I’m so fucking sick of this fixation on obsolete manufacturing jobs that only get attention because they’re seen as blue collar white man jobs. We’ve lost 90,000 retail jobs since Trump was elected, which is more than the entire coal industry employs. But we’ll never hear a peep about those because that’s work for women and POC.
And fuck all this demagoguing about foreigners stealing your job. A robot stole your job and it’s never coming back. 50 years ago a steel mill producing 500,000 tons of steel wire per year would employ 1,000 people, enough to prop up the economy of a small town. A steel mill with that same output just opened up and it employs, wait for it, 14 people. You won’t even see any humans on the production floor, just watching the monitors in the office above. No pussygrabbing orange fascist is gonna turn back the clock on that one. Oh sure, there was a candidate with a plan to retrain everyone in green technology jobs, but solar panels seem vaguely effeminate, not like the muscular labor of dragging shitty rocks out of the ground for pumping poison into the air. How about we really get back to basics and let dentists stick leeches on you again, there’s a lost source of income they could use. Maybe get some blacksmiths back to work. We’ll have a purely nostalgia-based economy and all the old demographics that we’re comfortable with.
socially progressive and economically conservative is so wild it’s like, “i don’t want people to die because they’re poor, poc, lgbti, or disabled. just that i don’t understand that they need resources to survive”
or like. let’s tackle oppression! but not the kinds of oppression that keeps people in a never ending cycle of poverty, that’s a bit extremist
this is the best “the floor is x” meme I’ve seen yet
[image description: an old-fashioned, black and white illustration of an aristocratic ballroom party, with individuals in suits and gowns. clustered at tables, they look with surprise and dismay towards the center of the room where someone’s clenched fist has punched through the floor. underneath the floor, a large group of people in plain clothes has been holding the party on their shoulders. some are still frowning at the ground but others look upward towards the hole made in the floor. the caption below the image reads “the floor is capitalism.” end description]
Yes, inequality is getting worse every year. In early 2016 Oxfam reported that just 62 individuals had the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity. About a year later Oxfam reported that just 8 men had the same wealth as the world’s bottom half. Based on the same methodology and data sources used by Oxfam, that number is now down to 6.
…………
It’s not just the bottom half: A 500-seat auditorium could hold as much wealth as 70% of the world’s population. According to the Forbes Billionaire List, the world’s richest 500 individuals have $4.73 trillion in wealth. Tables 2-4 and 3-4 of the GWD reveal that the poorest seven deciles of the world population own just 1.86% of the $256 trillion in global wealth, or $4.76 trillion. That’s over two-thirds of all the people on earth.
If you redistribute the wealth of the richest 6 men on Earth, you could double the wealth of about 3.7 Billion of the worlds poorest people. If you redistribute the wealth of just the 500 richest people, you could double the wealth of about 5 Billion people. There’s not a shortage of assets, there’s an appropriation of assets by the bourgeoisie. The question of where communists would get the resources for social programs we propose is not a hard one to answer when you start looking at where the wealth is right now. Take that 98% of the global wealth owned by the richest 30% of the population and use it to provide a good living to everyone.
someone: capitalism is a rational economic system
a bank: hi i noticed you don’t have any money in your account, so I’m going to charge you an additional $30 for not having any money
I really think it needs to be drilled into every capitalist’s head that their ideology is going to cause long-term agricultural collapse.
I’m serious. The concept of profit is the sole reason why we haven’t found a solution to global warming yet, and global warming will make vast swaths of land either uninhabitable or unsuitable for the growth of modern crop yields.
No matter how many times people uncritically repeat canned anti-communist, anti-socialist, or anti-leftist rhetoric, there is no escaping the fact that the necessity of profit in a capitalist economy has directly caused an environmental catastrophe that is likely to kill more than a billion people.
People who perform manual labor should be not only given high and liveable wages, but unlimited access to healthcare and physical therapy to help manage the myriad conditions that come from doing back-breaking work.
Like this is not an absurd concept. It bothers me that people think that it is.
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