this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Economic issues always come down to economic incentives. You care about property values because your home is an investment. You care about stocks because you have a retirement plan. You care about not being a burden on your children when you're old and having inheritance to leave behind when you die. You care about crime because you have things to steal and a life to lose.
I don't have property. I will never retire. I will never have children. I am nothing and no one and that will never change.
When I was younger I was a pretty typical liberal. By 30 I was a Marxist-Leninist and desired nothing but the complete destruction of the demon shithole country called Amerikkka. ๐
I am a machine that exists to create value for my boss. I'll never doubt that.
That's a well intentioned sentiment. So don't tske any of this as an attack, just a clarification.
We aren't just all on this journey together, some of us are oppressed by others. Our problems aren't abstract, they are a consequence of the ruling class engaging in warfare on the rest of us, and that's what the person above was getting at.
We know we're people, but we also know that we aren't people to the ruling class.
Okay I'm communist I'm not in one of your parties. I have no idea what you're talking about journey's and different places, that doesn't mean anything. Both of the parties you're refering to serve the ruling class and help facilitate the oppression of the global working class.
There's more to it, but at the end of the day there are two classes, the global ruling class who oppress, and the global working class who are oppressed. These aren't different parts of a "journey", its a global system of production thst is predicated on the exploitation of one class by the other.
You think Marxism is an overly simple take on things, but think your metaphor about journey's means anything at all?
I don't mean to be rude or anything, but it's not like communists have never heard of capitalists who also do some kind of labor. There aren't two classes, but rather, there are two very big classes that have contradictory interests and people will be filtered into one of those two. That's where the fight of capitalism is. Notice how peasantry has almost ceased to exist and most monarchs are ceremonial. Mao Zedong identified 5 classes within Chinese society in 1926: landlords, proletariat, peasantry, urban petite-bourgeoise, and national bourgeoisie. And that's actually what 4 of the stars on the Chinese flag symbolize, with the largest representing the CPC.
You sound like you're what's called petite bourgeois and you identify with the cause and ideology of the bourgeoisie because that's either something you aspire to or it's a structure you're able to take advantage of. Marx identified a transitional faction of capitalists precisely within his essay The Class Struggles in France, 1848โ1850, and there's a brief mention within the Communist Manifesto.
Basically, Marx said the capitalist class has separate factions who are not all in concert with one another, since not all capitalists have intrinsically similar goals. Some capitalists have contradictory interests to others and want the other abolished. In comparison, the working class have no such contradictory interests, all workers benefit from the same concerns: higher wages, fewer hours, more control over their workplace.
I'd really recommend reading the Marxist theorist Althusser on this one too. To summarize, he was one of the theorists who proposed class systems are more of an action one takes and the subsequent ideological formations within it than necessarily a strict divide of class hierarchy.
I'd recommend 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus' as Althusser's foundational text. His essay 'On the Materialist Dialectic' is the one where he talks about what I brought up. It can be tricky to understand if you haven't read much dialectic theory before Althusser, but he basically argues that there's a plurality of economic classes and activities, each with some degree of autonomy, but all of them depend on one another to a degree that they shape the boundaries of the other.
I will point out that in very clear terms that Althusser's own battle with mental illness shaped much of his philosophical work. He was very interested in structure and how various people were slotted into formations completely outside of themselves. He had a lifelong battle with schizophrenia that had him institutionalized at various points and in one very severe episode he accidentally killed his own wife.
He didn't believe in free will, is what I mean.
Are you a landlord
Optimism is for older generations, who lived the before times when life got better year-after-year.
That has never happened in my entire life.
Currents of "optimism" or "pessimism" are meaningless. Actions are all that matter. And it's not just you out there.
Industrial production, mostly with simple hand tools and feeding steel parts into welders and presses.
It's so fucking hot. It's so fucking hard. I'm so fucking tired. Everyday forever until I'm too old too work, and then I'll take out a 9mm retirement plan.
Replacing pensions with 401k was a stroke of genius for the ruling class. Now every worker is invested in the stock market and is forced to pray to the money line so they can retire, which means they vote for whatever party promises the most economic growth. Truly masterclass.
Nothing about the way everything's going is designed to let me feel like a person. Money's a requirement to simply exist. Everything's a race to get enough money to sustain myself. I'm simply a worker who generates profit so my parasite of a boss and the associated shareholders can hang out on yachts. My job is nonsense too that doesn't help anyone. I'm estranged from my family for gender and lifestyle reasons, can't make friends because I'm always exhausted from work, can't go to therapy except sparingly because it's too expensive.
No matter how much validity my humanity holds, none of it really matters if none of it can be expressed due to a combination of alienation and dead eyed pessimism about climate change.
And no, we all aren't on the same journey together. The economic strata that sits above mine has nothing in common with me.
Thank you. And well that's all fine and good to hope and imagine, but I've been trying to actively change things for the past 20 years through socialist organizing. Goes well sometimes, goes poorly most of the time, gotta keep trying anyway .
No offense, but it seems pretty naive to say things will get better. I try not to jump on conservatives when they are willing to engage, but that's a pretty rough take.
Half the country doesn't believe that climate change is real. If things were to get better, it would have to start with that group first.
I hope you find some comfort one day.
This kind of talk is so worryingly common on this site. Feels like people insist on being seen as a "drone to serve their boss" even though they're desperate to escape it. They're disgusted by optimism because someone taught them that escapism is dumb and they believed it