I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this isn’t part of what radicalized me back in the early 2000s.

However, as my world expanded through my life experiences and reading I came to understand that so much of what seems like a natural reward is artificiality propped at the expense of people in other parts of the world. That’s the system. Western workers have access to a wide range of material goods with prices kept artificially low because they are produced by workers who are paid less. What manufacturing that exists is much cleaner than it used to be, because the dangerous stuff is off shore, far from our eyes. Hell, we don’t even have to deal with the huge mountains of waste we produce! Temporary Migrant workers in agriculture and domestic work fill the same role except it is their labour that is exported cheaply.

I know the meme is about housing and the ‘cheaply made goods’ apply to that too. I live in a house built in the 1960s that is kind of the icon of cheap and cheerful working class post war period sprawl boom. Block foundation a wood frame with vinyl siding. Cheap to build, but can get expensive to maintain.

I guess all I mean to say is that I hope people who are seeing this problem are not easily swayed back into complacency if the capitalists recalibrate the feed of crumbs they give to the workers to ensure compliance. I hope for an era of world wide worker solidarity as it is the only way to tackle the problems capitalism has left us with.

I’m not going to try and convince people to have the exact same beliefs and analysis as I have because that’s silly and futile. I think most people would not find this documentary to be too radical: www.storyofstuff.org

Maybe give it a watch if you have the time and the comparison to depression era housing practices sounded reasonable lol. It’s so easy to take for granted how much things have changed in the last 150 or so years in north america, especially post WW2.

(You can save yourself the well acksualy about Henry Ford and his approach to wages in the 1910s. They are an important piece of the puzzle but reducing the cost of consumer goods allowed western wages to stay low by retain buying power so the appearance was of increasing standard of living that was increasing dependant on the ability to exploit global workers.)