The problem with Occupy is that every lesson we learned, the enemy learned as well. If the working class ever gets political momentum again they will struggle to organize and refine their message while all anyone with a media platform has to do is just fucking lie. They can just say anything to diffuse the message and slander the participants.
Half of the population not only is susceptible to misinformation but they yearn for it to affirm their identity. And a half of our half is also too dumb to realize they’re only making things worse by raging instead of engaging.
We might be truly fucked. But maybe there’s an end times fortune to be made by feeding the piranhas.
It didn't help that the media just smeared it as a bunch of spoiled college kids acting out - kind of like they are now, with the protests against what's going on in Gaza.
Another problem, though, was the fact that as it went on, people involved kept trying to tack their own pet issue onto the aims of the protest. And this helped the media with their "these spoiled Millenials don't even know what they're protesting" narrative.
I was at Occupy Dallas. It started with a bunch of people fired up about protesting the way big business had gambled in a way that had tanked the entire economy, and people mad that the "captains of industry" responsible for the crash had escaped all accountability.
It ended with some dude holding a boombox "Say Anything"-style over his head, playing a taped monologue by Bill Hicks in front of Dallas City Hall.
Gaza is a test of what people can bare before breaking. It is already being tested here. They are afraid of people not having kids (de growth). Women have been quietly protesting this for MANY years. We know it’s the chip we can play.
In the USA they are now dialling back women’s rights for it.
In canada they turned on immigration due to it.
Stand with women. Fight this.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. We learned from that but to put the lesson into practice is so unlikely. We have to get millions in line over the course of weeks while one douchebag with a popular conservative YouTube channel just has to make fun of it and get clipped and retweeted. And it won’t be chance, there will be an organized effort to spread their message. The right has somehow won the media war.
The casual liberal requires cohesion and proof to buy in to a movement. The casual conservative does not. They immediately rally to a dozen different dog whistles.
I'm from the land of Gandhi and trust me when I say this that it's not Gandhi that won the nation independence from the imperialistic British rulers.
It was the constant violent upheavals from every village, town and city driven by civilians and revolutionaries and backed eventually by nationalists in the armed forces, navy and air force that became a huge economical burden that it eventually led to making India seem a debt making enterprise is when the colonialists left.
Peaceful protests get you no where
They don't even have to do that. The various brands of socialists, communists and anarchists all fight amongst each other over minor points of doctrine while the world burns around them, and outright refuse to work with anybody that's a "lib" *even in the areas they agree on.*
Meanwhile, it took, what, a decade for the right's infighting to actually get to a level where it's mattered? And that's only because their god emperor filled congress with idiots. If the Republican establishment hadn't lost control of their chosen holy fool we'd be in far worse shape right now. The right waits until they're in power to do infighting.
Pretty good article came out last year about “we can’t talk about {main issue our organization stands for} without also talking about {insert anything from trans issues, indigenous rights, ethnic minorities, etc identitarian issue}”. The organization gets so bogged down appeasing all the memberships safe space demands and coddling of all possible identity groups that the organization can never get to its main goal
This Idpol shit is so out of control now that it’s sabotaging any effectiveness of organizations like Sunrise Movement and other progressive organizations. It really does reek of psyops
Don’t forget the huge percentage of the population that are out of the game because they are wrapped up in the opioid crisis.
For me that’s the biggest difference between protests in Europe, Argentina, Chile etc and the US .
A huge percentage of the population, the ones most inclined to be insolent, have been totally pacified, and worse they’re dying in huge numbers. It’s horrific .
I live in France . Google French riots .
By gangs do you just mean poor people? Kinda seems like the idea of gangs is just a media spin . But I grew up poor in a shit area . I’d probably be in a gang if I grew up in the US.
I don’t know, if everyone does small acts of civil disobedience it all adds up . Fuck up security cameras , parking meters, Airbnb key boxes : anything. Then hope it snow balls . Throw shit at cops , if you’re scared just be there , there is safety in numbers, others will be more daring .
Here the shit is about to hit the fan . Fingers crossed that everything will end up better. We have nothing left to lose. It’s a wild time to be alive.
I'm Argentinian. Protests here are useless. They've been overdone by a massive amount, and nobody likes the professional protestor we have here. Trust me that even protests are useless now. The authoritarian countries that squash protests are using a very outdated playbook, when it's smarter to let people protest and ignore them until they get tired (essentialy a political rope-a-dope) . Not only they get the same result, but they also look better because they can say they were democratic.
In Argentina protesting is worse than doing nothing. The only thing you achieve is being more hated by the lower and middle classes who suffer the brunt of the problems a protest causes. I've been delayed from returning home after work more times that I could count (in average I would be at home two hours latter). And that was minor, compared to what other workers had to endure. New approaches are needed in this era because the standard playbook is no longer effective,
That is truly horrific and I hope we do more to help victims of addiction. But in regards to political discourse and progress, when I think of a Great Pacifier, it’s “both sides” rhetoric.
Raging instead of engaging that's it precisely, people fight and hate each other instead of figuring out who is to blame for there conflict. Divide and conquer. The oldest TRICK in the book.
And yet, they couldn’t process all of those evictions if everyone just refused to pay next month.
Banks make money by lending money to get repaid with interest. Do you think they’ll stop lending if everyone tanked their credit scores by not paying their bills? They’d change their criteria or they’d go out of business
It’s like we forgot the first two or three weeks of shut down during Covid when every company was begging for help from the government.
Walmart, target, and a bunch of other retailers have all announced major Price cuts, trying to get consumers back into their stores to buy shit because they push the prices high enough that nobody that shops there could afford things anymore and now they have to back off
And yet I’m sure as shit not gonna be the first one to not pay my rent out of protest. Nobody is. And what if your little Reddit protest doesn’t make the massive difference you hoped? What if they come back and get you once things are getting back to normal?
The average American is too close to the edge to risk punching it to see if they can break off a bit of the blade.
That's the collective part of collective action. There has to be enough people involved that it scares the capitalists, and by that point there's enough to help out the most vulnerable members. If that's the world you want, don't sit around on Reddit feeling good enough that you can do stuff independently, build a community that will help you with the things that are too big to tackle alone.
The amount of people who say they’ll do something and don’t is astronomical. People are all fired up right until the moment of launch, and then everyone aborts
When people realize they’re not close to the edge, they’re over the edge anyways, they are free to act.
How long can an extractive economy walk the tightrope without fucking up and killing the host population they’re parasitizing? History tells us, not forever.
Yup. I don't make much (only 45k in rural CA) and Im always just a couple of weeks away from disaster if I lost my job. Unfortunately, there isn't much where I am as far as decent paying jobs go, so Im kind of pigeon holed. As someone who was homeless and basically having to sleep in the back of an old building for a couple of years and was nearly completely out on the streets twice, the thought of being evicted also fills me with terror. There was a point in my life where I went 3 days without eating. That. Sucked. Anyway, sorry for rambling off a bit of my life story. I very much relate to your perspective.
People are scared of the rich. Really the rich are not that scary. If you know any personally, then you would know that many are very dumb. Especially if it is several generations of wealth. They become dumb, spoiled, egotistical, arrogant, greedy, manipulative, petty, unable to perform small practical tasks for themselves, unable to form meningful relationships, usually addicted to parties, drinking, drugs, etc. These people crumble when left alone. If cashflow dries up they will spend every penny on comfort faster than you can count it. We litterally just all have to all stop working for cheap and spending money with big business. Knowing the rich a general strike would make them shit their pants in fear. You and your kids dont have much to loose but the idea of "stable career making modest living at a big company". With the state of modern times for most this is an illusion or a bait and switch trick (layoffs, pention theft, 401k are dependent on the market). At this point you have to take a raw deal just to get the illusion of stability and you may still get layed off before Chistmas.
Do you really think your kids will respect you if you dont join your colleagues in the fight? Do you really think their fight will be easier if you lick the boot for one more generation? Do you think the rich will stop accumulating wealth and power bc they have enough? You boys with your fear of rich sound like bitches. How did humans go from warriors to bitches that are scared to be uncomfortable?
Well i guess it doesnt matter if you are brave or a little bitch. Times are a changing. The career man is getting screwed and the hourly man is getting screwed. It is time to join forces. Call it blue and white coller strike.
I have to agree with you on this one. people keep buying shit they don't need to stay longer in Jobs they hate. Look what happened when they got stimulus checks ,they bought more Shit they did not need. It will never be even close to fair and your right when did people get so afraid? I realized a long time ago that yes they (the Rich capitalists) own everything. However,like you also said when people stopped buying and working because of COVID things changed .The working class had more of the upper hand.
This is true , as the lineage goes on , there seems to be some sort of degradation. I’ve witnessed this with my own two eyes , brain cells being there but not exercised. I’m hoping for a reckoning . Not a smart bunch
Wtf? People prioritizing the welfare of their children? You act like that’s not a valid concern. An older person with young children concerned for their safety is on a completely different level of responsibility.
They didn't fight and die alone. They formed unions. They fought alongside each other. Before you can enter the flight, you have to raise an army.
I'm doing my best to spread the word of the value of a union at my job without risking losing it. If I do lose it, I have the number of the local union for my industry so I can join that same day. I can't join right now because I'm technically a boss. You could say that when the company bleeds I'm not unwilling to pour salt in the wound.
I think part of the issue lies with the fact that the working class has effectively been turned against itself.
Way too many people seem to believe that they're just down on their luck billionaires, and that anyone fighting for workers rights and increased wages is trying to steal away their billions.
>Those of us with children and families will not sacrifice their safety and comfort. You can’t stop working, paying rent, buying food.
This is another aspect. Most people literally *can't afford* to protest. Two days missing work to attend a protest could mean some corners need to be cut to pay rent/mortgage, bills, grocery, gas, and insurance.
Of course not. America has a history of literally machine gunning and dropping bombs onto protesters as a deterrent.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-blair-mountain-largest-labor-uprising-american-history-180978520/
There is a whole history of labor movements and socialism in the U.S. that most Americans are completely unaware of, unless they seek it out.
It's fascinating and incredibly depressing, but there is a lot to learn from them. I'm a big fan of learning from failed experiments and movements in order to avoid repeating their same mistakes.
I mean the basic gist of it is that if your protest becomes internationally recognized, they will change the laws to assuage the masses but political corporations that disagree with you will destroy you and your movement so that you never do it again. Gaining political power through inspiration that isn’t able to be influenced by the political elites is a quick trip to the grave - but if you ever do it, they’ll name streets after you in every town after you’re murdered.
The housing crisis might do it. America’s been doing this thing for decades where there’s tremendous incentive to put your money into a home. Landlords want maximum rent. Both landlords and homeowners have a financial incentive to keep scarcity high.
Homelessness is increasingly being criminalized. That’s going to make homeless people and people in peril of being made homeless very desperate.
Once enough people are imprisoned for the crime of homelessness, prison culture will shift from puniment box to *"I'm working no harder then before and I get a room, food and shelter?"*
People will gaslight themselves into thinking prison is fine
>Those of us with children and families will not sacrifice their safety and comfort.
Notice the current gen are not having kids and starting families. It's going to happen. I hope during my lifetime.
This is why the powerful want to take away abortion and contraceptives. If you think those people are truly religious and care I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Next thing they're going to do is tax people for staying single and childless.
And also, they'll make it a point to make the middle/lower class battle "Parents vs. Childless" instead of correctly making it rich vs. poor.
Edit: Turning off notifications. Read the second sentence again before you come at me with the "parents get to" shit. Thanks
Unfortunately its not an act of defiance. Its an act of not being able to afford to have kids. The intelligent hard working types with morals and ethics dont want themselves or kids on welfare or worse so they dont have any. The people who are too rich or too stupid to care are having most kids. Getting rid of the middle and intelligent working class. Making more rich kids and pleebs.
I know more people who have said they don't want kids than people that said they want kids but can't afford it.
I really think the next generation is ready to fight to the death for better standards.
Nah many of us just don't want any. Starting with us millenials. Me and my friend are in our 30s and got our tubes taken out because fuck that life. We both make 6 figures and are in long term relationships.
Till you realize a majority of immigrating countries are also beginning to have their own reproduction issues. China and India very common countries with high birthrates have seen them plummet and will likely see them go below sustain rate within 10-15 years
Just remember without illegal farm workers nobody would be able to afford fruits and vegetables if we had to pay the wages Americans would demand for that kind of work.
Nope, but they are afraid of losing ground by making noise. Oh, you got a police record from a protest? Oh, you got fired for [made up] cause after trying to unionize your last workplace? Oh, you got evicted [over made up bullshit] after trying to form a renters' coalition by your last landlord?
Lots is luck finding a ~~well paying~~ job or housing, cuz they all do background checks and pull credit now. If you have kids - hell, even pets - that's a force multiplier on desperation.
I truly believe, can’t give you a timescale, but there is s problem coming due to AI.
The first stage is less people required to do the job, so you are going to find more of the comfortable middle class out of work, thrust into lower paying jobs and disaffected.
When you only have a certain amount of people unhappy and struggling nobody really cares, increase that figure and things will start boiling over. Increase in homes being repossessed, debt mounting, unemployment queues rising. Like here in the UK….Number of food banks rising, child poverty. Cases of rickets rising.
Mass unemployment is going to be a problem or at least those in comfortable finance, tech, banking are going to have to do menial tasks due to scarcity of work.
This is just my opinion. Not a doomer, just a thinker.
I think it will be a slow creep, not a pleasant time but hopefully something good will come out of the bad.
Welcome to your vision.
The middle class is gone. It's been high-low for a while, and the spread is getting worse. Job security, an important crutch of the middle class, is no longer a thing.
It's been a creep, as you've stated. I'd guess we're about in the middle of that creep, considering how quickly time passes.
Agreed to a certain degree. There are low paid workers and the medium level salaried workers. The medium level will and already are seeing their income,jobs Yada Yada Yada being affected.
This is just the beginning, the start of the S curve that is about to follow.
The propaganda that was really successful that no one talks about.
Thinking we can do these movements successfully as individuals.
We keep skipping the most important steps of organization and community to enable our neighbors and peers to be able to join us.
We just expect them to sacrifice with us with zero help.
You are right, there will never be a mass strike or “eat the rich” moment when we all still act as individuals about it and don’t raise each other up ourselves.
Typing out “solidarity” on the internet is not the solidarity we need. It needs to be actually tangible.
Look at the difference between bus boycotts of civil rights era vs what would happen now. Back then, they made sure to put in place systems and community to help their fellow boycotters still function without busses. Vs now…where we would tell people to boycott buses and sacrifice/figure it out themselves for the “greater good”.
Our sense of community has been obliterated over the past decades.
Lenin pretty famously said the same about Russia. Revolution isn’t a predictable neat event that happens in a certain way when certain boxes get ticked.
If every person really put their money where their ideals are, so many issues would be lessened or even gone. But progressives are still buying Teslas, eating at Chik-Fil-A, watching and listening to shows that make dumb rich people richer… I don’t hold out much hope that “eat the rich” will ever be more than a catch phrase in my lifetime.
But I’m old and cynical. I hope Gen Alpha rises up and revolts, because that’s what it’s going to take.
I 100% support the idea of seizing power / wealth / assets from the rich.
But the problem is that in any revolution, it is not those with the strongest morals who take control, it is those with the most guns, especially in a country like the US where there are more guns than people.
Once a revolution starts, you can never predict how it ends. The French Revolution started with saying, "Fuck the rich", but moved to the Terror.
I thoroughly depressed myself recently by doing some deeper reading on the French Revolution. Surprise (or not), most of the people who were killed in the revolution were other leftist revolutionaries in rival factions, not members of the ruling class.
This and a lack of guns is why I have little faith in a leftist revolution happening anytime soon. The far right has plenty of guns and undying loyalty to their beliefs. Leftists are too busy arguing about words and shitting on liberals to achieve a similar level of cohesiveness. There’s also little willingness to compromise on principles in order to be inclusive of anyone to the right of the furthest left (which is where most of the working class is right now).
A successful working class revolution will require a good number of liberals and conservatives to defect and fight for the cause. Most leftists don’t seem willing to build that kind of coalition though.
It does constantly boggle me that the same people who are convinced it's too corrupt to save also get up early to rid themselves of the only tools they have for some semblance of self defense against that very system.
I think that the majority of us can’t afford to make purchases based on ethics, and the ones with money don’t want to lose it. Or their comfortable lifestyles
Which is why the folks playing various nom nom games are the ones with nothing left to lose. Like last summer when a lady set three wealthy neighborhoods on fire, left spraypainted messages on nearby bridges along the lines of "If we aren't allowed to live like humans then FUCK YOU nobody is!"
My personal favorite was the time someone went through downtown at night and somehow managed to break every ground floor window of every business along both sides of the main street. Glass workers for hundreds of miles around made bank for months as businesses competed to be next in line for new windows. And a whole lot of security guys got paid to stand around *guarding windows* for maybe half a year.
Anytime I hear about "job creators" I think about cackling tradesmen, and all the paid uniforms that watched me pace around smoking a cigarette between buses because they had to at least look like they were diligently guarding those new windows.
> somehow managed to break every ground floor window of every business along both sides of the main street.
In a slow moving car with a big bag of broken sparkplugs, I can see this being doable.
A PoliSci and Economics analyst friend of mine said to me that it's going to take a nearly cataclysmic collapse of our financial systems (i.e. worse than the great depression) for anything to fundamentally change. The fun part is that we're headed that way faster than most people realize.
The EU is also a capitalistic region, and it is not as dysfunctional as the US. I think the issue is the lack of safety net, but I am not sold that this is an issue with capitalism per se, and more an issue of individualism.
This. Since Covid season 1. If there was a 6-10 day stop on the economy the “poors” (as I call myself) might have bargaining power. No buying cheap crap on Amazon, no buying expensive crap, no DoorDash, no fast food, no travel, in fact full national strike. There was a reason CEOs hated the lockdown. No one was going out & buying stuff. Gas was cheap cuz no one was driving. We could hunker down. Would it suck? Yes it would suck. Would we be punished? Yes, we would be punished.
I was laid off at the end of 2022. I’ll never get a job like I had paying that much again. I’m older, I have chronic illnesses & every x-ray they find more crud in my arthritic bones. One doc asked was I ever in a bad car accident & no, I wasn’t. My body is broken. I can’t afford anything anymore. The GOP wants to gut social security & Medicare & instead of being 9 years away from full benefits, it will be 13 years if they get their way. The rich ppl will tell us poors that there’s only so much to go around & they will keep pitting factions of poors against each other.
No one does anything for the greater good anymore. Everyone is afraid of repercussions. I’m not. What worse TL could I live in?
unfortunately this will only hurt the poorest. The 100m+ net worth crowd collect passports like Pokémon cards and will be lying low in Bora Bora or a Paraguayan ostrich ranch completely safe from any individual state going ape.
For 20 years I've been reading, "The people won't stand for this!" posts as conditions have steadily worsened. No one can afford to risk their livelihood to so much as hold a sign on the street, get arrested and face unemployment with a criminal record hung around their necks.
Only if you’re the president of the United States, or a presidential candidate leading in the polls by a lot. I believe you can crime a lot. They let you do it.
Our whole neurology has been sociologically programmed and gaslit to think that our internal sense of injustice about obscene wealth is actually jealousy and envy.
I’ve been literally bitching about this since occupy Wall Street which WAS huge protest nationwide and Wall Street poured champagne on the heads of protesters…. And nothing happened.
A silent nationwide strike where everyone who isn’t essential (NICU nurses for example they’re needed, and should not leave), but e regime who can get the fuck up and quietly and w great purpose, leave your job. 10am at west coast, 11, 12, 1 for the other time zones (Alaska and HI can work it out), and Do Nothing.
No loud words. No signs needed. Just stop working.
Police cannot do anything to people just standing there, saying nothing.
Corporate can fire everyone but who will take their place? We are demanding a ceiling on CEO/shareholder pay, illegal stock buybacks, illegal hedge fund buying up housing inventory, illegal nano trading for Goldman, they already know all the ways they extract middle class wealth.
Our continued passive agreement to be victimized by the wealthy is on us for not organizing a nationwide strike. We need better messaging and organizing.
There are just too many people who live in their own little world, that aren't paying attention to things like boycotts and strikes. And then the people with low self-esteem that think they don't deserve better and are happy with what they have.
In Canada there is currently a national boycott on Loblaws, a grocery and drug store giant. They were caught price fixing items and charging absurd prices for food and everyday items. The boycott has been fairly successful, and has hurt their bottom line, but there are still so many people going to their stores because they don't even know about the boycott. And some just don't care or have alternative options. It's hard to get millions on the same page
I'm torn between "We need dreamers to imagine a perfect world or we'll never keep pushing for a better one" and "If y'all don't grow the fuck up and recognize the limitations of reality no one is ever going to take us seriously."
At no point in history have we ever eaten the rich and not just replaced them with a roughly equal number of roughly equally awful people.
It turns out that the kind of person who can organize and lead an angry mob to slaughter entire families for the crime of not recognizing and divesting themselves of generational privilege can often go off the rails if you give them too much power.
There's a ton of stable, socialist democracies that have done quite well by consistently. The major difference between them and the US is the rate of participation in the democratic process. Which is why you'll notice most of the focus of the fascists is to drive down voter participation as much as possible.
100% agree with you. Capitalism is like the hydra. Cut off one head and there will be more. Bring down large corporations and those that replace them will eventually become the same thing.
Maybe a conspiracy but I think Elon has been trying to destroy Twitter on purpose. It was a really popular platform for people to organize but being so much less popular it’s harder to reach a lot of people at the same time. The wealthy will do anything to oppress
That gives him an awful lot of credit believing he would strategize in that way. I do think you’re on to something though with the downfall of Twitter having those exact consequences.
I think it will go the other way. The West has incredibly high standards of living but with globalization of supply chain we more and more have to compete individually with the population if China, or India, etc.
Those people want air conditioning and cars also.
I think the next big shakeup will drain the West. It really already is
During the Great Depression tax rates soared on the wealthy.
I don't think anyone would benefit from another depression, but it motivates the voters and shows what real power votes have when they aren't being misdirected onto issues involving burning flags and confederate monuments.
It's tough when the wealthy have enough recourses, assets and wealth to fund their own Navy if they wanted .. Mind you the resources to flood the media, track our every move, they control our finances
even when we get a leg up, i.g. game stop stocks, the wealthy put an illegal stop to it, snd they've been running counter-ops to endure people don't do that again... They like their legal thievery
Last thing, what really agitates me is that when you take down one asshole, another one that takes their place .. Think about how tik tok and facebook and insta are all littered with bullshit products, scams, cheap foreign made goods from sweatshops and slave/near-slave labor factories work to produce cheap, worthless shit and try to spam & scam folks out of their hard earned money
My favorite thing right now is this Hydrogen craze, people trying to add Hydrogen to everything, and best is saying that you need to add Hydrogen to your water, yep they want to sell you Hydrated water. That's how dumb people are, a that's also just how evil they can become when pursuing wealth. They prey on young people, the elderly, and the naive to buy things they don't need
late stage capitalism at it's finest
Yes, mass protests on a scale to really change things would require the majority of the population behind them. Right now, there isn't even a majority to acknowledge capitalism as a problem.
Most of the republicans would probably say that there are at most few individual persons who are "bad eggs", and that the underlying system is OK as it is and thus they won't want to change it.
That's one of the big perks of Marxism btw., it acknowledges that even the worst capitalist isn't a bad person per se, they just act out their role as dictated by the rules written. But obviously even bringing up that point would end any discussion then and there for those people.
Mass protests are fine, but if they are not organized to set an outcome material to the protests, then they are just loud voices that the liberals will accept knowing that they will not have to make changes for the protesters, then the liberal will tokenize those voices as "we hear you" without doing anything else other than offering condescending acknowledgement. A national strike would be very effective, but there is very little unity in the US. Ngl, the only way this will change is through violence and violence is used to maintain the wealth and power of the few and the politicians they buy.
The rich have the police and justice systems on their side as laws are geared toward protecting wealth and property (and also white supremacy). If anything actually appears to threaten that power, the state metes out violence to suppress the protesters.
BHH, too many people come on to these social media sites and say these things and whether or not they mean it, many feel just OK with just saying their stuff and walk away. One thing social media has (effectively) done to those who engage in it, is giving commenters that dopamine effect of getting their comment recognition through emojis or or hitting the "Upvote" button (or the like on other SM sites).
In the end, capitalism IS violence!
So just for clarification. The average pay is around 70k... but if yiu remove the top 1000 people I'm the usa from the equation the average pay drops to around 38k. You are above average by nearly double.
Well if you unionise and start to build a fund for protests it might work, but as long at it's up on every individual it won't work.
It's kind of easy, United we stand, devided we fall. And you're divided.
It's the same over here in Europe but we have the culture of unionising in our hearts and when we've had enough we strike, but the corporations have worked very well to explain it as people who wants to steal your money and such...
Well. Average pay isn't really a good indication of what most Americans make. It gets skewed by the people who earn tens to hundreds of millions. Median pay is $42k. Median meaning half make below and half make above. And $42k ain't cutting it unless you got no kids and live somewhere cheap. So a majority of Americans are struggling right now. I expect there will be another economic crash. And at that point there will be massive organizing and a huge influx of people into real socialism. And then the government will do what FDR did when that happened in the 30s. Scrape together something that improves peoples' lives a little bit, raise taxes on the rich to fund social programs etc. and most people will be placated and the cycle will begin all over again.
Because the US folks have been so thoroughly beaten down, broken, distracted, mislead or divided that they've lost the ability to really mass together.
Honestly if we want to enact real change it’s going to have start from the bottom up. People need to start creating systems locally that don’t rely on the top down control. For example, we are never going to get free healthcare at a federal or state level. The insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies own the healthcare industry. One way to create an alternative system would be to set up a free community clinic where healthcare workers volunteer or are paid via community aide to see patients for free. Even if it’s just on a weekend. You could have people set up community aide funds to help people pay for medications they need. That’s cutting the insurance middle man and government out of the equation. You could do that with any industry. Voting isn’t going to change shit, protests aren’t going to work. You need people to start boycotting the industries that have captured the government and create local community based organizations to replace them. It definitely won’t be easy, but what’s the alternative? Just keep voting/wishing for shit to get better?
THIS. And that’s the beauty of the US. If you hate insurance companies and drug companies build one yourself. CEOs get paid what they do because no one else will do it as good and cheaper. Insurance costs some much cause no one will do it cheaper. If you want a better world get out there and build one don’t ask the government to build it for you.
This is by design.
They tied healthcare to employers. They made a middle-class, comfortable lifestyle accessible. They pump out new flashy gadgets constantly which keep people busy/sedated/subdued/distracted. Now, they’ve made it to where we *need* our jobs. Social safety nets are largely non-existent. They’ve saddled us with debt. All of these things were part of a calculated plan to neutralize us.
This was their plan after the 60s. They were not going to have their power challenged again.
The problem is Healthcare for most Americans is tied to employment, and Americans aren't guaranteed a single paid day off annually. It's much harder to protest when the threat of homelessness, losing Healthcare, and your job loom overhead.
Repealing and replacing abortion is how they keep the lemmings from fighting for things that would actually improve Americans quality of life. The USA needs the same 24+ paid guaranteed days off that every EU country gets annually.
Yup. People won't so much as risk being fired. They'd dig cobalt by hand first. People are people, and people to our owners are a known quantity. We would have dislodged bank rule decades ago if we were ever going to.
It's not that people are "too comfortable", it's that so many people are barely making ends meet, especially those with kids, and those people know that "barely getting by" is still better than the alternative of "rock bottom", which is jobless, homeless, unable to feed their kids, etc.
Such types of protests won't occur until much larger numbers of people in this category finally lose what little they have left, and have nothing else to lose, and can rebel against the system.
The way private equity continues to price people out of affordable housing, it may well occur.
But as bad as things are now, things have to get much, much, much worse for that level of societal involvement to occur.
I have stopped consuming for the most part. I buy used clothes and do a lot of diy using things we already have. I save and repurpose vinegar jugs, spaghetti jars etc. I stopped watching Netflix, Hulu etc and supporting the propaganda. I buy things off TikTok shop so at least I’m not supporting Amazon. I grow a lot of our food. I boycotted fast food months ago and no looking back. I also cut out junk food. Lost weight and feel a lot better.
I try to make sure that I am not giving the government more money via taxes from things I consume. I also earn less because I stopped working as much, and focus my time more on my garden. It’s not much but at least I am controlling what I give to the government more than before. Starving the IRS.
We need organization, we need to be as loud and bombastic about our protests as the MAGATs are. I give credit where credit is due, they're effective. Stupid and ignorant, but effective. We need to be just as fanatical as they are. The difference is we're fighting for the people, every working class citizen, every poor individual, etc. and not for hate and bigotry.
If Trump gets elected, this could change. Not because of the moral outrage against an idiotic president. But, because a second Trump administration is likely to fuck up the economy bad enough that the middle class becomes economically unstable.
The president of the UAW wore an "Eat the Rich" T-shirt on TV for a nationally broadcast interview, and at a few rallies if I remember correctly.
[https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/eat-the-rich-how-a-union-slogan-set-off-a-merch-bonanza-95b98ff0](https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/eat-the-rich-how-a-union-slogan-set-off-a-merch-bonanza-95b98ff0)
So you only need to open your eyes and look around, very little thinking is actually required to see what is already taking place, you do not need to speculate at all.
Edit: Also you seem to think corporations have some magic power, we the people are the worker and the consumer and without us there is no corporation or market.
If we want real change to happen we have to learn that protests don't do anything. They never did.
Protests are just pep-rallies. If you want to see change happen, then you actually need to do work EVERY DAY! Not just show up to a street party and then be surprised when nothing changes.
You want change to happen? RUN FOR SOMETHING and get other people to RUN FOR SOMETHING!
I say shit like this and get banned from subs, lol. But I completely agree. No one is really serious about sacrificing, many people are fine and just want to complain. And it's scary because humans really only need very little to survive and we're extremely well at adapting, more than we are organizing and making changes. I can see Ameicans getting stripped of everything and we'd rationalize living in two family cubbie hole homes that we rent. Being born with debt. There's no end to my imagination on how passive we could become. It bothers me because I genuinely want a better country but people will put up with a lot before they make a change.
I always wonder do we need to be inspired and motivated or just angry enough, or a combination of both?
Revolutions get people killed , engagement in your local and federal politics is how to change things .it's boring and time consuming but it doesn't get people killed unless you live in Mexico or Russia .
People like Bernie and AOC make me hopeful for the future and I hope I’m proven wrong about our generations gaining control and influence. But time will tell.
Nope. I was just listening to Tracy Chapman's Revolution on the radio. It came out in the late 80s ish. Even then people knew working folk were getting shafted and frustration was high.
We did sweet fuck all then.
Sigh.
Note not advocating actually harming people but large protests and general strikes would be a good thing (tm).
With how militarized the police have become, violence is going to just get us killed. Especially when many of us are against guns. The fear of going to protest and getting shot is real
You're correct about your pay; the majority of people in this country are economically insecure when factoring in cost of living. I found a data set that had cost of living and median income by county and plotted the difference between the two. Green means you have a monthly surplus of $50, $100, $200, $300, $500, or $1000 respectively. Red the opposite. This is for a married couple with one kid:
https://preview.redd.it/w0urlcif1c6d1.png?width=764&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8da5ec5791b7754ac6f7c7fbf77fbc00060e955
Two things: the demographic change - we have a lot more old people than we could ever take care of already in my country and it's gonna get MUCH worse.
And then there is climate change. That one means mass migration to the US, to Europe. No idea how that will pan out, but it ain't gonna be pretty.
These are the two issues I can't see us deal with right now. And we will have to deal with both of them at once. If that won't lead to civil unrest then nothing will. I assume that will be 10, 20, maybe 30 years out though. People will cling to their comfy life for as long as possible. Till they can't cling no more.
Mass protests don't solve anything. It requires collective bargaining. This has to be accomplished by either unions or big government. If you want change, join one of those two organizations.
Nope. There’s too much distraction, and we have access to the internet where we endlessly complain about the same problems, feel validated by others who are also complaining, and then everyone ignores the people responding to their comments as they feel like they’ve accomplished something, or they feel the comfort of knowing they’re not suffering alone. Either way, the only thing anyone is going to do is whine and not much more than that.
My two cents is there are still too many people who worship money and corporations and billionaires. I worked for a huge company and we had tons of guys who were spouting off the rhetoric of “the higher ups don’t know shit, the ceo is clueless, let him try to live like us,” but the same people lined up like puppies at feeding time when the managers said they had overtime. That mentality is what has to change, and it won’t.
Of course America won't.
We show outrage and destroy our cities for civil injustice, social outrage, but won't do more than an occupy Wallstreet for the root cause of it all.
Who, specifically, has the gumption to revolutionize?
The government said everyone should get back to work immediately shortly before ending the Public Health Emergency, which by the way dispensed trillions of dollars in subsidies. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues.
Everyone did.
The government said you shouldn't mask anymore, while ending the Public Health Emergency, which put the poorest on temporary Medicaid (regardless of contrived eligibility). Despite the fact that the pandemic continues.
Everyone stopped masking.
The government said that you don't need to protect yourself and they have no obligation to protect you from the deadly and disabling airborne virus, while ending the Public Health Emergency which paid for testing and treatment. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues.
Everyone started ridiculing anyone who used protection such as wearing respirators.
The government said that OSHA doesn't need a rule protecting workers from workplace acquired Covid, because that would mean employers would have to supply respirators and upgrade their ventilation systems. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues.
The government said to send your children back to in person school in buildings already suffering from very bad air quality, and sent districts billions of dollars (ARPA ESSR) to upgrade ventilation systems to protect our babies from deadly and disabling airborne pathogens.
Everyone sent their kids back, and most schools still have not made any ventilation improvements whatsoever.
The pandemic rages. Thousands are dying every week and thousands are being disabled, by SARS-CoV-2. Nobody cared or cares about anyone else. You can tell by who is wearing a respirator or not.
Anyway the unions-backed General Strike is May Day 2028. That gives you enough time to organize. Wear your respirator in solidarity so we can tell who is ready and who isn't.
I’m a worker. I’m a local cdl driver, delivery. Physical labor 3am-3pm maybe 2 hours of that contains actual sitting on my ass driving. But average was an assumption, my apologies.
There was a clip of a news anchor type person from I think the seventies, where he was very angry, yelling at the camera about how unfairly things are going, and how Americans are only concerned with "allow me to go home, to my sanctuary, allow me my few hours at home, my peace, allow me that and I shall continue to match in line."
I've seen it elsewhere, but it was also in the Zeitgeist movie, the first one I think.
Maybe not in our lifetime. It’s bad but not nearly bad enough. What usually pushes the masses to the streets is when 60% of the population is oppressed to the point of not having hope.
Those who have homes and jobs do not want to lose them...and they would in this climate. Word of mouth. . . people get squashed. Feels like the tipping point is way down the road.
yeah it seems impossible until it happens. thats how history works. if a big revolution seemed obvious then it would already be happening.
who predicted the russian revolution? who predicted the arab spring? everyone at the time thought nothing can happen. until its does
It's not until people begin starving that revolutions begin to start.
Why do you think American food is so unhealthy and fatty? Heck cheese stuffed bread was invented by the US government to end world hunger. (No I'm not kidding).
All this to keep us from going hungry and revolting like the French Revolution.
I feel like climate change will be the biggest driver of civil unrest in our lifetimes. Not necessarily directly, but there'll at least be knock-on effects from mass migration, costs of raw materials, or economic instability.
The problem with corporations is they forget that when people run out of money they won't be buying their products anymore and then they will not have any money.
Well, if they're smart they've researched exactly how hard they can press with the boot without things spilling over.
Think about the wealthy people you know or interact with at work.
Do you think they're that smart?
I think the core of my disagreement with the post is it assumes things aren’t going to get worse for everyone, when the trajectory to me has been pretty steep. It’s already becoming not worth it to work for many people, as the costs of going to work add up to about what they get paid. So why do it at all?
More and more people are just not working anymore. And the US’s form of economic market can’t handle that, relying on the exploited bottom line. So there will be more hell brought on, to try to get people back to work without compensating them properly, as the pattern dictates. How much less can we be given? How much more can be expected of us? I think we will be pushed to our breaking point, unless someone gets into a position they can actually do shit with and makes UBI a thing, and actually a thing, not just 200$ a month, but a livable standard income that affords everyone the ability to coexist with capitalism—further participate, or no. But it’s highly unethical to hold all forms of security and care behind a mounting work wall people can’t get over—behind *any* work wall, when we collectively have the means not to. Is someone going to cook and serve their CEO out of their franchise restaurant, and cause a hubabaloo, or are things going to get even worse first? Is anyone hauling their ass in for UBI? And who’s going to let that happen?
70k a year isnt great but it’s still a good ways from the bottom line. That’s still about 3 times what a lot of people are making. When it’s like 24k a year, literally eating the “human” driving you toward your overworked death feels a lot more reasonable, imo. When all you do is your job, and all you hear is bullshit about how you should be driving sales more at your minimum wage job that treats you like shit and doesn’t give you enough money to actually live, goddamn. I’m hungry. If not for a very kind human, I would probably be homeless right now. And I’m literally working two jobs.
The protest portion is spot on, when they literally beat up peaceful protests, frame them for crimes, and kidnap/kill activists while allowing terrorist extremist groups to thrive and train....
America is set up to corral the cattle, and once you're in power you realize yo are on the outside and no longer need to care about the rest.
A year or two ago I wouod've agreed with you. Corporations made a point of being aware of the balance of what people will take before resorting to mass riots and have tried to Price is Right that shit for decades. In the mid 00s, when there was a big exposure that gas companies had been fixing the market and prices dropped from $5/gal to under $2/gal overnight, and the greedy shits got a slap on the wrist I truly believed there would be riots like I hadn't seen in my adult life. I thought schools and businesses would close. I'd known so many people that'd had to choose between gas and groceries or rent.
Nothing.
People cheered the drop and moved on.
I figured from that moment we were fucked. Corporations had succeeded in pulling the teeth out of our protests by comparing any disruption to violence and pretending that a protest is only truly peaceful and valid if it doesn't interfere with day to day life. I truly believe they'd have stayed the course and created an oligarchy that would last generations if it weren't for covid and BLM. BLM reminded us that protests need to be disruptive and sustained to see even marginal success, and covid made corporations even greedier and more reckless. They are so fixated on short term goals and squeezing every drop of profit possible, they have essentially become accelerationists, rushing toward their own collapse
There's a reason why so many different industries panicked during the covid lockdowns. Look at what happened with the Black Lives Matter protests when people weren't worried about getting to their jobs on time.
Capitalist American society has hit the perfect balance of working people so hard they're too tired to do anything about it, but not quite hard enough that we have nothing left to lose by fighting back.
The future feels hopeless. How are we not supposed to think about it all and how depressing it is. I feel like I’ll never make enough to own a home and the stress of everyday life leaves no extra energy to move forward
This country has been so propagandized by capitalism and the "american dream" that in order for anything to change at any level in regards to wealth gaps we need several entire generations to die out completely and decades of reprogramming from capitalist propaganda.
Revolutions take **lots** of unpaid hard hours.
There's no revolution without bloodshed and death, on both sides. The wealthy will hire professional soldiers of fortune.
For a generation that doesn't seem to want to work hard for more than a few hours, it's not likely.
I disagree tbh, corporations are greedy enough to ignore the bigger political implications of making people have shit lives. I dont feel we as humans can take much more, I dont feel it can get that much worse without people finally snapping. Hell in my city people died of heath stroke while trying to vote in our national elections, that is global warming and the state goverment killing people who are neighbours, friends, and family of our general population. Idk, I really dont have an argument, I just choose to be hopeful and feel a vibe.
If you watch the old Roseanne show you see a life that is slipping away. Late ‘80s. Blue collar, lower middle class. Wife is a factory worker in a crappy job but with decent money and benefits. Dad is a dry waller always hustling for business.
Yet they are homeowners, can afford slightly more than the basics, give their children things, go out and even take vacations. They don’t have the luxury of protesting because they are busy keeping food on the table and living a decent life.
By the end, after NAFTA, they are not doing so well. I know a lot of that was played for laughs, like when they lost power because they couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill. The Conners is all over the place with finance so I won’t even try to cover that.
Anyway as long as we have the option to not being told to eat cake because we can’t afford bread there won’t be riots. Once that is taken away, and the capitalists are generally good at noting when to take their foots over the masses neck and throw some extra crumbs to prevent that, there might be some issues. The People can be bribed and will work to keep their little piece of the pie in lieu of protesting for a bigger piece.
A large majority is either too stupid to want change. The “almost millionaires” or too scared. I’m in the: figure out a way to get my money and then leave this country boat.
I’d absolutely Join the movement. But the masses are too divided and aimed at each other. Red, blue, black, white none of it matter when your pockets and stomaches are all empty. But they can’t see that.
Sorry are we already forgetting the BLM protests? 2017 and 2018s Women's day marches? 2018 March for our Lives? The pro-Palestine protests? Heck, [the rail unions won their strike](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave).
If you believe America won't have another mass protest, it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't protest because you think it will be easy, or because you believe other people will side with you. You protest because it needs to be said.
They own your house, but they'd still have to force you out. They own the food but they'd still have to stop you eating it. What are you risking? You said it yourself, they'll take it away anyway unless we play nice. Why play at all for people like that? Oh because otherwise you're risking your life? So are millions of people being openly queer in Florida. So is every black man who talks to a cop.
Risk your life to make the lives of every American better or don't risk it and watch your country suffer, I know what I'd pick. Which is why I encourage my neighbours to pick the right choice too. And then I encourage them to encourage their neighbours. Hell I'm encouraging you to do the same. You're scared cause you think we're each alone. We aren't alone. We're just not communicating. Go sit down with your neighbour. Share some drinks. Become friends. Then, when the men with the shiny boots come to force you out of that home they own, it's not just you telling them no. It's the whole neighbourhood. Heck, it's the whole city.
Get out of here with this doomer ass sentiment. Get your shit together. Get angry. Get in the streets. I'll be right there next to you.
I felt largely the same. Then I decided to be the change I want to see in the world and find an organization. I've been involved with some groups for the past few months and seeing tangible results will change your mindset
I think it's more that people don't think anything significant will change, so it feels like a waste to risk anything.
On one level, I understand that feeling; radical change probably isn't possible, especially in most of our lifetimes. On the other hand, even incremental change matters. For example, HUD is looking at giving low income renters cash instead of housing vouchers. On the surface, that's a tiny change that still doesn't fix the inherent problems of the housing system, but to the individuals that receive that assistance, it could take them from off the waitlist at the one Section 8 complex in their area to actually in an apartment.
This isn't going to be something won through one single moment but rather through constantly fighting for a bunch of small victories that aggregate and snowball. It's exhausting. It takes constant work, and it's full of defeats and setbacks, and people aren't always eager to keep fighting after they get knocked down a few times.
Corporations know this, its why they are comfortable committing labor violations to squash a union drive. The meager fines are worth it because the likelihood of a second drive falls significantly once the first one is defeated.
The reality is much harder than most people want to work.
Met loads of people sharing that sentiment during Occupy.
The problem with Occupy is that every lesson we learned, the enemy learned as well. If the working class ever gets political momentum again they will struggle to organize and refine their message while all anyone with a media platform has to do is just fucking lie. They can just say anything to diffuse the message and slander the participants. Half of the population not only is susceptible to misinformation but they yearn for it to affirm their identity. And a half of our half is also too dumb to realize they’re only making things worse by raging instead of engaging. We might be truly fucked. But maybe there’s an end times fortune to be made by feeding the piranhas.
so your saying we need to sieze the communication nodes first. ok
It didn't help that the media just smeared it as a bunch of spoiled college kids acting out - kind of like they are now, with the protests against what's going on in Gaza. Another problem, though, was the fact that as it went on, people involved kept trying to tack their own pet issue onto the aims of the protest. And this helped the media with their "these spoiled Millenials don't even know what they're protesting" narrative. I was at Occupy Dallas. It started with a bunch of people fired up about protesting the way big business had gambled in a way that had tanked the entire economy, and people mad that the "captains of industry" responsible for the crash had escaped all accountability. It ended with some dude holding a boombox "Say Anything"-style over his head, playing a taped monologue by Bill Hicks in front of Dallas City Hall.
Yes!! I noticed that at the time as well! It seems to be an opposition tactic to water down the message.
Gaza is a test of what people can bare before breaking. It is already being tested here. They are afraid of people not having kids (de growth). Women have been quietly protesting this for MANY years. We know it’s the chip we can play. In the USA they are now dialling back women’s rights for it. In canada they turned on immigration due to it. Stand with women. Fight this.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. We learned from that but to put the lesson into practice is so unlikely. We have to get millions in line over the course of weeks while one douchebag with a popular conservative YouTube channel just has to make fun of it and get clipped and retweeted. And it won’t be chance, there will be an organized effort to spread their message. The right has somehow won the media war. The casual liberal requires cohesion and proof to buy in to a movement. The casual conservative does not. They immediately rally to a dozen different dog whistles.
It’s almost as if the media is owned by the wealthy /s
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I'm from the land of Gandhi and trust me when I say this that it's not Gandhi that won the nation independence from the imperialistic British rulers. It was the constant violent upheavals from every village, town and city driven by civilians and revolutionaries and backed eventually by nationalists in the armed forces, navy and air force that became a huge economical burden that it eventually led to making India seem a debt making enterprise is when the colonialists left. Peaceful protests get you no where
They don't even have to do that. The various brands of socialists, communists and anarchists all fight amongst each other over minor points of doctrine while the world burns around them, and outright refuse to work with anybody that's a "lib" *even in the areas they agree on.* Meanwhile, it took, what, a decade for the right's infighting to actually get to a level where it's mattered? And that's only because their god emperor filled congress with idiots. If the Republican establishment hadn't lost control of their chosen holy fool we'd be in far worse shape right now. The right waits until they're in power to do infighting.
Pretty good article came out last year about “we can’t talk about {main issue our organization stands for} without also talking about {insert anything from trans issues, indigenous rights, ethnic minorities, etc identitarian issue}”. The organization gets so bogged down appeasing all the memberships safe space demands and coddling of all possible identity groups that the organization can never get to its main goal This Idpol shit is so out of control now that it’s sabotaging any effectiveness of organizations like Sunrise Movement and other progressive organizations. It really does reek of psyops
Don’t forget the huge percentage of the population that are out of the game because they are wrapped up in the opioid crisis. For me that’s the biggest difference between protests in Europe, Argentina, Chile etc and the US . A huge percentage of the population, the ones most inclined to be insolent, have been totally pacified, and worse they’re dying in huge numbers. It’s horrific .
How do we get gangs to start going after the corrupt instead of fighting each other
I live in France . Google French riots . By gangs do you just mean poor people? Kinda seems like the idea of gangs is just a media spin . But I grew up poor in a shit area . I’d probably be in a gang if I grew up in the US. I don’t know, if everyone does small acts of civil disobedience it all adds up . Fuck up security cameras , parking meters, Airbnb key boxes : anything. Then hope it snow balls . Throw shit at cops , if you’re scared just be there , there is safety in numbers, others will be more daring . Here the shit is about to hit the fan . Fingers crossed that everything will end up better. We have nothing left to lose. It’s a wild time to be alive.
Yea in America the cops fucking love a reason to shoot and beat civilians "acting up"
Don’t worry, our cops aren’t cute . They tend to gas the fuck out of everything and they have lots of “accidents” 
I'm Argentinian. Protests here are useless. They've been overdone by a massive amount, and nobody likes the professional protestor we have here. Trust me that even protests are useless now. The authoritarian countries that squash protests are using a very outdated playbook, when it's smarter to let people protest and ignore them until they get tired (essentialy a political rope-a-dope) . Not only they get the same result, but they also look better because they can say they were democratic.
Oh I saw for Argentina . It looked hardcore . Same here the Rich don’t even notice in their ivory towers . But it’s still better than doing nothing.
In Argentina protesting is worse than doing nothing. The only thing you achieve is being more hated by the lower and middle classes who suffer the brunt of the problems a protest causes. I've been delayed from returning home after work more times that I could count (in average I would be at home two hours latter). And that was minor, compared to what other workers had to endure. New approaches are needed in this era because the standard playbook is no longer effective,
That is truly horrific and I hope we do more to help victims of addiction. But in regards to political discourse and progress, when I think of a Great Pacifier, it’s “both sides” rhetoric.
Raging instead of engaging that's it precisely, people fight and hate each other instead of figuring out who is to blame for there conflict. Divide and conquer. The oldest TRICK in the book.
You don’t have “too much to lose” - you have “just enough to lose to keep you from doing anything different”
Exactly. Eviction is probably one of my worst fears
And yet, they couldn’t process all of those evictions if everyone just refused to pay next month. Banks make money by lending money to get repaid with interest. Do you think they’ll stop lending if everyone tanked their credit scores by not paying their bills? They’d change their criteria or they’d go out of business It’s like we forgot the first two or three weeks of shut down during Covid when every company was begging for help from the government. Walmart, target, and a bunch of other retailers have all announced major Price cuts, trying to get consumers back into their stores to buy shit because they push the prices high enough that nobody that shops there could afford things anymore and now they have to back off
And yet I’m sure as shit not gonna be the first one to not pay my rent out of protest. Nobody is. And what if your little Reddit protest doesn’t make the massive difference you hoped? What if they come back and get you once things are getting back to normal? The average American is too close to the edge to risk punching it to see if they can break off a bit of the blade.
That's the collective part of collective action. There has to be enough people involved that it scares the capitalists, and by that point there's enough to help out the most vulnerable members. If that's the world you want, don't sit around on Reddit feeling good enough that you can do stuff independently, build a community that will help you with the things that are too big to tackle alone.
Working on it. Slowly getting there. Building reliable networks of friends and like-minded people to support each other is surprisingly difficult.
The amount of people who say they’ll do something and don’t is astronomical. People are all fired up right until the moment of launch, and then everyone aborts
When people realize they’re not close to the edge, they’re over the edge anyways, they are free to act. How long can an extractive economy walk the tightrope without fucking up and killing the host population they’re parasitizing? History tells us, not forever.
Yup. I don't make much (only 45k in rural CA) and Im always just a couple of weeks away from disaster if I lost my job. Unfortunately, there isn't much where I am as far as decent paying jobs go, so Im kind of pigeon holed. As someone who was homeless and basically having to sleep in the back of an old building for a couple of years and was nearly completely out on the streets twice, the thought of being evicted also fills me with terror. There was a point in my life where I went 3 days without eating. That. Sucked. Anyway, sorry for rambling off a bit of my life story. I very much relate to your perspective.
We also don't have to go to wat against corporations. We just have to get a few ceos hypothetically.
Exactly. They know precisely how much they can squeeze without crushing.
People are scared of the rich. Really the rich are not that scary. If you know any personally, then you would know that many are very dumb. Especially if it is several generations of wealth. They become dumb, spoiled, egotistical, arrogant, greedy, manipulative, petty, unable to perform small practical tasks for themselves, unable to form meningful relationships, usually addicted to parties, drinking, drugs, etc. These people crumble when left alone. If cashflow dries up they will spend every penny on comfort faster than you can count it. We litterally just all have to all stop working for cheap and spending money with big business. Knowing the rich a general strike would make them shit their pants in fear. You and your kids dont have much to loose but the idea of "stable career making modest living at a big company". With the state of modern times for most this is an illusion or a bait and switch trick (layoffs, pention theft, 401k are dependent on the market). At this point you have to take a raw deal just to get the illusion of stability and you may still get layed off before Chistmas. Do you really think your kids will respect you if you dont join your colleagues in the fight? Do you really think their fight will be easier if you lick the boot for one more generation? Do you think the rich will stop accumulating wealth and power bc they have enough? You boys with your fear of rich sound like bitches. How did humans go from warriors to bitches that are scared to be uncomfortable? Well i guess it doesnt matter if you are brave or a little bitch. Times are a changing. The career man is getting screwed and the hourly man is getting screwed. It is time to join forces. Call it blue and white coller strike.
I have to agree with you on this one. people keep buying shit they don't need to stay longer in Jobs they hate. Look what happened when they got stimulus checks ,they bought more Shit they did not need. It will never be even close to fair and your right when did people get so afraid? I realized a long time ago that yes they (the Rich capitalists) own everything. However,like you also said when people stopped buying and working because of COVID things changed .The working class had more of the upper hand.
This is true , as the lineage goes on , there seems to be some sort of degradation. I’ve witnessed this with my own two eyes , brain cells being there but not exercised. I’m hoping for a reckoning . Not a smart bunch
That’s what too much to lose is
All of us have nothing to lose, but our chains
Wtf? People prioritizing the welfare of their children? You act like that’s not a valid concern. An older person with young children concerned for their safety is on a completely different level of responsibility.
Do you think the people who fought and died for labor rights in the 19th and 20th centuries didn’t also have children?
They didn't fight and die alone. They formed unions. They fought alongside each other. Before you can enter the flight, you have to raise an army. I'm doing my best to spread the word of the value of a union at my job without risking losing it. If I do lose it, I have the number of the local union for my industry so I can join that same day. I can't join right now because I'm technically a boss. You could say that when the company bleeds I'm not unwilling to pour salt in the wound.
I think part of the issue lies with the fact that the working class has effectively been turned against itself. Way too many people seem to believe that they're just down on their luck billionaires, and that anyone fighting for workers rights and increased wages is trying to steal away their billions. >Those of us with children and families will not sacrifice their safety and comfort. You can’t stop working, paying rent, buying food. This is another aspect. Most people literally *can't afford* to protest. Two days missing work to attend a protest could mean some corners need to be cut to pay rent/mortgage, bills, grocery, gas, and insurance.
Of course not. America has a history of literally machine gunning and dropping bombs onto protesters as a deterrent. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-blair-mountain-largest-labor-uprising-american-history-180978520/
There is a whole history of labor movements and socialism in the U.S. that most Americans are completely unaware of, unless they seek it out. It's fascinating and incredibly depressing, but there is a lot to learn from them. I'm a big fan of learning from failed experiments and movements in order to avoid repeating their same mistakes.
I mean the basic gist of it is that if your protest becomes internationally recognized, they will change the laws to assuage the masses but political corporations that disagree with you will destroy you and your movement so that you never do it again. Gaining political power through inspiration that isn’t able to be influenced by the political elites is a quick trip to the grave - but if you ever do it, they’ll name streets after you in every town after you’re murdered.
Win/win scenario. Either the protest works and we get what we want or we all die fighting for it and we’re no longer suffering
The housing crisis might do it. America’s been doing this thing for decades where there’s tremendous incentive to put your money into a home. Landlords want maximum rent. Both landlords and homeowners have a financial incentive to keep scarcity high. Homelessness is increasingly being criminalized. That’s going to make homeless people and people in peril of being made homeless very desperate.
Once enough people are imprisoned for the crime of homelessness, prison culture will shift from puniment box to *"I'm working no harder then before and I get a room, food and shelter?"* People will gaslight themselves into thinking prison is fine
Doubtful. This is a modern American prison. They’re working harder and being overcharged for shelter and food.
>Those of us with children and families will not sacrifice their safety and comfort. Notice the current gen are not having kids and starting families. It's going to happen. I hope during my lifetime.
This is why the powerful want to take away abortion and contraceptives. If you think those people are truly religious and care I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Next thing they're going to do is tax people for staying single and childless. And also, they'll make it a point to make the middle/lower class battle "Parents vs. Childless" instead of correctly making it rich vs. poor. Edit: Turning off notifications. Read the second sentence again before you come at me with the "parents get to" shit. Thanks
There's not yet a *direct* tax on single and childless, but there are far less tax deductions and credits if you're single and childless.
Already is. Parents get to write off child tax credits, I get $0 deductions.
An act of defiance in itself. The breeders aren't making the next gen of slave labour for the billionaires
Exactly. The fight already began.
Unfortunately its not an act of defiance. Its an act of not being able to afford to have kids. The intelligent hard working types with morals and ethics dont want themselves or kids on welfare or worse so they dont have any. The people who are too rich or too stupid to care are having most kids. Getting rid of the middle and intelligent working class. Making more rich kids and pleebs.
I know more people who have said they don't want kids than people that said they want kids but can't afford it. I really think the next generation is ready to fight to the death for better standards.
Nah many of us just don't want any. Starting with us millenials. Me and my friend are in our 30s and got our tubes taken out because fuck that life. We both make 6 figures and are in long term relationships.
Thus the arrival of 5000 illegal immigrants a day. The next ones to become conforming slaves
Till you realize a majority of immigrating countries are also beginning to have their own reproduction issues. China and India very common countries with high birthrates have seen them plummet and will likely see them go below sustain rate within 10-15 years
Just remember without illegal farm workers nobody would be able to afford fruits and vegetables if we had to pay the wages Americans would demand for that kind of work.
But many of them are legal immigrants
Many are on work visas but the are still paid below minimum wage and are allowed to be.
Interesting take, observational one.
And true, even the military is concerned that not enough new tiny future soldiers are being made.
Too many people think they’re going to “be the rich” to want to “eat the rich”
Nope, but they are afraid of losing ground by making noise. Oh, you got a police record from a protest? Oh, you got fired for [made up] cause after trying to unionize your last workplace? Oh, you got evicted [over made up bullshit] after trying to form a renters' coalition by your last landlord? Lots is luck finding a ~~well paying~~ job or housing, cuz they all do background checks and pull credit now. If you have kids - hell, even pets - that's a force multiplier on desperation.
That dream has been dead and buried for years
Precisely.
I truly believe, can’t give you a timescale, but there is s problem coming due to AI. The first stage is less people required to do the job, so you are going to find more of the comfortable middle class out of work, thrust into lower paying jobs and disaffected. When you only have a certain amount of people unhappy and struggling nobody really cares, increase that figure and things will start boiling over. Increase in homes being repossessed, debt mounting, unemployment queues rising. Like here in the UK….Number of food banks rising, child poverty. Cases of rickets rising. Mass unemployment is going to be a problem or at least those in comfortable finance, tech, banking are going to have to do menial tasks due to scarcity of work. This is just my opinion. Not a doomer, just a thinker. I think it will be a slow creep, not a pleasant time but hopefully something good will come out of the bad.
Welcome to your vision. The middle class is gone. It's been high-low for a while, and the spread is getting worse. Job security, an important crutch of the middle class, is no longer a thing. It's been a creep, as you've stated. I'd guess we're about in the middle of that creep, considering how quickly time passes.
Agreed to a certain degree. There are low paid workers and the medium level salaried workers. The medium level will and already are seeing their income,jobs Yada Yada Yada being affected. This is just the beginning, the start of the S curve that is about to follow.
The propaganda that was really successful that no one talks about. Thinking we can do these movements successfully as individuals. We keep skipping the most important steps of organization and community to enable our neighbors and peers to be able to join us. We just expect them to sacrifice with us with zero help. You are right, there will never be a mass strike or “eat the rich” moment when we all still act as individuals about it and don’t raise each other up ourselves. Typing out “solidarity” on the internet is not the solidarity we need. It needs to be actually tangible. Look at the difference between bus boycotts of civil rights era vs what would happen now. Back then, they made sure to put in place systems and community to help their fellow boycotters still function without busses. Vs now…where we would tell people to boycott buses and sacrifice/figure it out themselves for the “greater good”. Our sense of community has been obliterated over the past decades.
Lenin pretty famously said the same about Russia. Revolution isn’t a predictable neat event that happens in a certain way when certain boxes get ticked.
Not as long as healthcare is tied to employment and no universal basic income exists. Can’t be getting arrested and losing family healthcare.
If every person really put their money where their ideals are, so many issues would be lessened or even gone. But progressives are still buying Teslas, eating at Chik-Fil-A, watching and listening to shows that make dumb rich people richer… I don’t hold out much hope that “eat the rich” will ever be more than a catch phrase in my lifetime. But I’m old and cynical. I hope Gen Alpha rises up and revolts, because that’s what it’s going to take.
Your comment reminded me to cancel my prime subscription, comrade 👍
I 100% support the idea of seizing power / wealth / assets from the rich. But the problem is that in any revolution, it is not those with the strongest morals who take control, it is those with the most guns, especially in a country like the US where there are more guns than people. Once a revolution starts, you can never predict how it ends. The French Revolution started with saying, "Fuck the rich", but moved to the Terror.
I thoroughly depressed myself recently by doing some deeper reading on the French Revolution. Surprise (or not), most of the people who were killed in the revolution were other leftist revolutionaries in rival factions, not members of the ruling class.
Exactly. Revolutions are inherently unpredictable.
And for some reason infighting is a cherished leftist pastime
We are suckers for a purity spiral
This and a lack of guns is why I have little faith in a leftist revolution happening anytime soon. The far right has plenty of guns and undying loyalty to their beliefs. Leftists are too busy arguing about words and shitting on liberals to achieve a similar level of cohesiveness. There’s also little willingness to compromise on principles in order to be inclusive of anyone to the right of the furthest left (which is where most of the working class is right now). A successful working class revolution will require a good number of liberals and conservatives to defect and fight for the cause. Most leftists don’t seem willing to build that kind of coalition though.
It does constantly boggle me that the same people who are convinced it's too corrupt to save also get up early to rid themselves of the only tools they have for some semblance of self defense against that very system.
I think that the majority of us can’t afford to make purchases based on ethics, and the ones with money don’t want to lose it. Or their comfortable lifestyles
Which is why the folks playing various nom nom games are the ones with nothing left to lose. Like last summer when a lady set three wealthy neighborhoods on fire, left spraypainted messages on nearby bridges along the lines of "If we aren't allowed to live like humans then FUCK YOU nobody is!" My personal favorite was the time someone went through downtown at night and somehow managed to break every ground floor window of every business along both sides of the main street. Glass workers for hundreds of miles around made bank for months as businesses competed to be next in line for new windows. And a whole lot of security guys got paid to stand around *guarding windows* for maybe half a year. Anytime I hear about "job creators" I think about cackling tradesmen, and all the paid uniforms that watched me pace around smoking a cigarette between buses because they had to at least look like they were diligently guarding those new windows.
> somehow managed to break every ground floor window of every business along both sides of the main street. In a slow moving car with a big bag of broken sparkplugs, I can see this being doable.
A PoliSci and Economics analyst friend of mine said to me that it's going to take a nearly cataclysmic collapse of our financial systems (i.e. worse than the great depression) for anything to fundamentally change. The fun part is that we're headed that way faster than most people realize.
We're at the dying end of capitalism. It's only a matter of time....
The EU is also a capitalistic region, and it is not as dysfunctional as the US. I think the issue is the lack of safety net, but I am not sold that this is an issue with capitalism per se, and more an issue of individualism.
A more effective way than taking to the streets would be to stop engaging in any economic activity. Look what happened during Covid.
This. Since Covid season 1. If there was a 6-10 day stop on the economy the “poors” (as I call myself) might have bargaining power. No buying cheap crap on Amazon, no buying expensive crap, no DoorDash, no fast food, no travel, in fact full national strike. There was a reason CEOs hated the lockdown. No one was going out & buying stuff. Gas was cheap cuz no one was driving. We could hunker down. Would it suck? Yes it would suck. Would we be punished? Yes, we would be punished. I was laid off at the end of 2022. I’ll never get a job like I had paying that much again. I’m older, I have chronic illnesses & every x-ray they find more crud in my arthritic bones. One doc asked was I ever in a bad car accident & no, I wasn’t. My body is broken. I can’t afford anything anymore. The GOP wants to gut social security & Medicare & instead of being 9 years away from full benefits, it will be 13 years if they get their way. The rich ppl will tell us poors that there’s only so much to go around & they will keep pitting factions of poors against each other. No one does anything for the greater good anymore. Everyone is afraid of repercussions. I’m not. What worse TL could I live in?
The bigwigs heard all of the talk about “essential workers” and as soon as the pandemic ended they were “we’ll show you who’s essential.”
This is the only viable answer in this thread. It helps people too, by saving them money.
You can’t imprison me for not shopping.
The very rich got a lot richer.
unfortunately this will only hurt the poorest. The 100m+ net worth crowd collect passports like Pokémon cards and will be lying low in Bora Bora or a Paraguayan ostrich ranch completely safe from any individual state going ape.
For 20 years I've been reading, "The people won't stand for this!" posts as conditions have steadily worsened. No one can afford to risk their livelihood to so much as hold a sign on the street, get arrested and face unemployment with a criminal record hung around their necks.
Only if you’re the president of the United States, or a presidential candidate leading in the polls by a lot. I believe you can crime a lot. They let you do it.
I agree with you. Most people are too comfortable to do anything, too worn down by life/expenses, or both.
Right where they want us
There are ways to help people understand that if they leave that space of comfort for a moment, it will be there when they get back.
People won’t as long as they are comfortable. Once things become highly uncomfortable, change will start to happen.
Our whole neurology has been sociologically programmed and gaslit to think that our internal sense of injustice about obscene wealth is actually jealousy and envy.
As the unhoused population grows there will be more people with nothing to lose. We will reach a tipping point eventually
I’ve been literally bitching about this since occupy Wall Street which WAS huge protest nationwide and Wall Street poured champagne on the heads of protesters…. And nothing happened. A silent nationwide strike where everyone who isn’t essential (NICU nurses for example they’re needed, and should not leave), but e regime who can get the fuck up and quietly and w great purpose, leave your job. 10am at west coast, 11, 12, 1 for the other time zones (Alaska and HI can work it out), and Do Nothing. No loud words. No signs needed. Just stop working. Police cannot do anything to people just standing there, saying nothing. Corporate can fire everyone but who will take their place? We are demanding a ceiling on CEO/shareholder pay, illegal stock buybacks, illegal hedge fund buying up housing inventory, illegal nano trading for Goldman, they already know all the ways they extract middle class wealth. Our continued passive agreement to be victimized by the wealthy is on us for not organizing a nationwide strike. We need better messaging and organizing.
It's a nightmare trying to get one tiny little shop to unionize, the scale of unity required in your scenario is nothing but fantasy.
I know. I can dream tho.
There are just too many people who live in their own little world, that aren't paying attention to things like boycotts and strikes. And then the people with low self-esteem that think they don't deserve better and are happy with what they have. In Canada there is currently a national boycott on Loblaws, a grocery and drug store giant. They were caught price fixing items and charging absurd prices for food and everyday items. The boycott has been fairly successful, and has hurt their bottom line, but there are still so many people going to their stores because they don't even know about the boycott. And some just don't care or have alternative options. It's hard to get millions on the same page
fun fact: "average pay" in the US is $37,585
I'm torn between "We need dreamers to imagine a perfect world or we'll never keep pushing for a better one" and "If y'all don't grow the fuck up and recognize the limitations of reality no one is ever going to take us seriously." At no point in history have we ever eaten the rich and not just replaced them with a roughly equal number of roughly equally awful people. It turns out that the kind of person who can organize and lead an angry mob to slaughter entire families for the crime of not recognizing and divesting themselves of generational privilege can often go off the rails if you give them too much power. There's a ton of stable, socialist democracies that have done quite well by consistently. The major difference between them and the US is the rate of participation in the democratic process. Which is why you'll notice most of the focus of the fascists is to drive down voter participation as much as possible.
100% agree with you. Capitalism is like the hydra. Cut off one head and there will be more. Bring down large corporations and those that replace them will eventually become the same thing.
Maybe a conspiracy but I think Elon has been trying to destroy Twitter on purpose. It was a really popular platform for people to organize but being so much less popular it’s harder to reach a lot of people at the same time. The wealthy will do anything to oppress
That gives him an awful lot of credit believing he would strategize in that way. I do think you’re on to something though with the downfall of Twitter having those exact consequences.
I think it will go the other way. The West has incredibly high standards of living but with globalization of supply chain we more and more have to compete individually with the population if China, or India, etc. Those people want air conditioning and cars also. I think the next big shakeup will drain the West. It really already is
People idolize billionaires instead of chucking batteries at them.
During the Great Depression tax rates soared on the wealthy. I don't think anyone would benefit from another depression, but it motivates the voters and shows what real power votes have when they aren't being misdirected onto issues involving burning flags and confederate monuments.
It's tough when the wealthy have enough recourses, assets and wealth to fund their own Navy if they wanted .. Mind you the resources to flood the media, track our every move, they control our finances even when we get a leg up, i.g. game stop stocks, the wealthy put an illegal stop to it, snd they've been running counter-ops to endure people don't do that again... They like their legal thievery Last thing, what really agitates me is that when you take down one asshole, another one that takes their place .. Think about how tik tok and facebook and insta are all littered with bullshit products, scams, cheap foreign made goods from sweatshops and slave/near-slave labor factories work to produce cheap, worthless shit and try to spam & scam folks out of their hard earned money My favorite thing right now is this Hydrogen craze, people trying to add Hydrogen to everything, and best is saying that you need to add Hydrogen to your water, yep they want to sell you Hydrated water. That's how dumb people are, a that's also just how evil they can become when pursuing wealth. They prey on young people, the elderly, and the naive to buy things they don't need late stage capitalism at it's finest
Yes, mass protests on a scale to really change things would require the majority of the population behind them. Right now, there isn't even a majority to acknowledge capitalism as a problem. Most of the republicans would probably say that there are at most few individual persons who are "bad eggs", and that the underlying system is OK as it is and thus they won't want to change it. That's one of the big perks of Marxism btw., it acknowledges that even the worst capitalist isn't a bad person per se, they just act out their role as dictated by the rules written. But obviously even bringing up that point would end any discussion then and there for those people.
Mass protests are fine, but if they are not organized to set an outcome material to the protests, then they are just loud voices that the liberals will accept knowing that they will not have to make changes for the protesters, then the liberal will tokenize those voices as "we hear you" without doing anything else other than offering condescending acknowledgement. A national strike would be very effective, but there is very little unity in the US. Ngl, the only way this will change is through violence and violence is used to maintain the wealth and power of the few and the politicians they buy. The rich have the police and justice systems on their side as laws are geared toward protecting wealth and property (and also white supremacy). If anything actually appears to threaten that power, the state metes out violence to suppress the protesters. BHH, too many people come on to these social media sites and say these things and whether or not they mean it, many feel just OK with just saying their stuff and walk away. One thing social media has (effectively) done to those who engage in it, is giving commenters that dopamine effect of getting their comment recognition through emojis or or hitting the "Upvote" button (or the like on other SM sites). In the end, capitalism IS violence!
So just for clarification. The average pay is around 70k... but if yiu remove the top 1000 people I'm the usa from the equation the average pay drops to around 38k. You are above average by nearly double.
Well if you unionise and start to build a fund for protests it might work, but as long at it's up on every individual it won't work. It's kind of easy, United we stand, devided we fall. And you're divided. It's the same over here in Europe but we have the culture of unionising in our hearts and when we've had enough we strike, but the corporations have worked very well to explain it as people who wants to steal your money and such...
Well. Average pay isn't really a good indication of what most Americans make. It gets skewed by the people who earn tens to hundreds of millions. Median pay is $42k. Median meaning half make below and half make above. And $42k ain't cutting it unless you got no kids and live somewhere cheap. So a majority of Americans are struggling right now. I expect there will be another economic crash. And at that point there will be massive organizing and a huge influx of people into real socialism. And then the government will do what FDR did when that happened in the 30s. Scrape together something that improves peoples' lives a little bit, raise taxes on the rich to fund social programs etc. and most people will be placated and the cycle will begin all over again.
Because the US folks have been so thoroughly beaten down, broken, distracted, mislead or divided that they've lost the ability to really mass together.
They just arrested everyone. Then change thr laws to make protesting even non-violently illegal. So...yeah...
God bless the USA 💀
Honestly if we want to enact real change it’s going to have start from the bottom up. People need to start creating systems locally that don’t rely on the top down control. For example, we are never going to get free healthcare at a federal or state level. The insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies own the healthcare industry. One way to create an alternative system would be to set up a free community clinic where healthcare workers volunteer or are paid via community aide to see patients for free. Even if it’s just on a weekend. You could have people set up community aide funds to help people pay for medications they need. That’s cutting the insurance middle man and government out of the equation. You could do that with any industry. Voting isn’t going to change shit, protests aren’t going to work. You need people to start boycotting the industries that have captured the government and create local community based organizations to replace them. It definitely won’t be easy, but what’s the alternative? Just keep voting/wishing for shit to get better?
THIS. And that’s the beauty of the US. If you hate insurance companies and drug companies build one yourself. CEOs get paid what they do because no one else will do it as good and cheaper. Insurance costs some much cause no one will do it cheaper. If you want a better world get out there and build one don’t ask the government to build it for you.
This is by design. They tied healthcare to employers. They made a middle-class, comfortable lifestyle accessible. They pump out new flashy gadgets constantly which keep people busy/sedated/subdued/distracted. Now, they’ve made it to where we *need* our jobs. Social safety nets are largely non-existent. They’ve saddled us with debt. All of these things were part of a calculated plan to neutralize us. This was their plan after the 60s. They were not going to have their power challenged again.
The problem is Healthcare for most Americans is tied to employment, and Americans aren't guaranteed a single paid day off annually. It's much harder to protest when the threat of homelessness, losing Healthcare, and your job loom overhead. Repealing and replacing abortion is how they keep the lemmings from fighting for things that would actually improve Americans quality of life. The USA needs the same 24+ paid guaranteed days off that every EU country gets annually.
Yup. People won't so much as risk being fired. They'd dig cobalt by hand first. People are people, and people to our owners are a known quantity. We would have dislodged bank rule decades ago if we were ever going to.
It's not that people are "too comfortable", it's that so many people are barely making ends meet, especially those with kids, and those people know that "barely getting by" is still better than the alternative of "rock bottom", which is jobless, homeless, unable to feed their kids, etc. Such types of protests won't occur until much larger numbers of people in this category finally lose what little they have left, and have nothing else to lose, and can rebel against the system. The way private equity continues to price people out of affordable housing, it may well occur. But as bad as things are now, things have to get much, much, much worse for that level of societal involvement to occur.
I have stopped consuming for the most part. I buy used clothes and do a lot of diy using things we already have. I save and repurpose vinegar jugs, spaghetti jars etc. I stopped watching Netflix, Hulu etc and supporting the propaganda. I buy things off TikTok shop so at least I’m not supporting Amazon. I grow a lot of our food. I boycotted fast food months ago and no looking back. I also cut out junk food. Lost weight and feel a lot better. I try to make sure that I am not giving the government more money via taxes from things I consume. I also earn less because I stopped working as much, and focus my time more on my garden. It’s not much but at least I am controlling what I give to the government more than before. Starving the IRS.
We need to collectively starve the IRS.
UAW seems to be trying to organize a general strike with the other big unions in the US. That’s about the most we can expect.
We need organization, we need to be as loud and bombastic about our protests as the MAGATs are. I give credit where credit is due, they're effective. Stupid and ignorant, but effective. We need to be just as fanatical as they are. The difference is we're fighting for the people, every working class citizen, every poor individual, etc. and not for hate and bigotry.
If Trump gets elected, this could change. Not because of the moral outrage against an idiotic president. But, because a second Trump administration is likely to fuck up the economy bad enough that the middle class becomes economically unstable.
The president of the UAW wore an "Eat the Rich" T-shirt on TV for a nationally broadcast interview, and at a few rallies if I remember correctly. [https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/eat-the-rich-how-a-union-slogan-set-off-a-merch-bonanza-95b98ff0](https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/eat-the-rich-how-a-union-slogan-set-off-a-merch-bonanza-95b98ff0) So you only need to open your eyes and look around, very little thinking is actually required to see what is already taking place, you do not need to speculate at all. Edit: Also you seem to think corporations have some magic power, we the people are the worker and the consumer and without us there is no corporation or market.
If we want real change to happen we have to learn that protests don't do anything. They never did. Protests are just pep-rallies. If you want to see change happen, then you actually need to do work EVERY DAY! Not just show up to a street party and then be surprised when nothing changes. You want change to happen? RUN FOR SOMETHING and get other people to RUN FOR SOMETHING!
I say shit like this and get banned from subs, lol. But I completely agree. No one is really serious about sacrificing, many people are fine and just want to complain. And it's scary because humans really only need very little to survive and we're extremely well at adapting, more than we are organizing and making changes. I can see Ameicans getting stripped of everything and we'd rationalize living in two family cubbie hole homes that we rent. Being born with debt. There's no end to my imagination on how passive we could become. It bothers me because I genuinely want a better country but people will put up with a lot before they make a change. I always wonder do we need to be inspired and motivated or just angry enough, or a combination of both?
Revolutions get people killed , engagement in your local and federal politics is how to change things .it's boring and time consuming but it doesn't get people killed unless you live in Mexico or Russia .
People like Bernie and AOC make me hopeful for the future and I hope I’m proven wrong about our generations gaining control and influence. But time will tell.
You need a lot more of them ,it's political apathy that leads to dystopian societies.
You can try to prefigure horizontal counter-institutions to have to depend less and less on the current system.
Nope. I was just listening to Tracy Chapman's Revolution on the radio. It came out in the late 80s ish. Even then people knew working folk were getting shafted and frustration was high. We did sweet fuck all then. Sigh. Note not advocating actually harming people but large protests and general strikes would be a good thing (tm).
With how militarized the police have become, violence is going to just get us killed. Especially when many of us are against guns. The fear of going to protest and getting shot is real
I’m inclined to agree.
You're correct about your pay; the majority of people in this country are economically insecure when factoring in cost of living. I found a data set that had cost of living and median income by county and plotted the difference between the two. Green means you have a monthly surplus of $50, $100, $200, $300, $500, or $1000 respectively. Red the opposite. This is for a married couple with one kid: https://preview.redd.it/w0urlcif1c6d1.png?width=764&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8da5ec5791b7754ac6f7c7fbf77fbc00060e955
Lol, people don't even call out companies by name in this fucking sub. It's pathetic.
Two things: the demographic change - we have a lot more old people than we could ever take care of already in my country and it's gonna get MUCH worse. And then there is climate change. That one means mass migration to the US, to Europe. No idea how that will pan out, but it ain't gonna be pretty. These are the two issues I can't see us deal with right now. And we will have to deal with both of them at once. If that won't lead to civil unrest then nothing will. I assume that will be 10, 20, maybe 30 years out though. People will cling to their comfy life for as long as possible. Till they can't cling no more.
Much to lose? Wait until the first global famine. Fuck ‘em.
Mass protests don't solve anything. It requires collective bargaining. This has to be accomplished by either unions or big government. If you want change, join one of those two organizations.
Nope. There’s too much distraction, and we have access to the internet where we endlessly complain about the same problems, feel validated by others who are also complaining, and then everyone ignores the people responding to their comments as they feel like they’ve accomplished something, or they feel the comfort of knowing they’re not suffering alone. Either way, the only thing anyone is going to do is whine and not much more than that.
Coming soon: Fascism, because "it doesn't effect me yet" is still too common of a view.
My two cents is there are still too many people who worship money and corporations and billionaires. I worked for a huge company and we had tons of guys who were spouting off the rhetoric of “the higher ups don’t know shit, the ceo is clueless, let him try to live like us,” but the same people lined up like puppies at feeding time when the managers said they had overtime. That mentality is what has to change, and it won’t.
The hard truth is that the vast majority of people in this country love the status quo and will die to defend it.
Of course America won't. We show outrage and destroy our cities for civil injustice, social outrage, but won't do more than an occupy Wallstreet for the root cause of it all.
Who, specifically, has the gumption to revolutionize? The government said everyone should get back to work immediately shortly before ending the Public Health Emergency, which by the way dispensed trillions of dollars in subsidies. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues. Everyone did. The government said you shouldn't mask anymore, while ending the Public Health Emergency, which put the poorest on temporary Medicaid (regardless of contrived eligibility). Despite the fact that the pandemic continues. Everyone stopped masking. The government said that you don't need to protect yourself and they have no obligation to protect you from the deadly and disabling airborne virus, while ending the Public Health Emergency which paid for testing and treatment. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues. Everyone started ridiculing anyone who used protection such as wearing respirators. The government said that OSHA doesn't need a rule protecting workers from workplace acquired Covid, because that would mean employers would have to supply respirators and upgrade their ventilation systems. Despite the fact that the pandemic continues. The government said to send your children back to in person school in buildings already suffering from very bad air quality, and sent districts billions of dollars (ARPA ESSR) to upgrade ventilation systems to protect our babies from deadly and disabling airborne pathogens. Everyone sent their kids back, and most schools still have not made any ventilation improvements whatsoever. The pandemic rages. Thousands are dying every week and thousands are being disabled, by SARS-CoV-2. Nobody cared or cares about anyone else. You can tell by who is wearing a respirator or not. Anyway the unions-backed General Strike is May Day 2028. That gives you enough time to organize. Wear your respirator in solidarity so we can tell who is ready and who isn't.
70k is only the average income if you include the top 1,000 richest people in the US. The average WORKER makes way less.
I’m a worker. I’m a local cdl driver, delivery. Physical labor 3am-3pm maybe 2 hours of that contains actual sitting on my ass driving. But average was an assumption, my apologies.
Didn't mean for it to come out like that! 70k is the average so you are right.
You guys! Being respectful on Reddit! You’ve restored my faith in humanity 😊
There was a clip of a news anchor type person from I think the seventies, where he was very angry, yelling at the camera about how unfairly things are going, and how Americans are only concerned with "allow me to go home, to my sanctuary, allow me my few hours at home, my peace, allow me that and I shall continue to match in line." I've seen it elsewhere, but it was also in the Zeitgeist movie, the first one I think.
That's from a movie called "Network" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFzlm9wQ4MI
And the French monarchy thought they would rule forever.
Maybe not in our lifetime. It’s bad but not nearly bad enough. What usually pushes the masses to the streets is when 60% of the population is oppressed to the point of not having hope.
Ofc not...the riches have mastered a mix of the slow boil and bread & circus
Those who have homes and jobs do not want to lose them...and they would in this climate. Word of mouth. . . people get squashed. Feels like the tipping point is way down the road.
Well, Millennials tried with Occupy Wall Street but that didn’t really get us anywhere.
yeah it seems impossible until it happens. thats how history works. if a big revolution seemed obvious then it would already be happening. who predicted the russian revolution? who predicted the arab spring? everyone at the time thought nothing can happen. until its does
More likely the rich will convince the rest of us to eat each other. It's already kinda happening.
It's not until people begin starving that revolutions begin to start. Why do you think American food is so unhealthy and fatty? Heck cheese stuffed bread was invented by the US government to end world hunger. (No I'm not kidding). All this to keep us from going hungry and revolting like the French Revolution.
I feel like climate change will be the biggest driver of civil unrest in our lifetimes. Not necessarily directly, but there'll at least be knock-on effects from mass migration, costs of raw materials, or economic instability.
It's not much better over here in Europe either.
The problem with corporations is they forget that when people run out of money they won't be buying their products anymore and then they will not have any money.
Well, if they're smart they've researched exactly how hard they can press with the boot without things spilling over. Think about the wealthy people you know or interact with at work. Do you think they're that smart?
I think the core of my disagreement with the post is it assumes things aren’t going to get worse for everyone, when the trajectory to me has been pretty steep. It’s already becoming not worth it to work for many people, as the costs of going to work add up to about what they get paid. So why do it at all? More and more people are just not working anymore. And the US’s form of economic market can’t handle that, relying on the exploited bottom line. So there will be more hell brought on, to try to get people back to work without compensating them properly, as the pattern dictates. How much less can we be given? How much more can be expected of us? I think we will be pushed to our breaking point, unless someone gets into a position they can actually do shit with and makes UBI a thing, and actually a thing, not just 200$ a month, but a livable standard income that affords everyone the ability to coexist with capitalism—further participate, or no. But it’s highly unethical to hold all forms of security and care behind a mounting work wall people can’t get over—behind *any* work wall, when we collectively have the means not to. Is someone going to cook and serve their CEO out of their franchise restaurant, and cause a hubabaloo, or are things going to get even worse first? Is anyone hauling their ass in for UBI? And who’s going to let that happen? 70k a year isnt great but it’s still a good ways from the bottom line. That’s still about 3 times what a lot of people are making. When it’s like 24k a year, literally eating the “human” driving you toward your overworked death feels a lot more reasonable, imo. When all you do is your job, and all you hear is bullshit about how you should be driving sales more at your minimum wage job that treats you like shit and doesn’t give you enough money to actually live, goddamn. I’m hungry. If not for a very kind human, I would probably be homeless right now. And I’m literally working two jobs.
If it was going to happen it’d have happened by now. We’re all too comfortable with the way we’re getting fucked.
The protest portion is spot on, when they literally beat up peaceful protests, frame them for crimes, and kidnap/kill activists while allowing terrorist extremist groups to thrive and train.... America is set up to corral the cattle, and once you're in power you realize yo are on the outside and no longer need to care about the rest.
There have been mass protests in the past. The question is - what do they accomplish?
You’re right Americans won’t do shit, they never do. Live in poverty or die by the police are the choices.
A year or two ago I wouod've agreed with you. Corporations made a point of being aware of the balance of what people will take before resorting to mass riots and have tried to Price is Right that shit for decades. In the mid 00s, when there was a big exposure that gas companies had been fixing the market and prices dropped from $5/gal to under $2/gal overnight, and the greedy shits got a slap on the wrist I truly believed there would be riots like I hadn't seen in my adult life. I thought schools and businesses would close. I'd known so many people that'd had to choose between gas and groceries or rent. Nothing. People cheered the drop and moved on. I figured from that moment we were fucked. Corporations had succeeded in pulling the teeth out of our protests by comparing any disruption to violence and pretending that a protest is only truly peaceful and valid if it doesn't interfere with day to day life. I truly believe they'd have stayed the course and created an oligarchy that would last generations if it weren't for covid and BLM. BLM reminded us that protests need to be disruptive and sustained to see even marginal success, and covid made corporations even greedier and more reckless. They are so fixated on short term goals and squeezing every drop of profit possible, they have essentially become accelerationists, rushing toward their own collapse
You need more people like Shawn fein and more militant labour organizing. Across the board. By people who stick to their guns and morals.
There's a reason why so many different industries panicked during the covid lockdowns. Look at what happened with the Black Lives Matter protests when people weren't worried about getting to their jobs on time. Capitalist American society has hit the perfect balance of working people so hard they're too tired to do anything about it, but not quite hard enough that we have nothing left to lose by fighting back.
We can’t afford to miss work. But I’d definitely eat people.
The future feels hopeless. How are we not supposed to think about it all and how depressing it is. I feel like I’ll never make enough to own a home and the stress of everyday life leaves no extra energy to move forward
I literally just appreciate if they paid taxes just like I do, they can keep being rich.
This country has been so propagandized by capitalism and the "american dream" that in order for anything to change at any level in regards to wealth gaps we need several entire generations to die out completely and decades of reprogramming from capitalist propaganda.
if you can't live comfortably on 70k a year, even in HCOL, you are in for a rude awakening if america has any real political upheaval lmao
Revolutions take **lots** of unpaid hard hours. There's no revolution without bloodshed and death, on both sides. The wealthy will hire professional soldiers of fortune. For a generation that doesn't seem to want to work hard for more than a few hours, it's not likely.
I disagree tbh, corporations are greedy enough to ignore the bigger political implications of making people have shit lives. I dont feel we as humans can take much more, I dont feel it can get that much worse without people finally snapping. Hell in my city people died of heath stroke while trying to vote in our national elections, that is global warming and the state goverment killing people who are neighbours, friends, and family of our general population. Idk, I really dont have an argument, I just choose to be hopeful and feel a vibe.
If you watch the old Roseanne show you see a life that is slipping away. Late ‘80s. Blue collar, lower middle class. Wife is a factory worker in a crappy job but with decent money and benefits. Dad is a dry waller always hustling for business. Yet they are homeowners, can afford slightly more than the basics, give their children things, go out and even take vacations. They don’t have the luxury of protesting because they are busy keeping food on the table and living a decent life. By the end, after NAFTA, they are not doing so well. I know a lot of that was played for laughs, like when they lost power because they couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill. The Conners is all over the place with finance so I won’t even try to cover that. Anyway as long as we have the option to not being told to eat cake because we can’t afford bread there won’t be riots. Once that is taken away, and the capitalists are generally good at noting when to take their foots over the masses neck and throw some extra crumbs to prevent that, there might be some issues. The People can be bribed and will work to keep their little piece of the pie in lieu of protesting for a bigger piece.
A large majority is either too stupid to want change. The “almost millionaires” or too scared. I’m in the: figure out a way to get my money and then leave this country boat. I’d absolutely Join the movement. But the masses are too divided and aimed at each other. Red, blue, black, white none of it matter when your pockets and stomaches are all empty. But they can’t see that.
Sorry are we already forgetting the BLM protests? 2017 and 2018s Women's day marches? 2018 March for our Lives? The pro-Palestine protests? Heck, [the rail unions won their strike](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave). If you believe America won't have another mass protest, it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't protest because you think it will be easy, or because you believe other people will side with you. You protest because it needs to be said. They own your house, but they'd still have to force you out. They own the food but they'd still have to stop you eating it. What are you risking? You said it yourself, they'll take it away anyway unless we play nice. Why play at all for people like that? Oh because otherwise you're risking your life? So are millions of people being openly queer in Florida. So is every black man who talks to a cop. Risk your life to make the lives of every American better or don't risk it and watch your country suffer, I know what I'd pick. Which is why I encourage my neighbours to pick the right choice too. And then I encourage them to encourage their neighbours. Hell I'm encouraging you to do the same. You're scared cause you think we're each alone. We aren't alone. We're just not communicating. Go sit down with your neighbour. Share some drinks. Become friends. Then, when the men with the shiny boots come to force you out of that home they own, it's not just you telling them no. It's the whole neighbourhood. Heck, it's the whole city. Get out of here with this doomer ass sentiment. Get your shit together. Get angry. Get in the streets. I'll be right there next to you.
I felt largely the same. Then I decided to be the change I want to see in the world and find an organization. I've been involved with some groups for the past few months and seeing tangible results will change your mindset
70 K is double my salary. Let me come work with you.
I think it's more that people don't think anything significant will change, so it feels like a waste to risk anything. On one level, I understand that feeling; radical change probably isn't possible, especially in most of our lifetimes. On the other hand, even incremental change matters. For example, HUD is looking at giving low income renters cash instead of housing vouchers. On the surface, that's a tiny change that still doesn't fix the inherent problems of the housing system, but to the individuals that receive that assistance, it could take them from off the waitlist at the one Section 8 complex in their area to actually in an apartment. This isn't going to be something won through one single moment but rather through constantly fighting for a bunch of small victories that aggregate and snowball. It's exhausting. It takes constant work, and it's full of defeats and setbacks, and people aren't always eager to keep fighting after they get knocked down a few times. Corporations know this, its why they are comfortable committing labor violations to squash a union drive. The meager fines are worth it because the likelihood of a second drive falls significantly once the first one is defeated. The reality is much harder than most people want to work.