@Radical_EgoCom Unless you can find a PT job that actually pays the bills and you have enough time on the side to train for another job. This is why I insisted my kid get a free CNA certification (could have been welding or coding) before heading off to college.
I'm not sure it's a wage issue so much as it is a housing-cost issue. Capitalism is supposed to be regulated so that those numbers realistically work. Reagan broke it.
@janisf@Radical_EgoCom The problem with capitalism is not how regulated it is. The problem with capitalism is that workers are denied the fruits of their surplus labor. A business’s profits are stolen wages. From the communist perspective, it’s an unjust economic system by design.
It leads to accumulation at the top and has a long history of creating major crises as a result. This has been true for as long as capitalism has existed and only gets worse with time. It’s unstable.
@lawas@Radical_EgoCom I'm not really an economist, or a political philosopher. I'm a dabbler, at most. My feeling is that we need innovative solutions that drive hope (HF do we need that). We need something to respond to the massive clog that happened in the "trickle down" fuck up that doesn't leave middle-income investors feeling sucker-punched.
@janisf@Radical_EgoCom I’m a Marxist, so I think that system does exist. It’s not just a change of economic system though, it requires a social revolution led by a class-conscious party of working people. Communism is the only system that actually addresses inequality at its root.
We drive hope by liberating people from oppression and that comes by smashing capitalism. Personally I don’t care about investors, I care about the working class.
@lawas@Radical_EgoCom Those small-time investors are all retirement accounts, and maybe a few small-to-mid-sized business owners. They are also the bulk of Americans. If you don't care about them, you'll just have their police, with the support of the big investors, shut you down.
With all due respect, you're talking about at least 100 million people, probably a third to a half who own guns themselves.
I'm not the one who's stuck in ranchville, but they are.
@janisf@Radical_EgoCom I really don’t think you understand where I’m coming from lol. Investments are profits derived from other people’s labor, that’s inherently unjust just like the rest of system.
I do care about people, which is why I want to create a world free from the systems oppressing us. I also specified a social revolution, it’s something people have to be on board with.
Socialism: Scientific and Utopian is an intro to these ideas. State and Revolution is good too.
@lawas@Radical_EgoCom Then out yourself in their shoes. They negotiated some pretty hard deals, most of them, for those wages they painfully stashed, and now they've just retired, or their on there way there, inside the system. The fact is, most people work, have worked, and have tidy-but-tiny retirement nest eggs. They have literally spent their lives at it.
How are you going to make it an easy blow to them when they find out that was for nothing? Think they'll cave?
@janisf@lawas@Radical_EgoCom
Most people, according to national polls for the last decade or two, do not have a tidy nest egg.
The vast majority of Americans can't financially cope with a $500 emergency.
As a nation, we financed wage stagnation with debt; from about 1975 on. The vast majority of Americans can't save money, for a number of reasons, including the aforementioned.
@TessRants@lawas@Radical_EgoCom I know, I'm one of them. Unfortunately, the way things are set up, there are enough voters who poured themselves into the system for whom that worked. I'm not fighting on their behalf. I'm articulating what I see as the biggest obstacle folks like us face. Neither one of us has figured out how to tackle that.
@janisf@TessRants@lawas
One of the best things people can do to tackle this is to convince people to lose their trust in this current social/economic system and advocate for the creation of a new system (Libertarian Communism in my opinion) to replace it.
@Radical_EgoCom@janisf@TessRants This. I think the point I was trying to make that was overlooked is that we actually have to convince people to change the system. Educating the working class to prepare them for proletarian rule is a key part of Marxist thought.
We need to convince working people to abandon the system and overthrow the class that work against their self-interest. I wish people would read theory, this has all been covered by thinkers much smarter than us.
@lawas@Radical_EgoCom@janisf@TessRants yeah, good luck with that. Still need to replace it with something more operational than books and theories. That's how you reach the hearts and minds of the workers; and create something worth upholding.
@antics@lawas@janisf@TessRants
Political theory is very important; it's what does and will motivate the actions of the people who actually want to create a better system to replace this one. Real-world action is obviously important, but a blueprint is necessary in order to succeed, and that blueprint is theory.
@Radical_EgoCom@antics@lawas@TessRants The blueprint we need is for conversion. I was just contemplating how communism is an economic model more than it is a political one. Capitalism appeals to our basest nature, there isn't even a parenting book that's got tips on how to talk people into leveling up.
@janisf@antics@lawas@TessRants
One way to convert our capitalist society into a communist society is by increasing the amount of workers' unions and workers' cooperatives to increase the amount of control workers have over their lives and society at large while simultaneously convincing workers of the goal of creating a communist society where they'd collectively have complete control over production and society. This will take a long time, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.
@Radical_EgoCom@antics@lawas@TessRants right, which involves legislation to limit corporate interference with unionizing employees, which is what Democrats do, not in small part because unions are a democratic organization.
@janisf@antics@lawas@TessRants
Yeah. I'm not against voting for politicians in the interest of workers and workers' rights, I'm only against the mentality that voting alone will solve the working class's problems. Voting is a means to an end, the end being the abolition of capitalism and the construction of a communist society, which will ultimately rely on the efforts of the working class to construct this new society from the bottom up, and likely against the wishes of the capitalist state
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