My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory. (TikTok screencap)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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I know it's cliche, but i think capitalism deserves a lot of the blame.
What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it's what they're doing now). They're not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It's not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are 'real' and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. 'Money' and 'inflation' are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we're being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn't really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
Like, you sre right. There is injustice. And im not, like, a fan of tjose things, but i think the system is much more fucked than you think it is.
You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.
But the whole system is shit. Its designed to fuck you without your consent.
These things are not failures. They're working as intended, and without a gun to its head, its always gonna do that shit.
This is capitalism. This is the only path capitalism aants to do.
We don't need to 'fix inflation'; we need to abolish money and put in place a system of managing our economy that isnt entirely based around reveling in vice and insane cult bullshit.
I know the system works because it used to work.
It provably does not. I thought we agreed that it does not
It didn't. That was colonial extraction, internal exploitation of women+poc, and compromising with communism while we still had a labor movememt and the threat of the ussr. It was an intermediate form forced on it by circumstance, it's not sustainable, youre ignoring all the costs, and the system's own incentives are what destroyed it. What will always destroy it. The metagame is broken, there is no going back.
And with global warming/climatepocalypse; we need to be doing better than that imagined bullshit rough-edges-sanded-off version of the 1950s anyway. which we can; why are you so hostile to the idea? Why are you so in love with your chains?
We could and should do do much better. We could distribute things and coordinate in muvh better ways. This shit collapses every few Years, why not give it a shot?
Work for whom?
Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.
Reform is not mutually exclusive to our constitution, and indeed our current plutocracy and rising fascism is. The constitution is dishonored systematically by our system.
In fact with our existing laws we could break up all of these mega corps, and prosecute the worst like health insurance execs for one thing and another. Drug co execs need to be put in line.
We would need to reinstate and update some laws, and get a national healthcare program with new laws.
But we need a restoration to the laws we had, and addition to them, and most of all, enforcement of existing laws. Judiciary being bought and owned by plutocracy notwithstanding but a strong real populist could fix even that.
We just need leadership, someone that knows how to build and run a political machine. A thing antithetical to our corporate opposition party playing good cop to ruling party's bad cop like it is 1990 still even as the ruling party is not playing bad cop so much as hitler. Achieving more of a mussolini but that is another story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Sure, but I'd wager it goes beyond the singular manifestation of power as money. Plenty of other manifestations, and all lead to similar places.
Its not about the money directly, it's about the alienation from things like labor and value, plus absolutely insane shit people need to believe to feel okay in it.