Stumbled on this chart recently:
It kind of tells its own story.
It’s worth reading The Communist Manifesto. People have weird ideas about it, but a lot of it is really unexceptionable. For example, Marx and Engels demanded pensions for old folks.
Capitalists looked at this, and said, “Oh, we can do this if the alternative is worse,” and introduced them. Someone as hard-headed as Bismarck responded this way.
The threat of a credible enemy ideology which treats ordinary people better than capitalists do forces capitalists to change. For a long time, we haven’t had that, but the single party “Marxist-but-with-capitalism” CCP offers another. And yes, they do (overall), treat their workers better, as well as being better at capitalism than capitalists. No one is as obsessed with how markets actually work as Marxist economists.
Let’s look at another of my favorite charts:
Oh hey! Having powerful organizations taking the part of workers matters.
Something happened right after Reagan took power:
Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers
Then there’s this:
(The numbers have gone down since then, but they’re still vastly high, and far, far higher than China.
Break the unions and lock up the people who won’t obey bullshit (a.k.a. drug) laws.
Class war is real, and constantly ongoing, and elites have won that war.
Power and fear is all that capitalists ever respond to.
Always remember that.
Dan
Many people’s only actual exposure to Marx and Engels is to read the Manifesto…which is better than nothing, but a lot of people don’t seem to understand that the Manifesto isn’t meant to be some timeless Ten Commandments of communism; it’s quite literally the 1848 party program of the Communist League (plus some definitions and history), amidst all the bourgeois and socialist revolutions and upheavals happening across Europe at that time.
Right-wing (especially libertarian-leaning) cranks love to point out that “most of the Manifesto’s demands are already in place!” As if that’s proof that anything other than laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism is somehow communism, when in fact it’s proof that capitalists figured out they’d better throw the workers some kind of bone if they didn’t want to end up like the Ancien Régime French aristocracy.
Purple Library Guy
Ayup.
mago
Nobody’s gonna break out the tumbrils or the wood chippers.
Everybody’s cowed, distracted, confused and just trying to survive—talking about the majority of underlings of course who live in mental fog. Not that their masters don’t, but they’re the ones who hold the whip.
Turn on the radio, turn on the internet, turn up the volume. Kinda like the anti Timothy Leary, who’s long been dead.
What’s a poor boy to do?
Put another dime in the jukebox baby/I love rock and roll. . .
Never mind.
Feral Finster
“Class war is real, and constantly ongoing, and elites have won that war.
Power and fear is all that capitalists ever respond to.”
Power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats. The actual system doesn’t matter, in the end, the sociopaths always get in and corrupt everything. In fact, any system can be made to work tolerably well, if and to the extent it is not ruled by sociopaths.
This is why, after some 5,000 or more years of human history, we can find successful examples of all sorts of political and economic systems, and all eventually fail.
Richard Holsworth
Attacks on Left-led unions came from within the US trade union movement, with the CIO expelling nine unions due to their opposition to the Marshall Plan and their backing of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in the 1948 election.
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/red-scare-iww-cio-mine-mill#:~:text=The%20local%20hoped%20that%20by,by%20a%20Left%2Dled%20union.
bruce wilder
Rule or be ruled.
It is not easy or simple for the common people to find and keep leaders, who are both competent and committed to some concept of the general welfare. The common people may be practiced followers, but practice does not make skill in this business of democracy.
The capitalists, on the other hand, have gotten better at their game, or at least have hired more skillful help.
Z
Greed is insatiable, a carrot that can never be caught. The only cure for greed is fear.
Capitalism is an economic system that’s emotional lifeblood is greed. One of its core principles is the anti-intellectual idiocy of infinite growth on a finite planet.
In the past what led to collective actions against our rulers was some sort of economic calamity that produced a large mass suffering at the same time, such as the Great Depression. That created fear for our rulers and they would adapt the system to assuage enough of the working class and poor to dissipate the force against them.
Now, however, with the fiat money system and the Fed at the trigger to paper over any and all financial crises, the blows are cushioned and the damage dispersed and there isn’t a large enough amount of people to collectively suffer that would lead to a substantial unification of the working class and poor.
All the man-made systems …such as political and financial … can be corrupted by fiat money, but the natural systems can’t.
So, the only thing that might be left to produce a large collective suffering … short of world war … that would lead to a large enough uprising against our rulers for them to fear us is unfortunately a breakdown of the ecosystem and the damage to it that it might require for that might be irreversible.
Z
Oakchair
The capitalists, on the other hand, have gotten better at their game, or at least have hired more skillful help.
—–
It makes sense why our rulers and their professional managers spend so much narrative control trying to deny the ever skyrocketing rates of chronic illness, intellectual disability, physical pain, obesity and so on. They benefit from a populace too sick, numb, physically incapable, and dumb to even consider opposing the oligarchy let alone revolt.
It’s the same strategy the CIA and FBI used when starting gang wars, flooding the country with drugs while simultaneously waging a war against drugs. As a Nixon adviser said flat out:
“You want to know what this war on drugs was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Arkady Bogdanov
The smart move here is just to eliminate capitalists. Period. Then you don’t have to worry about threatening them, or otherwise trying to manage or fight them.
Easy peazy. Long past time for a real revolution in the west. Will it be costly? Yes. However, it will be less costly than continuing to put up with this capitalist menace that we have been subjected to since 1787 (The coup that overthrew the original US constitution was the first domino to fall that led to capitalists creating a corrupt global empire that serves only their interests).