Comment on It's been downhill since 2020
hector@lemmy.today 6 days agoWorking 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.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
The white ones did.
hector@lemmy.today 6 days 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@lemmy.ml 6 days 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 6 days 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.