I suppose many of them really would consider closing financial loopholes and making them pay higher taxes “beating them up and taking their stuff.”
14 Likes
David Graeber was always clear that the top 1% were the more than the 1. IIRC he even argued that the 0.001% were the real, real, real, problem…
2 Likes
Many of the articles on the one percent argue that in one time in American history, the middle class enjoyed a lifestyle that is now restricted to the one percent. Stuff like being able to pay for college. Stuff like having a political opinion that actually counts for something. Perhaps they are being a bit delusional. “Check YOUR privilege. Why don’t YOU check your privilege, dumbass!”
5 Likes
Hi!
So, I heard we’re gonna beat them up and take their stuff?
Steelcaps
Van
3 Likes
It’s the 0.1% who create and maintain the situation of the 90% being unable to pay for education and generally be upwardly mobile. The 9.9% between that 90% and the 0.1% aren’t wealthy enough to lock down the economic wealth of the world. We (and globally speaking probably you) do have the privilege of being temporarily inured against privation, but we’re not the heirs apparent of the neofudalism.
That distinction matters because it’s the political influence of the 0.01% who hold sway over the likes of Clinton and Romney and Cruz and the entire global political establishment. If we want to break their choke-hold on the economy, we have to address our policies toward the wealthy, not the vanishing middle class. Your dentist or lawyer isn’t in the Panama Papers; your political masters and their masters, the heirs and heirs apparent of the robber baron class who looted the globe from Greece to Wall Street to the Kremlin, are.
This is why even Sanders is wrong that he’s a socialist, at least in the classical sense. He’s just a guy trying to unseat the kingmakers and oligarchs who are swiftly returning us to the days of the Medicis less the Renaissance.
12 Likes
Maybe the real problem is not the 0.1%, but how people measure wealth. If the average person measures wealth in a way that facilitates 0.1% of the population gaming them and symbolically hoarding it all, they should try something else?
It’s a surprisingly “hard sell” for most people, conceptually. And some even get upset about it. But seriously, if somebody uses a symbolic system to take everything, implementing new and better symbols is a much quicker and easier way to fix the problem than arguing with them about it. Re-invent money and commerce, instead of being taken for a ride.
2 Likes
The whole idea of using percentage as a class is a good way to start a discussion, not a hard rule. I mean, I think most everyone accept that Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers have significantly different views on society and their part in it.
The ultimate problem is that the wealthiest people in society control a vastly oversized level of political influence combined with a sadly typical disdain for any sort of feeling of social responsibility above raw greed. Just dealing with the wealth accumulation problem by itself isn’t a solution, if the comparatively wealthiest people in society still tend to control the government and the media.
4 Likes
Nice dream, bummer that reality exists (food, shelter, health care, education, etc.)
11 Likes
Of course. But if you argue that the top one percent who haven’t (yet?) lost what more people used to have in good times “run the show,” then they do so in ways that are very different from those of the much smaller minority that matches the usual “one percent” rhetoric. And if you do, then why stop there? The system is also rigged in favor of the ten percent.
1 Like
I don’t know how you do things, but how people measure optimally has everything to do with reality. Yet, the average person somehow never labels arbitrary, unsustainable economics like most people use now as being “utopian”. I wonder how it is that I am supposedly dreaming when it is easy to demonstrate that most business is based upon wishful thinking.
1 Like
But how dire was the state of that discussion if something like that could make a positive difference?
Just enact full communism - boom, problem solved! So simple.
As far as the notion that we can just re-invent commerce, I’m inclined to say the same, but can maybe grant that some redefinition is what we want. So long as they have most of the money the 1‰ inherently control most of any resource that is interchangeable with it. It’s a worthwhile goal to make access to basic things like food, housing, health, and education work beyond that. That’s sort of changing the meaning of money, so that it’s no longer “stuff people need to survive”, right?
5 Likes
I mostly agree, except for:
Just like if somebody “cleverly” steals your credit card or your checkbook - you cancel it - leaving them with a handful of inert symbolism. Even if your new ones work identically to your old ones, you have still meanwhile taken their exchange power out of the hands of thieves. I am astonished that people don’t do something similar when their economy is stolen! What I suspect is that there is no solidarity, because many people are gullibly bought off by the thieves into playing along.
3 Likes
No. I mean literally raid their homes, seize their assets, beat them up for no good reason, and take their shit.
Why should they be the only exceptions to the way everyone else in this country is treated?
Call it civil forfeiture. Call it RICO. Call it whatever.
Let the justice system grind up the .1 percent and use their financial remains to fertilize our glorious social programs.
3 Likes
There you go again, acting like you just arrived on this planet.
I mean, that’s so obviously the problem. Capitalism is excessively individualizing, to the point that people can’t even see their connections to and dependence on others, let alone how the “thieves” have been stealing from them.
14 Likes
Good luck with that.
To an extent, I think that it is also paradoxically redundant. If people are really into “being individuals”, then why do they allow themselves to be stereotyped into the same extremely narrow range of motivations? How is “make lots of money” really an individual goal when one expects that billions of other people are doing the exact same thing? Hoarding resources, clamoring for consumer goods, comfort, survival, social status, reproduction, etc are extremely pervasive goals. One might imagine that those who fancy themselves individuals would instead happily gravitate towards goals and metrics which are unique to them!
So capitalism not only makes for extremely dysfunctional collectives, it makes for extremely dysfunctional individualism as well.
4 Likes
Ha, I remember having that same conversation with my best friend, back in high school. Repeatedly. The “ditch weed” made our claims and realizations seem all the more profound. Thanks for the memories.
7 Likes
