It's been downhill since 2020
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I know it's cliche, but i think capitalism deserves a lot of the blame.
What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
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What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
capitalism in the 50s
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it's what they're doing now). They're not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
inflation is the problem!
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
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capitalism in the 50s
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it's what they're doing now). They're not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
inflation is the problem!
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It's not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
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My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory.
(TikTok screencap)In 2010 they tried to create micro black holes, since this hat not worked the probability for extra dimensions is somewhat limited, at least that is what we believe.
But maybe something went wrong back in 2010. -
Ah the good old Futurological Congress by Lem. Read it, the movie is a mess.
There is a movie?
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The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It's not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
wrote last edited by [email protected]You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are 'real' and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. 'Money' and 'inflation' are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we're being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn't really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
Like, you sre right. There is injustice. And im not, like, a fan of tjose things, but i think the system is much more fucked than you think it is.
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Perhaps it's a contextual Great Filter only for instances of intelligent life in which capitalistic modes of production win out.
Then it doesn’t serve its purpose of solving the Fermi paradox.
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You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are 'real' and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. 'Money' and 'inflation' are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we're being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn't really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
Like, you sre right. There is injustice. And im not, like, a fan of tjose things, but i think the system is much more fucked than you think it is.
You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.
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You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.
wrote last edited by [email protected]But the whole system is shit. Its designed to fuck you without your consent.
These things are not failures. They're working as intended, and without a gun to its head, its always gonna do that shit.
This is capitalism. This is the only path capitalism aants to do.
We don't need to 'fix inflation'; we need to abolish money and put in place a system of managing our economy that isnt entirely based around reveling in vice and insane cult bullshit.
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Then it doesn’t serve its purpose of solving the Fermi paradox.
What? Any and all filters an intelligent species could encounter need to be factored in statistically, even if not all of those filters will 100% be encountered
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But the whole system is shit. Its designed to fuck you without your consent.
These things are not failures. They're working as intended, and without a gun to its head, its always gonna do that shit.
This is capitalism. This is the only path capitalism aants to do.
We don't need to 'fix inflation'; we need to abolish money and put in place a system of managing our economy that isnt entirely based around reveling in vice and insane cult bullshit.
I know the system works because it used to work.
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I know the system works because it used to work.
wrote last edited by [email protected]i know the system works
It provably does not. I thought we agreed that it does not
because it used to
It didn't. That was colonial extraction, internal exploitation of women+poc, and compromising with communism while we still had a labor movememt and the threat of the ussr. It was an intermediate form forced on it by circumstance, it's not sustainable, youre ignoring all the costs, and the system's own incentives are what destroyed it. What will always destroy it. The metagame is broken, there is no going back.
And with global warming/climatepocalypse; we need to be doing better than that imagined bullshit rough-edges-sanded-off version of the 1950s anyway. which we can; why are you so hostile to the idea? Why are you so in love with your chains?
We could and should do do much better. We could distribute things and coordinate in muvh better ways. This shit collapses every few Years, why not give it a shot?
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I know the system works because it used to work.
Work for whom?
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My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory.
(TikTok screencap)wrote last edited by [email protected]*2016 was the last normal year.
Let's not forget the chaos and societal upset during the first term.
Edit: I guess it would actually 2015 as the last normal year. 2016 started with Harambe and ended with the far-right winning an election and a Nazi parade honoring trumps election.
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*2016 was the last normal year.
Let's not forget the chaos and societal upset during the first term.
Edit: I guess it would actually 2015 as the last normal year. 2016 started with Harambe and ended with the far-right winning an election and a Nazi parade honoring trumps election.
Bruh we as Americans have such a short attention span/memory I stg.
His first term was "BUILD THE WALL", "CHECK THE BAFROOMS", "SHUT DOWN BASES IN EUROPE" and "NO MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ALLOWED!!!!"
None of these ideas he's espousing are new, they're just more hateful and damaging. He just got slightly better at understanding politics/government, so now he's more dangerous/efficient.
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Work for whom?
Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.
Reform is not mutually exclusive to our constitution, and indeed our current plutocracy and rising fascism is. The constitution is dishonored systematically by our system.
In fact with our existing laws we could break up all of these mega corps, and prosecute the worst like health insurance execs for one thing and another. Drug co execs need to be put in line.
We would need to reinstate and update some laws, and get a national healthcare program with new laws.
But we need a restoration to the laws we had, and addition to them, and most of all, enforcement of existing laws. Judiciary being bought and owned by plutocracy notwithstanding but a strong real populist could fix even that.
We just need leadership, someone that knows how to build and run a political machine. A thing antithetical to our corporate opposition party playing good cop to ruling party's bad cop like it is 1990 still even as the ruling party is not playing bad cop so much as hitler. Achieving more of a mussolini but that is another story.
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Bruh we as Americans have such a short attention span/memory I stg.
His first term was "BUILD THE WALL", "CHECK THE BAFROOMS", "SHUT DOWN BASES IN EUROPE" and "NO MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ALLOWED!!!!"
None of these ideas he's espousing are new, they're just more hateful and damaging. He just got slightly better at understanding politics/government, so now he's more dangerous/efficient.
Yeah, there was too much infighting and incompetence for him to do as much damage in the first term. His cabinet was dropping like flies the first term and we're almost 8 months in and nobody's been fired yet
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Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.
Reform is not mutually exclusive to our constitution, and indeed our current plutocracy and rising fascism is. The constitution is dishonored systematically by our system.
In fact with our existing laws we could break up all of these mega corps, and prosecute the worst like health insurance execs for one thing and another. Drug co execs need to be put in line.
We would need to reinstate and update some laws, and get a national healthcare program with new laws.
But we need a restoration to the laws we had, and addition to them, and most of all, enforcement of existing laws. Judiciary being bought and owned by plutocracy notwithstanding but a strong real populist could fix even that.
We just need leadership, someone that knows how to build and run a political machine. A thing antithetical to our corporate opposition party playing good cop to ruling party's bad cop like it is 1990 still even as the ruling party is not playing bad cop so much as hitler. Achieving more of a mussolini but that is another story.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.
The white ones did.
White prosperity has always been built on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Superprofits are stolen from the global South and from internal colonies within the global North (i.e. the periphery) to then be redistributed to a special privileged segment of the working class in the metropoles in order to prevent revolutionary consciousness.
Those reforms were bribes.
Now that the empire is in decay those superprofits are running out, so all those reforms can't be sustained.
Calls for reform can be a way to rally workers to our cause, but reforms can't be the limit of our goals because reforms under capitalism require rebuilding the empire. Call for reform, sure, but our only hope is to link arms with those imperialized and colonized people of the periphery and for the workers of the world to unite with revolutionary goals rather than purely reformist ones.
White workers in the metropoles don't get to be privileged above workers in the underdeveloped periphery anymore. We hang together or we hang separately. That's going to mean organizing undocument workers, organizing prison labor, organizing gig workers, organizing home healthcare workers, and organizing across borders.
Try to have some revolutionary optimism.
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Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.
The white ones did.
White prosperity has always been built on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Superprofits are stolen from the global South and from internal colonies within the global North (i.e. the periphery) to then be redistributed to a special privileged segment of the working class in the metropoles in order to prevent revolutionary consciousness.
Those reforms were bribes.
Now that the empire is in decay those superprofits are running out, so all those reforms can't be sustained.
Calls for reform can be a way to rally workers to our cause, but reforms can't be the limit of our goals because reforms under capitalism require rebuilding the empire. Call for reform, sure, but our only hope is to link arms with those imperialized and colonized people of the periphery and for the workers of the world to unite with revolutionary goals rather than purely reformist ones.
White workers in the metropoles don't get to be privileged above workers in the underdeveloped periphery anymore. We hang together or we hang separately. That's going to mean organizing undocument workers, organizing prison labor, organizing gig workers, organizing home healthcare workers, and organizing across borders.
Try to have some revolutionary optimism.
That is typical. You regurgitating what you have been taught to anytime someone brings up the New Deal, there was still Injustice against minorities! So therefore everything from then is defunct.
Of course by that logic every example from every time would be defunct. There is injustice now, there was in your parents lifetimes, your grandparents.
Explain to me how because everything was not perfect in every way it is not an example that we know a minimum wage job could pay for a dignified life.
And that includes those minorities that still were discriminated against, making enough money to live. It is telling of the quality of your opinions if you ask me.
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That is typical. You regurgitating what you have been taught to anytime someone brings up the New Deal, there was still Injustice against minorities! So therefore everything from then is defunct.
Of course by that logic every example from every time would be defunct. There is injustice now, there was in your parents lifetimes, your grandparents.
Explain to me how because everything was not perfect in every way it is not an example that we know a minimum wage job could pay for a dignified life.
And that includes those minorities that still were discriminated against, making enough money to live. It is telling of the quality of your opinions if you ask me.
And now you're insulting me.
What I've been taught? Who the fuck do you think taught me all this theory and history? Ebil gommunist brainwashing school?
I fucking read and read and read. Off the top of my head: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, I read A Dying Colonialism, I read The Wretched of the Earth, I read Black Reconstruction, I read A People's History of the United States, I read Shock Doctrine, I read Revolutionary Suicide, in fact I just read Empire of Borders and it really handily describes the global apartheid system our reforms rely on!
These are the basis for what I now understand about reformism within the imperial core. Reforms can only ever privilege a small segment of the working class above the workers in internal colonies and out in the periphery, they can not even help everyone under capitalism because then *where would capitalists get profits? Profit is theft, you can't reform your way out of that.
Instead, reforms like the New Deal were a way to bribe that special privileged segment of the workers into opposing revolution. That's it. They saw what happened in the USSR and it scared the shit out of them, so they bribed white workers into supporting capitalism and deputized them as enforcers. They can't bribe everyone with reforms, so they just bribe enough to act as enforcers.
And now that the empire is in decay they're running out of money to bribe us with. There are limits to growth, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, you can't escape this.
We can fight for reforms! But they should be the basis for further revolutionary aims, not be the end goal in and of themselves.
