And no, the 6.134258 shares of Apple in your 401K don’t make you an owner, lol.
bourgeoisie vs proletariat
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?!
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.
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:
The 400m beats the 800m any day of the week. The 800m is too long to sprint and should be abolished.
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.
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?
