For the unemployed, the guard labor economy is becoming the only part that we can touch. And a big slice of that is media telling us how apathetic and stupid we the people living around us are.
It can be so mature sounding, that cynical, jaded dismissal, there’s nothing to be done, there’s no point, we get what we deserve… But you’re basically echoing the message that the Koch bros want repeated as much as possible, making you a corporate shill.
I very much want to believe that a get money out of politics amendment can pass. I just want there to be more to do than send them money.
I believe that part of the tactic should be to try and break the 2 party system. We need to keep splitting the vote further until every government is a coalition government. Party politics is the wrong course for governance.
Yeah, being poor is shameful (and “working class” is often seen as a synonym for “poor”), and describing oneself as “rich” is perhaps a bit unseemly, people’s notions of wealth are relative (and I’ve seen some people actually argue that they’re not rich because they don’t have that much money left after they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying for all their children’s private schools and high-income neighborhood housing, etc.) and certainly if one acknowledges being rich, then it also makes it difficult to argue that increasing one’s taxes hurts the middle class…
Read the fine print in your contract…
I ended up with a cheap piece of plastic and I even had to supply my own handle. For rabble rousing in a mob it was still effective and I found that I was hardly tired after hours of thrusting it in the air, however it was totally useless for offensive purposes.
Tis true “taking away a lot of rules and regulations makes it easier for some people to get rich, but it also makes it easier for a lot of people to get swindled/robbed.”
In a perfect world those rules and regulations would protect us, however more often than not the rules put in place to protect are manipulated and gamed to exploit loop holes. This will continue as long as the people creating the rules are put in place by the people we seek protection from.
Actually, the American colonies were pretty literate compared Europe:
You’re also assuming that ownership of a book and the ability to read it equals the ability to comprehend it. as the article points out, many people heard the book and I bet a fair number of them understood it.
What I wish this zillionaire could be saying to his peers: Y’all are setting yourselves up to be the captain of the titanic, as the whole biosphere slides into a toxic state. Do you really want to live and die as tyrants? As it is, his message translates to, “Yes, they’re coming to get you with pitchforks, invest in pitchfork futures”
The rich don’t think much of poor people’s aim. History teaches them we can be corralled into circular firing squads. Until some rich people are actually successfully murdered just for being rich, Hanaur’s warning is not credible. And by the time it gets that far, the window for making things better has slammed close.
I think this is interesting… I’m curious, does the working class extend to those who sell their labor and do pretty well off that labor, like putting them into what we’d consider the 10%? Is it selling your labor to work at a desk, if you are making something for example? Do we consider college professors and computer programmers “working class”, because in many ways, they are still selling their labor as part of the knowledge economy - they are just paid better for it than a guy who works at an un-unionized factory and produces a physical object? Thoughts?
BTW - I do agree that the Marxist language we use are ill-suited to our present world. the game began to change with the runaway factory phenomenon.
Perhaps we should rebrand the labor movement as the “able-consumer” movement to make it more palatable to zillionaires…
Breaking up the rapidly forming new aristocracy is an essential move, absolutely; Let’s do it; I’m ready. Another key component in changing the attitudes of both the wealthy and the less-than-wealth will be the understanding of the idea that capitalism and socialism are not diametrically opposed. In fact capitalism, in order to survive symbiotically with the host, rather than destroying it, must be paired with socialism. The resources exist for everyone to be protected from destitution, and in fact to allow all to live relatively comfortably without fear of economic ruin. The owners of the means of production have to realize that for the markets to truly be dynamic and efficient, all market participants must be protected from the ebbs and flows, and the risks inherent in rapidly changing conditions in order to be able to go with the flow. Nobody should worry about a machine taking their job, or that a factory needs to downsize, if those advances benefit us all through the magic market beast. Life, liberty and happiness should not be tied to the success of a labor union in a particular organization. Either pitchforks or market socialism zillionaires, your move. Also, stop shitting dangerous working conditions and environmental ruin where you eat. Take care of the world and it’s human flora, if for no other reason than that’s where your galdern widgets come from.
What you just described is a social democrat, but we don’t have those in the US. The closest we have is the Green Party. I’m 89% Socialist (I don’t recall what site had that silly test, but the result didn’t surprise me), so there’s really no one that really represents my political sensibilities in this country. I have to suffice with the Greens.
Yes. It’s not the amount of income, but its source that defines who is and isn’t working class. Those who exchange their labour in return for a wage, which is nearly everybody, are working class. That said, class isn’t something with perfectly discrete boundaries, because it’s a description of social relations, rather than social position. Artists, small businesspersons, intellectuals, etc, exist in that blurred space, because they are both the owners and workers of their own “means of production”.
What people may think of their own or another’s class is something else though. It’s not surprising that high wage earners may identify with the business class they are not technically part of, because a dollar is a dollar no matter where it came from, and they have enough wage income to enjoy a similar lifestyle. But their “class consciousness” doesn’t alter the actual social relationships, or stop the dynamics of capitalism in narrowing that blurred space between the owning few and the working many.
I disagree that it’s ill suited to describing present day realities, as the relationship between worker and capitalist is still the same, but I don’t know what you mean by “the runaway factory phenomenon.” Outsourcing?
What you are describing is social democracy as it has been practiced for decades. Great as it was, it is unfortunately not invulnerable to being dismantled by the wealthy, even when it is theoretically not in their long term interests to do that. Within a capitalist society, power ultimately lies with those who own capital, and social democracy leaves that ownership mostly untouched, instead redistributing some of the surplus to ensure a good average standard of living and prevent wealth from concentrating. However, to maintain social democracy requires constant vigilance and mass popular organization (unions, parties, etc) in the face of threats from the wealthy who can leverage media, business and their own political parties. All it took was one crisis that post war Keynesian economic policy seemed unable to handle, and the assault on social democracy began in earnest. And the response to the present economic crisis is even worse - round after round of punishing and deeply unpopular austerity in Europe, where the remaining social democratic guarantees are characterized as obstacles to growth, even though the cuts are clearly making the crisis worse.
I’m not trying to discourage you here, but we really should not be proposing a resurrection of social democracy to the zillionaires who are currently circling around it to deliver the mortal blow. They clearly can’t be trusted, and any system that delivers those great social benefits at the cost of preserving the fortunes of the wealthy is one that will be destroyed by those fortunes.
