And no, the 6.134258 shares of Apple in your 401K don’t make you an owner, lol.
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.
Absolutely agree.
Framing/Marketing is essential.
It’s how they’ve sold this exploitative hellscape.
“This isn’t hell, this is freedom! Freedom from responsibility to one another. Free to win big or lose bigger!”
It’s sad that it does work, but it does. Hell, marketing has convinced us that a blatant antisocial vice like greed is virtuous rational self-interest. Marketing 👐
(also Boureoisie is hard as fuck to spell)
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.
You insult the average person, people are far smarter than you give them credit for. Moreover, you can’t avoid discussing the “baggage” that comes from Marxism anyways, so acting scared and secretive is more damaging than anything else. Maintaining a correct line is more important than trying to be sneaky and having it backfire by having them either not read theory, which would be disastrous, or having them retain anti-socialist views because you were sneaky.
Yes, those are some of the words the owners convinced the masses are SCAWY and EVIL, and only spoken by people that want to take your money when you’re a millionaire/billionaire one day.
Because clearly if you succeed, you would never want to have some of your success taxed to repair/improve the commons like roads, schools, and HEALTHCARE of the society that provided the conditions for your astronomical success in the first place.
That would be ridiculous. How can you expect to buy a pet mega yacht to keep your first mega yacht company, while buying an island, while buying up smalltime entrepreneurs that would compete with you, while space touristing, while building your luxury climate change bunker compound if you can’t suck entire nations dry?!
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’m out-of-the-loop. Did Drake do something bad?
I will do so!
Damn dude, you win. Way to inspire me to aspire to your level of greatness.
Nice
We cannot accept capitalism’s conception of economic relations as “free and private,” because contracts are not made among economic equals and because they give rise to social structures which undemocratically confer power upon some over others. Such relationships are undemocratic in that the citizens involved have not freely deliberated upon the structure of those institutions and how social roles should be distributed within them (e.g., the relationship between capital and labor in the workplace or men and women in child rearing). We do not imagine that all institutional relations would wither away under socialism, but we do believe that the basic contours of society must be democratically constructed by the free deliberation of its members.
Exactly.
Freedom without responsibility or equity is a rampage.
Our people are only free in the sense that our most successful sociopaths are free to take everything their fellow citizens labor for without giving back anything, and everyone else is free to die in the gutter.
Societies have social contracts backed by law, we forgot and deregulated ours half a century ago, and even then it was lacking.
What society would want an economy that makes it untenable for most humans to raise a family on a single earner’s income so a partner can raise kids? That was stolen for the owners profit. Such a society plainly does not prioritize having any future.
The shape of any society’s economy tells you everything you need to know about that society’s priorities. Ours says “everyone for themselves. You’re either in the boat made of bodies, or feel free to drown, loser.” Gotta love how enthusiastic our economists are about the system needing to have legions of “losers” as if their very lives are a fucking game.
Here’s the full article if you’re interested:
So left. That’s what leftism is.
While globally true, it isn’t what the United States heavy handed Democrat party is at all. They work with Republicans to deny class struggle exists while they bicker on social issue symptoms. A for profit media amplified left/right freak show designed to keep us distracted and hating each other over relatively petty social issues so the owners can bleed us dry in peace. They’ve made us so divided on so many lines we can barely see straight, all to facilitate profit/growth/metastasis at all other expense.
The handful of spoiler candidates the DNC despises and undermines more than Republicans notwithstanding, the owner’s succeeded in legalizing political bribery in the US, and thus we have an economically right-wing neoliberal party and a “put undesirables in concentration camps” party to the right of them.
A leftist movement either needs to steal the DNC infrastructure out from under them and force the neoliberals out as Trump did with the GOP by out-hating them, or we need to somehow make a third party work.
Because the DNC and the RNC are high on Corporate bribe money. Their values align more with one another than their voters. They will do all they can to undermine this movement, and will cooperate on that like peas and carrots.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775 (Pelosi defends lawmaker stock trades, citing ‘free market’)
https://www.commondreams.org/news/aoc-and-nancy-pelosi (Nancy Pelosi ‘Making Calls’ to Undermine AOC’s Bid for Top Oversight Role)
Alternatively, we can just continue to be comfortable having our children murdered solely to increase quarterly earnings of cheering profiteers that would consider your dead child less than human if they bothered to think about them at all, which they wouldn’t.
“Democrat” is not synonymous with Left. Most Democrats aren’t leftists
This. Comparing them to my national parties (NL), my rough estimate is that the Dems are more right wing than D66, and they’re pretty much centre-right.
Come back to me when your left is on par with GL-PvdA
The US democrats are a far right party. The US doesn’t allow any left-wing party to reach the public sphere, because its far right country.
While globally true, it isn’t what the United States heavy handed Democrat party is at all.
??? Democrat party was traditionally center-right and now is far-right
Most social justice aware leftists don’t deny class issues, lol wut
It’s still very important to recognize the impacts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. White supremacy, cishet supremacy, and patriarchy are additional axes by which the overall contradiction of bourgeois vs proletarian is waged. You can’t erase that. You have to acknowledge it within the broader class war. Historically, class war has been waged the fiercest by those most marginalized by it, uniting and making significant social progress is necessary for Socialism.
No war but class war.
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.
thats a good point. its part of how they divide us.
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.
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.
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.
The 400m is the worst distance because it’s the longest, that can be done anaerobic.
This results in the maximum lactic acid and pain for such a short event. It’s the uncanny valley between proper sprint and endurance.
Right is in the first place because they support capitalism, therefore support owners
Thought it said labradors and thought this post was written by a dog criticizing human politics compared to their dog politics between themselves and their owners
“Humans have limitless bacon, but force us to perform tricks and go outside to pee in view of the whole world before they’ll give it away as a treat.”
cough cishets
deleted by creator
They’re saying you should have used the word “cishet” instead of cis, because cis only refers to ones gender, not sexual orientation. Cishet is both gender and sexual orientation (cisgender and heterosexual).
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.
Being distracted and divided is what we do.
