• Enkrod@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    I keep repeating myself.

    Bernie, AOC, Zohran Mamdani… conservatives shouldn’t be shocked by their popularity, they should be thankful.

    Because electing popular lefty politicians through the system and working with the system to change the system is a compromise.

    The working class has other means to defend itself from the overreach of the bourgeoisie inherent in the system, and everyone who wants to hold onto the current system should be extremely thankful that the working class doesn’t simply decide to violently overthrow it.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      They are aware of this. They are very careful to just push that line ever so slightly, over time. Trump might be testing how quickly they can push it.

  • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
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    1 day ago

    So, to pre-empt a counterargument: It is true, just as numbers, this is a naive calculation. Money does not necessarily equal actually produced goods and services, and a lot of that wealth is not liquid. So, ending poverty is more complicated than just taking money. But reducing it to that, is usually also a straw man.

    Firstly: This still means that there has been an increasing flow of actual influence and liquid wealth from the bottom to the top. Just as market dynamics tend to create - consolidation of capital. And with it, markets are less and less capable to service the needs of people.

    Then: All that non-liquid money, even if it couldn’t be translated easily into ending poverty without further reforms, is also a tremendous, obscene power base, that kings of old would have only dreamt of, reaching globally. As investments within the purview of the 1%, they at best service their personal human fancies and interests, which can even be philanthropic at times, but even then cannot undo the damage that was necessary to exist for the wealth to be concentrated like that in the first place - and at worst service a rather cold, purely “logical” short-term profit incentive in bundled investments, where even that miniscule human touch of personal fancies has been removed. Having that wealth - or its equivalent in labour power and resources - under the control of 1% of humanity, is deeply undemocratic and follows the logic of further and further concentration of wealth within that system - and history has shown this to happen at the cost of human dignity and life.

    And lastly: Even if it gets more complicated than just “take money from the rich and give it to the poor” - that does not mean, that the status quo is not perverse and that redistributing that money is not meaningful. It just means that the social functions of money (investments regulating production; managing access to who gets their needs met and who doesn’t; Regulating what wants beyond needs get fulfilled for whom), have to be re-thought and re-structured more fundamentally - after taking that money to already allow for human dignity and more sustainable investments even within the status quo.

  • IninewCrow
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    1 day ago

    As long as the voting public in first world countries are not starving and have something to eat, even if it isn’t enough or even healthy … they won’t vote for any kind of social change.

  • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    Because the working class is apparently too lazy and coward for it.

    Crafting a guillotine is not even that hard compared to most of the compromises taken. You don’t even need to build it up to code: if it has issues, it still gets the job done just cause extra pain to the burgeois that goes into it.

    Similarly all those *thousands* of people who are parading up in complain to Trump could easily walk into the White House and solve the problem by themselves. Instead, they are content on just “I was here”-ing for a photo.

    One thing the last elections convinced me of: at some point, people at large just want to be let be evil.