Stumbled on this chart recently:
Kind of tells its own story.
It’s worth reading the Communist manifest. 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 are still vastly high, and far, far higher than China.
Break the unions and lock up the people who won’t obey bullshit (aka. 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.