Because most of the working class are convinced that this system is the best one, they just think the other political party and their voters are the reason everything sucks.
It’s really genius.
It’s not even just politics either.
We are taught not to share what our wages are and to compete against and rat out our co-workers, all for the benefit of The Company and often the detriment of ourselves and other working class people.
I often see people vehemently against lower skill jobs like fast-food earning a living wage simply because “I do x and I don’t make that much, why should they?”
That kind of attitude is exactly what they want you to have because in reality better wages for fast-food employees would force your employer to also raise wages.
They want us actively keeping each other down.
Unions are powerful because they bring members of the working class together.
Yep you’re totally right. I’m in a union making 15 dollars an hour more than I would outside of the union in my trade. And I get pension and top end benefits. Unions are the shit.
I work in a non union workplace and my wages are twice that of similar jobs in my company in other parts of the country, because unions are strong in this region so nonunion companies have to offer more just to keep workers. Unions are awesome. I wish there was a way for me to send some portion of my check to them as thanks for the benefits they’ve indirectly given me.
Yeah this is exactly right. Last time a union went on strike in my company, I kept hearing from people “fuck thise selfish union assholes, they want the company to pay for their health insurance, and I have to pay for my own health insurance - they should have to pay for their own health insurance like me”
I always would counter “why are you mad at the workers fighting to get free health insurance? Shouldn’t you be mad our hundreds-of-millions-a-day making company doesn’t want to pay for your health insurance? They clearly can afford to but they choose not to”
What’s funny is almost everyone that heard it phrases that way agreed they would rather we all get free health insurance - it’s like they never even thought of it on that way. Seems the human brain is wired by default to claw everyone down to their level, like fucking crabs in a bucket
Remember this as 340,000 UPS Teamsters workers may go on strike at the end of this month. They have been able to do away with a 2-tier wage system and have gotten agreement on air-conditioning in their trucks but are still negotiating with management over cost of living increases and wages for part-timers. Remember this as the Teamsters are looking to unionize Amazon.
Ordering mail-order stuff used to take a week or two to get to you, and nobody died for having to wait. If you absolutely needed it sooner you bought it locally. This was as recently as the mid-90’s (Amazon went public at $18/share in 1995) not horse and buggy days.
We should be willing to wait patiently for parcel delivery or go local for as long as it takes to show solidarity with these workers!
That’s fantastic if you have a car and can drive to get items from shops at the other side of the city or from a different town/city altogether. Much less convenient if you don’t have one or can’t drive at all. Like I would love to buy my homebrew supplies locally. In my old city that was an option. In my new one not so much…
We also need better public transport that would help with this but still. Some people can’t even get groceries without having it delivered (especially the elderly and remote). Some people would literally starve if they couldn’t get deliveries on time.
Most can’t even comprehend what living without capitalism would be like. They can’t comprehend montivations not shaped by capitalist ideas that gave been indoctrinated their whole life.
For some reason there is a large group of people who think they have more in common with billionaire parasites like Musk, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos than the local beggar on the street.
In reality, well over than 90% of us are closer to the penniless homeless person in terms of net worth than a billionaire.
They are just apolitical, kek. I, being from r-ssia, was kinda surprised how many logical hoops ordinary people would make to rationalize not even showing support to corpo-rats, but killing people for money, being shot for doing that. Class conciousness needs a lot of work to start to be. There’s none at this moment.
We only have to eat one!
One per year
Have you seen them lately? All that Botox… Yuck
Because in the USA the police murder peoples that go at the rich.
Everywhere works like that. Police are there to serve the rich
That is the problem.
I wish there was some kind of saying with an easy abbreviation that could express this
The working class literally can’t afford to revolt.
ironically we have more to loose now than in the age of revolutions (at least in the imperial core). When most people truly had nothing to loose but theirs chains. Nowadays most of what we have “to loose” tho are empty platitudes, it’s not bread and circuses anymore, just fastfood and apps…
Can’t afford to exist though either, so surely doing all out on the one that might actually get change is the better way?
(that’s more rhetorical, sadly I am well aware of all of the hurdles put in our way by the very system we seek to destroy, and that keeping us fighting for survival, and against each other, so that we have no energy or resources to fight those in power is a feature not a bug)
perhaps they are saving that for sweeps
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Answering as an American:
Because the working class understands that “elites” are a necessary decadence and side effect of free markets, and they are fine with billionaires if it means those free markets enable them to live like a king from the 1800s, and they are not consumed with narcissistic jealousy of people that have more than them. Plus they understand history, and they see how class wars worked out in the Bolshevik revolution.
I consider myself rich AF, because I have a roof over my head, AC, and healthy food to eat, which is RELATIVELY easy to come by in America. Tradespeople like plumbers and electricians are doing very well in America, and if they are reasonably fiscally responsible and save their money well, then they can retire comfortably after 15-20 years of work.
Many people all over the world understand all of this, and they clamor to immigrate to America.
between 15 and 25% of Americans are facing food insecurity. 25% of Americans are facing bankruptcy due to medical debt. 10% of Americans have no medical insurance. 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
That is not doing well, that is very fucking bad. And no, free markets do not require billionaires. We can get rid of all billionaires and distribute the money to the workers who actually generated that value, and still have healthy and relatively free markets.
Would you choose to be paid in stocks instead of cash? That’s exactly what “distribute money to the workers” means: Workers become shareholders of their company and profit through dividends and increased stock value, but they also have the risks of no dividends and decreased stock value if the company has a bad time. Lots of companies actually offer these “employee stocks”.
Yes, all workers should get stocks in the companies they work for.
I would take the stocks, but most people seem to prefer cash instead.
CEOs get cash as well, worker should get both.
This is already possible with many companys, but most workers choose 100% cash.
Not all that many. And it should be in addition to the cash, not an alternative. Workers should own at least 50% of all companies, and be able to outvote the board on any decisions that affect the company.
There is a better alternative to this, especially since a lot of the time this stock is virtual/ non voting stock which doesn’t really change the power dynamic it doesn’t give the workers control over the capital. The workers resonably should be equal owners for example in a worker co-op.
Beeing in a cooperative would come with a finincially liability. You participate in both profits and losses, you even sometimes have to provide additional capital if losses were too heavy, and it’s usually not so easy to leave the cooperative. Not many workers want that. They want the upside, the profits, of course, but are not willing to accept the downside.
If there are limited liability business co op should also be allowed to be limited liability, also large losses where the business is in actuall cash flow trouble don’t happen so frequently because they are generally less speculative, and have the option to instead of laying people off to reduce hours or pay temporarily. They largely don’t even want the profits, they want to know the can live by their own therms, and work without being needlessly managed by people with no idea of the core business.
Even with limited liability, your shares on the cooperative are always at stake. The cooperative needs money to invest, which comes from their owners, which are the workers in that case (they trade a fraction of their salary to get shares of the cooperative, to participate in later profits). If the business fails, the money is gone and you would have been better of taking 100% cash. You have a combined risk of losing both your income and your savings.
Also, there a conflicts of interest. Look at automation, for example. A worker’s cooperative would probably decide against automation, because the workers want to secure their own jobs, but in the long run the cooperative would go bankrupt as competitors could produce more efficiently and charge lower prices. That might be the reasons why such cooperatives are not very widespread.
Even with limited liability, your shares on the cooperative are always at stake. The cooperative needs money to invest, which comes from their owners, which are the workers in that case (they trade a fraction of their salary to get shares of the cooperative, to participate in later profits). If the business fails, the money is gone and you would have been better of taking 100% cash. You have a combined risk of losing both your income and your savings.
So it’s the same as getting virtual stock as compensation just that you also get control over how the business is run. Which in my opinion makes the business better, you don’t seem convinced but you don’t seem to have a good reason for why because …
Also, there a conflicts of interest. Look at automation, for example. A worker’s cooperative would probably decide against automation, because the workers want to secure their own jobs, but in the long run the cooperative would go bankrupt as competitors could produce more efficiently and charge lower prices. That might be the reasons why such cooperatives are not very widespread.
isn’t really an argument against coops, similar shortsighted thinking can frequently be found in other forms of enterprise, if a private enterprise can rationalize automation a coop can as well and they can both fail to come to that conclusion. It’s just that control over this automation is in the workers hand, and even if all the workers automate themselves away without finding other places to create value, the profit of that automation wouldn’t be centralized quite so aggressively, because all (former) workers share in it. The workers fundamentally don’t need to preserve their own jobs, rather they aim to preserve their livelihood.
I can offer a different explanation which partially explains their uncommon existence, which points again to the central conflict under capitalism, which is the unwillingness of conventional banks to approve credit for coops, making it much harder to start anything in the first place, particularly large capital investment like automation.
Careful, if you keep licking that hard you might choke on that boot that’s standing on all of our necks…
Lmao its not worth even trying to explain to you all the many ways you are wrong. 60% of my generation is so ruined by financial stress that they “are incapable of functioning”. My mom died and its unironically been the only hope I will ever have of getting a home. Cheers to late stage capitalism, where I make twice minimum wage and rent is 50% of my income for one of the worst apartment buildings in my city.
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I don’t think anyone wants to live voluntarily on your “healthcare” system lol, if you can even call it that.
The “just give us money and don’t get sick” system. AKA the “if you get sick, give us a lot of money anyway” system.
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