It's a meme
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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How exactly? Other than excessive bloodshed, which - other than edgelord tankies - most people would neither want, nor have the stomach to pursue.
Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker's rights. Teach them it's not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people's rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.
Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they're living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.
General strike (like the writers guild, except everyone) until the distribution of (a part of the) dividends to the workers is enshrined into law.
Sounds pretty doable to me.
Start by talking about your wages. Most people won't even do that, for fear of reprisals. Even though it's protected federally.
Casually bringing up support for unions, and those on strike.
This is base level, and in many places, will take a long time to see movement.
i'd do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.
i'd consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn't going to happen , , ,
but it's not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.
(By the way i'm basically arguing for a more "free" market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market "free" from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)
Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of "crazies".
The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It's a personal judgment what degree is "excessive bloodshed".
What does bank reform mean? Banks already give loans to small bussinesses.
You can start a company that does what you want them to do. You can create all the innovative processes you want and open source them in the existing system.
The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.
The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It's going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there's going to be havoc.
Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxdxa/1500-scientists-warn-society-could-collapse-this-century-in-dire-climate-report
It's not like it's gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.
Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that's ultimately what matters.
I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.
There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It's just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.
If you're arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that's fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers
These people don't actually care about statecraft or political science. It's all about fan service for them.
The severe, civilization scale consequences of the damage we have done, are presently doing, and will continue to do for private profit to our only habitat we all depemd on for survival from one moment to the next also doesn't care about ~~statecraft or political science~~ attempts to minimize/ignore/discredit it through self-serving rhetoric of those in political power attempting to maintain that power.
Sorry. No bullshitting our way out of this one like it's just another human on human genocide we can rebrand and massage the messaging of. The physics are determinate, and no amount our patented human extracted snake oil will change that.
Try to spin the greed vice, failing, and personality deficit as a positive like "rational self-interest" all day. Humanity sanctioning and even encouraging that darkest of impulses did this.
That isn't what I said and I think you know it. Next time just say you don't know the answer either and save yourself the effort.
I know what humans are going to do by our track record. Kick the can until there is a physical obstruction preventing it.
We will talk the biggest of games claiming otherwise the whole time, though. Surely rhetoric will save the day this time!
You seem to know a lot for a guy who hasn't been able to suggest any kind of realistic solution.
I believe humanity has passed the point where we can. We lack the will. We're monkeys just barely smart enough with concerted effort to create technologies we lack the impulse control to wield responsibly. We figured out gun powder, and proceeded to use it to commit genocides, for example.
This wasn't a problem for the planet, only one another, until industrialization. Now we're addicted to technologies that make wealthy people wealthier while poisoning our only shared habitat. Now we're monkeys with multiple, competing self-destructive but potentially profitable technologies all vying to blow up in our face in the quest to enrich those that hold their patents, and they answer to no one. World governments instead seem to answer to them.
So yeah, I don't see a non-violent solution where you put a big red nuclear button in an orangutan sanctuary that looks like their food dispenser button, and taking thr big red nuclear button away from them, even by force, is off the table.
I can only control myself, I can't force my fellow peasants to stop digging their own graves to further enrich a few thousand sociopath families who've convinced them this is the only way. There's peace in acceptance I suppose.
Maybe you shouldn't use terms if you don't understand them, liberal.
Anyone who uses liberal as an insult is incredibly cringe in my book.
There's nothing cringier than right-wingers who pretend they aren't right-wingers... ie, liberals. For people who can be called leftist with a straight face, "liberal" is quite the insult.
Wanna see what MLK had to say about liberals?
You lump us with fascists. "Scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds" has to be one of the most ridiculous things ever said. We're not your enemies! Democratic socialists are in the Democrat party in America. Social Liberals and Social Democrats have much more in common than Social Liberals and Conservatives. In Europe Liberals and moderate socialists form parliamentary coalitions
Really? Liberals are invested in the maintenance of the status quo, but aren't willing to do the dirty and bloody work that the maintanance of the status quo requires... fascists are. It's a match made in the deepest pits of hell. There's nothing new about this - the liberal Weimar regime climbed into bed with fascism right from the get-go to crush working class revolt. It's the same reason the liberals USians vote into the Waffle House are more interested in "reaching across the aisle" than actually doing anything to prevent white supremacist terrorism.
Who else will protect the capitalist world order for you, liberal? You? Who did you think maintains the murderous exploitation in the 3rd world that makes your glorious 1st world existence possible? It's fascists, genius... your precious world order cannot be maintained without them.
If a fascist regime rises, it's only because a liberal regime came before it that loosened the ground for it to grow.
Read the economy and class structure of german fascism if you want a detailed explanation for "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds"
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
So they didn't eat the rich.