Comment by gyomu
11 hours ago
> social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934
etc.
What put the fear of god in governments, was the great depression(which is an indirect a result of the industrial revolution), terrible leaders rising because of it, and WWII as the result.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
Nothing says "social change" like building a Flock of predictive-surveillance cameras capable of spotting the revolt before the flock even knows it’s a flock.
The arrondissements of Paris did not prevent the formation of the commune.
The fascist leader needs to catch every single revolutionary group every single time. But a single revolutionary with a pistol only needs to catch the leader ONCE.
You should probably read the history of anarchism in Imperial Russia.
There were tons of assassination attempts against the tsars in the 1800s, and they even killed a tsar. Yet the empire fell due to an external war, roughly 100 years later.
Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights, yet it took between 200 and 400 years for full legal equality to be introduced everywhere and some places still have nobility with special status, to this day, even in developed countries.
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This is not a superhero movie. Fascism is a symptom, killing one individual will not do away with it. Also its relatively easy to divide revolutionary groups because they are very paranoid, whereas fascist leaders are often highly insulated by the state apparatus. But fascism is also not a very good form of governance and tends to collapse on its own after only a few decades at most. Its really more like, every so often, a bunch of people are needlessly executed to preserve the capitalist system, and then after that things kinda go back to "normal" for a while. Revolutionary movements operate somewhat irrespective of fascist regimes, although yes its more difficult to do so under an oppressive state.
Which I'm not sure it happens that often anymore because it's easier to just complain on social media
Only as long as you still have enough cash to order uber eats.
I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...
This breaks down if there is less competition for labour, and we enter a new Depression era. Under your logic, capitalists will pay nearly nothing for labour because there is so much of it. Then "society" has to step in and not-so-gently point out that these are people we're talking about, and they need things like dignity, time off, good health, good working conditions, as well as money.
We have to remember that people are the point of the economy: the economy exists to provide for all the people, people don't exist to be economic assets. There is a tendency for capitalists to forget this, and then we have to prod them with pitchforks to remind them.