Comment by FredPret
1 day ago
...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.
> People advocating for their interests isn't warfare.
When those interests come at the expense/lives of other people, it is [1] [2].
> I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.
Correct, their theatrics are even dumber than that [3].
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[1] "House Republicans Push Forward Plan to Cut Taxes, Medicaid and Food Aid" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/congress-tax-...
[2] "Sanders on GOP Medicaid cuts: ‘Thousands and thousands of low-income and working people will die’" - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5302085-bernie-sanders-r...
[3] "Musk waves a chainsaw and charms conservatives talking up Trump’s cost-cutting efforts" - https://apnews.com/article/musk-chainsaw-trump-doge-6568e9e0...
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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.
Technology increases the size of the pie, but it is always possible to make the distribution of slices extremely unequal. More gdp and tech does not guarantee a better quality of life, as many countries today demonstrate.
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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.
> Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".
Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
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.
That is not accurate. There were many strikes in the industrial part of the US during the 1800's. That's how working conditions were improved in the mills. The free market would have crushed the working people had they not banded together and revolted to improve safety, reduce working hours, and increase pay.
Wikipedia has articles on the larger actions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_stri...
The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
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There was the Homestead Strike in 1892, during which 9 people died. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which "handled" the strike for Carnegie, is notorious for violently busting strikes in the 19th century US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
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There were quite a few slave revolts in the 19th century.
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> The common thread of workers' lives improving is free markets, not revolts.
The common thread is both, not one or the other.
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There were plenty of worker revolts in the 19th century which laid the groundwork for the modern labor movement.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...
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The war has never stopped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...
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.
And by the end of all that, they had a king again.
Their efforts were all for nothing.