And no, the 6.134258 shares of Apple in your 401K don’t make you an owner, lol.
Yup. It’s not about the “gays vs the straights” or the “left vs the right” or the Romulans vs The Federation. It’s about the rich vs everybody else. It’s a class war. It always has been and the rich use the media they own to make you think it’s a culture war. To keep you fighting with other so you won’t figure out where the REAL source of your pain comes from.
i love how this guy is putting class consciousness into people.
the race, gender and politics discussion is important, but to get anything done we need class consciousness first.
Less “first,” more “alongside” imo. Class division is the primary contradiction, but you can’t untangle it without making progress on the secondary contradictions.
And no, the 6.134258 shares of Apple in your 401K don’t make you an owner, lol.
Thank you for saying this. It’s very frustrating when people act like having retirement savings makes you like billionaires.
This is 100% by design. The only way to retire in this economy is to invest in an exploitative business. So over time, people find themselves supporting ideas that make retirements in general farther away, but their own retirement nicer.
I kinda disagree with this a little. These things are interconnected. While we shouldn’t let stuff like race and sexuality divide us, we shouldn’t ignore that some groups have been fucked over more than others and part of dismantling the system is seeing what parts are rotten. Red lining n shit.
I’m not saying to ignore them, I’m saying we have a common enemy using those differences to exploit and murder us by amplifying every division except owners vs workers using for profit media and captured government, encouraging us to fight one another over them so they can do so.
Note the absolutely confused and terrified tone the for profit media is going through right now when they’re perfectly fine when 10 kids get gunned down. That’s just another wedge for division, gun control, for them to stoke as no one that mattered, to them, died.
Im saying that until we pause and dethrone the owners, they will see to it those secondary divisions remain entrenched and heated to keep us weak, and therefore they are the primary threat that must be the priority to solve literally any of our great national blights.
We cannot begin to heal… Any division… Until the instigators that keep stoking them for private profit are defeated and made subject to society, government, and regulation again instead of controlling them.
Reigning in our sociopathic, murderous late stage capitalism is step 0 to any positive change. They are the gatekeepers. Or get comfy with everything continuing to decline until collapse. It’s hell now. It will get so much worse with them running government and controlling mass media.
I’ve seen some pretty compelling arguments from minority groups that step 0 can’t be done without simultaneously addressing the divisions you’re talking about. I don’t see why we can’t do both. I agree that these things are used and usually ultimately come from capitalism, but I think that recognizing and fixing those divisions is an integral part of dismantling capitalism.
Again, capitalism amplifies these divisions with the bully pulpits ONLY THE CAPITALISTS CONTROL through government and profit media.
You can’t have any movement they don’t inform and can’t kill entirely if they wish, because they own the signal, and a few techies on distributed social media doesn’t change that.
But nothing will change, because there are too many people that refuse to acknowledge that, that think their cause is more important and must take priority when the class war either created or exacerbates their oppression, effects more people, almost everyone, and while identify affirmation is a nice and in a decent society important thing, material needs, food, water, shelter for ALL are objectively a higher priority than telling 10% of the population for any subgroup “I see you, your identity is valid.” I’m all for that. But this is a literal war where people are being murdered, and a cause parade for any cause other than stop murdering/exploiting our very lives for profit us has no place in a war for the vast majority of the population’s survival.
And it’s ridiculous when people say “we can do both” no we can’t. We can’t do anything. We’ve been in a steady downward spiral for 60 years as income inequity has grown. We can’t do anything under this economy. Not one god damned lasting thing. That is by oligarch design.
But we won’t as a society unite and forcefully remove that common enemy because someone else has to have their symptom addressed before. Climate change will do what we should have in a few decades, force the permanent collapse of this inhuman economy, but it’ll hardly matter then, and nothing equitable will take it’s place.
bourgeoisie vs proletariat
I think the framing in the meme is actually more helpful. Marxists would do well to update their language instead of constantly speaking in terms that sound utterly archaic to modern ears.
I would in fact prefer “Owners vs Workers” because “Laborers” still implies specifically forms of physical labour in a way that makes a lot of people feel excluded from the movement we’re trying to build.
I disagree, actually. Labelling them by their Marxian terms ties them to Marxism. This continues to tie Marxism to modern day analysis. Using general terms erases Marxism, and therefore erases critical theory.
You can still teach people theory. Theory is important. But it makes no sense to open with it. That’s like being asked to teach someone how to use a computer and opening with an explanation of how a CPU works.
No one is going to pay attention to all your theory if they can’t understand how it meaningfully relates to their circumstances.
And, frankly, the term Marxism comes with so much cultural baggage at this point that you’re far better off focusing on what it actually means rather than what it says. You need to get people out of their preconceptions and help people understand what Marx really meant.
The 400m beats the 800m any day of the week. The 800m is too long to sprint and should be abolished.
You.
Take.
That.
Back.
While I appreciate you covered up drakes face with Luigi, please consider using the laforge version of this meme in the future. Here is a copy for you. Thanks.
I will do so!
The top brackets are manifestations of the bottom bracket. Its a divide-and-conquer strategy, and foolish to ignore on its face.
For centuries women couldn’t own property, couldn’t hold professional jobs, and couldn’t participate in politics. Same with ethnic minorities. Queer sexual preference was outright prohibited by law and used to disqualify candidates from office, to break up organizations with police action, and to deny people access to private careers and public services.
You can come at this from a vulgar Marxist perspective and only see the Owners v Workers. But you’re missing why owners have power if you neglect the layer upon layer of privileged class surrounding them.
If it really does just boil down to Workers v Owners, why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois if they themselves are not invited to the Epstein Island Bunga-Bunga parties? What keeps suburban professionals loyal? What keeps religious radicals loyal?
There’s more at play than mere title to real estate or collection of rent. You have to face an ideology that’s caked on thick.
If it really does just boil down to Workers v Owners, why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves?
https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-of-the-american-labor-movement-142538
A good article for understanding the relationship between the police and other unions. But it doesn’t answer the question
Why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois?
Police unions do not see themselves as part of this movement. With one exception – the International Union of Police Associations, which represents just 2.7% of American police – law enforcement unions are not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the U.S. labor body that unites all unions.
Because as outlined culturally the police see themselves as the system itself, by nature of the job, as evidenced by their hostility towards the larger labor movement they’re often tasked with breaking, something the vast majority of other union heavy vocations don’t do, and are often given special carve outs when the labor movement and unionization are targeted legislatively precisely because it’s their job to enforce those rules.
American police are more a capital defense force, and unlike the larger labor movement, have their priorities of being unaccountable to those they police backed by the state. They’re the owner’s special little boys/girls, they attract and recruit conservative minded power seekers who conflate legality with morality, and they like it that way. Note their awesome insurance, their massive starting salaries with high school education, they have little to complain about. Not to the owner’s level at all, but they don’t live in the same America most do.
They probably could take this country for themselves, but have you ever met a cop who wasn’t a fan of structure for its own sake?
