Do it.
I will start a free lunch program the next fucking day, I have a whole city full of fucking commies ready to go, I will feed your babies bellies delicious food and I will feed their minds revolutionary proletarian theory. I will teach their parents about Marx and Lenin and Fanon, Luxemburg and Kwame Ture. and we will take this shit over.
Ideologically driven psychos forget how this shit started in the first place. We remember.
The original argument was "any form of investment is a form of rent seeking, land lords are rent seeking, landlords are bad, so investment is bad."
I didn't say landlords aren't bad, I said that what makes them bad isn't their individual consumer decisions, but the decisions they are likely to make with the ruling class against our working class.
When I'm talking to other leftists I'm hoping that we share some common values. My fear is that we share values but we don't understand the material circumstances from which those values manifest. There is a reason we are against private property, rent seeking, etc., but it isn't ethical. We use a materialist dialectic. If not we are no different from religious zealots and liberals. Our beliefs aren't shibboleths, they emerge out of revolutionary necessity. I'm not picking friends or people I agree with, I'm trying to engage with messy, contradiction laden politics; History, not dogma.
The action of rent seeking is bad, but it doesn't make someone a class enemy by sheer virtue. It dehumanizes over time, people become class enemies, they arent born evil. And people can change. All I was saying was there are cases where regular people are just going along with what their material circumstances dictate, like op, and there's absolutely no point in trying to make them feel bad about it or alienate them from the broader movement. We should be bringing people in, not locking people out. This is an ethical value that I believe more than nit picking their investments or lack thereof. If we don't understand why rent seeking is bad, then we end up making lousy formulations like the one I was responding to.
When you quote me like that its like you're just trying to misconstrue what I'm trying to say, and I don't know what the point of that would even be. The post I was responding to used a really bad example, with the $200k investment even, so it was clear to me where they were coming from. You seem to want to make it look like I'm saying being a landlord is okay. What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."
Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.
There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.
I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.
It would have dropped out at the 8th grade to pursue a SoundCloud rapper career
So is it just in relation to medieval Italian city states? Idk about that history.
You said they're not capitalist, they're like proto-semi-merchantile (yeah I would agree) but that's the only reason you cite that they weren't imperialist. Hence my confusion. Or Shoot me a link, I'm a reader
That's just bog standard conservativism.
A better bit would be to go online and say we made money shorting the stock of the companies that woke hunters get mad about, and donated it to gender affirming care clinics and planned parenthood or whatever. Like anytime we donate to a charity say we made the money shorting Disney or Budweiser stock.
I am not saying that agitating within the army is the path to socialism, I specifically said that I was not making that argument. I'm saying that it had been the path to socialism in specific historical contexts, and thinking about it is not akin to allying with Nazis. Stop trying to win a debate. We can have discussions.
Some people engage with politics in other ways than the one way that is designed to be completely undemocratic; and more frequently than every 2 or 4 years.
joins ML instance
only lectures people on how to vote without providing any context, resources, or actual critique
So what's your deal anyway? Why don't you try posting on F*cebook? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you just a debate lord, or a masochist or some kind of operator? There has got to Be a better use of your time than debating literal anarchists and communists, any one of which likely dwarfs your political imagination with theory and praxis, on why they should vote for a capitalist party that is consciously and actively contributing to the mass-death of thousands of species including humanity.
It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital
-- Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Basically if your boss is paying you and your coworkers overtime, then they're just not paying another employee. You make a little more money but your boss makes a lot more, and has no incentive to hire another person. In fact as long as he can get people to work overtime, its actually against their interest to hire more people. The whole time they're crying how none wants to work, but really they're not willing to hire anyone unless it is for less than half of your salary. If they do they lose money.
Get organized
Weird that it doesn't show him being canoed by Seal Team 6
I got an identical rating it would appear
That logo sucks ass