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Posted by Deminime

Who is working class? The United States Labor Day holiday got its start in 1893 with the death of 30 strikers during the Pullman Strike, as pdb points out in another thread. Eugene Debs, one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike and a later candidate for President of the United States, was imprisoned as a result of that strike. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated union contracts that protected nearly half a million federal workers in what a former political director of the AFL-CIO called "the largest act of union-busting in American history." Between 1893 and 2025, the American labor movement was often associated in the popular imagination with post-agricultural industrial work: the coal miner, the dock worker, the laborer on the factory assembly line1. Management jobs and the professions were not considered laborers, but bourgeoisie, leading to a rising and ongoing association between manual labor and anti-intellectualism in the United States that was historically less present in Europe.

The early imagery of the working class is replete with depiction of human laboring bodies, while the mute compulsion driving their labor is most often metaphorically depicted as chains—debt and wages2—do not easily lend themselves to visual representation. Yet at the center of debates over labor is that unbreakable connection between bodies and time. Marx's insight was to change the terms of that economic debate: rather than seeing economic activity as a matter of reasonable, utility-maximizing individual agents making free choices to produce and consume what suits them best, Marx demonstrated that economic activity could instead be seen as a matter of the powerful owners of capital siphoning off the surplus value produced by the workers in order to enrich themselves and promote continuing economic growth—at least until the next moment of economic crisis, when capitalists will be rescued by government, but the poor will suffer what they must. Technological advances resulted in labor-intensive processes being replaced by capital-intensive processes, and resulted as well in reconfigurations of work to the point where not only body-intensive manual labor was replaceable, but also the white-collar work of those whom Robert Reich would describe as "symbolic-analytic labor." The routinization of urban office work produced new sites of economic precarity3 for the further appropriation of value by capital, as well as a hollowing-out of American cities that became places for the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to work but not to live near the urban poor4, who could become a reserve army of the unemployed. The new precariat would inherit the effects of Charles Babbage's efficiency studies and their extension in Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" and later time-motion studies that would determine how many seconds, for example, it should take a secretary to file a document, paving the way for future debates over wage theft, but that also resulted in the invention of the Carnegie Unit or college credit hour. While Adam Smith's labor theory of value was a theory of relative prices (things cost different amounts for consumers due to the different amounts of labor that go into them), Karl Marx's value theory of labor was a theory of relative exploitation. The American boom of wealth and productivity that followed WWII saw the widespread acceptance of the 40-hour work week5 and corresponding increased belief in Americans as consumers rather than laborers, and the 1817 slogan of utopian socialist Robert Owen—"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will"—was largely forgotten. At the same time, increased participation by women in labor markets led to shifts in the American class structure and the rise of "pink-collar work" and other forms of caring and gendered labor, including the recognition that women perform6 a great deal of uncompensated labor. Shifts away from an economy of goods and toward an economy of services also raised questions about the nature of labor involved in producing and consuming services, and about the nature of "experience goods" like movies and education that one pays to consume: how much (and what kind of) labor gets expended in what we typically consider recreation or non-productive behaviors? The commodification of work has resulted in a corresponding commodification of play7 for those fortunate enough to have the time to play. Debates over the commodification of play became more visible in the early 2000s with the phenomenon of goldfarming and the use of coerced labor, and the representation of goldfarming took many back to the old farm-based8 feudal metaphors of digital serfdom. Former Valve games economist and Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has labeled our current economic epoch one of Techno-Feudalism (previously), wherein contemporary capitalists use their platforms as a form of economic coercion over unfree labor. An apparent glaring mismatch in that comparison is that feudal lords held patriarchal responsibility for the well-being and protection of their serfs, whereas today's corporations dismiss any such responsibility as non-economic "externalities," leading to a condition of widespread economic precarity interpreted as individual malady9. Capitalism's unique feature is to atomize the power of the individual but collectivize the workings of capital, so that capital's invisible hand seems irresistible: the message becomes that there is nothing we, collectively, can or should do about the economy. The key line in the Johnny Paycheck song10 is "If I had the guts to say": the rhetorical construction of capital is that it cannot be answered. We are now taught, according to J. K. Gibson-Graham, that "economy" is
a force to be reckoned with outside of politics and society, located both above as a mystical abstraction, and below as the grounded bottom line. . . With the shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society, the economic imaginary has seemingly lost its discursive mandate and become an objective reality. (New Keywords,"Economy" 94–97)
In such an "objective reality," labor for the market becomes a priority, and other areas of human endeavor fall away: all education becomes vocational education, with students tracked into different classes depending upon their potential for profitability, the humanities and the arts are dismissed as either unprofitable or luxury goods, and schooling becomes an extension of the factory11. Yet we know that money is not the only yardstick of value, as the apocryphal quotation sometimes attributed to Emma Goldman12 implies. Marxist economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff propose a reading of Capital volume 2 that defines socioeconomic class as a process of appropriation: capitalists appropriate the value of the factory worker's labor at the site of production, but the appropriation of value by different parties can occur at different points in the cycle of production, distribution, use/consumption, and re-production. An independent musician appropriates the value of her own labor by practicing or busking, and a daughter's pleasure in cooking a meal for her elderly grandfather becomes the appropriation of value, as well. Such a reading radically opens up the space of economic possibility by expanding our sense of what value means. Today, if we're going to give our labor the respect it deserves, we might think about the economic metaphors through which we see the world: are we Pareto-optimizing, utility-maximizing agents rationally choosing what we consume and produce—or are we members of communities whose bonds go beyond those of money, seeking to guard ourselves and our loved ones from exploitation, and wanting to put our money, our time, and our labor into the activities and enterprises that sustain those communities? Happy Labor Day! Notes
  1. Bruce Springsteen, "Factory"
  2. Johnny Cash, "Sixteen Tons"
  3. The Bangles, "Manic Monday"
  4. Stevie Wonder, "Living for the City"
  5. Dolly Parton, "9 to 5"
  6. Donna Summer, "She Works Hard for the Money"
  7. Loverboy, "Working for the Weekend"
  8. Brass Against, "Maggie's Farm"
  9. Dire Straits, "Industrial Disease"
  10. Johnny Paycheck, "Take This Job and Shove It"
  11. Green Day, "Working Class Hero"
  12. Sophie Ellis Bextor, "If I Can't Dance"
nuh_s: Photo of the Toy Soldier looking up at a blue sky. It is pale with a drawn-on mustache and red lapels on its black jacket. (Default)
[personal profile] nuh_s posting in [community profile] no_true_pair
Title: And They Lived
Fandom: The Mechanisms
Pairing/Characters: Drumbot Brian & Gunpowder Tim
Content Notes: None
Prompt: September One - 2 Drumbot Brian & 6 Gunpowder Tim - and they lived happily ever after
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70210311

September the First.

Monday, September 1st, 2025 08:56 pm
hannah: (Zach and Claire - pickle_icons)
[personal profile] hannah
Three weeks to the day of Rosh Hashanah is an auspicious way to start a month. The season as a whole, really. It's not summer right now, no matter what produce I can find in the markets - it hasn't been for a while now, I just haven't admitted it yet. This year it ended for me on the 18th, waking up the morning after a big gullywasher cleaned out the last of the lingering humidity and giving me two weeks of the kind of days that wind up in movies and on postcards. And now it's September, with fall officially beginning.

Yes, that was the day after the Tom Cruise retrospective wrapped.

I've still got some cherries and rhubarb and plums in my fridge, and a quarter of a honeydew melon. The melon and cherries won't last much longer. But I'm not cooking with pumpkin until October, if I can help it.

Artificial Intelligence

Monday, September 1st, 2025 08:02 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Two more articles about AI crap


I look at these and I am concerned, not because AI is inhuman, but because it is  picking up aspects from its human creators, including some of the worst ones.


fleetsparrow: Drawing of Bear in a Batman costume, in her identity Bat-Bear. (Default)
[personal profile] fleetsparrow posting in [community profile] no_true_pair
Title:  I'm Reaching Out to You (But There's A Gun In My Hand)
Fandom:  DC Comics/Batman comics
Pairing/Characters:  Bruce Wayne & Jason Todd
Content Notes:  No Warnings Apply (though I will note that Bruce is physically in absentia here, he is very much haunting the fic)
Prompt:  September One - 2 & 6 - and they lived happily ever after
Summary:  Jason's pretty sure he's cursed. That's why this all keeps happening to him.
Totally a curse.


Read on AO3!

South Korean National Assembly Hanbok Day

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 12:06 am
[syndicated profile] metafilter_feed

Posted by needled

The South Korean National Assembly opened its regular session on Monday, September 1, 2025. Assembly Speaker Rep. Woo Won-shik of the ruling Democratic Party suggested wearing hanbok for the occasion as a show of unity. All parties except the main opposition People Power Party showed up in varied styles of hanbok, with some even wearing the traditional gat headwear during the session and subsequent interviews. PPP members showed up in black funereal garb.

Pen and Ink

Monday, September 1st, 2025 05:02 pm
lovelyangel: (Kagamin Pleased)
[personal profile] lovelyangel
TWSBI Diamond 580AL Fountain Pen and Pilot Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu Fountain Pen Ink
TWSBI Diamond 580AL Fountain Pen
Pilot Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu Fountain Pen Ink

It might not be a good thing that I’m signed up for JetPens emails, as I can be easily tempted. Sure enough, their weekly newsletter waved an addition to their stock of TWSBI Diamond 580ALR Fountain Pens before me, and I had to go look. Up until then, I wasn’t familiar with TWSBI pens.

JetPens is a wealth of information, and of course there’s a feature: Which TWSBI Fountain Pen Should I Buy? I read the entire article. While the Diamond 580ALR pens come is all sorts of wonderful colors, I shied away from the texture on their aluminum grips. So I looked into the TWSBI Diamond 580AL model, which has a smooth aluminum grip. (Actually, it’s very faintly textured, which is what I preferred.) The drawback is that it comes in only two colors – Silver and Iceberg Blue. I decided to get the blue one.

Ink was a no-brainer. I got a nice, large (50ml) bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu Ink. The price was pretty good, too.

I placed the order last Wednesday, and the kit arrived in the mail on Saturday. Unfortunately, I am packing up my office and workspace, so there’s no way I have the time nor place to play with the new items. Playtime will have to wait until October.

Daily Check-in

Monday, September 1st, 2025 06:01 pm
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[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, June September 01, to midnight on Tuesday, September 02. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33563 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 7

How are you doing?

I am OK.
5 (71.4%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
2 (28.6%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
4 (57.1%)

One other person.
2 (28.6%)

More than one other person.
1 (14.3%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

Graham Greene, RIP

Monday, September 1st, 2025 11:53 pm
[syndicated profile] metafilter_feed

Posted by Ideefixe

Dies: Oscar-Nominated 'Dances With Wolves' Actor Was 73 The trailblazing Canadian First Nations actor who opened doors for Indigenous actors in Hollywood, died September 1 in a Toronto hospital after a long illness. The Oscar nominee from Dances with Wolves was 73.

2025 OTW Election Statistics

Monday, September 1st, 2025 07:48 pm
[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

OTW Elections News

Now that the 2025 election is over, we're happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2025 Election, we had 15138 total eligible voters. Of those, 2197 voters cast a ballot, which represents 14.5% of the potential voters.

Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 22.8%.

We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 3415 to 2197, which represents a 35.6% decrease.

Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW's projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.

For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 3 candidates this year, revealing that information is unavoidable.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

[admin post] Admin Post: Challenge 490: Issue

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 11:43 am
china_shop: Close-up of Da Qing looking conspiratorial (Guardian - Da Qing conspiratorial)
[personal profile] china_shop posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Our new challenge is:

ISSUE



As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.

Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, 10th September. No sign-up required.

Mods will tag your work with fandom and challenge. When you've posted entries to three consecutive challenges, you will earn a name tag, and we'll go back and tag all your previous entries with your name.

All kinds of fanworks in all fandoms are welcome. Please have a look at our guidelines before you play. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact a mod. And if you have any suggestions for future challenges, you can leave them in the comments of this post.

Also, keep an eye out for the next [community profile] ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the [community profile] ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)

[admin post] Admin Post: Admin: Challenge closed

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 11:39 am
china_shop: An orange cartoon dog waving, with a blue-green abstract background. (Bingo!)
[personal profile] china_shop posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
The Amnesty challenge is now closed. Here are the entries:

Punch: due South: Fanfiction: Like a Punch to the Face by [personal profile] lucy_roman
Revenge Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Revenge At Last by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Crush Challenge: S.W.A.T.: Fan Fiction: Crushing On You by [personal profile] darkjediqueen
Crowd Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Wait And Hope by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Face: Spooks (MI5): Fanfic: At The Funeral by [personal profile] smallhobbit
Old Friends: Final Fantasy XII: Fanfic: (Re)United by [personal profile] the_paradigm
Science Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: A Man Of Science by [personal profile] badly_knitted
One Night Only: Starsky & Hutch: Fanfiction: Love, Despair, and Starsky by [personal profile] lucy_roman
Taking Turns Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Date Nights by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Sorry Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Words Aren't Enough by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Mending: Sherlock Holmes (ACD): Fanfic: Providing an Income Boost by [personal profile] smallhobbit
Credit Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: The Interview by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Red Challenge: Women's Soccer RPF: Fanfiction: Stanford Red by [personal profile] infinitum_noctem
Long Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Travelling Hopefully by [personal profile] badly_knitted
The Fantastic Journey Double Drabble: Uncomfortable Doubts by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Z challenge: Zorro: icons: the mark by [personal profile] highlander_ii
Clean Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Hot Water by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Telephone: Multifandom: Rec: Ringtones by [personal profile] treonb
Do-over Challenge: Sherlock (BBC)/Hamlet: Fanfic: Summer at Holmes' Hall by [personal profile] smallhobbit
Dash Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: The Real Thing by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Red challenge: Marvel Comics: fanart: red by [personal profile] fadedwings
Letter Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Left Behind by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Spicy Challenge: Torchwood: Spicing things up by [personal profile] m_findlow
24 Hours: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fanfic: Overpowered by [personal profile] veronyxk84
Relief Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Exhausted by [personal profile] badly_knitted
School/Midnight Challenge: Sherlock (BBC): Fanfic: The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine by [personal profile] smallhobbit
Guest Challenge: Greek Myth: Fanfic: Trauma Shared by [personal profile] drabblewriter
Double Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Mirage by [personal profile] badly_knitted
Spicy: Wildfrost: Art: spice yuki by [personal profile] himejoshiheart
The Last Word: xxxHoLiC: Podfic: death as a perfect circle (that elusive object) by [personal profile] bluedreaming
Je Ne Regrette Rien: You Are Desire: Poetry: the way we were by [personal profile] teaotter
Waiting: Guardian: fanfic: Best Friends Forever by [personal profile] china_shop

\o/ \o/ \o/

Thank you to everyone who participated! You're now free to post your entries to your journal or wherever else you'd like. If you're archiving on AO3, you can add your work to our fan_flashworks collection there.

New challenge is on its way.

Sticky Tales: Spiders, Silk, and Human Attachments

Monday, September 1st, 2025 11:18 pm
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Posted by paduasoy

The artist Eleanor Morgan writes about gathering spiders' silk herself, and about the practice's history. Her book Gossamer Days: Spiders, Humans and Their Threads is reviewed at Caught by the River.

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