The Internet has made people too easy to divide and conquer
Phhh that’s exactly the kind of behaviour I’d expect with a user from leminal.space!
Violence isn’t the answer!
The answer is… checks history book
wait not that one… starts flipping pages
uhh if you hang on a second uhh furious page-flipping
Has this been aged? Lol looks like sepia
Yes, because it’s long been true and people didn’t fucking listen. Now my country doesn’t even really have liberal democracy, and people are still himing and hawing about disruption being bad and lawbreaking being bad
I was just trying to make a pithy joke about the discoloring
It’s just UV damage from exposure, nbd.
People really need to stop leaving their memes out in the sun.
Cursed
Are USians not still working 10 hours day/6 days a week? The USA are usually near the top of the “time worked per week” OECD rankings.
Also, interesting how the poster and first replier have the same avatar. Is that a historical figure?
The desperation and work culture of believing we can just slave away into success are what keeps people from rocking the boat. Faith in being able to win the game is how we got here.
It looks to me like the top post is a screenshot of Twitter, and the two below are on Tumblr. I think they were just sharing their own post. But I don’t use either site, so I can’t be sure.
The State only respects power. If a group of people show that they have more power than the State, change can happen. However, what is power?
Power comes in many different forms.
There is economic power which is showcased through strikes and boycotts.
There is democratic power which is showcased through the ballot box.
There is soft power which is showcased through the lobbying, and speeches.
There is non-violet power which is showcased through protests, marches, and sit ins.
There is violent power which is showcased through physical violence such riots.While, the populace has access to many different forms of power. The State is limited to either soft power or violent power. Depending on the State, soft power might not even be contemplated.
Riots are just one form of power for the populace to exercise.
This feels really insightful, and I wonder if there is a source other than ShaggySnacks.
Can anyone expand on or contradict this comment? I honestly want to hang it in my house so my children can see it and understand they power they have.
This feels really insightful, and I wonder if there is a source other than ShaggySnacks.
Sadly, no source. It’s something I’ve observed. I can’t recall any time a State changed it’s position on an issue simply because it was the moral thing to do.
There are other forms of power such as legal (using the Courts), culture, morality, etc.
The examples above aren’t exhaustive, for example having allies in the State does help with change, which is means running for office in an a democratic system.
The only reason we have 5 day work weeks, 8 hour workdays, overtime pay, benefits, workplace health/safety/environmental regulations, unions, health care, paid time off, vacations, etc. is because our grandfathers and great-grandfathers busted heads, and got their own heads busted, fighting corporate goons in the streets - and WINNING!
Those heroic workers would be ashamed at what their grandchildren have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs have done to America. They fought hard to keep those psychopaths under control, and we not only let them up, we helped them take full power.
Remember to thank your local anarchist for the 8 hour work day.
Personally I wish they’d rioted a bit more because frankly I’m usually done by about 1:00 p.m.
did you find this post in a bottle on the beach
basically 😔
Funnily enough there’s a very similar situation to the US that’s going on in Serbia, where a canopy falling and killing a bunch of people due to government cheapening out led to lots of outrage and exploded into a massive student movement against the president due to corruption, election rigging, suppression of dissent and executive branch abuse.
At first, they did peaceful protests, blocked roads and all that jazz constantly, but after seeing that it had led them literally nowhere (they got nothing except for a fake concession that was some minister resigning) except on getting arrested and beaten up in jails, they decided to give a green light to civil disobedience, violence, trashing ruling party’s headquarters all over the country.
What did this escalation result in? A whole load of nothing except cracked skulls, mostly for the students.
If you’re looking at reformism ‘fixing’ things during the course of history, civil disobedience the vast majority if not all of the time was noise. What eventually got implemented or changed wasn’t because the ruling class got scared, but because they were either getting major gains in terms of compromise as a result of the reform, or the reform itself was beneficial to their interests and only a small minority didn’t want them to pass.
If you’re looking at reformism ‘fixing’ things during the course of history, civil disobedience the vast majority if not all of the time was noise. What eventually got implemented or changed wasn’t because the ruling class got scared, but because they were either getting major gains in terms of compromise as a result of the reform, or the reform itself was beneficial to their interests and only a small minority didn’t want them to pass.
So, in your opinion the woman’s suffrage movement, or LGBTQ activism, for example, were just wastes of time? These people didn’t need to do or say anything since the bourgeoisie were about to give them everything they wanted anyway?
If they held no benefit to the ruling class, then no. LGBT opens up more industry focused on identity (via pride merch, medical needs) which means more profitable industry for bourgeois, while women’s suffrage legitimizes capital’s rule further by allowing more people to vote + liberates capitalist women which is what bourgeois feminism is primarily about.
Whether these reforms would have happened without the noise though, can’t really say - there’s no mirror that looks into alternate realities. Still, these kinds of reformist mass movements are usually a result of bourgeois infighting, not some spontaneous working class action - just look at who organizes and funds them.
Thats not to say liberal working class are idiots for joining them and acting as footsoldiers, no - there are definitely benefits to be had for one’s identity no matter the class, like in the case of LGBT, but the things won aren’t full-on liberation, just specific compromises that are capital-friendly(women getting voting rights but still being discriminated against to encourage births/staying at home and raising more workers, LGBT getting essentially bare minimum recognition and care to be sold merch but not enough to significantly attack the traditional family for child-raising). Therefore, true liberation can only happen via the abolishment of the class society, else it’s gonna be endless compromises that miss the mark.
I think workers should own their workplaces but tbh I don’t see that by itself automatically fixing all forms of prejudice and discrimination. Certainly not on a personal level, but probably not even at a systemic level either. Though I agree that the present conditions definitely forment reactionary thought.
Yeah it won’t, because commodity production, markets, accumulative money and therefore capital won’t be abolished, meaning that the incentives to oppress certain groups of people for growth will remain.
Only after we overcome the production for profit model and replace it with production to satisfy people’s needs will capital fully be replaced and dead, removing any incentives to discriminate (aka systemic discrimination). Will it change prejudices that people have immediately? No, but it will certainly disappear over time given how the central source of these prejudices is now abolished + a revolution and development like that is only possible in a class conscious society which produces solidarity with other workers no matter their features (USSR is a good example of this when looking at Oct Revolution - women were viewed as fellow comrades, led the charge on most influential mass protests, and once revolution happened they got a ton of systemic freedom in terms of abortion rights and legal autonomy, while the rest of the western world was still on legal guardianship).
To give a bit of hope to the liberals in the US though, what’s happening there isn’t new and the state of things from before (as in liberal democracy functioning normally) is going to sooner and later return, it’s a cycle that happens every now and again due to falling rate of profit, crisis and rise of reaction that happens as a result.
Eventually, liberal capitalists will start fighting the conservative capitalists to get their place in the sun again, maybe it’s going to happen electorally or maybe there’s going to be a slaughter of millions of workers in the name of liberal democracy or anti-fascism, after which wholesome democracy will reign supreme once again and the countdown towards another crisis and rise of reaction will start once again. Isn’t that lovely?
The most sociopatic “winners” of the current system will always laud whatever was done to establish the system in which they get so much and decry anything that might overthrow or even meaningfully change that system.
Those who have a more empathic view of things, even when they too are considered “winners”, have a different posture if they think the current system isn’t working well for most people because they don’t think only about personal upside maximization at any cost for the rest.
As it so happens, caring for more than just “me, me, me” is what distinguishes leftwingers from rightwingers.
So this is a great way to spot fake leftwingers in or seeking positions of power and wealth: no matter how “progressive” their words are in general, when it comes to the current system they’ll display exactly this kind of hypocrisy of being against any kind of actions that will change the current system whilst lauding the very same kind of actions when they installed the current system, since their one true drive is “What’s in it for me”, a rightwinger’s motivation.
Woe to the vanquished !!
the names of our heros, and our defiers, will last forever !!
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There is a VERY VERY small percentage of the population that suffer from a mental disorder where every waking moment of their life revolves around gathering resources and trying to outdo others to the exclusion of everything else … they also think YOU are insane because you dont do this.
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You can’t abuse people and expect to keep running things.
You can’t, but yes they can.
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Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
This state of affairs is not especially surprising – if it were the popular belief that violence is justified to change society in some particular way, then society would already be changed in that way. Just like how no stock on the market can be widely seen as undervalued.
This is why class consciousness is important.
You’ve got to seize the means of production, of course in the US that means getting on a plane.
Global capitalism makes seizing the means of production a global effort no matter where you are, which is why nationalism is main the tool for maintaining capitalism
