I understand everything, except the eating out. I mean, I don’t do it because I don’t have the money, but aren’t moet restaurants and takeout places local?
I don’t necessarily boycott businesses just to achieve some higher purpose like beating fascism away or whatever- most of the time it’s cuz I know the owner(s) are assholes to their workers. Fuck those guys. Plus, most food served outside is inferior to the one I make at home, so not much of value is lost.
Being local doesn’t magically make something good, though. Everything is local to somewhere.
My problem is with capitalism itself, not specifically American businesses or big businesses or whatever. Small business owners are a major part of the economy. If the small business owners aren’t feeling the pain of capitalism too, they do not have incentive to join the rest of the working class as part of a social revolution.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
So do you grow your own food and harvest your own electricity and smelt you own ore to make your own electronic devices to post on the internet that you’re accessing via your own isp?
“Small business owners” feels like an arbitrary line. Sure, there’s those that are doing it because they’re bootlickers and capitalists, but restaurants are terrible investments. If you’re avoiding chains and conglomerates, you’re more likely to be supporting a comrade who is trying to survive in a capitalist country. This is not an ACAB situation. There are employee owned small businesses and work places that treat workers fairly.
As I said, I just do everything I can to minimize spending, because spending keeps the economy afloat. Cooking my own food is just cheaper, and thus reduces spending overall. You don’t need to follow my example if you disagree, that’s totally fine, do what you feel is right.
I understand everything, except the eating out. I mean, I don’t do it because I don’t have the money, but aren’t moet restaurants and takeout places local?
I don’t necessarily boycott businesses just to achieve some higher purpose like beating fascism away or whatever- most of the time it’s cuz I know the owner(s) are assholes to their workers. Fuck those guys. Plus, most food served outside is inferior to the one I make at home, so not much of value is lost.
Being local doesn’t magically make something good, though. Everything is local to somewhere.
My problem is with capitalism itself, not specifically American businesses or big businesses or whatever. Small business owners are a major part of the economy. If the small business owners aren’t feeling the pain of capitalism too, they do not have incentive to join the rest of the working class as part of a social revolution.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
So do you grow your own food and harvest your own electricity and smelt you own ore to make your own electronic devices to post on the internet that you’re accessing via your own isp?
“Small business owners” feels like an arbitrary line. Sure, there’s those that are doing it because they’re bootlickers and capitalists, but restaurants are terrible investments. If you’re avoiding chains and conglomerates, you’re more likely to be supporting a comrade who is trying to survive in a capitalist country. This is not an ACAB situation. There are employee owned small businesses and work places that treat workers fairly.
As I said, I just do everything I can to minimize spending, because spending keeps the economy afloat. Cooking my own food is just cheaper, and thus reduces spending overall. You don’t need to follow my example if you disagree, that’s totally fine, do what you feel is right.