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Cake day: August 24th, 2019

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  • There’s a commune like this in Denmark, very historical, called Christiania. Due to some legal loophole the grounds of an old barracks in the center of Copenhagen were not under the jurisdiction of any government and so people started moving in and occupying the grounds. In their first years they drove out the LGBT community from the grounds, and then were plagued with gang violence for the next 30 years. Their economy relied entirely on selling weed to clueless tourists. Also lots of “no photo” signs everywhere.

    Starting in 2012 Christiania started buying up the property because of gang violence, and part of the deal to do that was that they had to build low-income housing. This also put an end to the effective commune, as it is now administered by a foundation that exists under Danish law. Though they’ve been relying on city services such as water, electricity and waste management since 1994.











  • tbh spotify solved a lot of headaches I had with organizing my music. I used to torrent full discographies from artists I discovered and organize the files on my PC which took up a lot of space. Eventually I started converting the mp3s to lower bitrates to save on space lol. I also had to spend time and harmonize the album titles and song titles within the folders because sometimes when you download music torrents the ripper likes to put a bunch of stuff or write everything in all caps. Spotify essentially does all that categorizing for me and with Spicetify I don’t even get ads anymore and I’m still on the free plan.

    Only thing I don’t like with them is the algorithm, it’s so bad. Youtube’s is much better, google hasn’t enshitified that yet at least.











  • I think in a marxist sense services are simply considered commodities: a product, though intangible, whose purpose for existing is to be bought and sold.

    However, I think massage therapists and plumbers are productive because they create profit and thus accumulation of capital for their employer (or for themselves if they’re self-employed).

    We look at them from the POV of who hires their work, e.g. the client booking an appointment, but the rendering of services is what matters and what creates profit: a massage company charging 100$ for a massage and paying their therapist 60$ per massage makes a 40$ profit off every client, rendered possible by the therapist’s labor.

    The bakery in your example requires both types of labor: the bakers are productive because they imbue value in a commodity, but the cashiers are not because they don’t directly create profit, they turn the value of the commodity into its money-form – from what I understand of Cockshott’s video “Are barristas productive?”. If the bakers are also the cashiers as is often the case in this late-stage capitalism period, they perform both types of labor: some of it is productive, some of is unproductive.

    We can take another example: a capitalist hiring a chef. In either cases, the chef produces a cooked meal with his labor-power. If the capitalist hires the chef to cook a meal for himself (and provided the chef didn’t come through a temp agency or whatever else but was directly hired as they used to do back in Marx’s days), then the labor was unproductive: it didn’t generate more capital. If however the capitalist hires the chef for his restaurant, the labor is the exact same, but it becomes productive because the meal is sold for a profit.