This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)
These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.
I’ve noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.
In part, killing capitalists is not killing capitalism. We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others. Retribution is only a proxy to practical justice, not justice itself. The rich should be forced to give up their wealth, not punished for their actions. They should only be killed for resisting. Violence is necessary to deal with the violent, but it will never be inherently good.
We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.
The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.
Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.
But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.
I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.
My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.
It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)
I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.
I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.
It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.
Things look really bad, but I ultimately realized that dwelling in doom has no benefits when compared to hope. I don’t blindly hope things will work out, but I never write off the future. The future will be best if we think we will win.
Bullshit. Conservatives don’t want people living in tents. I’m tired of all this propaganda. They clearly want anyone who can’t afford a house in a prison, not a tent.
From a Pure capitalist POV, the only thing wrong with that scenario is that the prisoners probably won’t be working. Or won’t be working enough. Capitalism isn’t concerned with a balanced state budget
Nah in America prisoners are literal slaves as allowed in the 13th amendment so the GAP and Nike will be plenty happy the more people are in prison. :(
I find myself temporarily kind of sort of not really homeless. I bought five acres of land, with an agreement on file that the county would open the barrier upon purchase. Here I am 5 months later still struggling to even get them to answer my calls much less open my barrier. So while I have land, and an RV, I have nowhere to put it.
The majority of RV parks have no availability for long-term stay, even if they did they cost pretty much the same if not more than renting an apartment which is stupid. And most places are insanely hostile towards RVs staying anywhere else. I’ve been lucky in that I happen to be near a rest stop that is both usually not busy and absolutely huge. I’ve been sneaking under the radar staying here longer than I should occasionally hanging out at a wallmart or something during business hours to avoid being noticed.
But this is getting harder and harder as most public Waste stations have closed, and the ones that are open still have gotten rid of their potable water so I might be able to dump my Wastewater but I have nowhere to then refill water.
I built this RV to be great for 24/7 living, I have over 4 kilowatts of solar on the roof, I have over 15 KW hours of battery storage so I don’t even need an electrical hookup. I have a full size heat pump hot water heater, two chest freezers one of which is to use as a fridge, and I have about 100 gallons freshwater capacity. On top of that I have enough filtration on my water system to make it so that I could probably just safely use stream water if I really wanted. I’ve got multiple levels of whole home size filtration right at the tank, and then for all my drinking and cooking water it goes through an additional 10 stage filter system that has reverse osmosis and alkaline remineralization. It’s in good condition, clean, and it’s hard to miss the solar lining the whole thing. It’s obviously not a dilapidated homeless RV but people treat me like I’m some kind of homeless crack addict just because I’m in an RV.
My wife and I sold our house about two years ago to travel for her job, and we are on our second rv. Full time is difficult literally everywhere, and you are absolutely correct about the expense of a full time spot in an rv park. We currently pay $700/m for an absolute dump outside of a major city in ND. That’s literally what my mortgage was before we sold the house. It’s $1000/m at the KOA up the street.
It’s fucked out there if you didn’t already have a home and fixed rates 10 years ago. We aren’t quite struggling but plenty of others in every park we have stayed at are.
Whenever I do, someone will point out that houses today are, on average, bigger.
Houses are bigger because lots are bigger, so developers have to build bigger houses on them in order for the improvement value to be high enough to turn a profit.
Lots are bigger because the zoning code was designed to make them too expensive for minorities to afford, once the Fair Housing Act came through and de-jure segregation and restrictive deed restrictions were outlawed.
In other words, not only is “the houses today are bigger” not really the rebuttal people saying it think it is (because it’s not driven by genuine market forces), they’re also defending institutional racism.
They also fail to mention that the cost of materials today is wildly lower making larger homes easier to achieve. Not to also mention advances in building techniques.
I don’t know about you but I’ll gladly take the house on the top (also as a Transfem the lab is nice but I’m Asexual so that bedroom is exclusively for sleeping and Blåhaj).
I am not trying to flex but I have a Sprinter van and camper trailer with a Starlink mount that my wife and I use to “go off-grid” in Wyoming and Montana (Yellowstone, Grand Teton, etc, area). It doesn’t suck. If you can make just enough to maintain a lifestyle that keeps you in nature, I highly recommend it.
PS: A lot of people (young and old) in my area of Wyoming do that. They work the high tourist seasons and odd jibs in the low season, then spend the rest of their time out in nature.
This is my retirement plan (I hope). I’d love to do it sooner even if the wife and I both end up with remote jobs. I’d love to just travel all over then US then find a spot to plop down for like a month and explore. After we are done move on to another spot.
I’ve legit dreamed of doing something like that. My wife and I could pretty easily do our jobs fully remote, but she’d never go for it as she likes to physically be in the office too much. We’ve also got a baby on the way in a few weeks, so it’d be even less feasible then. Oh well - I can dream.
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