- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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True… we’re not even feeling sorry for people starving half as much as hoarders
There’s enough hoarders that We have shows about hoarders.
Even worse we actively try to make sure they don’t go to our country, because we all know how much we did to become part of our own country (this is sarcasm because we did nothing at all, being born is not something we chose to do)
The right given by the “democratic” capitalist state to own the means of production is the root cause of this problem
I love the quotation marks here. We have two parties that are both team stock-market/GDP, and there is no third option: we can hardly be called a democracy.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
John Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath”
Is that Steinbeck?
oh yeah, the attribution fell off when copy-pasting
Thought I recognised it. Crazy how relevant it still is.
It’s relevant for as long as capitalism is relevant because this is what is required to keep an economy motored by the profit motive going.
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange
Yes unfortunately so. If the system values profit over life, then profit will always be the priority. Even if that leads to (and encourages) acts of inhumanity.
The reason the system values profit over life is because it requires profit to survive. No profit, no capitalism. This is why the people that keep trying to reform capitalism have failed for almost 200 years now, there is no reforming the profit motive away from capitalism.
Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.
Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital”
Have you seen the cost of the figs???
And the worst part of it is that I wouldn’t even want to be slacking off all day. I want to do so many things, and I would do it if I weren’t being paid! Fuck!
If only a significant percent of the population didn’t feel the need to control other peoples lives.
But the rich man’s ego of pretending to be a saint by doing charity. THINK OF THEIR FEELINGS!
though if you stopped working hard, foreigners would come and take your job, and then take your kitchen and land. (they come regardless, no worries, but they’d come faster.)
on top of that, what’s the point of life without adventure and progress? we make great progress through your suffering, so heads up, the 40 hour work week is worth something. also, capitalism is a natural structure based on people’s greed, and you can’t abolish the capitalists because they will simply be replaced by other capitalists.
signed, your friendly capitalist :)
no but seriously … it drained my soul somewhat to write this. i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.
I honestly don’t mind working a lot, as long as it benefits EVERYBODY and not just a handful of hoarders. I love improving things for others.
I just don’t want my healthcare tied to a fucking job. Then I could actually work whatever, whenever, and how long I want to.
I love teaching for this reason. At least when it’s not administrative bullshit, “fill out the forms for this miraculous new program,” but the actual interacting with and helping young people grow. If I get my third job I’ll be doing that 7 am - 8 pm basically 7 days a week, but I’m okay with that. Sitting next to a kid and getting them to understand how imaginary numbers work is the thing that makes me not want to kill myself. Explaining to a high schooler that yes, dinosaurs were real… saying “hey this time of year it’s really easy to see Orion,” or saying “yes I absolutely LOVE Ender’s Game! Let’s talk about foreshadowing in that book!”
It’s bullshit work that kills the soul. I’ll teach until I’m hoarse and be happy to be alive.
Thank you for sharing that. I think that passionate teachers are the cornerstone of a good society and healthy community!
That made me think about the Finnish model. I think they are doing this somewhat right. A masters degree is a minimal requirement for teaching at all levels except very early education.
If anybody from Finland reading this could share their thoughts on this that would be amazing. In not from Finland myself.
not to contradict you, just mentioning it:
well i do mind working a lot because it drains my body and i get really really bad sensations after an exhausting work day, including the feeling that everything is shit and such. idk, it’s probably only me, but there is people who struggle with work, independent on what kind of work it is. it’s literally the exhaustion itself that does it.
though it’s good if you made that decision for yourself. doing community service definitely does help the world, especially your local community :)
Yeah that makes sense of course. You are definitely not the only one. Sounds like you know your limits!
In the end, and in my personal belief, we’re all one big community and we have a chance to uplift each other (I know, I know, utopian fantasy much?). It should not be a competition, but a synergy. In my book, it’s the effort that counts, not the hours.
yeah i’m programming a computer game rn and intend to make it open source once i have some substantial amount :)
actually, i think competitiveness is artificially instilled on us based on a thinking in races, i.e. “getting ahead”. not like skin-color, just beating the other guy by being better than him and such. (i.e. like a race-car competition).
actually, i think competitiveness is artificially instilled on us based on a thinking in race
Agreed. Keeping the masses artificially competing with each other over the crumbs the upper 10% leaves us just distracts people from who they’re really in competition with.
i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.
No offense but who is stopping you from working only 20 hours?
starvation
Also homelessness.
I bet you could live on less if you wanted to.
But you would have to make some tradeoffs to make it work with 20 hours of work, live downgrading your living situation or moving to a cheaper place to live.
Now I am not saying that’s good, I am just saying you can make 20 hours of work work if you really want to, but really people just like to bitch.
Agreed! Worked 12 years full time. Last 3 years lived in a small forest off grid, working 2 to 3 days a week. In the winter months I rent a room in a cohousing.
It’s a different kind of life. It takes adjusting. The “luxeries” like no running water, electricity being very limited, etc are fine. I honestly prefer the simplicity. I prefer that making a coffee takes 40 minutes, from starting the fire, to boiling water. The ritual is part of the experience.
Most difficult is that friends still do the city hard work, hard (and expensive) play, constant complaining thing, that I can’t relate to or keep up with.
Not sure if I’ll do it forever. But the next couple of years for sure!
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Only 8 dudes but we as 300M+ can’t even come together and depose them
Ah, yes, this is only about 'Murica.
Someone says something that applies to the world, 'murica brain can’t comprehend that they aren’t the only ones.
That 300M+is inclusive. Your comment is Proof we can’t come together to depose a few rich assholrs
Half of them praise those 8 men tho. So you’re 150M of individuals vs 150M of individuals and $3T
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Because it isn’t true lol
Ok
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Is there a way to look up what the violation was?
My problem with this is that most people think the solution is to ask politely leveraging peaceful protests and waving signs.
When in reality this has been a popular concept that is protested for the past 100 years with ZERO actual progress, and the real solution to properly implement this kind of generous socialist idea of distribution of wealth and food and shelter with equity requires aggressive rhetoric and likely needs to be enforced with actual violence, otherwise fascism and capitalism will continue to persist for generations.
Honestly, I think most people don’t even see it as a problem. Anyone who is better off than the average person likely doesn’t want stuff to get handed out for free. It’s easy to think “I struggled to get my stuff and now we’re just going to give it out for free!?”
It’s like someone finally paying off their student loan after years of thrifty spending and going without and then seeing their classmate who didn’t pay a dime towards theirs, instead spending on frivolous luxuries and going on yearly trips, having it forgiven. The person who did things “the right way” feels like they got played.
Unless people who have gone through struggles to improve their situation can avoid feeling slighted, they’re unlikely to be supportive of change.
Okay, so why aren’t people upset that some joker who wasn’t smart enough to get a physics degree and switched majors because it was too hard, then had a sure thing handed to him by the company he was working for arguably because he was bad at his job, started a business that took less than a month of work to become profitable, and then became one of the world’s richest men by exploiting the desperate working class? Why aren’t people angry about that?
Probably because they can’t relate to someone who has lived his whole life in extravagance. But they can relate to the neighbourhood kid whose college debt was excused. They can imagine “It should’ve been me, not him”. That’s their envy.
The likely reason they follow the clowns is in hopes of getting rich quick. They imagine themselves getting free handouts or being buddies with the rich. But the rich will do what they’ve done since time immemorial. Use and throw away when they’re done.
This. You cant give back the thousands of hours studying instead of living life and hanging out with friends, then the lazy person that only partied gets all their shit paid for. That isn’t gonna fly.
Peaceful protesting does work. But the sit in and get arrested kind. Waving signs doesn’t do much. People aren’t miserable enough yet to misbehave.
Also the don’t work and grind the economy to a screeching halt kind.
Actual violence was used by the rich to create this current moment too. It is all they know or will understand.
Violence to free us from oppression isn’t violence to oppress. Get your priorities correct. Your food is stored for use, take it. Don’t starve. You were taxed for it, it’s yours.
That’s what I’m saying, I’m sharing perspective that they violently keep us in check all the time. Non-violence can work but most discussion surrounding it is from the ruling class in order to keep us from rising up.
🤝
However I disagree in solely nonviolence tactics, it’s violence to liberate, and nonviolence to collaborate.
What’s happening in the 🇺🇲 is counter-nonviolence tactics.
I was there witnessing all the noneffective protests. Get a back bone, liberate folks in death camps.
Responsibility also lies the people. We have no respect for our belongings, frequently trash working tools, computers and other goods. Replace the old with new, for the sake of keeping up with the times. Even cheap knives and other edged tools can be sharpened thousands of times before requiring replacement. Most are never sharpened at all.
The classic tale of a dining table made to last for generations, paid for by the father, be tossed by the son for something made by Ikea. As a woodworker, ive seen firsthand that the biggest killer of fine, handmade furniture.
It isn’t time, it’s us.
Yeah, so many people seem to buy new shit just to buy new shit. Even when the new thing is lower quality. Hell, my parents did it with their house. I’m constantly surprised by the crap my family and friends spending their money on. Most of my stuff is second hand that they’ve been throwing out.
Dude same. There is NOTHING wrong with old and many times its BETTER because corporate enshittification hadnt reached an all time high until recently because of the invention plateau we are in now.
I partly disagree. I think we are already past the point where people were able to change the world by fiscal choices. The answer is already there: the money people own grows slowly if even in some countries, the money circulating altogether grows somewhat steeper thanks to inflation and (war cost) depts, making peoples choice less and less effective and able to change a fuckingthing. I won’t cease trying to find a way though, just to make it a whiney bit more costly to get to me xD Heads up!
2/3s of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and americans consume multiple X what even wealthy Europeans do.
The issue is that people are unhappy then they try to fill that void with buying stupid shit no one needs, going for fancy cars to match their neighbors, oversized houses they don’t need and can’t afford.
Ofc there are other systemic issues like the racist origins having single family house zoning and lack of public transport which is the most reliable predictor of social mobility.
But still, people make dumb choices, spend recklessly.
But then people might get stuff without working for it! The horror!
COVID taught me Americans enjoy grifting, soo
