Nine former tenants of Equity Residential, the nation’s fifth-largest apartment owner, announced this week that they’re going on a new kind of strike. According to the company, the former tenants still owe amounts ranging from $195 to more than $50,000 — but in order to spotlight what they say are predatory practices by corporate landlords, the tenants will collectively refuse to pay up.

For sisters Tay’Laur and Tai’Leah Paige, one missed rent payment triggered a chain of events that left them homeless and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Two years ago, when the Paige sisters came up short on rent for their North Hollywood apartment, they say Equity Residential moved rapidly to lock them out of their online payment portal and file for eviction. Even after they secured rental assistance that would’ve cleared their balance, they say the company refused to accept it, while escalating fees and back rent piled up during a months-long court battle. Soon after the sisters agreed to move out in August 2024, the company began attempting to collect nearly $50,000 in debt — and reported that debt to credit bureaus, a crushing barrier in their search for new housing. The sisters spent months living in their car in between stays at hotels and relatives’ homes.

Because their eviction record was sealed by the court, the sisters ultimately got the company to stop reporting the debt and are resuming their housing search. But this week, they announced plans to go a step further, launching a rent debt strike to protest the company’s practices. The strikers are joining a larger group of current tenants already withholding the opaque utility fees that they contend allow Equity Residential to shift its costs to renters and circumvent local rent control regulations. The strike was organized with support from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first union of debtors.

At least 600,000 Palestinians are currently under siege in Gaza City amid the Israeli army's ongoing bombardment, encirclement, and expulsion campaign, the New Arab reported on 2 October.

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that all Palestinians remaining in the city must abandon their homes, pass Israeli checkpoints, and move to tent encampments in the south, stressing that anyone who stays will be considered a “terrorist” or “terrorist supporter” and targeted by invading Israeli forces.

Now is the “last opportunity for Gaza residents” to move south, Katz said.

Israeli forces have currently blocked all travel northward on the Rashid coastal road, cutting off the city's last surviving lifeline for humanitarian aid and preventing Palestinians who had moved south temporarily in search of food and shelter from returning.

“The only safe road for bringing in food and medicine has been cut. Announcements and speeches mean nothing if aid cannot reach civilians,” stated Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson of the Gaza civil defense, in a press statement.

While the Israeli military expected a mass exodus to the south, between 600,000 and 700,000 Palestinians remain in Gaza City, the UN estimated

Full Article

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54678688

Liberalism arises historically with the bourgeoisie, promising universal rights, free markets, and political representation.

Its core contradiction: it proclaims universal freedom but maintains private property, class hierarchies, and colonial domination.

Its “progressive” content (rights etc) is always mediated by its “reactionary” content (capital accumulation, imperialism).

In the late 20th century, liberal politics shifted focus from material redistribution to recognition and representation of identities (race, gender, sexuality).

This has real emancipatory elements (civil rights, anti-discrimination), but within a liberal framework it tends to:

Fragment the working class into competing identity groups.

Leave capitalist property relations untouched.

Turn politics into a symbolic arena of inclusion/exclusion rather than redistribution.

This becomes what some call “neoliberal multiculturalism”.

The Alienation of the Proletariat:

Workers whose economic position deteriorates under neoliberal globalization see elites championing diversity while offshoring jobs and cutting welfare.

They perceive “liberal elites” as hypocritical or hostile — not because they oppose equality per se, but because the equality on offer seems to bypass their economic suffering.

This creates fertile ground for reactionary movements that reframe their economic grievances as cultural ones.

The Dialectic: Liberalism to Fascism

If we think dialectically:

Thesis (Liberalism): Universal rights, formal equality, market freedom.

Antithesis (Proletarian Alienation): Mass discontent over the gap between formal equality and real inequality.

Synthesis (Fascism): A counter-movement that rejects universalism but mobilizes identity (national, racial, religious) to restore a sense of collective belonging and purpose.

Fascism thus does not arise ex nihilo; it is the reaction to liberal contradictions:

Liberalism’s fragmentation of solidarity enables fascism’s call for a unified, “authentic” national identity.

Liberal elites’ cosmopolitanism enables fascism’s anti-globalist populism.

Liberal tolerance of corporate power enables fascism’s authoritarian alliance with capital.

Fascism is hence the “Degenerate Offspring” of Liberalism

You can theorize fascism here as:

Not simply a negation but a mutation of liberal politics: it retains mass politics, identity focus, and even some welfare-state promises — but only for the “in-group.”

A perverse form of “recognition politics” where instead of expanding recognition, it contracts it violently.

The endpoint of liberalism’s failure to resolve class contradiction: when equality cannot be achieved materially, it is abandoned and replaced with exclusionary hierarchy.

This would mirror Marx’s notion that each stage of history contains the seeds of its own negation.

This theory does not mean liberal politics intends fascism. Just that its contradictions enable fascism.

Overcoming fascism requires not just defending liberal norms, since the radical aspects of it which have been valuable are being attacked, but transcending liberalism’s economic foundations — i.e., re-centering class and material redistribution.

Now I’m no Hegelian, my understanding of Hegel and Marx is fairly limited. But this is the best I could do put forth the reasoning for fascism and where to move forward.

This is also not US centric, I am not american and am seeing fascism and surveillance states rise around the world. While fascism used to be a fear of ‘the other’ as an outsider, we’re seeing a world where fascism uses citizens as ‘the other’ now.

I would love to go more in depth here. I would like to incorporate naom Chomsky’s idea of manufacturing consent to show how the alienation is created.

In a genuinely Hegelian sense, capitalism contains the seeds of its own transcendence. But contrary to Marx, this transcendence is not socialist.

Through ideological domination the working class is stripped of its revolutionary potential. The only remaining agent capable of resolving capitalism’s crises is the capitalist class itself.

This class resolves contradictions not by abolishing capital but by restructuring the state around authoritarian and nationalist principles.

Thus the dialectic moves from capitalism to fascism, not because of proletarian liberation, but because of capital’s own drive for self-preservation.

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

BlueMonday1984

2025-09-21 23:00:08

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th September 2025 - awful.systems

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

https://awful.systems/post/5621644?scrollToComments=true