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A drop. A trickle. Then a flood. The labor movement is resurging and rightly so. We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution globally. Wealth
by jollofricepeas 3y ago
A drop.
A trickle.
Then a flood.
The labor movement is resurging and rightly so.
We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution globally.
Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution.
- geodel 3y agoI love violent revolutions, they always lead to lovely results where ever or whenever they occur.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago(GP's comment does not appear to be advocating for violent revolutions.)
- thebradbain 3y agoWell, they usually end up with the people everyone was most angry at for causing the circumstances that lead up to the revolution powerless or dead, as an explicit aim. So regardless of who ends up in charge after or if that regime succeeds, you can’t say revolutions themselves are not frighteningly effective. After all, every existing country on earth is the result of a revolution against the leaders of its past.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoDepends on whether the real goal is "kill those people" or "make a better life for the rest of us". The first is easy; the second is harder.
- autoexec 3y agoI assume it often starts with "kill those people" and once that nasty business is out of the way and new people are selected to replace them there's a very strongly implied "Now you people make a better life for the rest of us, or else we will go back to the 'kill those people' step and repeat as needed."
- ALittleLight 3y agoI think you're confusing successful revolutions with revolutions. Way more likely the revolutionaries succeed in doing a bit of damage and get crushed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flangola7 3y agoDefinitely should not have shot at those redcoats
- neurobama 3y agoYou jest, but strong arguments have been made on both sides of that counter-factual. Popular narratives of the American Revolution leave much unsaid. Contemporary accounts of inciting events such as the Boston Massacre were often gross distortions or plain lies. The Townshend Acts were meant to tax the colonies to recoup the cost of their own defense, after the French and Indian War kicked off arguably due to Washington's poor French and inexperienced military leadership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jumonville_Glen#Aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jumonville_Glen#Afte...
- cool_dude85 3y agoHow is the status quo working out for people in Haiti or Palestine or Sub-Saharan Africa? Lovely results, I expect?
- marcusverus 3y agoFantastic results! Check out how GDP per capita is trending in those areas. It has doubled in Palestine and Haiti over the last couple of decades, and is way up for many sub-Saharan African countries. Funny that you'd pick those areas and not Asia, where a billion people were lifted out of absolute poverty in the last 30 years! Pure chance, I'm sure.
- 27fingies 3y agomight be worth looking at the 200 years before that
- shkkmo 3y ago> It has doubled in Palestine and Haiti over the last couple of decades, and is way up for many sub-Saharan African countries. https://tradingeconomics.com/haiti/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/haiti/gdp-per-capita The actual facts don't match your rosey summary. Haiti has faced 4 straight years of a shrinking economy and the GDP per capita is at one of it's lowest points in the last 60 years. Yes, many people have been lifted out of poverty but it has happened alongside increasing inequality and there have been some very notable failures and Haiti is one of them.
- marcusverus 3y agoWrong. World bank data shows Haiti's GDP per capita has more than doubled since 2000. [0] You anti-capitalists have already caused a century of misery and wont--can't you just admit defeat? Haiti is the perfect example of the extraordinary benefits of our system. 40% can't read. 60% lack access to electricity. Yet even they can't escape the bounty of global capitalist system! It's over. Capitalism won, for the benefit of all of humanity. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/country/haiti https://data.worldbank.org/country/haiti
- darrenringstadt 3y agoHuman existence is meaningless to the universe so you know; if our existence is to be treated as such I would rather have front row seats to the apocalypse than work a rote office job another 20 years
- selimthegrim 3y agoI’m assuming this is lovely in the SomethingAwful bowdlerized sense
- marcusverus 3y agoYes! Rest assured that there is no historical reason to fear "unintended consequences". The very idea is a reactionary dog-whistle.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoAye, like the metric system
- anonylizard 3y agoPlease stop fantasizing about 'global revolutions'. Wealth redistribution movements can successfully happen within national borders, or even within tightly knit groups of nations (say EU, or NAFTA). But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers, heck there won't even be any solidarity between Indian and African workers. China in particular violently suppresses unions because they believed it'll result in China outcompeting all other developing countries in manufacturing, which is exactly what happened. If AI is to replace white collar jobs, the outsourced white collar jobs (low precision, low criticality) will be the first to go. Replaced by one person in the home country doing the job of 5-10 in the past. This fact alone crushes any sympathy across borders.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago> But there will never be any solidarity between say US and African workers Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that things are more interconnected and more fragile than we expected. That fragility is also opportunity. I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.
- anonylizard 3y agoWhy would tech workers pay miners to strike (Lets ignore the insane difficulty of organising that for now)? Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers. Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware, in the same way car companies benefit from cheaper oil. Car workers don't get paid better because oil prices go up, they get laid off. Also, most rare earth minerals are mined in China, China does not look kindly to foreign 'interference', such as labour organisation.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoI'd happily earn less knowing that the people working in literal mines to support my success felt less soul destroyed.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago[flagged]
- AlecSchueler 3y agoBecause you care about people other than yourself?
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago[flagged]
- snacktaster 3y agoYou're supposed to care about all the poor souls that can't code and feel guilty that they have no opportunities whatsoever in the future when machine automation and AI drive the economy.
- ChrisClark 3y agoYou're not the only conscious being in the universe. Others have their own personal perspectives and as human's we have the capability to care about their feelings, in addition to our own. Helping someone else does not doom you to suffering. It's not a zero sum game.
- darrenringstadt 3y agoExactly. Who is VWWHFSfQ and why do I care about one random out of billions? What’s a run of the mill office worker done for me lately I can’t do for myself having grown up on farms fixing machines, growing food, later earning a masters in elastic structures and working on hardware products. Imma make chips with AI built in; why not make the machine assemble whatever state I ask for without some useless middleman?
- tysam_and 3y agoI'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not, but putting aside the impact of this statement from, say, even a non-zero-sum game perspective, this statement, er, almost ironically mirrors perfectly a few choice historical examples of why the flood broke the way it did in the past. I'm not sure if there's a way I could succinctly share a response detailing the why, other than certain general desires for relatively decent self survival and for the general wellbeing of the population outside of our small walled garden. Theres's a lot of debate that could be had over the second half of that last sentence, so all I can comfortably say is that what we take affects other people. But the bigger part is probably some of the historical irony in the statement, since it is likely what a museum piece would use if translating historically what has happened in the past into a modern day hypothetical scenario, in terms of how different sides viewed the issue and communicated.
- motohagiography 3y agoHow is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less?
- AlecSchueler 3y agoIf you abuse someone to the point that they break then it's hard to blame them for their actions against you. It's tragic to see someone feel that they have no other avenue than violence.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoOnce you've reached that point, it's not just "violence." It's self defense.
- anigbrowl 3y agoWealth & power distributions are a little more complex than just 'having stuff.' In biological bodies, excess concentrations of resources in a single organ is associated with illness, exacerbation and proliferation of other conditions, and eventually failure and death. Intense wealth concentration strikes me as the social equivalent of diabetes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rf15 3y agoYou can draw a similar parallel with cancer, including the whole "the more you have the more you get" feature of wealth.
- Volundr 3y agoI'm sure many aristocrats would have framed the revolutions against them this way. And if you are willing to look at it from the right angle a great many revolutions throughout history come down to more or less this. You can claim it's not right, but there's right and there's the reality of human nature. Push the populace hard enough they WILL push back.
- kneebonian 3y agoYou need to take some time to study some real history rather than some Marxist-Lenist bullhockey.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI have some suggested reading for you, as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Delving into the history of the labor movement in the 1930s might be insightful, too.
- nahnahg 3y ago[dead]
- throwawaylinux 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. The majority of blue collar workers, as well as quite possibly the majority of people in many countries outside your own, might have very different views about things than you do.
- logicchains 3y ago>Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution. This is simply untrue. The only large labor revolutions, the communist revolutions in Russia, China and the like, led to a massive destruction of wealth, not a transfer, plunging those countries into extreme poverty with worse standard of living than before. For over a decade after the revolution Russia didn't even have weekends. And if you're thinking of the French revolution, you should know it wasn't a revolution against the rich; it was a revolution _against the government_! That's why they beheaded the king..
- faeriechangling 3y agoThat's a noble goal and all. Just understand that global wealth equality doesn't mean this community gets richer. It means this community get poorer and by quite a lot.
- 127 3y agoThis has usually been solved by making the poor fight each other through bloody wars.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIt's absolutely ridiculous more outrage here isn't directed at wealthy companies who use labor that pays as low as $1.50 an hour. It's hard to believe these are multi-billion dollar companies paying as low as $1.50 an hour for anything let alone paying for a service which will not only make them rich, but potentially put many more out of work. It's really disgusting...
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoWhat's disgusting is all the defense of it, since it's "above market rate" in those countries. Bald admittance that all the "entrepreneurs" here would pay similar rates if they could get away with it too.