We are told that the last time widespread protests yielded positive results, we achieved a perfectly just society, and to protest any more is going too far.
Even if we did achieve a perfectly just society, they’ve spent decades eroding worker’s rights and exploiting us.
Also the protests are watered down. Rosa Parks just had a rough day and was too tired to stand up? No, she was educated in political issues and involved in organizing and did what she did very deliberately. She never held a speech because of patriarchal structures within the civil rights movement.
TL;DR Everyone knows MLK had a dream but no one know what it was.
They only call it “class warfare” when poor people fight back.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” - Warren Buffett
A rich man who’s actually talented should have no problem with higher taxes, because everyone will be better off, and he has faith in his ability to earn it back.
When the poor create an angry mob and kill the rich, it’s called justice
I kind of don’t like when we label random stuff as capitalism, because it’s the same language Tankies and other Fake Communists use. Capitalism can and should be done without wealth concentration, extortion, or taking advantage of vulnerable people.
Capitalism doesn’t exist without wealth concentration, extortion or taking advantage. They are features, not bugs.
Capitalism does exist without wealth concentration
Clearly a typo, but I agree 100% it can be done, quite easily even.
It should be, but it inevitably ends up with a massive concentration of wealth. It doesn’t take much to topple the checks and balances, just a lot of time and these people are patient.
Why are you saying this as though you know?
History?
Oh, you’re a big history reader are you? Could you provide a reading list for the evidence of this?
Sealioning
What happened to your last account?
Was gonna ask what you meant but then I realized you didn’t know what instances were.
I mean, look around you, France, Germany, the UK. They used to be pretty stable, with an okay redistribution system. And then, one law after another, some people got insanely wealthy, started lobbying for cuts left and right because they could afford it, and now they’re funding fascist propaganda. Some earlier than others, the UK was during Thatcher, France is currently going full neo liberal.
What happened in the Weimar Republic is somewhat similar too, the industrial complexes and the bourgeoisie helped the Nazis gain power.
What a strange reading list, it’s almost like you never took the time to learn about this at all and have only shaped your worldview on the information that’s fed to you. What are the odds that someone who doesn’t think critically about the historical narratives they’re given would develop a worldview that just so happens to benefit the power hierarchy they already exist in? (The UK being neoliberal only while Thatcher was around is hilarious btw)
Everyone knows that liberals will side with fascists, but you don’t know why that happens so you just accept answers that have the right vibes. Your narrative naturalizes human tendencies toward authoritarianism, a liberal and fascist narrative that is contradictory to what we have learned about indigenous peoples all over the world that were subject to European colonialism and its accompanying system of knowledge (Check out Kathleen DuVall’s Native Nations for North American context). Liberals and fascists do not differ on the fundamental principle that society should be stratified along the lines of socially and politically constructed groups imagined to be fundamentally different from privileged groups – such as how racism emerged to facilitate slavery – which they use to justify the violent extraction of wealth from colonized land. Liberals and fascists purport to differ on the basis of individualism, but the fascist claim to exceptional community in the form of national identity is fanciful when positioned in the broader history of colonialism where their concepts of human society and history uncritically drew from.
Liberals respond to challenge through violent oppression first and assimilation second when that inevitably fails. They appropriate concepts like progress and equality to disarm social justice movements and position their efforts securely within the legal frameworks of the state through civil rights assurances. Conversely, fascist rhetoric depends on narratives that construct liberal states as weak for their inability to more effectively carry out the genocide of groups that they commonly understand to be inferior to the privileged groups they’re a part of. Liberalism’s tendency to slowly wear down dissent with marginal concessions frustrates the fascist who is critical of their tactics, not the specific fundamental violence that liberalism depends on.
Now, in the face of neoliberalisms penetration into daily life and the gradual erosion of middle-class material security globally as avenues for growth diminish, why would fascist rhetoric emerge in North America and Europe today? Why are they talking about “population control” as cause of climate change when it is so obviously stratified access to resources? Your explanation would assume that it is just the human tendency to be awful, but the reality is that is what the system you are subject to has taught you specifically to make you less capable of criticizing it. Humans are not naturally awful, it is this system that is violent and that is more than what the government looks like, it is how you imagine the world around you.
You’re lucky I had to wait for a meeting, y’all don’t normally get a free lesson.
I never said anything about human nature, you just assumed that from my 10 lines of comment. That’s a lot of words to just say that we basically agree ? You’re just being weirdly condescending about it. Also, the UK is still a neo liberal country, I never claimed the opposite. It just started earlier than others, maybe I didn’t convert that thought in my comment.
Thanks for the lesson, that was interesting, but you should definitely keep the condescending tone down.
Theres no alternative, though. Whether you’re ruled over by a capitalist oligarchy or an authoritarian autocracy, the results are all the same.
The only way forward is to promote an educated class of people to succeed in democracy.
Whether you’re ruled over by a capitalist oligarchy or an authoritarian autocracy
Are those really the only two options?
The other option was the second line. Apparently you didn’t make it that far in.
The only way forward is to promote an educated class of people to succeed in democracy.
The point I am getting at is that removing capitalism doesn’t solve the problem. We’ve tried it before.
I’ll take Anarchism for $0 thanks Alex.
I’m sure that will go well for about 10 seconds before somebody uses force to seize power.
We can’t force you to read about anarchism
The means of production include the means to defend your community.
State power exists because of a monopoly on violence. Capitalism is a fine term to use since property rights are propped up by the violence of the state. The end game of capitalism is a monopoly on the means of production by an entitled few enshrined in property rights.
Amarchy means an end to domination by hierarchical power such as that foundational to capitalism. Instead people will organize horizontally power in collective communities. Keep your gun, toothbrush and fight for your community when domination is imposed. Better to live 10 seconds on your feet under anarchy than to live a lifetime in bondage under capitalism.
State power exists because of a monopoly on violence.
Making violence free and open for all has certainly always been beneficial in the past. /s
States are a largescale collection of people. The exclusivity of and participation in the state varies from one to the next, but they exist as a means for people to protect their very large community.
Now what a specific understanding of how politics works, one that just so happens to make the hegemony we live under fated to be, natural even. I wonder how you came to accept a worldview that is so beneficial to the hierarchy you were born under, socialized by, and apparently uncritically consume the media of.
The hegemony would be a lot happier without the democracy, tbh.
Okay I know I’ve been very sarcastic with you so far so I’ll be clear. You do not know what you are talking about. You’re just another arrogant asshole who thinks they’re imbued with answers just because you don’t challenge yourself to think differently.
Last time I checked the rich HATE paying taxes, they HATE people voting for fairer labor laws, they HATE being told they can’t use illegal means to produce goods, and they HATE having to pay for regulatory bodies making sure their products are safe and efficient.
Democracy is the enemy of the rich.
You seriously just got all of your history from reddit and twitter eh. A fundamental element in neoliberalism is corporate welfare dude, your misunderstanding of politics as simple “I like this” or “I do not like this” is incompatible with even the concept of appropriation as it depends on a world where interests are as pure as ideals. I’m sorry but the world is more complex than your funny memes online where fixing the world is as simple as thinking the right thing.
I will not be paying attention to you again, I will not even read your response. If you’re interested in actually learning, feel free to dm and get a reading list and nothing more.
. . . The rich robbing the poor is literally capitalism?
Capitalism is a pyramid scheme at its core, it relies on peoples as the bottom losing out so those at the top can profit.
Capitalism means a system of creation of goods and services in a market filled with individuals who choose what and how much to produce, with a focus on the existence of private property both physical and intellectual.
Which is to say, literally every modern nation for hundreds of years.
Capitalism relies on extraction of resources be that material, human, or social. For someone to make a profit, someone else must make a loss in one of those fields - usually all 3 at once.
Yes it is the system we have been running for a few hundred years. Completely unrelated but in the last few hundred years something no one can figure out happened and now the majority of our species and most other life on Earth is going to die due to global warming.
For someone to make a profit, someone else must make a loss in one of those fields - usually all 3 at once.
Well idk about you, but I pretty frequently make homemade soaps and breads from scratch and no pe0ople or animals were harmed at any point. The people who harvested the ingredients profited and the people who purchase from me are gaining more value than they lose. I personally suffer no loss, I enjoy doing it and I even get paid for it on top of that.
So your presumption that there “must be a loss” is stupid and pointless. Satisfaction is constantly created and consumed, always has been and always will be no matter what system you’re in.
Well idk about you, but I pretty frequently make homemade soaps and breads from scratch and no pe0ople or animals were harmed at any point
Because that doesn’t describe capitalism. The capitalist mode of production involves a business owner (capitalist) who owns the capital, and a worker who doesn’t own capital. The capital-less worker enters a “free” employment contract with the capitalist, in which the worker sells his labour time as a commodity to the capitalist to put the capital to work, in exchange for a wage lower than the total value of goods/services produced, NAD those goods/services are later sold in a free market.
What you’re describing is manufacture, not capitalism, and it was abundant in pre-capitalist societies in which a lot of the total consumption didnt come from purchases in a market.
CApiTaLism iS WHEn uh um SlAVeRy
I’m not going to give people the time when they’re arguing with dictionaries. I live in a capitalism, I participate in a free market, I set the value of my own labor the same as everyone else.
I didn’t say the word slavery at any point, I specifically talked about “free” contracts. It’s the literal definition of capitalism, I haven’t made judgment or given an opinion.
I set the value of my own labor
No, you don’t. Your wages are limited upwards by the total productivity, and downwards by the reserve army of labor. This is well studied and measured, and the only way to fight it within capitalism collectively and meaningfully is through artificial labour scarcity, i.e. unionization
The people who harvested the ingredients profited and the people who purchase from me are gaining more value than they lose.
Oh yeah, agricultural workers across the world are well known for profiting off of capitalism.
You are being so deliberately obtuse, it’s pretty sad how invested you are in defending such a system.
Unless the agriculture relies on slave labor like private prisons or authoritarian nations, yeah, they do profit. Otherwise, why would they do it? It’s not hard to not buy goods from North Korea or the FSIN, if anything I feel like you’d have to jump through hoops in order to do that.
Please stop being so dishonest.
Wealth concentration is the point of capitalism. Exploiting labor so those at the top can become wealthier is the design.
Wealth concentration is the result of unregulated capitalism.
The point of capitalism is the freedom to make whatever you want in however much amount because people demonstably can’t otherwise competently work together for 5 minutes to figure out how everything should be done to provide for everyone. Everytime somebody has tried to get rid of it, it ended with pointless death and suffering, and often led to autocracy.
Capitalism has nothing to do with freedom to make whatever you want. I don’t know who told you that but it is absolutely 1,000% not true. Capitalism is those with the most Capital controlling the means of production. That’s it that’s literally it. You can see how that inherently leads to exploitation.
By the way capitalism is supposed to be unregulated. We have to regulate it because it’s such a abysmally broken and self-destructive system. So saying wealth concentration is the result of unregulated capitalism is just admitting that capitalism results in wealth concentration. Your first sentence there basically concedes your argument. Regulation by the way which is inherently self-defeating because it can’t fix the very essence of the problem.
Merriam Webster Dictionary:
capitalism
nounan economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
You’re arguing with the dictionary.
Damn, I wonder why that’d keep happening. It’s almost like there is some fundamental element in a capitalist system that makes reform impossible. Fuck eh, what do you do to resolve the inherent brutalities of such a system? If only there was some way to identify those fundamental elements through like, the work of thinking about it really deeply with other people who want to end that system. That sucks though because obviously people are just bad and we should just keep doing this because the political compass memes told me that history is super simple actually.
Empower democracy > the democratic government hold people accountable and redistributes wealth to provide a minimum standard of living for all > problem solved permanently.
Empower democracy > the Democratic government hold people accountable and redistribute wealth > get fucking couped by the USA like Salvador Allende, Gaddafi or Mosaddeq, or literally bombed until millions of your citizens die like in Vietnam.
At least you had the balls to drop the flimsy venier that this was about means of production and admit it’s a fucking East V. West Tankie Propoganda.
“Propaganda” is when you mention the democratic regimes toppled by the USA?
Oh of course, we just gotta empower democracy and everything will be fine. Why didn’t anyone else ever think of that? How did you access such remarkable knowledge?
Because a large enough number of people have been convinced not to try it, fucking it up for the rest of us.
Including you. You don’t even realize what you’re saying.
