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 👐
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
