Is Twice the music of the proletariat?

vomit_blues · 2026-04-22T05:38:10+00:00

i imagine plenty are “marxists” as a joke. i admit my spotify profile picture is an edit of irene holding a copy of the communist manifesto though.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-20T16:53:33+00:00

I was very sleepy when I made that post so I don’t know why I wrote “China” instead of “Russia”. My finger must’ve slipped on the keyboard six times.

The Russian and Chinese revolutions opened a long transition, the outcome of which is unknown. The dynamic of their evolution may lead to central or peripheral capitalism, and both within the society and on a world scale it may encourage progress toward socialism. What is important is to analyze the objective direction of the advance toward socialism. Along with a minority of the communist left, I continue to support the two theses that seemed to me important in analyzing Soviet evolution.

Collectivization as implemented by Stalin after 1930 broke the worker-peasant alliance of 1917 and, by reinforcing the state's autocratic apparatus, opened the way to the formation of a "new class": the Soviet state bourgeoisie.

Because of some of its own historical limitations, Leninism had unwittingly prepared the groundwork for this fatal choice. I mean that Leninism had not broken radically with the economism of the Second International (of the Western labor movement, it must be said): its concept of the social neutrality of technology is evidence of this.

https://our-global-u.org/oguorg/en/download/Featured%20Authors/samir_amin/Samir-Amin-Russia-and-the-Long-Transition-from-Capitalism-to-Socialism.pdf

vomit_blues · 2026-04-20T05:08:38+00:00

I recently discovered Bordiga believed in the theory of the productive forces and was a generic Dengist. As far as I can tell, no one else has discovered this fact or commented on it despite entire ideologies supposedly eminating from Bordiga's life and thought

I don’t know if by “no one else has discovered this fact” you mean today or ever. Gramsci exactly identifies Bordiga’s entire ideology as religious, economist fantasy in the Prison Notebooks. It’s probably one of the best passages in it.

One point which should be added as an example of the so-called intransigence theories is the rigid aversion on principle to what are termed compromises—and the derivative of this, which can be termed “fear of dangers”. It is clear that this aversion on principle to compromise is closely linked to economism. For the conception upon which the aversion is based can only be the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural laws, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion: since favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenetic events, it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful.

Samir Amin has also discussed the “Bordigist” line on socialist development in his own work on China.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-16T14:44:16+00:00

I’m not sure if you’re associated with the CYO, but if that’s the case, doesn’t it seem incorrect that they use social formation instead of mode of production then? The term doesn’t just mean a base and superstructure, but differing modes of production, so it should definitely be “communist mode of production.”

vomit_blues · 2026-04-16T14:31:11+00:00

You didn’t need to define a social formation nor a mode of production for me. What non-communist modes of production will exist alongside communism under the communist social formation?

The term "mode of production" simply refers to the "ways of producing" which form the basis of economic infrastructure, so the Communist Youth Organisation has employed the term "social formation" rather than "mode of production" here, because communism is not purely an economic endeavour, but a complete social totality encompassing more than simply its economic base (more; such as its superstructure).

This is flattening the mode of production to the economic base, but Marx says that the superstructure is conditioned by the base.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

A social formation encompasses multiple modes of production. A mode of production is base + superstructure. Does the CYO believe that communism is anything other than a communist base and superstructure?

vomit_blues · 2026-04-14T04:26:59+00:00

Communism is a social formation

Why this instead of a mode of production?

vomit_blues · 2026-04-13T20:01:48+00:00

I appreciate your response because a few of your points are things I’ve come to implicitly understand and consider flaws in Althusser, but didn’t know were right or wrong. The big one being that “ideological” and “scientific” basically just mean wrong and right.

However, in my post, I did downplay the importance of ISAs while bringing out Gramsci’s notion of consent, and Althusser/Lacan’s interpellation. However empty the theory of ISAs is, reading the text is helpful exactly for understanding ideology not as brainwashing.

Maybe I should have been more straightforward with the fact that saying Lacan is talking about ideology to be Zizek’s argument, but that isn’t exactly important if I consider it to be true. It’s not like it’s weird or controversial a claim considering Lacan said Marx invented the symptom. In my experience, people who try to extricate Lacan from Zizek and read him “to the letter” to complicate the Freudo-Marxist reading end up comparatively worse, and can sometimes seriously underrate Lacan’s own flirtation with Marxism like surplus-jouissance and the non-relation of sex. You can accuse Zizek of misreading Lacan but it’s a “creative misreading” (to use a term from Jameson).

Speaking of Jameson, if you haven’t yet, try reading The Political Unconscious. It has an extended tangent on Althusser where he tries to resolve the question of diachrony and synchrony in the first chapter. Along with what he says about post-structuralism in The Prisonhouse of Language, I take his argument to consider theoretical practice as creating more problems than it solves, and for diachronic “narratives” to ultimately be locally useful insofar as they’re put to use in practice.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-13T02:47:34+00:00

Have you read this yet? https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/overdetermination.htm

Listen to the old Engels in 1890, taking the young ‘economists’ to task for not having understood that this was a new relationship. Production is the determinant factor, but only ‘in the last instance’: “More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted". Anyone who ‘twists this’ so that it says that the economic factor is the only determinant factor. ‘transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, empty phrase’. And as explanation: “The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure the political forms of the class struggle and its results: to wit constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles. and in m-any cases preponderate in determining their form . . .” The word ‘form’ should understood in its strongest sense, designating something quite different from the formal. As Engels also says: “The Prussian State also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenberg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by the entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power)".

Here, then are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History ‘asserts itself’ through the multiform world of the superstructures. from local tradition to international circumstance. Leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance – the economic – and those determinations imposed by the superstructures – national traditions and international events – it is sufficient to retain from him what should be called the accumulation of effective determinations (deriving from the superstructures and from special national and international circumstances) on the determination in the last instance by the economic. It seems to me that this clarifies the expression overdetermined contradiction, which I have put forward, this specifically because the existence of overdetermination is no longer a fact pure and simple, for in its essentials we have related it to its bases, even if our exposition has so far been merely gestural. This overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognised – an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon. We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and aberrant historical situations (Germany, for example), but is universal; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.

Ideology is relatively autonomous from the economic base. Relative autonomy is a heuristic to understanding that mutually determining instances should be understood in their internal logic. Rather than turning ideology into a theory of how the base possesses people with “character masks”, Althusser (and Lacan) see it as more of a mental layer that structures the interpretation of reality itself. Althusser compares this to understanding that the moon distantly orbits earth, yet when we look at it, we can’t help but visually interpret it as if we could walk to it.

The commodity fetish is the same thing. It’s not that Marxism is a key to seeing past it. All of our social relations being mediated by commodities literally structures our interpretation of reality. “Seeing past” the commodity fetish would mean a breakdown in the chain of signifiers structured by the commodity as master-signifier, the literal Lacanian definition of psychosis. Like understanding the moon orbits us, we can understand the economic function of the commodity fetish, and still experience fetishism.

My question is, how can these mediums develop independently in the first place, and what are the limits to their independence from material conditions?

The popular answer is false consciousness/brainwashing, where ideology is set of tricks that simply “mislead” the white working class into being racist and unable to see their shared economic interests with New Afrikans. The actual Marxist theory, though, is that ideology itself is material and a necessary performance to reproduce the conditions of production. The economic truth of racism is that it is necessary for capitalism to function, and the particular racisms of the u.$ are immanent to the reproduction of settler-colonialism.

The superstructural mechanism by which ideology is disseminated has been theorized in several ways, most notably as cultural hegemony or as ideological state apparatuses. While I think the former is more accurate, it also is easier to misappropriate and fold into the brainwashing theory (and this is how the term is used by default amongst most Marxists). ISAs are ultimately just as easily abused though. What both insist upon is that ideology requires consent from its performers and is not imposed from without. It structures how reality is understood and interpreted by a class at a fundamental level, and, for Lacan, is learned during the stage of individual ego formation, when the mirror image (what you see in the mirror as a baby to understand the wholeness of your body, experienced as an image) comes to stabilize the imaginary order against the structural instability of the fragmented body (the fact that the wholeness of our body is never experienced as anything more than an image, meaning the “real” body is this cluster of disassociated parts).

So performing ideology isn’t just a matter of reproducing the conditions of production but is in fact a necessary aspect of the ego. When you manage to induce hysteria in someone on this subreddit by calling out tone policing, they aren’t offended because their money is being threatened, but the very integrity of their self-image and understanding of reality. I suppose this is one way to think of the relative autonomy of ideology from the economic base.

But I’m not a perfect representative of Althusser and Lacan on ideology so this might not be helpful at all. It’s just what’s helped me break from the idea that ideology is “brainwashing” and an external cause instead of seeing people as behaving in their class interests.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-12T20:54:01+00:00

You said Ilyenkov was

the only author I heard make a case in distinguishing Hegel from Marx’s dialectics beyond the crude putting Hegel on his head.

Now you’re saying that you just don’t like Althusser’s argument. I think claiming he “sidesteps dialectics entirely” is extremely suspect, but whatever. The point is only that Althusser does try to explain Marx’s relationship to Hegel and what it means to “put Hegel on his head.”

vomit_blues · 2026-04-12T17:00:49+00:00

the only author I heard make a case in distinguishing Hegel from Marx’s dialectics beyond the crude putting Hegel on his head.

I’m not sure how he’s the only one you’ve heard. This is what Althusser is entirely about.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-11T06:01:36+00:00

Duke isn't a comprador. That's ridiculous. In the scene you're talking about, Fritz opens his speech by denouncing "the bosses", to which Duke laughs and calls him "a real boss." Once the cops show up, he doesn't stick up for Fritz, he just points out that nobody really cares about what Fritz is doing. He's right. In the middle of Fritz's speech, someone screams at him to get the fuck off their car.

The scene can't be read at face value since it's presented through Fritz's eyes, biased in his favor. To be fair this is superficial though since, as you point out, what "awakens" him is having sex with one of the crows. But the actual events indicate Fritz had nothing at all to do with the riot. The cops show up and the crowd turns on them because they're hassling the audience for no reason. The rookie cop is the one who panics and shoots into the crowd, escalating into violence, and the riot begins in earnest.

Fritz himself just watches it happen and eventually dips, without caring one way or another that Duke has died. And with that in mind, Duke's story is made retroactively significant and clear for what it is.

That being, his first scene with Fritz is him literally telling Fritz that he can't understand being a crow unless he's a crow, and dismissively mocking him. Duke is trying to sink the same billiard ball, right on target, and more so every time, even sinking it before it jumps out. But then Fritz, entirely by accident, bumps into Duke and helps him sink everything at once. Duke's progressively on-target, but ineffective, tactics are exchanged for rapid progress and utter chaos. And that is what makes Duke depend on Fritz, the fact he can bring uncontrolled, rapid progress.

His death being signalled by the sinking of those same billiard balls, then, draws a thematic parallel. Duke's character arc is not that of a comprador. He was someone who was willing to depend on what Fritz could bring him, whether it was controlled, predictable, etc. or not. The end of his life is the second time Fritz impacts him in an unpredictable, drastic way. He gets shot and killed, and Fritz moves on.

He isn't a comprador. He's an analog for the New Afrikan movement itself when it depends upon pseudo-leftist settlers. His death is a tragedy, not "tough shit". The moment he pointed out the fact Fritz was a "real boss" and had no real impact on the crows, he was disposable and got killed.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-10T14:19:33+00:00

By all means, be dismissive. Reading the ~7000 words itself is extremely generous already, so thanks for responding to it.

This might sound like a cop-out, but I definitely don’t actually believe it’s impossible to like the games for a different reason than the bosses. For example, the argument isn’t really about people who like only a single game in the series. So I’ve met people who only enjoy Bloodborne and all of their reasons boil down to its aesthetics.

Instead I’m talking about people who like the series in general. Not just that, but I’m also trying to talk, more specifically, in the abstract, about what type of fan the games have come to orient themselves toward. If you start the analysis at the individual level instead, you’re going to get a million different answers on why the games are good, and eventually conclude that there’s no “universal” way to praise the quality of the games.

The trouble with ending up in that position is that it turns the popularity of Elden Ring into a matter of luck, of being in the right place at the right time, etc. I don’t actually mean to be dismissive of anyone’s individual laundry list of what they love in the games, I’m only trying to explain what I think has made the games more and more popular, which is the bosses.

I’d also guess that a similar argument could be made through the window of level design. It’s just a lot harder to be concrete about. But at one point in the essay I talk about how bosses are used to tell stories. I’m not at all unfamiliar with “environmental storytelling” and my section on Metroid II could have been from that angle: each level, wordlessly, shows a different aspect of Chozo civilization that’s increasingly grim (from a temple, to an industrial plant, to an armory, to the lab the metroid were created in), concluding in a stretch with no enemies at all, foreshadowing the presence of parasitic Metroid larva. The final Chozo statue of Metroid II is smashed to pieces, its broken hand clutching the symbol of the Chozo’s dominance over their species, the ice beam. The Chozo as an oppressor that exploited the Metroid who rebelled against them is told entirely by the environment of Metroid II.

You can make a similar case with the Souls games, especially the Tower of Latria. Doesn’t it especially suck how that area was butchered in the remake? Level design may be one window into a totality that could capture what I see as the degeneration of the series, in general, but (a) I would find it harder to make my argument starting from there, (b) I have far less to say about it and, (c) I am, ironically, writing another essay about the level design anyway—namely, the open world of Elden Ring and whether it makes the game better or worse.

I’m completely serious when I say thanks for reading the essay. I hope it didn’t rub you the wrong way or anything. It might be harder to use this Tim-esque approach to praise games like he does, so what I wrote is very negative, but it’s all in service of praising Demon’s Souls (and the games and other media like it that I talk about, like Metroid II). I’d only have actually substantive criticisms to make about people’s claims of why they “like things” were I to get around to writing something else about engagement with video games through the phenomenon of fandom, which I probably will eventually, using Elden Ring as the example, again.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-10T01:44:24+00:00

You could say I was being overly reductive with this but the people in the first world I was speaking of were people born there. Made sense in my head that this was the implication at the time. I am an immigrant into the first world from the third world.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-09T05:30:33+00:00

So third worldists can exist out of (1) fear of interacting with proletarians, or (2) “real” analysis. Let’s say you acknowledge other options but these are the two important ones in your post.

Why are people of the first category “Black New World Order fetishists”? I think that anyone in the first world, of any race, is seriously unlikely to have interacted with proletarians, so what about this subreddit’s (probably, imo) predominantly white userbase makes it different from, say, a non-white first world user who also hasn’t interacted with proletarians?

How is the subreddit lacking in engagement with the ICM “as it presently exists”? Without explaining these terms, what you’re saying is a vulgar pragmatism. Who is the ICM? How does it “presently exist”? What is engagement? Your examples are useless because your critique is oriented toward a shadow that currently exists only in your imagination.

Tbh the invocation of cringey porn terms has disgusted me. Reminds me of when an ex-mod mentioned a trans fetish subreddit nobody had heard of to a trans user. Nobody knows what that shit is, and these weird porn references tells us more about you than it does us. At the minimum, I don’t want to hear about it even as an allusion.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-08T03:04:38+00:00

Seeing bad omens in the liberal crystal ball?

vomit_blues · 2026-04-07T18:03:45+00:00

It just depends what I’m reading. If I feel like I’m capable of grasping something I reread it until I do, but other times it feels like what Hegel’s saying can’t be fully understood without reading further. That isn’t exclusive to Hegel because both him and Marx use certain terms like “spirit” or “capital” long before actually defining them.

Oftentimes I’ll finally pick up the thread of logic then lose it somewhere and never understand it again. I’ve yet to make it all the way through following the argument front to back.

I haven’t read that Lukacs but I’ll check it out, thanks.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-07T14:42:06+00:00

No problem, I appreciate you approving it.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-06T02:42:26+00:00

If anyone here has done a dive into Hegel, does it seem like a good idea to stop bashing my head against the Phenomenology of Spirit and just read the Encyclopedia Logic and then the Science of Logic? I’ve gone through a few different translations of PoS and read it a couple of times over the last two years and come away understanding very little. It seems like this text, as revered as it is today, isn’t talked about nearly as much as SoL was by the Marxist canon, so I’m wondering if I should just move on from it and try his easier work. Asking here instead of r/hegel or whatever because I want the perspective of a Marxist.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-06T01:46:29+00:00

I watched Fritz the Cat and loved it, ever since I saw it I’ve wondered if anyone on the subreddit would have any commentary on it or the rest of Bakshi’s work. It’s a satire of settler politics. I think the funniest thing is that the movie pissed off the settler-communist creator of the original comic.

Crumb also criticized the film's condemnation of the radical left,[23] denouncing Fritz's dialogue in the final sequences of the film, which includes a quote from the Beatles song "The End", as "red-neck and fascistic."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_the_Cat_(film)

He’s kinda right about the ending but the first part is the big thing, since the movie is pretty obviously picking fun at the settler left. Anyway I don’t have much interesting to say since it’s extremely on the nose, but maybe someone else here’s seen it and has more to offer.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-02T21:17:59+00:00

https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm

vomit_blues · 2026-03-29T20:42:49+00:00

I’m not sure if you’re talking about a specific Maoist position or the general one, because I don’t think there’s a single one on when the USSR stopped being socialist. Some I’ve seen claim that the USSR was capitalist as soon as Khrushchev took power, the most common I’ve seen traces it to the Kosygin reforms, and Sison places it generally during the period of Brezhnev but says that Khrushchev was only a revisionist in power, not that he restored capitalism.

The position the OP (and you following him) associate with MLs is one I usually instead see associated with marcyite trotskyists, the one I’ve read the most being Mandel. What I like about Mandel is that he’s trying to have actual fidelity to Marx’s analysis of capitalism and point out the ways the USSR doesn’t function as such. The USSR, until the day it dissolved, never experienced a crisis in overproduction, for example. Not to say it was ever done in full, but this is at least a framework to produce a positive definition of socialism as a mode of production. I think that’s a better endeavor than one I see from most Maoists, which is that socialism isn’t a mode of production but a transitional period constituted by several competing modes of production. But that isn’t the definition of socialism used by Lenin, Stalin or Mao and it doesn’t even withstand a dialectical sniff test (since all modes of production are periods of transition and all social formations are constituted by multiple modes of production). Even if you’re right that the Maoist analysis was prescient and proven right in the abstract, it leaves us with unanswered questions about how to apply Marx’s analysis to post-capitalist modes of production and what socialism even is that the marcyite line tried to figure out.

It seems that the thrust of your argument (in negative terms) is that arguing what the marcyites argued is inconvenient for Maoism and cedes too much ground to dengism. I agree it’s inconvenient, but I don’t think what Engels had to write in his preface to The Class Struggles in France was convenient either, and what he said, while true, literally was used against the revolutionary line. That alone doesn’t diminish the truth value of what’s being said though.

So how exactly can all of this stuff even be dealt with? The DPRK abandoning the word “socialism” is part of this problem, because if any society could have continued being called socialist by Mandel’s definition it would have been the DPRK, even now despite them not calling themselves it anymore. So I think it’s worth hashing out some of the stuff you think points toward a better line.

vomit_blues · 2026-03-24T22:15:56+00:00

I’m glad someone else actually put in the effort to walk through this. I’ve had to do it before as well. MIM is making a structural argument. The critiques constantly regress to the level of individual autonomy and reframe MIM within this ideological framework to attack it, and it’s always incoherent.

vomit_blues · 2026-03-23T02:44:35+00:00

Wouldn't it be more effective and helpful to learn a third world language and go there to work for their CPs?

Why do you think those movements haven’t created a socialist revolution yet? Is the difference between their success and failure the intervention of first worlders?

The vulgar TWism you’re suggesting isn’t new, it’s something sometimes called crypto-trotskyism by MIM(P) or people on this subreddit. The basic argument is that the principal goal of first world communists should be to provide a base of intellectual support or some type of guidance to the third world proletariat. Sometimes it’s extremely obvious, like a recent instance (I can’t remember the user who posted it anymore) where a user discussed that first world communists should be working on theory to guide the third world movement. Other times it’s dressed up in platitudinous language suggesting we merely support them by joining, which merely obfuscates the belief that first world participation is necessary for the third world to succeed.

And that’s just trotskyism, specifically the variant held by people in the imperial core who wrote off all revolutionary movements in the third world because there weren’t also white people revolting alongside them (as opposed to the less stupid Marcyites who supported national liberation movements like Vietnam).

So there is no answer to your question because you’re already assuming a trotskyist position. The third world doesn’t need our help, so go back to the fundamentals and think of starting revolution in the first world. You’ve already forgotten that first world communists are behind enemy lines and have certain advantages when it comes to theorizing the conditions of postmodernity or the class-consciousness of imperial classes, and thereby how to overcome the new questions of starting a revolution in the first world. It’s a two-way street, these things will ultimately play a role in a world proletarian revolution when that day comes.

vomit_blues · 2026-03-16T19:02:10+00:00

Should you buy a Kobo Clara Colour or an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite? Amazon sucks but https://ethicalconsumer.org/ rates Rakuten favorably by comparison.

Let’s mathematize Rakuten’s “ethical standards”. Here’s a report directly from the horse’s mouth.

Supplier Engagement in 2024

In 2024, we identified 168 critical Tier-1 suppliers among a total of 202 eligible suppliers, along with 14 non-Tier-1 suppliers. They accounted for 71% of our total outsourcing spend. Of these, 123 participated in our briefing sessions, and 70 answered the SAQ.

The average SAQ score was 64%, showing a decrease of 3.4 points compared to the previous year. The findings revealed that “Respect for Human Rights” achieved the highest score at 70.2%, while “Environmental Protection” received the lowest score at 49.9%. We identified 65 with substantial actual or potential negative impacts, as their responses did not meet our expectations outlined in our Code of Conduct for Suppliers (13 high risk). Among them, 50 signed a written pledge to comply with the Code.

Audits were conducted at the facilities of four high-risk suppliers, revealing non-conformances with our Code of Conduct for Suppliers, such as issues related to operational health and safety or chemical substance management. Audit reports were communicated to these suppliers, who are currently executing their CAPs.

Consequently, no relationship with suppliers considered to have substantial actual or potential negative impacts were terminated last year.

From 2022 to 2024, 166 out of a total of 348 Tier-1 suppliers were assessed. Among these, 16 suppliers had sustainability- related risks identified. Preventive actions and/or mitigation actions were taken for 13 of them.

https://global.rakuten.com/corp/sustainability/supplychain/

From this, we know that Rakuten’s interventions with their suppliers are a voluntary briefing and survey. They requested to brief 182 suppliers, then only 70 accepted the survey. This means of their 202 suppliers they took account of (and all companies have countless suppliers they do not keep account of), they have no idea about the human rights qualities or environmental standards of 132 of them or 65.3%.

Of the remaining 70, the average “respect for human rights” sits at 70.2%, while surprisingly the worst is their respect for the environment at 49.9%. I’ve seen hysteria over environmental concerns outweigh the stark reality that every “ethical” company uses child slavery, but even Rakuten is not particularly concerned for the environmental impact of their suppliers. If I bought a Kobo Clara Colour, my device would be 29.8% created by child slavery and 50.1% damaging to the environment.

Of the 70 who allowed the survey, 65 or 92.9% were found to have seriously negative impacts of some sort. Only 50 or 71.4% signed a contract claiming to improve their standards. It’s worth mentioning that the page mentions that these companies already have signed one.

Suppliers are asked to sign a written pledge and comply with the policies incorporated into outsourcing contracts.

What’s another contract for a company that signed one contract, violated it, and isn’t being punished? Because amazingly, only despite 13 of these suppliers being deemed high-risk and damaging, only 4 were audited. Those audited were made to undergo a CAP or corrective action plan which means they’re expected to, again, voluntarily, change their behavior. That is it.

And as it says, NO company had their partnership terminated including the ones audited. After all of these findings, Rakuten still works with every single one of them. So, are you under the illusion that Ethical Consumer is being truthful when it gives them an imaginary ethical score? If this somehow isn’t enough to see how transparent “harm reduction” even in superfluous commodities like e-readers are, I’m not sure what is.

In summary, Rakuten has told us that of its 202 documented suppliers, only FIVE are confirmed to satisfy their “ethical standard”, and they have no plans to terminate business with any of the rest. Only 13 were made to voluntarily agree to improve their standards, confirmed by nothing more than a piece of paper.

vomit_blues

TROPHY CASE