The worst part is--it's really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system's worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.
Personally I'm in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn't strictly necessary.
These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues.
UBI actually makes billionaires richer, even with higher taxes. Money trickles back up to them. The problem with UBI is that it redistributes power, and the powerful want all of their power. Wealth "needs" to buy power.
Protectionism. Musk stands to gain a ton if there's less competition from imported EVs, and that's true for a lot of other products that American companies make. If you can just throw a few million at a presidential campaign and essentially guarantee your competitors will have a 10-60% disadvantage, those few millions can turn into billions in profit.
On paper, the goal seems to be to spur companies to return to the US, but I think the net impact will be higher prices for Americans and reduced trade w/ other countries due to retaliatory tariffs.
Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don't do aggressive changes like this.
That said, I'm not convinced the net result is good, so we'll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).
81-89. I don't think Reagan's presidency or party really explains it, because we see it rise shortly and then fall, both during Bill Clinton's presidency (93-2001). So George H.W. Bush raised taxes during his term, and then Clinton cut them again, but did so while balancing the budget (Clinton ran a surplus).
Reagan certainly slashed taxes, but so did Clinton, and to a similar degree.
Add this to the news that Mike Johnson said they will end Obamacare and I can't believe anyone would vote for Trump. He's going to raise your costs, reduce government services, kill healthcare as we know it, the list goes on and on.
I read recently "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).
Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.
It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country's wealth.
He is, though he's wrong about Trump's plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he's saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump's claims about the economy
I only heard the clip from here.. but it sounded like he said for long term prosperity, not necessary.
I assume what he was saying is that people will suffer while we force the market to move into isolation.
What he doesn't want to admit to the populous is that to have long term benefits of cheap labor, you have to have cheap labor.
So either you have that by being richer than other countries and outsourcing the labor, or isolating the country and subjugating a portion of the population so much that they are the cheap labor. That portion... Isn't going to be small if it's going to be able to provide everything for the rich who blast through resources like crazy.
Shut up, shut up, shut up please just shtfu already elon. How are people like him and bezos controlling the world? I swear we celebrate and praise mediocre morons in the US.
As a nation we have lost 30 years of progress because we give the loudest most idiotic people to ever live a platform to spew their collective nonsense. Take me back to 2010 where the internet was still fun and not just some massive propaganda machine for the uber wealthy and political nut jobs
But without capitalism we wouldn't have (insert something that has nothing to do with capitalism but that I completely attribute to it). And that would mean no trade.
They werent John Brown style abolitionists, they just got pissed off by a business associate and took it about as far as you would expect from a family who still consider themselves American-Scots.
He's never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There's a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.
It's only going to be temporary though, see.. we starve everyone for 30 years as we force ourselves into isolation, then those who are left.. wait, who's left, we killed the work force.
They are pro free-market, so long as the market is contained and controlled in every measure by themselves. Okay so maybe not free, maybe more of an enslaved market. They are going to need to shop that name, stick with calling it what it isn't for now, free
As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you'd bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have *any* money left at the end of the week, that's abhorrent to them.
It will be a beautiful necessary. Everyone will love the carnage. We will destroy America bigly. Like never before. The radical left democrats will hate it, but it will be glorious. Trust me.
What's up with upper class trying to destroy middle class all the time? Are middle class a threat to them? Has to be, otherwise this wouldn't matter.
Make things hard for billionaires and spread their wealth amongst the lower class to start evening shit out. Who tf needs almost a trillion unspendable dollars?
Capitalism is a system that rewards sociopathic behavior, so sociopaths with no empathy or investment in anything other than themselves naturally rise to the top.
The oligarchs who control our nation are all mentally ill narcissistic sociopaths who don't care what happens to the country or to humanity or the earth after they're gone. Life to them is a story where they're the main character and everyone else is an expendable NPC.
This is why capitalism is considered unsustainable to anyone other than those who idolize the oligarchs and wish to become one themselves. This is why hierarchy and class is something we should be trying to eliminate from society, not lean into even further. When human ego and individualism is allowed to be the cornerstone of human society, it is a matter of when, not if, that society eventually crumbles to the long term effects of wealth inequality.
There's no such thing as the middle class. You either own means of production, you sell your labour to those who do, or you belong to the criminal class that doesn't contribute to the growth of capital. The middle class is a fairy tale capitalists tell us to keep us in the labour class instead of the far more sensible criminal class.
I always wanted to ask this so might as well now, feel free to answer if you want: what are the means of production? In $cureent_year, that is.
We are not in 1870 Germany. We don't all work in huge factories owned by Rockefellers. I work in IT. My means of production is a laptop. I do own a few. I sell my labor to whoever needs IT services. Am I a capitalist or a communist? In the past I work for a big company and used their laptop. Was I being exploited?
The painter that is coming to fix my walls owns his ladder and spraygun. I assume he bought the paint with his own money. I don't know about the van, he might own it too. He sells his labor to me, who don't own anything of his. Is he a capitalist?
The company is and always has been the means of production. Shared distribution of the profits of a company, no owner taking it all and distributing wages.
So everybody should be a contractor? I have done both and I honestly appreciate the benefits of a salary without all the risks and overhead of contracting. Or founding and managing a cooperative.
I have worked for ESOP operations before and you get all the benefits of working for a company, because it is a company, but it's owned by the people that work there, not shareholders or a singular owner. So when the business does we'll everyone makes more money.
The ways in which you produce goods and services for transactions in a market.
Using a laptop (/server) to produce IT services is no different to a cobbler using a machine to produce a shoe, or a bard using a lute to produce a song.
The more you dig into it though, the more hardware and infrastructure you'll find: router, servers, storage, switches, cables, management systems (both technical and HR). Even if you work alone you still use *the internet* which is made up of physical computers owned by someone, and telephony infrastructure, and you'll still use a service to find work, and you'll still take payments using a bank...
It's equally applicable now to an IT worker as it was to a draughtsman at an architect firm in 1840.
Are you a capitalist or a communist? You're certainly not a communist, I believe what you are hinting at is "socialized" vs "individual" labor, and it is a historically progressive development of capitalism. How a software developer fits into the means of production is they aid in the exchange of money from the sale of commodities, and make the transactions possible. But at the end of the day some product is being sold to some end user and you help to make that possible. Without the transaction there is no sale, which means no exchange of commodities for more money than they cost to produce and bring to market (profit or surplus value) which is the basis for the whole system, it is the point where the exploitation occurs.
Everyone is always "exploited" by the system, its part of what drives competition. But to be more specific, everyone is alienated from the system of production. we are all very individuated in our thinking, which bears out in our alienated experience. In more advanced or more advantaged countries, with a higher outlay of financial or investment capital, the class character of any individual is more specific and hard to suss out. In developing or economically repressed nations, where the factories of 1870s Germany still exist, alongside the factories of 1840s England, if not in capital than in conditions, the class character of any individual might be more clear and concise. Our "class character" is determined by our relationship to production, and it is not altogether straightforward. I've seen many fights like "are cops workers" and even "are baristas workers" that have sent me.
All that to say, capitalism promotes cooperation through competition, it socializes production, so that the product of your labor is just one part of a very complex whole. Even the painter has to pay for insurance on his van, probably has a couple loans for his business. The fact that your labor is socialized doesn't make you a communist. Communism is the struggle for a classless, moneyless society. It too will presumably also have socialized production, but also socialized ownership of the means of production whereas under capitalism the MoP is privatized. This is the fundamental contradiction within capitalism and it is right that you found yourself wondering about it.
The "means of production" is a very abstract and fundamental concept. I think its right for you to question it, and how it relates directly to you. Its a very general concept, and everything you are asking of of applies to is very specific. The means of production has been well defined it seems elsewhere in the discussion, but its basically "everything that is used in human production" which is the driving force of history from a Marxist/sorta Hegelian perspective. So it is a big deal.
But what is also relevant, is how production is defined, and namely who owns its products. You work in IT (so do I) so in that example you own your work laptop? That laptop is MoP, same as the painter tools, and you sell your product to the company, who uses it to run how ever millions of transactions. Or making those transactions possible for that company, integrating some new feature. So more specifically, those tools are Capital, which is an essential mean of production under capitalism. But a ton of the infrastructure for those transactions was publicly funded, paid for with taxes. But now most if not all of that infrastructure is privately owned.
So in that way you are like the painter, in that you sell directly the product of your labor to the capitalist. Both you and the painter are workers in the same way, but youre an intellectual worker vs he is a physical laborer. but the paint and personal items in your personally owned house is for your personal use, whereas the software you sell to a company is for commercial use, in effect the software is capital, whereas the paint on your walls is not. But if the painter painted the walls at your company's office, that would be capital. The painter "bought the paint with his own money"? But you are paying him, so you are buying the paint.
Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren't attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the "answer" to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren't able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.
There is no middle class. There are workers and owners. If you own real estate and stonks you are still a worker unless you can live off of just investments. This is designed to corrupt and neuter you. You have enough skin in the game of the owners to not want to oppose them, but not enough to actually be them. Unless you hope to retire, at which point you make the transition from working class to owning class, but only at the end of your life, if you even make it that far, and often owning very little.
It is designed. Being *forced* to buy real estate or stonks to save for retirement is a relatively recent policy, created by Richard Nixon, around the same time as deunionization that was also on purpose.
But there was almost no indication for decades that employer-sponsored health insurance would spread from sea to shining sea.
World War II disrupted those trends. As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation’s workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to “all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee,” including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as “bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees.”
But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: “insurance and pension benefits” could grow “in a reasonable amount” during the freeze.
As companies struggled to deal with wartime labor shortages, the wage freeze left them in a serious bind: How could they retain workers if they couldn’t give raises? If they didn’t soon realize the allure of fringe benefits, insurance companies pressed that case through marketing campaigns, as historian Jennifer Klein has observed.
The Revenue Act of 1942 triggered another rush to enroll employees in health plans. By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes. Employee benefits, according to the new law, could be deducted from profits. As an anonymous employer observed in a study published on trends in health insurance, “it was a case of paying the money for insurance for their employees or to Uncle Sam in taxes.”
:::
Due to that, employer healthcare and pension/retirement plans became common because companies had to pick between paying a ton of taxes or increasing benefits to attract and retain workers, and many of them chose the latter.
Defined contribution plans (e.g. 401ks) actually started under Carter when he signed the Revenue Act of 1978, which was also a tax cut. They became prolific under Reagan, but probably because he took office 3 years after (big changes like that take time to get adopted) and not because of anything he necessarily did.
Companies are moving away from pensions because they add risk to the company that 401ks don't, and employees aren't necessarily choosing jobs based on them having a pension, but based on overall benefits. And the average person is probably better off with a 401k instead provided they contribute the same amount as they would to the pension because pensions are conservatively invested (i.e. the company wants to cover its butt), whereas 401ks can be aggressively invested, meaning more growth and thus more money available at retirement time. It can be pretty dramatic too, as in 4-5% growth for pensions vs 10-12% in a 401k, because a pension needs to provide guaranteed payouts, while a 401k just needs to provide expected payouts.
That said, before the 1920s or so, a lot of people just lived with family when they got old. That changed after WW2 when people started depending more on the company than their families for retirement expenses (partially due to Social Security being enacted, and partially due to wage controls forcing companies to provide benefits to attract talent).
Having a comfortable retirement has already been tied to the value of stocks going up. And a while back republicans wanted to do the same to social security.
Anyone that actually cares about the economy would see that every time the republicans get in they fuck it, and every time the democrats get in they fix it.
But they don't care about reality, only their feelings
Bro we couldn't even get people to wear masks and get free tests and vaccines without triggering white outrage, how you think actual financial hardship is going to go over with these people?
They'll scream for blood, but it won't be the blood of billionaires.
They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that's fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They're cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.
They'll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be *rookie* shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they're indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet "experts" they're arguing with.
Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they're working hard to ensure that never happens.
This is why i think there's still such a strong push for AI from the major tech companies--it's not just about developing a product for consumers to use--it's a product to use *against* consumers too
p3x.de
Next thing you know, the "president" will be saying to "eat bitter".
Wait till he hears how necessary it is for life to get harder for billionaires.
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just wait till they outlaw protests and impose curfews
That's so 2020. Oh, that was under trump rule. Just a small sample of what's to come if he gets into office again.
The French found a solution some time ago, maybe history really repeats.
There are now a lot of people who think we should be nice to billionaires because they also could become one sometime in the future
Wouldn't be the first civilization that disappeared because the elite doesn't want to compromise and give up status. It's a constant in history.
The worst part is--it's really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system's worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.
Personally I'm in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn't strictly necessary.
UBI actually makes billionaires richer, even with higher taxes. Money trickles back up to them. The problem with UBI is that it redistributes power, and the powerful want all of their power. Wealth "needs" to buy power.
Harder - lol. He'll have to settle for two 180 foot yachts instead of three.
necessary for what?
necessary for what, motherfucker?
Your comment has the same energy as "states' rights to do what?", and I'm here for it.
If I wasn't at work I'd edit the goose meme to match.
I love that meme
https://i.imgflip.com/98hgjg.jpg
You get me.
For a complete fascist takeover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
🔪🦢
Protectionism. Musk stands to gain a ton if there's less competition from imported EVs, and that's true for a lot of other products that American companies make. If you can just throw a few million at a presidential campaign and essentially guarantee your competitors will have a 10-60% disadvantage, those few millions can turn into billions in profit.
On paper, the goal seems to be to spur companies to return to the US, but I think the net impact will be higher prices for Americans and reduced trade w/ other countries due to retaliatory tariffs.
*"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"*
Why do we only seem to get the bad outlandish things from books and movies? :/
Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don't do aggressive changes like this.
That said, I'm not convinced the net result is good, so we'll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).
Eat the rich.
That graph is interesting. When was Reagan president again...?
Nailed it.
81-89. I don't think Reagan's presidency or party really explains it, because we see it rise shortly and then fall, both during Bill Clinton's presidency (93-2001). So George H.W. Bush raised taxes during his term, and then Clinton cut them again, but did so while balancing the budget (Clinton ran a surplus).
Reagan certainly slashed taxes, but so did Clinton, and to a similar degree.
Add this to the news that Mike Johnson said they will end Obamacare and I can't believe anyone would vote for Trump. He's going to raise your costs, reduce government services, kill healthcare as we know it, the list goes on and on.
They literally want to end government. Aka, services for anyone who isn't wealthy.
The only government service they want is the police, and it to be funded by civil forfeiture.
Also the military.
*Necessary* for Elon and trump to evade prison sentences.
These shitbags are trading the health of the majority to evade repercussions for their crimes (of which there are many).
Drone strike please.
🗡️🫨
... there's no guillotine emojis yet
What even is that face emoji doing?
I like how you improvised.
Edit: 🗡️🫠. I wanted to try and I like this.
its the billionairs head rolling away, no?
That was my other choice
The fucking *gall* this billionaire POS has to utter the phrase "live within our means."
I wonder if when he says "necessary" he's referring to some longtermism weird BS.
I mean, he's definitely referring to some weird BS. But I wonder whether specifically it's longtermism BS.
I read recently "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).
Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.
It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country's wealth.
He is, though he's wrong about Trump's plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he's saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump's claims about the economy
He's not wrong, he's bald faced lying. The two are not equivalent.
I only heard the clip from here.. but it sounded like he said for long term prosperity, not necessary.
I assume what he was saying is that people will suffer while we force the market to move into isolation.
What he doesn't want to admit to the populous is that to have long term benefits of cheap labor, you have to have cheap labor.
So either you have that by being richer than other countries and outsourcing the labor, or isolating the country and subjugating a portion of the population so much that they are the cheap labor. That portion... Isn't going to be small if it's going to be able to provide everything for the rich who blast through resources like crazy.
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No, some of US will need to suffer, but that's a sacrifice he's willing to make. Him suffering isn't acceptable.
Shut up, shut up, shut up please just shtfu already elon. How are people like him and bezos controlling the world? I swear we celebrate and praise mediocre morons in the US.
As a nation we have lost 30 years of progress because we give the loudest most idiotic people to ever live a platform to spew their collective nonsense. Take me back to 2010 where the internet was still fun and not just some massive propaganda machine for the uber wealthy and political nut jobs
Capitalism
But without capitalism we wouldn't have (insert something that has nothing to do with capitalism but that I completely attribute to it). And that would mean no trade.
My ancestors wouldnt have pushed at least one Southern plantation owner to suicide.
I believe this is what they call based
They werent John Brown style abolitionists, they just got pissed off by a business associate and took it about as far as you would expect from a family who still consider themselves American-Scots.
Which is now, very very obviously, not a system design to promote it's own fitness, a la Darwinism...
I wonder what happens to piles of sand placed in the path of high-flowing rivers?
The United States has always been the best place for the mediocre white man.
In trump's case, we praise exceptional morons
He's never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There's a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.
“Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to make”
When can we feed Elon to a dragon?
Bitch, we're already going through hardship. How much more hardship do we need to go through just so you can keep your power trip going?
It's only going to be temporary though, see.. we starve everyone for 30 years as we force ourselves into isolation, then those who are left.. wait, who's left, we killed the work force.
They are pro free-market, so long as the market is contained and controlled in every measure by themselves. Okay so maybe not free, maybe more of an enslaved market. They are going to need to shop that name, stick with calling it what it isn't for now, free
As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you'd bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have *any* money left at the end of the week, that's abhorrent to them.
So many unnecessary steps. I wonder when will someone optimize this process.
Trump is better at this than Musk...
It will be a beautiful necessary. Everyone will love the carnage. We will destroy America bigly. Like never before. The radical left democrats will hate it, but it will be glorious. Trust me.
What's up with upper class trying to destroy middle class all the time? Are middle class a threat to them? Has to be, otherwise this wouldn't matter.
Make things hard for billionaires and spread their wealth amongst the lower class to start evening shit out. Who tf needs almost a trillion unspendable dollars?
Capitalism is a system that rewards sociopathic behavior, so sociopaths with no empathy or investment in anything other than themselves naturally rise to the top.
The oligarchs who control our nation are all mentally ill narcissistic sociopaths who don't care what happens to the country or to humanity or the earth after they're gone. Life to them is a story where they're the main character and everyone else is an expendable NPC.
This is why capitalism is considered unsustainable to anyone other than those who idolize the oligarchs and wish to become one themselves. This is why hierarchy and class is something we should be trying to eliminate from society, not lean into even further. When human ego and individualism is allowed to be the cornerstone of human society, it is a matter of when, not if, that society eventually crumbles to the long term effects of wealth inequality.
There's no such thing as the middle class. You either own means of production, you sell your labour to those who do, or you belong to the criminal class that doesn't contribute to the growth of capital. The middle class is a fairy tale capitalists tell us to keep us in the labour class instead of the far more sensible criminal class.
"There is no middle class only virgin workers and chad lumpen proles" is an incredible bit
I always wanted to ask this so might as well now, feel free to answer if you want: what are the means of production? In $cureent_year, that is.
We are not in 1870 Germany. We don't all work in huge factories owned by Rockefellers. I work in IT. My means of production is a laptop. I do own a few. I sell my labor to whoever needs IT services. Am I a capitalist or a communist? In the past I work for a big company and used their laptop. Was I being exploited?
The painter that is coming to fix my walls owns his ladder and spraygun. I assume he bought the paint with his own money. I don't know about the van, he might own it too. He sells his labor to me, who don't own anything of his. Is he a capitalist?
The company is and always has been the means of production. Shared distribution of the profits of a company, no owner taking it all and distributing wages.
So everybody should be a contractor? I have done both and I honestly appreciate the benefits of a salary without all the risks and overhead of contracting. Or founding and managing a cooperative.
I have worked for ESOP operations before and you get all the benefits of working for a company, because it is a company, but it's owned by the people that work there, not shareholders or a singular owner. So when the business does we'll everyone makes more money.
"what are the means of production?"
The ways in which you produce goods and services for transactions in a market.
Using a laptop (/server) to produce IT services is no different to a cobbler using a machine to produce a shoe, or a bard using a lute to produce a song.
The more you dig into it though, the more hardware and infrastructure you'll find: router, servers, storage, switches, cables, management systems (both technical and HR). Even if you work alone you still use *the internet* which is made up of physical computers owned by someone, and telephony infrastructure, and you'll still use a service to find work, and you'll still take payments using a bank...
It's equally applicable now to an IT worker as it was to a draughtsman at an architect firm in 1840.
Are you a capitalist or a communist? You're certainly not a communist, I believe what you are hinting at is "socialized" vs "individual" labor, and it is a historically progressive development of capitalism. How a software developer fits into the means of production is they aid in the exchange of money from the sale of commodities, and make the transactions possible. But at the end of the day some product is being sold to some end user and you help to make that possible. Without the transaction there is no sale, which means no exchange of commodities for more money than they cost to produce and bring to market (profit or surplus value) which is the basis for the whole system, it is the point where the exploitation occurs.
Everyone is always "exploited" by the system, its part of what drives competition. But to be more specific, everyone is alienated from the system of production. we are all very individuated in our thinking, which bears out in our alienated experience. In more advanced or more advantaged countries, with a higher outlay of financial or investment capital, the class character of any individual is more specific and hard to suss out. In developing or economically repressed nations, where the factories of 1870s Germany still exist, alongside the factories of 1840s England, if not in capital than in conditions, the class character of any individual might be more clear and concise. Our "class character" is determined by our relationship to production, and it is not altogether straightforward. I've seen many fights like "are cops workers" and even "are baristas workers" that have sent me.
All that to say, capitalism promotes cooperation through competition, it socializes production, so that the product of your labor is just one part of a very complex whole. Even the painter has to pay for insurance on his van, probably has a couple loans for his business. The fact that your labor is socialized doesn't make you a communist. Communism is the struggle for a classless, moneyless society. It too will presumably also have socialized production, but also socialized ownership of the means of production whereas under capitalism the MoP is privatized. This is the fundamental contradiction within capitalism and it is right that you found yourself wondering about it.
The "means of production" is a very abstract and fundamental concept. I think its right for you to question it, and how it relates directly to you. Its a very general concept, and everything you are asking of of applies to is very specific. The means of production has been well defined it seems elsewhere in the discussion, but its basically "everything that is used in human production" which is the driving force of history from a Marxist/sorta Hegelian perspective. So it is a big deal.
But what is also relevant, is how production is defined, and namely who owns its products. You work in IT (so do I) so in that example you own your work laptop? That laptop is MoP, same as the painter tools, and you sell your product to the company, who uses it to run how ever millions of transactions. Or making those transactions possible for that company, integrating some new feature. So more specifically, those tools are Capital, which is an essential mean of production under capitalism. But a ton of the infrastructure for those transactions was publicly funded, paid for with taxes. But now most if not all of that infrastructure is privately owned.
So in that way you are like the painter, in that you sell directly the product of your labor to the capitalist. Both you and the painter are workers in the same way, but youre an intellectual worker vs he is a physical laborer. but the paint and personal items in your personally owned house is for your personal use, whereas the software you sell to a company is for commercial use, in effect the software is capital, whereas the paint on your walls is not. But if the painter painted the walls at your company's office, that would be capital. The painter "bought the paint with his own money"? But you are paying him, so you are buying the paint.
Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren't attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the "answer" to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren't able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.
They have all the money. Now they want more.
There is no middle class. There are workers and owners. If you own real estate and stonks you are still a worker unless you can live off of just investments. This is designed to corrupt and neuter you. You have enough skin in the game of the owners to not want to oppose them, but not enough to actually be them. Unless you hope to retire, at which point you make the transition from working class to owning class, but only at the end of your life, if you even make it that far, and often owning very little.
This is why Worker and Consumer Cooperatives are so vital.
"designed" is a bit much but it sure does play into their hands.
It is designed. Being *forced* to buy real estate or stonks to save for retirement is a relatively recent policy, created by Richard Nixon, around the same time as deunionization that was also on purpose.
That's not exactly true, here's an article about the history of pension plans. Basically:
So pensions are pretty recent, and IMO largely became important in the 1940s because companies were prevented from competing on salary due to wartime wage controls:
::: spoiler long quoted section
Due to that, employer healthcare and pension/retirement plans became common because companies had to pick between paying a ton of taxes or increasing benefits to attract and retain workers, and many of them chose the latter.
Defined contribution plans (e.g. 401ks) actually started under Carter when he signed the Revenue Act of 1978, which was also a tax cut. They became prolific under Reagan, but probably because he took office 3 years after (big changes like that take time to get adopted) and not because of anything he necessarily did.
Companies are moving away from pensions because they add risk to the company that 401ks don't, and employees aren't necessarily choosing jobs based on them having a pension, but based on overall benefits. And the average person is probably better off with a 401k instead provided they contribute the same amount as they would to the pension because pensions are conservatively invested (i.e. the company wants to cover its butt), whereas 401ks can be aggressively invested, meaning more growth and thus more money available at retirement time. It can be pretty dramatic too, as in 4-5% growth for pensions vs 10-12% in a 401k, because a pension needs to provide guaranteed payouts, while a 401k just needs to provide expected payouts.
Before Nixon, you could just save money for retirement.
You still can.
That said, before the 1920s or so, a lot of people just lived with family when they got old. That changed after WW2 when people started depending more on the company than their families for retirement expenses (partially due to Social Security being enacted, and partially due to wage controls forcing companies to provide benefits to attract talent).
Having a comfortable retirement has already been tied to the value of stocks going up. And a while back republicans wanted to do the same to social security.
its only "necessary" so him and his ilk can continue to bleed the nation dry
So where are the "Republicans are good for the economy" voters now?
Anyone that actually cares about the economy would see that every time the republicans get in they fuck it, and every time the democrats get in they fix it.
But they don't care about reality, only their feelings
Bro we couldn't even get people to wear masks and get free tests and vaccines without triggering white outrage, how you think actual financial hardship is going to go over with these people?
In an alternate universe, conmen Trump and Musk used their sole talent of convincing fools to wear masks.
He'll immediately blame Biden for all the suffering he causes.
They'll scream for blood, but it won't be the blood of billionaires.
They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that's fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They're cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.
They'll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be *rookie* shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they're indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet "experts" they're arguing with.
Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they're working hard to ensure that never happens.
This is why i think there's still such a strong push for AI from the major tech companies--it's not just about developing a product for consumers to use--it's a product to use *against* consumers too
What middle class?
Nothing about trump is necessary
It's necessary for me not to have TSLAs price tank and the Saudis take recover loss out of me, pound-of-flesh style.
Or, probably how he's guilty of a ton of ITAR violations related to Saudis, SpaceX rockets, plus Russia and Starlink
Not it’s not
WHY DO YOU MAKE ME HURT YOU WHEN YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?
...is that the "Dark MAGA" bullshit he's throwing out there?
Yeeaahhh, OR we can just not be dumbfucks and actually work on the economy, Elon, you hack
Unearthed or AI generated? I hate Musk, but AI generated fakes are becoming more predominant and it's good to be sure of the source of your facts.