Class Struggle

Better to struggle, with class…

Than to class struggle.

okay that was clever. quotable even.

Scapegoating goes both ways. The poor blame “the rich” for their own ills. The rich blame “the poor” for their own ills. So, which is it? Who is to blame? What is the cause? What is the consequence?

To conduct yourself philosophically, on this matter, you have to investigate. What is “the rich” and “the poor”. Not ironically, poor people are homeless, slackers, unwanted persons, intolerable, bad hygiene, unintelligent, and the like. Those who become disposed by society, do so, and are so, for a reason. It’s not an accident. I can take a microscope on any truly-poor person, and it’s no surprise. Poor beget poor; and rich beget rich. Class solidity occurs and develops because those in-power, those who gain wealth, want to keep, maintain, and secure it.

Before you go pointing the finger, talk pragmatically. Imagine if you (Prom) owned a Contracting Business. I mean, you never will, because you don’t have any substance beyond a teenager’s sense of Responsibility, which is also why you deny Free-Will. But let’s imagine you did, own your own Contracting Business. Would you succeed, or, would you fail? Success means making Profit, which is difficult to do. If everybody could do it, then everybody would. But, few do. Making Profit requires risk-taking, intelligence, cunning, planning, social relationships, salesmanship, etc. It takes a lot. Only after you make Profit, can you even afford to hire Employees. Employees aren’t responsible for much. The business-owner, however, owns the business 24-7. If a business owner can’t pay his employees, then the business will fail.

Prom, you make it seem easy to gain Profits, to hire Employees, to keep them, and to, somehow, keep such a business model lasting for more than a few months, more than a few years, more than a few decades. The businesses that have traditionally succeeded in the US, have done so, as positive evidence and proof of the success of Capitalism. People are free to start, run, and prosper from their own business prerogative. That you want to intervene, pretend it is something other than what it is, or worse, want to steal, thief, and regulate such, demonstrates the endless failures of socialism and communism.

If you can’t paint a scenario, of basic business-ownership and prosperity, then you have literally no authority or trustworthiness on this topic. You know nothing about the reality of business, corporatism, economics, society, and later on, politics.

Exactly. And many of them do not work.

You’ll have to demonstrate that.

A large percentage of poor people are children. There is also the working poor which is more and more common in the US. As the corporations globalized and did not feel any loyalty to the parent nation and the support they got from that nation, wages went down, jobs got moved out of the US, and you had more working poor and unemployed.

When people on the right complain about globalization and the attack on nation states, primarily their own, they often seem to forget that it was corporations that were huge drivers in this. They don’t want countries to have control of their own economies and laws. They have no allegiance to any nation, even if that nation via tax driven education and infrastructure supports and the priviledges of corporate charters got those companies to a place where they could leave the parent country. They are, right now, pressuring the neo-cons to eliminate boundaries between countries. They are right now dream of the North American Eu where the three main countries merge. They are antidemocratic. They guide foreign policy. That is what some of the rich are doing. When the poor whine it might lead to some kind of social benefits, yes, though this has been reduced steadily for decades, much thanks in fact to Clinton gutting Welfare. When corporations whine people from poor background are flown to the Middle East to die and kill and get fucked in the head.

As explained in the video I linked, concerning Lawyers and the Legal profession, students, post-graduates, and then lawyers, partners, and firms, put in ungodly amounts of hours on constant barrages of legal cases. Global corporations sue each-other daily, as means to undermine and ‘throw money’ at their competition, to attempt to drive them out of business. This is the reality. The salaries are 300k starting per year, and far upward.

How about Medical Professionals and doctors? Do they laze around? Are doctors lazy? Surgeons?

For you and others, in this thread, to paint a picture that “rich people” are lazy, is simply out of touch with reality.

Delusional.

How about Oil Workers on offshore platforms? How about Railroad Engineers? How about Coal Miners? All lazy?

No, those who have gained massive amounts of wealth, representing US corporations, have done so through sheer work, diligence, and Willpower.

To cut into their profits, which they own By Right, is theft. It’s the socialists and communists of the world, who are a threat. And the first casualty is Freedom.

And while many perhaps most rich, at least the breadwinner rich in the family, likely do work, work hard and probably long hours, this is misleading.
Because the problem is that the rich have ways of making money, a lot of money, via non-labor. A lot of these people identify with their work and if their work has a positive effect on the world, great. But there is a huge problem in that in addition to income these people can make huge amounts of money, and do, in addition to the income from their labor, from nonlabor. The worst of this takes place via fiat banking where money is being created out of nothing in a way that benefits the rich. This money must be paid back, generally, by people’s labor. Some people get to create money, this money must be paid back via labor. There are other ways to make money off of non-labor, a number of these directly responsible for the 2008 collapse. There are ways through real estate through having others invest and play with their money and more. The idea that someone might have great ideas and or work their ass off and accumulate a lot of wealth doesn’t bother me in the least. That’s not where I see a problem, more power to them. The problem is the ways the rich have created to make money off of nonlabor.

And then also that they have made an oligarchy and lie about it.

“You’ll have to demonstrate that.”

Am, no, he doesn’t.

He is making. A claim.

Not proposing magnetism.

Look, you can keep using Trustfund babies as “the rich” all you want. But they comprise, what, 1% of the “top 1%”? That’s not significant. Furthermore, Trustfund babies who don’t “get into it”, and return to work, will eventually lose their wealth.

The scapegoat you are presenting, the “rich crooked criminal and ne’er to do”, is not realistic. It’s not reality.

Reality is: 99% of the “top 1%”, work, work hard, and work smart, to have gained what they got, and must work ever so hard, daily, to maintain these institutions, which is the backbone of all corporations.

As-if Walmart upper-management “does nothing” or “is lazy”?

No, the higher you climb on corporate ladders, the more fierce and ruthless the competition. 40 hours a week? The middle class has little, or nothing to complain about there. The rich can only dream of a “40 hour work week”. Business owners work 24-7. Work never ends.

That’s the difference between Employee and Employer.

That’s why, nonetheless, I respect Bloomberg.

I hate his motherfucking guts.

But I respect him.

Some rich people are hardworking, smart and contribute a lot.
And then some rich people are like the Bidens.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/11/hunter-biden-democrats-joe-biden-ukraine-trump

Some poor people are lazy, some rich people are lazy, but the idle poor always suffer the consequences, whereas the idle rich often don’t, because they write the laws and rules, which don’t apply to them.

But surely your problem with the Bidens is that they are sleazy politicians, and not that they are rich?

You cannot say they are an example of the sleazy rich writing the laws, because they weren’t rich when they got in.

Sure as shit are now.

Perhaps it’s not the best example of the point I’m trying to make, but still, big businessmen can do buy the courts, lawmakers and politicians at will.

I don’t believe in Class Struggle. It’s more about genetics and your ethnic group. That’s the primary value. Class is secondary, or lower. When push comes to shove, people don’t care much about those they work for, with, or against. People care about family. People care about clan. People care about tribe.

So appealing to “the poor”, the “middle class”, the “rich”, is unrealistic and impractical. This is another reason Marxism/Communism/Socialism fail, because, they ignore ethnic obligations, ties, connections, and loyalty. People are more loyal to blood, than they are to money.

Also people shed crocodile tears for “the poor”, when, realistically, nobody wants to be around poor people, not even other poor people. Why are there Gated Communities, except for the fact, people want to be away from and separated from the refuse and throwaways of society.

The way people talk about “the poor”, seems out-of-touch. Homeless people comprise most of “the poor”. Homeless people smell bad, sleep in their own urine, are not smart, usually addicted to drugs, almost always, undependable, unemployable, etc.

Class struggle only makes sense in Homogeneous societies, like Japan.

But how does Japan view “class”? Do they? Do they care?

I don’t think Japan and the Japanese have “class struggle” like Western civilization. Because, some ethnic groups have been dispossessed historically, and hence became “lower” or 2nd class.

We’re not talking about increasing taxes on doctors, engineers and miners, or at least I’m not, they’re upper middle to lower middle class, I’m talking about increasing taxes on the upperclass, the richest 1%, and redistributing it in the form of affordable housing, free education, universal healthcare and supplementary income for working and middle class citizens, not for alcoholics, (prescription) drug addicts, the idle poor and illegal migrants.

Not all social democrats think alike, let alone socialists.

Perhaps don’t increase taxes on wages at all, increase them on big businessmen, especially ones who’ve benefitted from fractional reserve banking, illegal immigration, offshoring, unsocial corporatism and vulture capitalism.

Or just spend the money we spend on corporate bailouts, subsidies and welfare, and on war, on free education and so on instead.

At a certain point, it’s virtually impossible to fail, unless you’re a rich crackhead.
Just invest much, most or all of your dozens of millions or billions in low-risk investments, and never touch the principal.

There’s other points too, but I feel like I’ve participated in discussions like these dozens of times over the years, and I really can’t be bothered to get too into it right now.

Don’t forget about the central bankers, corporatists and military industrial complexes of the world.

And it depends on how you define property.
If you define all property, or some forms of property collectively, then it’s not theft.
There’s always been and probably always will be some public property.
Government is public, infrastructure is public.
The air we breath, the water we drink and national parks are public, as they should be.
Some societies emphasize public and some private, but every society has a mix.
It’s not a question of if public property, but how much?
What runs better publicly?
What runs better privately?

Well, that’s very specific then, isn’t it? While I can agree that some forms of limits and taxation could occur in those areas; they are largely immune based on their political payoffs and bribes. Thus neither democrats nor republicans will actually impose taxes on them. Because they pay too much in political bribes. Thus you would need to attack State-ism and Corruption, before any realistic imposition could occur on reserve banking, off-shore loopholes, stock trading, etc.

In my opinion, federal money spent on “education”, welfare, public goods, etc. mostly go to waste. Example? Evidence? Proof? Look at all the brain-washing and indoctrination that gets pumped through the “public education system” nowadays. Teaching children that “gender is fluid”, homosexuality is “okay”, miscegenation is encouraged, etc. Because of all this filth, it should be defunded completely, as soon as possible. It’s broken. It’s just another extension of State corruption, the end-result of Stateism pushed way too far, with too large a central government. However, realistically, history has momentum, and it will only Stateism and Corruption will only continue forward relentlessly until Western society breaks down. Trump is the symptom of this, of the Public pushing back, against State corruption and bloat. Unfortunately, it’s not enough, not even close. Perhaps the only sufficient societal reset would be all-out civil war, to reestablish blood-ties, ethnic and racial solidarity, and ‘resetting’ public institutions. Until such a thing occurs, very unlikely as it is, more corruption, perversion, taint, and rot will spread.

“The rich”, meaning the specific groups you mention, will remain immune. They control the politicians (via lobbyists). And so, laws cannot touch them.

“Deep State”.

If anybody wants to investigate real corruption in the US, then look which companies, banks, and lobbyists pay both the Republican and Democratic parties. Some do. Why would a corporation pay both political parties, except, to gain something from either or both?

Oh, I should have made clear. I consider nonlabor to be wealth earned through non-production and not working combined. I do think that if you come up with ideas that add value, this is work. You don’t necessarily have to start the company that builds your invention, say. I respect the work of the mind and it always, always has much prior work, in many different forms, before the Eureka moment. It all the siphoning off wealth by creating non-productive middle man finance shit, for example, that I am critical of. It’s gaming society and always has a political lobbying legislative side where the rich create out of nothing ways to make money out of not doing things. Yes, most rich people also go to work where they generally make huge amounts of money. If they are actually doing anything of value there, peachy. It’s their other sources of income that I am critical of. It’s parasitical. It also creates inflation, devaluing of the work and compensation of others and the utter impossibility of workers, for example, paying back their loans and/or keeping jobs. Check out fiat banking and the federal reserve and what these processes actually involve and how they entail unemployment, reduction of compensation, a shift of wealth away from those with less income regardless of work performed and a source of nonlabor income for the wealthy. A vast one.

I am not sure this even needs to be done. I would want their bullshit gaming the system banking and finance wealth production for no labor or value production bs cut off. Then we could see. People assume this is just a given in capitalism, but its not. And much of it was added after the formation of the US, for example.

Another area is yes, taking the idea that corporate charters are a priviledge back into action. The founders of the US were not just concerned about government tyranny. They had see what the giant pseudocorporations like the East India company could do and did do. Corporate charters included the idea that the company follow the law, for example. Well, that idea is gone and the conservatives who refer to the founders never seem to complain about this.

I would also look into lobbying and create enormous restrictions there. Election finance also.

It’s like a taboo to even question these things for certain parts of the right. They think that capitalism must have central banks. Their are illiterate when it comes to money creation out of nothing. They choose not to notice how we have an oligarchy that decides when we go to war, for example, and is essentially anti-democratic, abroad and domestically. If you criticize these facets of elite’s warped version of capitalism, then you supposedly are communist and want the USSR to come back now in the WEstern hemisphere.

Fucking A right. The commons is not a lefty thing. It was presumed by the founders. Of course one can try to figure out where the line is drawn, but conservatives, if they want to conserve traditions and uphold founder ideas and intentions would not just be pro all privitization.

And as if corporations are not, in many case, regions of fascism. These conservatives don’t seem to want to notice that there is a new feudalism, a new royalty. Yes, I don’t want anything like communism. But I don’t see how oligharchic feudalism with a new royalty is somehow meeting conservative values. It’s not. It has nothing to do with freedom, except the ever increasing freedom of the elites and the expense of the rest of the population.

They have no problem siphoning the commons when they want oil in some region or military intervention for their own purposes. And the surveillance capitalists got their whole realm via work done by government tech and development. Of course private companies created a lot there also, but they did it in a partnership with the public domain and using it. And of course they have no conservative values at all. The right to privacy is of no interest to them at all. And for some reason conservatives seem to be under the illusion that people are choosing to give up their right. Yes, this happens also, but there is no way to avoid, even by staying off line and paying in cash, the panopticon. This will only get worse with the coming and already here internet of things. Only a small part of the radical fringe of the right (God bless them) is concerned about this.

There is a set of triggers. You are critical of some facet of what gets called capitalism
bam, you want a Gulag.

People seem to have no idea what capitalism is and assume all this chicanery that has nothing to do with capitalism must be in capitalism. And under these illusions they keep opening the gates of the city to the incoming would be kings and queens.

Is this an objection to the notion that people can have anything in common?
Or just that they can’t have “class” in common?

One nurse is an entirely different person to another nurse, and yet if you got them talking they’d be all but guaranteed to have plenty to talk about - at least as far as work and types of interests go.
The same for fathers, the same even between all family members - they are a “group” of individuals by virtue of having things in common whether through one of many roles they each play in their life, genetics, or some other common ground.

“Selling wage labour” as opposed to “buying it and the use of money as capital” each serves a different distinct function, even though they can overlap to different degrees for each individual person. A “working class” individual will be more reliant on selling their labour in order to remain qualified to participate in the economy, having too little capital to no longer have to do that - i.e. “earning” money from owning the property that other people work with and thus having claim over any of the profits “gained” from paying workers less than they earn you. It’s a very broad distinction between the two roles, with every unique person having a different life experience of each of the two roles.

I’m not sure if it was Marx, but I think it was, who observed that a working class person would probably have more in common with another working class person from a far removed country than they would a capitalist from a nearby neighbourhood. Things overlap a little more nowadays with the “middle class”, but the observation will still stand to an averaged-out degree.

Such a claim would seem as broad as if you replaced the term “working class” with either “male” or “female” though. Mechanics or mothers have more specific experiences in common, and it’s easy to identify them as a group even if each member is a very different person overall. But the same concept goes for gender and class simply by virtue of having a significant part of one’s unique life in common with other people. The reasoning therefore goes that it’s odd that “class consciousness” wasn’t a particularly binding ground to say “you have something in common with a bunch of other people and thereby qualify as a distinct group”, when other broad things like gender, job and family role always were seen as legitimate common grounds to substantiate a “group”. Therefore wouldn’t it be interesting to see if raising “class consciousness” went anywhere towards rethinking normalised economic strata and perhaps revolutionise economics?

In short, just like any other group can have common struggles by virtue of things they have in common in their life, why can’t “broad economic role” be a common struggle by virtue of having that in common with separate/other/different people?
The struggles of parenthood and jobs don’t make you a victim any more or less than your economic role, even capitalists have their own common struggle by virtue of their common economic situation - even though they’re all completely different people. Working individually or collectively to overcome these difficulties is what everyone does, so why is it particularly bad if the working class do the same?

It’s funny that both political groups - for and against the notion of “class struggle” - each complain about the others complaining over nothing.
Where is the introspection, and impartial personal evaluation? Less hypocrisy would go a long way to resolution, in my opinion. But then, it occurs to me that that’s the whole point - to not resolve things. People love to externalise their anger and frustrations upon a common “enemy”. It’s been a while, but I think this is a point Nietzsche made in “Beyond Good and Evil” - that “wrong” is socially defined by what the other tribe with whom they war does differently to them. We see the same thing on this forum all the time. I’ve still never read “Human, all too human”, but it probably covers similar themes - at least the title rings true on this “very human” behaviour.

So welfare is no trouble, so long as the country is rich enough to afford it for a scarce enough population?
Similarly, I’ve brought up the topic of how Capitalism works best for poorer countries with an abundance of people.

I think Social Democrats and Communists tend to have so much beef with each other because they’re annoyed that the other group is approaching progression in “the wrong way” when they could be combining their resources and have more of a chance of success. A Conservative might quip that they’re both right, but whilst Social Democrats pursue reform and regard revolution as too extreme and unnecessary, Communists regard anything short of revolution as insufficient and only serving to tinker with a fundamentally broken system and therefore justify it staying mostly as it is. It’s an ongoing trend in my country for all the left wing parties to collectively outnumber the right wing parties by a significant margin, but the right wing still consistently gets in because there’s less variation that’s more consolidated in the fewer number of parties.