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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#281

Post by Miner49er »

username90 wrote: post #271
viburnum wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gay people can get married in America, which was completely unthinkable a generation ago. 100% due to activists, many who risked their lives to make it happen.

Gay marriage was also prevented in America for hundreds of years 100% due to activists. There is no money for or against gay marriage, it was always only activists on both sides so it isn't a good example of a class war.

I'm not so sure, gay rights intersects with the class war in at least a couple of ways:

- Dividing the working class on the issue of gay rights is an effective way for the elites to get the working class to ignore the class war.

- Control of reproduction offers some control over labor.

Re: The Real Class War

#282

Post by esoterica »

Despegar wrote: post #135
intended wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s incorrect - the global pie has grown bigger. Inches and markers exist which never existed before. All those new workers are consumers for goods and services from America. America soy beans are famously bought in China, as are American bonds. Economically- if you get cheaper goods, you do more with the same income, meaning your quality of life goes up. The issue is not the growth of China- the issue is the dist…

The pie may have grown, but aside from labor in the Global South, the people who have captured the gains from that growth have been the capital class in the developed nations (i.e not blue collar workers or the professional class). And no, getting some of your compensation in stock options doesn't make you apart of the capital class, unless you can stop working.

You can retire on your investments in your 30s or 40s on a higher end professional salary if you’re not an idiot with money. My old boss retired at 31. Not a CEO or a venture capitalist, just another schmuck who came in to the office to write code every day and got paid a lot of money to do it.

Re: The Real Class War

#283

Post by buboard »

simonh wrote: post #105

This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…

The idea was that globalization would push the West to ‘creative’ jobs. Instead we got bullshit jobs. (And this is even more prevalent here in europe)

Re: The Real Class War

#284

Post by giggles_giggles »

macintux wrote: post #140
giggles_giggles wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's been growth; it's just all gone to the very wealthy in the West. Wrong. According to ourworldindata.org the world population in extreme poverty fell by half since 1990. I'm sure there are other sources to match this data as well. But that doesn't fit your narrative.

You misinterpreted the grammar. "In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is the intent. Not "All the growth in the world has gone to the wealthy in the West."

"In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is also a claim that is broad, hard to define, and is empty without evidence.

Of course those who pay attention to these sorts of things know that the reality is more complex than that, even if you limit your analysis to "The West," which isn't a unified bloc. See the differences exhibited by the change in income inequality by these nations: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes.png . You can't make a generalized statement about "wealth in the West," because it has exhibited different patterns in different countries over different timeframes. You have to specify all of those parameters before an intelligent conversation can even be started.

Even if the grandparent was worded too vaguely to communicate the poster's actual point, the grandparent turned out to be making a statement that was too low resolution to actually communicate anything beyond hand-waving anti-Capital rhetorical sentiment.

Re: The Real Class War

#285

Post by jimbokun »

snowwrestler wrote: post #265
tvanantwerp wrote: post #159

I've spent my career working in public policy circles, and this rings true to me. > At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “un­acceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies. > Unlike the work­ing class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and re­q…

Have you never heard of the labor movement? The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class? How have you spent your career working in public policy circles and come away with so little understanding of what grassroots activism is, and the impact it has…

> The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class?

But didn't all that happen almost a century ago?

Re: The Real Class War

#286

Post by jimbokun »

ryanong wrote: post #270
ameister14 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activists, yes - but not really through marching. Money, judicial challenges and coordinated political action to promote marriage equality as a goal were the key. The debate was reframed, messaging was crafted carefully and the groups organizing and paying for it all were extremely organized and cohesive. The Proteus fund and specifically the CMC did a heck of a lot here.

Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.

Is this demonstrably, empirically true, or is it something you are just telling yourself because you desperately want it to be true?

Re: The Real Class War

#287

Post by CharlesColeman »

kortilla wrote: post #34
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advancing humanity should be a requirement for access to that kind of money. It's a hugely privileged position to be in, and the idea that it comes with exactly zero responsibility to Rest of World is nonsensical.

Why? The service and/or product provided by their business is providing significant value to society (lest they wouldn’t be collecting profit). Is the reward for creating a successful business really more responsibility to just give back instead of using it to create more business?

> The service and/or product provided by their business is providing significant value to society (lest they wouldn’t be collecting profit).

Making a profit is not proof of providing value to society. It's a tempting simplification to make, but it's false.

Re: The Real Class War

#288

Post by buboard »

paulus_magnus2 wrote: post #103

The resentment of big capital is not entirely without a reason. Most money right now is "passively" deployed into pre-existing securities. This means it's used to extract existing value by market cornering / scarcity generation / rent seeking / monopolies / oliglopolies. On the other side there is new value / securities creation. This is what people like Elon Musk are doing. He took circa $50mln of his own money, add…

The valuation of his companies doesnt translate to societal value necessarily. As much as i love Musk, Rockets and battery cars are aspirations. I d much rather he was leading a couple of biotech companies instead

Re: The Real Class War

#289

Post by buboard »

raldi wrote: post #180

Clickbait antidote: The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent—or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on profes­sional labor.

I d say take the bait because the article is brilliant

Re: The Real Class War

#290

Post by AnimalMuppet »

triceratops wrote: post #278
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two almost completely unrelated wrongs don't make anything.

Trade secrets and copyright are both types of intellectual property. They aren't unrelated.

Well, they're both lumped into this bucket called "intellectual property". Indy cars and unicycles are both vehicles, too. They share the property of having wheels. That doesn't make them particularly related.

The laws for copyright and for trade secrets are quite different. In fact, when someone talks about "intellectual property" rather than about one of the specific kinds (patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets), they often wind up reaching wrong conclusions. They try to apply concepts from one kind of IP on another kind, and it doesn't work.

So: Theft of trade secrets isn't going to fix draconian copyright law, not only because two wrongs don't make a right, but also because copyright and trade secrets don't have all that much to do with each other.

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