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they run them down a conveyer belt or something now i think, they got a location thats totally automated and has no employees
Boomers still think fast-food jobs are part-time things that teenagers do for some pocket change. They literally do not grasp the idea that there are adults working there to pay rent and buy food.
But if no one has to struggle, how will we know who’s beneath us??
He struggles so the billionaire can own a yacht.
Hint: we’re all at the bottom and there’s only another layer
Lateral poverty
It’s this, and it’s also more than this: there has to be a limitation put on profit, a place at which the corporation achieves balance and success- enough to not feel the need to continually chip away at wages and working conditions or increasing enshittification in search of immediate short-term profits.
If enough profit is never enough, it will forever remain a constant battle between corporations and workers, and corporations and the public.
People will point out that it makes more sense to punch up than to punch down but the later is significantly easier and better paid.
Punching down gives the monkey brain that sweet squirt of dominance when you see the suffering of your subject. Punching up is unrewarding because you don’t get results unless everyone else does it, and then you have to share the victory with everyone else.
Focusing your wrath where it belongs doesn’t make the million year old monkey brain squirt the reward chemicals.
These is why the alt right pipeline for women is transphobia/TERF shit.
Sexism is real, lots of teenage girls and young women feel frustrated and powerless, but they get easy wins going after trans women. They can’t get Dobbs reversed, but forcing trans people to detransition is an explicit goal of conservative power structures. They get to feel like they “won” with that UK court ruling - that “women’s rights” were won by something that did nothing to actually meaningfully help women.
their con man idols tell them that the reason their lives are shitty is because of the mexicans, gays, black people, women, librarians, immigrants…everyone except the people who are literally paying them nothing and laughing at them for it.
and the people are all too happy to believe it
Well… You ought to know to listen to your betters, too!
I think a lot about something i read somewhere - “you hate every piece of capitalism but won’t connect the dots to see that’s the picture”.
I have this conversation with people all the time.
Everything always boils down to people being dumb and if magically the people would become smart, all problems would just get fixed.
Sure but we must ask how much should you be able to afford in this position?
I’m sick of talking about a “living wage”. I want a thriving wage.
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.
As the screenshot said, enough to pay for rent, bills and groceries. That’s is, enough to not be homeless, starving or unable to afford healthcare.
Renting what though? How many bedrooms?
I’m chill with safety nets for poor people and regulations on large companies
what I consider far left is when people start saying that the govt should own everything and there shouldn’t be private property. that’s an extreme and I am against that.
Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. (Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847)
Communists ain’t taking away my beaten up electric bass and my microwave oven
One of my friends described it as there’s difference between private property and personal property. Your toothbrush is personal property. No one cares about that. Your factory where you assemble widgets is private property, where you’re paying people to convert labor into stuff you can sell.
I should read more left-wing theory. It made sense when he explained it.
Modern leftists (i.e. anarchists) are against the government at all.
that’s only the case if you exclude authoritarian communists and other similar systems that want a govt from your definition of ‘leftists’
The rational left (i.e. not the authoritarians) only want the “government” to own everything insomuch as the “government” is a profoundly democratic representative body, in an administrative capacity.
Don’t confuse “private property” (industrial machines and other means of production held privately by an investor class in order to extract profit via the arbitrage between the productive value of employees and their flat wages) with “personal property” (your house, car, clothes, dishes, toothbrush, etc.). There aren’t many leftists who think there shouldn’t be personal property.
Private property that isn’t personal is someone elses property, and if I want to have my own property it makes sense for others to also have it
I don’t want the govt owning my home, or having to rent from a govt, and I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
There aren’t many leftists who think there shouldn’t be personal property.
I’ve been on .ml before and theres more than a few people than think NK and Stalin are/were good, and are anti-private property
edit: I honestly kinda think some of you are downvoting this because other people have downvoted this. these aren’t unpopular or insane ideas, and anyway I only used water as an example of govt ownership because that’s the first thing that came to my mind. a better example would be that I wouldn’t want my food to be grown by the govt
Private property that isn’t personal is someone elses property
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Everyone is entitled to personal property, the things they have for personal use (e.g. your house or toothbrush). Private property is not someone else’s personal property, it’s the things for group use which generate value to the group (e.g. the industrial equipment necessary to create your house or toothbrush) which under capitalism are owned and controlled by investors.
The leftist position is that those “means of production” being owned and controlled by investors leads to the investors paying their staff as little as possible while charging as much as possible, so that they can thrive on the difference between prices and wages.
The leftist solution is for those “means of production” to be owned collectively by the people who actually use them to produce things. There’s a whole spectrum of exactly what that looks like.
On one side are those who think the government should own everything. The argument being that, assuming you can trust the administrators to not be corrupt, that is the best way to coordinate resources. This is logically sound, since the resources which would be wasted on marketing, and redundant R&D in competing companies, and other capitalist inefficiencies, could be directed productively. The flaw is in the “assuming you can trust the administrators to not be corrupt” part. That’s a big reason why the USSR failed.
On the other side, there are those who think that the basic concepts of market economics are sound, the problem is simply the capitalist-worker relationship. The argument being, capitalism can be subverted while retaining the benefits of market economies through co-ops: instead of revenue being paid in part to wages with the remaining profit being divided along shareholders, the revenue after costs is divided totally among the employees, who are themselves the only shareholders. This preserves the competitive innovation of the market, while excising the parasitic capital class.
Only the most extreme zealots in the Soviet camp ever push for abolishing personal property. That’s a fringe position even for the left.
after you say this
Private property is not someone else’s personal property…
you say they are this
…are owned and controlled by investors.
that stuff is the investors personal property (or the corporations but that is a technicality) and them selling it to me is fine as long as there is meaningful competition and no monopolies and govt regulations stopping them from putting toxins in it or something. I dont think the best solution to high prices and wealth inequality is taking the personal property away from these investors and handing it to their employees (who lets be honest probably don’t know much about economics) who aren’t motivated to take risks with the company and aren’t motivated to lower their wages when the company needs to save money or isn’t production much money. This lowers the competitiveness of the company, but having a CEO to manage all this while being kept in check with a union is a fine solution to this.
If there is a wealth gap higher taxes on the wealthy is all that is really needed to even it out
Without capital new factories wont be built btw, unless you have a bank or investor financing them. And I don’t think bank tellers should get a say in what the bank invests in (if its run by the workers this would happen, as the bank teller is a worker at the bank), because they very probably don’t know about the finances and economics of the industry the bank is investing in and wouldn’t have an educated opinion on the matter. I would rather have investors (who may have more money than others, but if its too much taxes can fix that, not funky ownership stuff needed) picking small companies, giving them money and later getting back their money as the small companies grow.
You’re a liberal then, pro-market with regulation, maybe a social democrat using Nordic countries as an example? With the overton window changing so much you’re not really a leftist anymore
I kinda dislike all these terms like left, socalist, communism, ect because everyone has different understandings of them.
If you ask a right-leaning libertarian about the differences between socialism and communism, I imagine that they would say that their the same thing, and point to China or the USSR calling themselves socialist, while being communist (china not so much nowadays though)
I try not to categorize myself too much because of that
.ml folks aren’t far left, they’re full on authoritarian dictatorship apologists. They’re no more leftist than China is communist
I think that depends on what you call far left. If you ask me thats exactly what it is, other than the exception of more libertarian- or even (another exreme) anarchic- communism
I guess I wouldn’t call them right wing either. The authoritarian side of the political compass kinda looks the same on every side, when it boils down to the actual policies they want
I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
I’m pretty sure private for-profit water is absolutely worse than government run water. Everyone can at least nominally vote to change the government. A private org is beholden to no one except shareholders (if they have any), and maybe laws (if they exist, are relevant, and are enforced).
We already had a gilded age where we learned how low for-profit entities will go. We had saw dust in bread, chalk in milk, and worse.
For profit food production is giving us price gouging and a water crisis. Would government do better? Well, given the current administration maybe not.
I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
Been drinking tap water straight from government-owned companies for decades. Taste is okay (a bit hard for geological reasons), but it couldn’t be healthier.
Still, though, you’re right that the question of the state not owning everything is a very serious one that needs to be addressed.
What are your thoughts on cooperatives, libertarian socialism, or anarchist communism?
I think a major problem with decentralizing too much is that basic goods that the modern world needs, like artificial fertilizers and computer chips cant be produced or if they can be produced they cant be made in large quantities. What I understand anarchist communism to be is many small communities of people that collectively grow their own food and make their own medicines, without much large scale trade. With libertarian socialism and cooperatives there’s still the issues that if the workers own the factories they aren’t going to be incentivized to take risks with the company, the average worker has no idea about macro-economics and how to run the business, and they also wont want to lower their wages if its necessary (like if the company is doing poorly or if there needs to be additional financial motivation for low preforming workers - obviously that can get out of hand but some of it makes sense). To somewhat even out the wealth gap I think higher taxes on the wealthy and more rights for unions is pretty much all that is needed.
My government owned power utility is selling me the cheapest electricity of all the OECD, and still turning a profit that’s returned in the government’s coffers to invest in research and social services. It’s awful!
What I don’t like isn’t the fact that the profits of the service aren’t going to shareholders, but because it gives the govt more power over you. This is fine if you trust the govt, but at some point there is an extreme of trusting the govt with too much. like I wouldn’t want the chinese govt controlling my finances
edit: why tf am I being downvoted? if you disagree with me then reply.
Yeah you’re right, the shareholders really have my best interests at heart!
Thankfully in this case I AM THE SHAREHOLDER.
no ur not 🤦
your government is
how about you tell me right now what a shareholder is because it really seems like you don’t know
the shareholders only care about themselves, but the system that they collectively create through mutual competition and distrust for each other provides (ideally) cheap and (ideally) high quality products for the costumer. Why isn’t this the case irl? Not enough competition, which the govt can safely encourage with antitrust laws.
If you work, you and your family should have their needs met, aka, we should all be able to help our community have all of our basic needs met
This same worker should also have capital F free health care a house or condo he and his family like or she and her family, or their family, yours or mine
This worker should be able to have paid leave, both vacation and sick.
…
I’ll do you one better. If you exist you and your family should have their needs met. We have the ability to feed, provide medical care, and house everyone on the planet many times over yet we don’t. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why we don’t.
We should put the psychopaths that can’t care about others in a reserve, where they can make their own hellscape, away from normal people.
So we can have a normal society without some insane psychopath arguing about healthcare, because he happens to not need it.
We will see who’s society is better
We will see who’s society is better
Did you ever read “A libertarian walks into a bear”? It’s a non-fiction book about a bunch of libertarians that moved to a small town, and used their new voting bloc to try to bring about their libertarian paradise. It went badly. There were bears.
The author points out how a nearby town that was otherwise very similar. It had prospered during the time libertarians were driving their town into the ground
This sounds like a fascinating read lol. I’ve never heard of that before!
Regardless of ideology, I do find those “let’s start our own society” accounts very educational, because everybody thinks they can do it better, but there’s a lot of pitfalls and footguns to learn from.
We should put the psychopaths that can’t care about others in a reserve, where they can make their own hellscape, away from normal people.
Digitally, we’ve already done this, and called it LinkdIn!
But somehow we got pulled into having to play their stupid games. :(
Yes. Minimum wage is supposed to cover every basic living necessity at the very least - from rent to food to even a modest amount of leftover money meant for a bit of fun here and there. It’s not supposed to allow a lavish lifestyle or allow one to eat at restaurants every day, obviously, but it should allow you to live modestly and support your household regardless of you living with others or alone.
So for these McDonald’s overlords who live lavish livestyles thanks to the thankless work these workers put in, then why should they even work at a McDonald’s in the first place? With inflation constantly rising and wages staying where they are someday even a McDonald’s job won’t be worth the hassle for the non-livable pitance of money they receive in return.
Down with overly rich billionaires living off other people’s misery. If your business allows for you to live the most lavish and extravagant life while your workers barely have enough to make ends meet, you are not a successful businessperson, but a grifter to society and use your power to keep the status quo as it currently is. Flipping burgers on a McDonald’s or working in garbage disposal are still essential jobs to serve society, and people are needed for them.
So they should still be properly valued and compensated as humans trying to live their lives while they supply the vital workforce for those same jobs. Plain and simple - there’s more than enough for the rich to still be rich while regular people maintain a satisfactory level of life, and no need to ghoulishly hoard all the wealth (in many cases through tax loopholes which should not be legal whatsoever) like they were gonna live eternally.
And no, I’m not a minimum wage worker, so with this I’m not advocating for myself, but for what’s right for us as a society.
Right-wingers remind me of that meme template where the dog has the ball and it’s going “Throw! No Take! Only throw!”
They want a thriving economy, but they don’t want to pay people wages. No pay. Only spend.
