up and we make profit to a boss, we have no future.... we're fucked!!! our generation is fucked. we need to start thinking and organizing little man...


Who am I?

I am a member of the poorest generation since those who came of age during the Great Depression. Born to the “end of history,” we watched the ecstatic growth of the Clinton years morph seamlessly into the New Normal of Bush and Obama.

We have no hope of doing better than our parents did, by almost any measure. We have inherited an economy in secular stagnation, a ruined environment on the verge of collapse, a political system created by and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality, and an emotionally devastating, hyper-atomized culture of pyrrhic consumption.

The most recent economic collapse has hit us the hardest. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth of people under 35 fell 55 percent between 2005 and 2009, while those over 65 lost only a fraction as much, around 6 percent[iv]. The result is that if you calculate debt alongside income, wealth inequality is today increasingly generational. Those over 65 hold a median net worth of $170,494, an increase from 1984 of 42 percent. Meanwhile, the median net worth of those under 35 has fallen 68 percent over the same period, leaving young people today with a median worth of only $3,662[v].

Despite cultural narratives of laziness and entitlement, this differential is not due to lack of effort or education (my generation is the most educated, as well, and works some of the longest hours for the least pay). The same Pew Study notes that older white Americans have simply been the beneficiaries of good timing. They were raised in an era of cheap housing and education, massive state welfare and unprecedented economic ascent following the creative destruction of two world wars and a depression—wars and crises that they themselves didn’t have to live through.

And the jobs that older Americans hold are not being passed down to us, though their debt is. When they retire, the few remaining secure, living wage and often unionized positions will be eliminated, their components dispersed into three or four different unskilled functions performed by part-time service workers. The entirety of the job growth that has come since the “recovery” began has been in low-wage, temporary or highly precarious jobs, which exist alongside a permanently heightened unemployment rate.