Comment by yapyap
1 day ago
I think class warfare will get the working class further than whatever is being done at the moment honestly.
1 day ago
I think class warfare will get the working class further than whatever is being done at the moment honestly.
...why? How?
Have you seen any history at all? This has never worked.
Cohesive, trusting societies get much further than ones that are at war with themselves. Even so, cohesion and trust are nice-to-haves.
Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
I don’t think he working class started the war so if the working class stops the class war doesn’t end.
People advocating for their interests isn't warfare.
I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
When the working class unionizes or vote for more rights, this isn't warfare - as long as it's fair-minded and pragmatic rather than idealogical. The same goes for the rich.
Regarding people with other backgrounds and interests as evil sociopaths / socialists is where the problem comes in.
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You should maybe read about the history of the US labor movement to understand how and why we have good working conditions: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...
We have good working conditions mainly because we can now afford them.
Do you think poor people didn't get upset / rebellious in centuries and millennia past?
The difference now is that we have the GDP and tech to support much cushier lives for vast numbers of people.
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It has worked in many, many places.
> Tech progress and GDP growth has meant that the world's poor live better lives, decade after decade, for many centuries now.
Every single time during the leaps of technology that brought tech progress and GDP growth there needed to be some kind of workers' revolt or the threat of it to actualise poors living better lives. Every leap in progress of systemic quality of life for workers came through class war: revolts, general strikes, mass protest, organized labour, etc.
Why do you think now it's different?
Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
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There was no workers' revolt in the 19th century US, but the lives of the poor across the board pulled scores of millions in poverty into the middle class and beyond.
The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
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Cohesive trusting societies are borne out of the struggle to dethrone oligarchs and lords.
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French revolution worked pretty well for the working class
It was more of a middle class thing. It kind of worked kind of relatively well for them. When the French Kingdom was reestablished after Napoleon it was run by bankers and not nobles..
I cant tell if that is sarcasm or not. It was characterized by mass dysfunction and devolved into a dictatorship within 5 years, and 10 years of global war as France tried to fund populist mistakes by pillaging foreign countries, a million French deaths, and maybe 4 million foreign deaths, not to mention mass wounded, starvation, and hardship.
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Warfare is dumb.
The class struggle is a perspective. It points to how blind rich people are to social issues, and how blind the poor are to economic issues. These two need the struggle, gently. Without it, there is either bloody revolution or cruel autocracy.
That's as simple as it gets. Many people get it wrong.
I assure you that poor people are not universally blind to economic issues. lol.
That's the least important part of my statement.
There is a struggle between those who have power and those who don't. This displacement creates blind spots, and also vantage points.
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