My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory. (TikTok screencap)

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.

    The white ones did.

    White prosperity has always been built on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Superprofits are stolen from the global South and from internal colonies within the global North (i.e. the periphery) to then be redistributed to a special privileged segment of the working class in the metropoles in order to prevent revolutionary consciousness.

    Those reforms were bribes.

    Now that the empire is in decay those superprofits are running out, so all those reforms can’t be sustained.

    Calls for reform can be a way to rally workers to our cause, but reforms can’t be the limit of our goals because reforms under capitalism require rebuilding the empire. Call for reform, sure, but our only hope is to link arms with those imperialized and colonized people of the periphery and for the workers of the world to unite with revolutionary goals rather than purely reformist ones.

    White workers in the metropoles don’t get to be privileged above workers in the underdeveloped periphery anymore. We hang together or we hang separately. That’s going to mean organizing undocument workers, organizing prison labor, organizing gig workers, organizing home healthcare workers, and organizing across borders.

    Try to have some revolutionary optimism.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      16 hours ago

      That is typical. You regurgitating what you have been taught to anytime someone brings up the New Deal, there was still Injustice against minorities! So therefore everything from then is defunct.

      Of course by that logic every example from every time would be defunct. There is injustice now, there was in your parents lifetimes, your grandparents.

      Explain to me how because everything was not perfect in every way it is not an example that we know a minimum wage job could pay for a dignified life.

      And that includes those minorities that still were discriminated against, making enough money to live. It is telling of the quality of your opinions if you ask me.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        And now you’re insulting me.

        What I’ve been taught? Who the fuck do you think taught me all this theory and history? Ebil gommunist brainwashing school?

        I fucking read and read and read. Off the top of my head: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, I read A Dying Colonialism, I read The Wretched of the Earth, I read Black Reconstruction, I read A People’s History of the United States, I read Shock Doctrine, I read Revolutionary Suicide, in fact I just read Empire of Borders and it really handily describes the global apartheid system our reforms rely on!

        These are the basis for what I now understand about reformism within the imperial core. Reforms can only ever privilege a small segment of the working class above the workers in internal colonies and out in the periphery, they can not even help everyone under capitalism because then *where would capitalists get profits? Profit is theft, you can’t reform your way out of that.

        Instead, reforms like the New Deal were a way to bribe that special privileged segment of the workers into opposing revolution. That’s it. They saw what happened in the USSR and it scared the shit out of them, so they bribed white workers into supporting capitalism and deputized them as enforcers. They can’t bribe everyone with reforms, so they just bribe enough to act as enforcers.

        And now that the empire is in decay they’re running out of money to bribe us with. There are limits to growth, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, you can’t escape this.

        We can fight for reforms! But they should be the basis for further revolutionary aims, not be the end goal in and of themselves.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          15 hours ago

          I’m very happy for you, but you also just used a bad faith argument the super rich have taught everyone to say to derail any conversations. I was asking you to give me one period in time that could be used as an example where everything was perfect that would be acceptable to take an example from by your logic? Just give me one.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            15 hours ago

            How does “my logic” lead anyone to believe there has ever been a period of time that was perfect? The powerful have been oppressing us since we invented fucking agriculture and they started forming empires. All hitherto history is the history of class struggle, nothing has ever been perfect, what are you talking about?

            Are you confusing me with someone else?