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The Internet has made people too easy to divide and conquer

The only reason we have 5 day work weeks, 8 hour workdays, overtime pay, benefits, workplace health/safety/environmental regulations, unions, health care, paid time off, vacations, etc. is because our grandfathers and great-grandfathers busted heads, and got their own heads busted, fighting corporate goons in the streets - and WINNING!

Those heroic workers would be ashamed at what their grandchildren have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs have done to America. They fought hard to keep those psychopaths under control, and we not only let them up, we helped them take full power.

Why is this yellowed like it's been in a smokers house for the last 15 years?

Violence isn't the answer!

The answer is.. checks history book

wait not that one.. starts flipping pages

uhh if you hang on a second uhh furious page-flipping

Has this been aged? Lol looks like sepia

This is literally every country.

"OUR REVOLUTIONARIES WERE HEROES"

But also: "Don't y'all even dare thinking about overthrowing the current system. Violence Baaad!"

Woe to the vanquished !!

the names of our heros, and our defiers, will last forever !!

Are USians not still working 10 hours day/6 days a week? The USA are usually near the top of the "time worked per week" OECD rankings.

Also, interesting how the poster and first replier have the same avatar. Is that a historical figure?

I think it’s worth pointing out that calling these riots isn’t really appropriate. When we think of riots, we think of unfocused, unplanned, unmanaged, etc. Highly organized protests sometimes wind up turning into riots because capitalists use violence, but it’s not the norm.

The State only respects power. If a group of people show that they have more power than the State, change can happen. However, what is power?

Power comes in many different forms.

There is economic power which is showcased through strikes and boycotts.
There is democratic power which is showcased through the ballot box.
There is soft power which is showcased through the lobbying, and speeches.
There is non-violet power which is showcased through protests, marches, and sit ins.
There is violent power which is showcased through physical violence such riots.

While, the populace has access to many different forms of power. The State is limited to either soft power or violent power. Depending on the State, soft power might not even be contemplated.

Riots are just one form of power for the populace to exercise.

The most sociopatic "winners" of the current system will always laud whatever was done to establish the system in which they get so much and decry anything that might overthrow or even meaningfully change that system.

Those who have a more empathic view of things, even when they too are considered "winners", have a different posture if they think the current system isn't working well for most people because they don't think only about personal upside maximization at any cost for the rest.

As it so happens, caring for more than just "me, me, me" is what distinguishes leftwingers from rightwingers.

So this is a great way to spot fake leftwingers in or seeking positions of power and wealth: no matter how "progressive" their words are in general, when it comes to the current system they'll display exactly this kind of hypocrisy of being against any kind of actions that will change the current system whilst lauding the very same kind of actions when they installed the current system, since their one true drive is "What's in it for me", a rightwinger's motivation.

Remember to thank your local anarchist for the 8 hour work day.

did you find this post in a bottle on the beach

Violence is the only answer, and until youre ready for that nothing will change. Extreme violence is the only answer.

Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.

Funnily enough there's a very similar situation to the US that's going on in Serbia, where a canopy falling and killing a bunch of people due to government cheapening out led to lots of outrage and exploded into a massive student movement against the president due to corruption, election rigging, suppression of dissent and executive branch abuse.

At first, they did peaceful protests, blocked roads and all that jazz constantly, but after seeing that it had led them literally nowhere (they got nothing except for a fake concession that was some minister resigning) except on getting arrested and beaten up in jails, they decided to give a green light to civil disobedience, violence, trashing ruling party's headquarters all over the country.

What did this escalation result in? A whole load of nothing except cracked skulls, mostly for the students.

If you're looking at reformism 'fixing' things during the course of history, civil disobedience the vast majority if not all of the time was noise. What eventually got implemented or changed wasn't because the ruling class got scared, but because they were either getting major gains in terms of compromise as a result of the reform, or the reform itself was beneficial to their interests and only a small minority didn't want them to pass.

Funny how it's getting harder and harder to find a job in the US that isn't 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.

This state of affairs is not especially surprising -- if it were the popular belief that violence is justified to change society in some particular way, then society would already be changed in that way. Just like how no stock on the market can be widely seen as undervalued.

This is why class consciousness is important.