Tankies stop at the system is fucked. It can’t be improved according to them, tear it down and build a new thing. Obviously that won’t happen and if we tried it would animal farm into something worse right off. And just isn’t true, the system here worked relatively well after the second world war. Never perfect, but with controls on the system and governed by mostly reason, we did make the most prosperous working class the world has every seen by a large margin. Now gone, chiseled away by the CPI having been understated for half a century averaging 2-3 percent a year just by 2008 under the new measures, while it was 5-8 percent under the old.
That was not a good faith change, it was done to steal from working people at every level and stage, and give to investors, and no one questions it even still, as the ivy league suits tell us our buying power has never been higher, when that clearly isn’t true.
The post war economy created the most prosperous working class in history but at whose expense?
The entire post-war period is littered with the US toppling third world anti-imperial movements for the sake of bolstering its position in the world/gaining economic advantage. It’s a farce. It was unsustainable. It required the slaughter of countless people to hold up that US economy. And that’s not even getting to the modern imperialist project held up by the IMF, forcing disadvantaged nations to essentially fully give themselves over to American corporations with no material gain on their part.
All that cold war bullshit had nothing to do with the high standard of living working people TOOK from the ruling class in the Great Depression, when they had some real leadership in FDR’s New Deal, and Unions.
All the subjugating other peoples had nothing to do with the high standard of living. Korea, vietnam, and so forth to all of latin america. None of that helped working people, imperialist wars never help working people’s situation. Unions, and good leaders got those gains. They put 90% taxes on the rich at obscene levels to discourage the rich taking more than their share, etc.
And that is what is missing now, organization, we need unions, but not just around where we work, we need to be organized otherwise, I think innumerable groups federated together on general forums, to cooperate on what they agree on, like not getting fucked by the super rich without consent. From that forum, where we can organize around issues, cooperate on what we agree on, both privately and publicly, we could find and groom real leaders to take government from these parasites that now control it. We are stronger than they are, we just need to unite.
It’s easy to say “Oh, I wish we had unions like we did back in the day.” But we had unions back in the day and they didn’t stop things from turning out the way they did. What we need is a sober analysis of the class dynamics and why things went awry, and what we can do differently going forward.
The government in the postwar era used a carrot and a stick to root out communists. The stick was McCarthyism, but the carrot was the fact that the government was willing to cooperate with unions provided they showed a willingness to purge communists, like the AFL/CIO did.
The decision of unions to cooperate with that is a major reason why everything has gone to hell. In the short term, sure, they got to enjoy a higher standard of living. But all the while, the ruling class was building power through imperialism and anticommunism. At a certain point, they were simply powerful enough that they no longer needed the unions’ cooperation at all, and so they betrayed and dumped them, in the Carter/Reagan era. The only thing that could’ve stopped that shift would have been if the unions had stood together in solidarity, for example in a general strike. But “standing in solidarity in recognition of a common class interest” is the sort of thing that commies do.
Decades of riding high on the promises of the New Deal era transformed unions to become almost entirely self-interest, with no solidarity even with other domestic workers, much less with the global south. And of course, all of this is a very white perspective on things. The offer to get a high standard of living in exchange for ratting out commies was never really extended to minority groups. And again, confronting racism and using your voice and position to blah blah, again, commie shit.
“You give up all ideals, all solidarity, all high minded ideals of justice and equality, and kick out the people who won’t, and we’ll give you some real nice benefits. And who cares if we get to secure our position in a generation or two, you’ll have retired by then anyway.” This is the foundation of the “left” anticommunism that won out in the West. Of course, now, that offer has been rescinded, because the ruling class already got what they wanted. And yet, we still have plenty of people who love punching left at communists for no real reason. They’re not even offering a reward for it anymore! But whether because of force of habit or indoctrination or whatever brainworms, people are still throwing around “tankie” the way they used to throw around “pinko” or “red.”
If we manage to rebuild unions, we need to ensure that they do not become compromised by narrow self-interest like they did before. We have the ability to build them from the ground up with the correct approach, but it’s only through recognizing the mistakes of the past that we have the opportunity to correct them.
Part of the problem, in 1971 the Business Roundtable huddled up a group of the most powerful companies and they agreed to cooperate on a long game to kill liberal democracy, to subordinate the government into their creature, and take away the benefits of the new deal and great society, and lower our standards of living, (even though our high wages is why they are so rich as there are people to buy their goods, when poor there are less goods bought and everyone is poorer,) and one of the many things they agreed on, was killing all rival power sources. Of the things they did, was infect the Unions with Organized Crime, on top of all of the other attacks. Meanwhile they co-opted law enforcement further and turned the country into a police state on The Fear of the Other, in the crime waves that started in the 70’s and got bad in the 80s, that they helped along. This police state was also put on the Unions that organized crime gave them more cause to target, and hurt the reputations of unions everywhere.
But more than that they got these Ivy League types to lead every agency, business, group, and unions were no exception. The got aristocrats in charge of them and everything else, aristocrats that were hostile to the union and working peoples’ interests. As if union bosses should be paid like CEO’s in the first place.
But just business cooperating on these things, while dividing the opposition, it started a slow rot. As we know there was plenty of rot before this point, but this concerted effort by the business was enough to kill the unions, and start the fall of everything that was good and decent. Worth mentioning is in appointing their ivy league aligned hacks to lead everything, including schools and regulators, they changed the CPI, the inflation number everything is based off of. They changed the measure several times to understate it. The new inflation was 2-3 average, the old averaged 5-8 just by 2008 from the 70s.
We take a pay cut every year, ignorant and trusting, none of the politicians mention it, no academics hardly mention it, we all collectively ignore it, we ignore that by 2008 under the old unchanged standard, social security checks would be worth on average 1,300 more A Month. And experiences of people backs it up. A social security check, or any paycheck, used to pay for life, it was noticeably not paying so well buy the 80’s into the 90s. It’s a pittance now.
Organization has been the key to all of their success. They are organized, we aren’t. We are stronger, but played. I see us getting played all the time, with leadership we could overcome that, turn the tables on them.
Tankies stop at the system is fucked. It can’t be improved according to them, tear it down and build a new thing. Obviously that won’t happen and if we tried it would animal farm into something worse right off. And just isn’t true, the system here worked relatively well after the second world war. Never perfect, but with controls on the system and governed by mostly reason, we did make the most prosperous working class the world has every seen by a large margin. Now gone, chiseled away by the CPI having been understated for half a century averaging 2-3 percent a year just by 2008 under the new measures, while it was 5-8 percent under the old.
That was not a good faith change, it was done to steal from working people at every level and stage, and give to investors, and no one questions it even still, as the ivy league suits tell us our buying power has never been higher, when that clearly isn’t true.
The post war economy created the most prosperous working class in history but at whose expense?
The entire post-war period is littered with the US toppling third world anti-imperial movements for the sake of bolstering its position in the world/gaining economic advantage. It’s a farce. It was unsustainable. It required the slaughter of countless people to hold up that US economy. And that’s not even getting to the modern imperialist project held up by the IMF, forcing disadvantaged nations to essentially fully give themselves over to American corporations with no material gain on their part.
All that cold war bullshit had nothing to do with the high standard of living working people TOOK from the ruling class in the Great Depression, when they had some real leadership in FDR’s New Deal, and Unions.
All the subjugating other peoples had nothing to do with the high standard of living. Korea, vietnam, and so forth to all of latin america. None of that helped working people, imperialist wars never help working people’s situation. Unions, and good leaders got those gains. They put 90% taxes on the rich at obscene levels to discourage the rich taking more than their share, etc.
And that is what is missing now, organization, we need unions, but not just around where we work, we need to be organized otherwise, I think innumerable groups federated together on general forums, to cooperate on what they agree on, like not getting fucked by the super rich without consent. From that forum, where we can organize around issues, cooperate on what we agree on, both privately and publicly, we could find and groom real leaders to take government from these parasites that now control it. We are stronger than they are, we just need to unite.
It’s easy to say “Oh, I wish we had unions like we did back in the day.” But we had unions back in the day and they didn’t stop things from turning out the way they did. What we need is a sober analysis of the class dynamics and why things went awry, and what we can do differently going forward.
The government in the postwar era used a carrot and a stick to root out communists. The stick was McCarthyism, but the carrot was the fact that the government was willing to cooperate with unions provided they showed a willingness to purge communists, like the AFL/CIO did.
The decision of unions to cooperate with that is a major reason why everything has gone to hell. In the short term, sure, they got to enjoy a higher standard of living. But all the while, the ruling class was building power through imperialism and anticommunism. At a certain point, they were simply powerful enough that they no longer needed the unions’ cooperation at all, and so they betrayed and dumped them, in the Carter/Reagan era. The only thing that could’ve stopped that shift would have been if the unions had stood together in solidarity, for example in a general strike. But “standing in solidarity in recognition of a common class interest” is the sort of thing that commies do.
Decades of riding high on the promises of the New Deal era transformed unions to become almost entirely self-interest, with no solidarity even with other domestic workers, much less with the global south. And of course, all of this is a very white perspective on things. The offer to get a high standard of living in exchange for ratting out commies was never really extended to minority groups. And again, confronting racism and using your voice and position to blah blah, again, commie shit.
“You give up all ideals, all solidarity, all high minded ideals of justice and equality, and kick out the people who won’t, and we’ll give you some real nice benefits. And who cares if we get to secure our position in a generation or two, you’ll have retired by then anyway.” This is the foundation of the “left” anticommunism that won out in the West. Of course, now, that offer has been rescinded, because the ruling class already got what they wanted. And yet, we still have plenty of people who love punching left at communists for no real reason. They’re not even offering a reward for it anymore! But whether because of force of habit or indoctrination or whatever brainworms, people are still throwing around “tankie” the way they used to throw around “pinko” or “red.”
If we manage to rebuild unions, we need to ensure that they do not become compromised by narrow self-interest like they did before. We have the ability to build them from the ground up with the correct approach, but it’s only through recognizing the mistakes of the past that we have the opportunity to correct them.
Part of the problem, in 1971 the Business Roundtable huddled up a group of the most powerful companies and they agreed to cooperate on a long game to kill liberal democracy, to subordinate the government into their creature, and take away the benefits of the new deal and great society, and lower our standards of living, (even though our high wages is why they are so rich as there are people to buy their goods, when poor there are less goods bought and everyone is poorer,) and one of the many things they agreed on, was killing all rival power sources. Of the things they did, was infect the Unions with Organized Crime, on top of all of the other attacks. Meanwhile they co-opted law enforcement further and turned the country into a police state on The Fear of the Other, in the crime waves that started in the 70’s and got bad in the 80s, that they helped along. This police state was also put on the Unions that organized crime gave them more cause to target, and hurt the reputations of unions everywhere.
But more than that they got these Ivy League types to lead every agency, business, group, and unions were no exception. The got aristocrats in charge of them and everything else, aristocrats that were hostile to the union and working peoples’ interests. As if union bosses should be paid like CEO’s in the first place.
But just business cooperating on these things, while dividing the opposition, it started a slow rot. As we know there was plenty of rot before this point, but this concerted effort by the business was enough to kill the unions, and start the fall of everything that was good and decent. Worth mentioning is in appointing their ivy league aligned hacks to lead everything, including schools and regulators, they changed the CPI, the inflation number everything is based off of. They changed the measure several times to understate it. The new inflation was 2-3 average, the old averaged 5-8 just by 2008 from the 70s.
We take a pay cut every year, ignorant and trusting, none of the politicians mention it, no academics hardly mention it, we all collectively ignore it, we ignore that by 2008 under the old unchanged standard, social security checks would be worth on average 1,300 more A Month. And experiences of people backs it up. A social security check, or any paycheck, used to pay for life, it was noticeably not paying so well buy the 80’s into the 90s. It’s a pittance now.
Organization has been the key to all of their success. They are organized, we aren’t. We are stronger, but played. I see us getting played all the time, with leadership we could overcome that, turn the tables on them.
Agree with you on the organization front. Awakening mass class consciousness should be the focal point of every single person left of center.