StrayCatFrump

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Poor people can't afford to lend money when they're struggling just to eat and make rent. It's not a viable way for them to "keep up" with inflation.

But in a sense you're right: inflation (by itself) isn't the problem. The problem is that wages don't keep up with it. Because the labor movement has been failing not only to make gains, but to prevent failures (e.g. keep our effective wages from going down). Most forms of capitalist passive income keep up with inflation by design, which is no accident.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Generally you should do what:

  1. Maximizes your personal well-being (though note I'm not saying "wealth", because they two are not always the same), and
  2. Satisfies your personal and ideological principles as well as possible, at least to the point where you can live with yourself.

Just because we have systemic critiques doesn't mean we should go live in a cave and eat bugs. To the degree possible we should prefigure the society we want to build, but torturing ourselves individually to do it is both unproductive and likely takes away from our focus on more important things like organizing and taking direct action that impacts the system. We do tend to make personal sacrifices to further our ideological goals, but there's both a practical limit and one where we shouldn't be cruel to each other in our expectations.

Many of us are vegans. Most of us probably avoid buying shares in oil companies. But all of our circumstances are different. Perhaps people salting Chevron to radicalize union organizing there will wind up with its stocks in their retirement accounts that are difficult to divest from without harming their ability to retire, due to their particular circumstances. It seems pretty shitty to expect someone to just get rid of them without us having some kind of dependable (e.g. mutual aid) infrastructure in place to take care of each other in our old age.

TL;Dr: Yet you participate in society. Curious!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A liberal who waves a red flag and pretends they aren't liberal. Often they call everyone else (including us) liberal. 😂 😉

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thusly, any violent revolution stands a STRONG chance of being shunned by those who do not want a government with sanctioned violence.

I disagree with this part. Violent revolution—violent opposition to our oppression—is absolutely necessary. However, turning it on ourselves—that is, in any direction other than that which opposes authority—is a recipe for disaster as you say.

It's not violence itself that is the problem. There are literally always forms of violence sanctioned by every single political philosophy (including absolute pacifism/non-violence, which sanctions violence performed by the state even if its subscribers often don't realize this). The question is how and when that violence is performed and by whom, and the anarchist/non-authoritarian answer is that it must only be in the struggle for liberation, not the fight to gain and maintain power over others.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

It's not. Gates' "charity" does an incredible amount of damage, and also destroys a lot of positive change that would otherwise be happening. For example, he was instrumental in ensuring an open-source COVID-19 vaccine didn't get released, in a way that potentially denied access to COVID vaccines to millions—perhaps billions—throughout the Global South, in the interests of protecting the profits of big pharma. His diversion of education improvements into private and charter schools is pretty infamous for destroying attempts to improve public education...all so that education can be repurposed into creating good, obedient, unthinking workers for capitalist industry. And a lot of his "food programs" and "vaccination programs" throughout Africa have done a great deal of damage to the general public trust in such programs, while arguably doing as much harm as good materially as well.

You might want to do your homework. Here's a start: