I have always said that so long as McDonalds has a hot burger for a few bucks on every street corner, there will not be a revolution in the US.
Rather than starving to death, we have an obesity epidemic along with an opiate epidemic, which prevents the revolution from getting up off the couch.
Not trying to claim a conspiracy here, just the way things are.
can’t say I’m a huge fan of Nick Cruse or the rest of RBN, but a graph’s a graph I guess
Looking at wealth distribution on a country-by-country basis is a mistake.
Take that US wealth distribution graph and then graph it with the rest of the world; the reason there’s no revolution becomes obvious.
Despite the current wealth inequality a good number of people are still living decently enough.
I’m waiting to see what happens when Trump starts putting his taxes in place. When people are miserable enough they’ll take to the streets and protest. If we reach a breaking point where living conditions completely break down and there still aren’t protests then it may as well be over for democracy.
As if the US is currently a Democracy
Never has been
As if there is really a democracy left anywhere. We’re going back to fiefdom baby!
Yeah there is no single explanation for revolution. Looking strictly to wealth distribution is reductionistic at best. I mean, wealth distribution was arguably better in the U.S. in the 1860s than it was in the prelude to Revolutionary France and yet we had a Civil War lmfao. There are endless examples that disprove this rule. The reality is: popular unrest is extremely complicated, and the factors that lead up to it are varied with fluctuating levels of influence at different stages of development. Sure, perception of wealth is a key component… but its hardly an explainer.
yes but have you considered that in nk they have no food and push the trains? (source: CIA) instead of all this radical talk i think we should VOTE harder, especially for progressive like bernie and aoc
Careful, bub, there are people lurking who think this quite seriously
You don’t? Tankie detected 😠
Gasp! My clever disguise has been sundered!
Wait till most people are starving.
Elon Musk could transfer $1 million in stock to each of his 153,473 employees,
which would cost him $153 billion and he would still have a net worth of $302 billion!
He’d still be the richest man in the world and would still have $56 billion more than Jeff Bezos!And some of that money he has came from under-paying factory workers at his Fremont, California assembly plant. For a long time the hourly rate was $22 (not sure what it is now) but auto plants in the Midwest were paying that or better and he was paying $22 per hour in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.
Elon is now worth more than Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates combined.
Tbf, if he transfered that stock, the price of it would crash as the employees sold it. He’d have to do some kind of slow transfer over several years.
All businesses should be worker or consumer cooperatives. Capital shouldn’t be divorced from stakeholders like in our current capitalist system, but rather socially owned by the direct stakeholders like in Mutualism.
And some of that money he has came from under-paying factory workers at his Fremont, California assembly plant. For a long time the hourly rate was $22 (not sure what it is now) but auto plants in the Midwest were paying that or better and he was paying $22 per hour in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.
All those employees were given stock options as part of their total compensation which those other auto factories did not give to everyone.
All the early floor workers would be multi millionaires if they kept their initial stock, not counting using the employee program to buy more at a discounted rate or further employee incentives.
Anyone who joined a little after the Model S was being sold and the early model 3 time up to around mid 2020 would have around a quarter million if they didn’t aquire any additional stock.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla as a company created the most employee millionaires of any recent USA company due to giving every employee stock as part of their compensation.
Early SpaceX employees are in a similar boat, but it’s harder to get rid of their shares since it’s private so it’s harder to quantify it.
The “wealth distribution” theory of unrest is so thoroughly debunked its insane to see people who still think in these terms. Smh.
why would you crop out the source declaration?
Why would you post an image of text?
“Data for Boston 40% in France is extrapolated from a single data point.”
Oh I see, this is reliable data.
You want absolutely precise statistic data from XVIII century?
I want more than one data point. This is poor scholarship being presented as rigor.
The reason there isn’t a revolution in the USA is mostly down to atomization. Suburban growth directly leads to insular communities with no sense of responsibility to the rest of their brothers and sisters. Working class families in the burbs have functionally 0 ability to organize.
To add that on, I like to underscore the gravity of the situation here with details:
- The top 10% of earners starts at ~170k/yr
- The top 1% start at ~820k/yr
- The top 0.1% start at ~3,300k/yr (3.3 million)
- If Elon Musk had 100% of his net worth in really basic bonds giving 5%/yr he’d be pulling in 22 BILLION dollars per year, forever.
The interest on his earnings alone is equivalent to 130,000 workers at the start of the top 10%. That’s the entire workforce of American Airlines for comparison.
If the average person was paid like the 0.1% for 1 year they could retire and live off 65k/yr forever.
This chart is broken down by quintiles but it illustrates the disparity well imo.
Half of the wealth of the top 20% here (excluding top 1%) is in businesses or real estate they own. Most of that will be their own house and a small business, though
leeches“landlords” mostly fall in this category too.For the top 1% that’s more like 20% of their net worth.
No dude you mixed some numbers up - 5%/yr of 440 billion is 22 BILLION dollars per year.
Unless you meant he could put 0.1% of his wealth (440 mil) to pull 22 million a year.
In fact, he could put less than half of his total net worth, 200 bil, into a basic savings account returning 0.5% a year and live off of a billion dollars a year, which is equivalent to the median income of 16,666 others.
While you were writing this comment I was updating my original comment because I messed up! Correct: 22 BILLION.
Market 10 year average is 11%. 400B at 11% for 30 years left of his life. That’s not 1 trillion dollars, not 2… Not 3… It’s over 9 trillion.
His money if allowed to be passed down and kept in the market, would make more than 1T dollars a year at that point.
Yeah but his net worth is tied mostly in specific stocks.
And beyond that broad market withdrawal rates mean you can really only safely pull about 4% without eating into the nest egg.
But yeah it’s all true - he’s on track to a trillion before he dies.
He doesn’t really need to sell though does he. Like imagine if ceo’s came out to trade and give public announcements beforehand to build trust. For instance an Apple Executive trading directly with Musk equal valued shares and telling the populous it is a good thing as these executives are showing that they believe strongly in these other companies. Next thing you know he’s got his investments varied across every field, and should maintain a portfolio matching the market average whether one field struggles for a bit or not. It “looks” like they are all showing faith in each other’s future gains, but in reality is is diversifying their portfolio to ensure no large setbacks
What’s interesting is that this doesn’t even tell the whole picture.
Because those people earning $170k/year? More than likely their net worth is negative. They owe more than they’re making, and even at that income rate and excluding long term debt, they have just enough in savings to last three months max.
Most people that are making that kind of money are pretty smart. They have multiple investment strategies, multiple places that they store their money, and typically have some sort of easily accessible nest egg (like a mutual fund or crypto). I guarantee about 3/4 of them have enough to last AT LEAST 6-8 months without a job before things started getting a little tight.
If your living within your means and making that kind of money, you don’t really have to worry about losing a job or things breaking down, or other big issues (short of medical emergencies).
Yeah and those are national statistics.
You don’t hit the top 10% in New York state until you break 330k
Neighborhood politics, social gatherings, community hotspots has massively declined in the last two generations,
It’s really hard to organize anything face to face?
It is and while I don’t think that was Eisenhower’s 5d chess play it is more or less directly from cold war era policies that encouraged Americans to live anywhere besides a city.
Yet if you keep the comparison until present times, you can only acknowledge the fact that the French once again rioted very violently and for months back in 2018-20. The “yellow vests” were mostly lower-income workers from far away suburbs and villages. Facebook let them organize and have a real impact on national politics and policy.
It was also a significant amount of right wing agitprop opposing any reduction to fossil fuel usage…
Yep, I wonder what would happen in the US if gas was suddenly taxed 50% up (much more than the yellow vests case, but it is a thought exercise)
The internet is also a big reason. Why put effort into fighting back when you can just removed about it on social media?
Are you sure it’s not 220 mil or 22 billion a year
Whoops it’s 22 billion not million.
The French people do not tolerate shit, the Americans on the hand will wallow in it and say work harder for less.
It’s one of the main reasons our owner class has sought to mock the French with “surrender” slurs and “freedom fries.”
They’d very much like the citizenry to forget Frances contribution to America and “western culture” over the last 200 years lest they get any ideas.
100%
In France, they set shit on fire at the drop of a hat. Can’t have that in 'Murica.
Oh we definitely set some shit in fire after watching how they lynched George Floyd
I know it’s cliche by this point. But this one misattributed1 quote has become more prescient than ever.
They’ve learned that giving us new shiny shit every year will keep the majority of us mollified against all kinds of injustice.
1 - Commonly credited to George Orwell’s novel. It’s actually from the stage play adaptation.
I wouldn’t glorify Orwell, he was violently reactionary, even Anarchists fighting alongside him questioned why he wasn’t on the “other side.” He had a deeply aristocratic worldview, admired Hitler, and despised the Working Class for their “stupidity.” I recommend reading On Orwell as well as A Critical Read of Animal Farm.
Not glorifying Orwell. I’m aware of his history. The quote actually belongs to either Robert Icke or Duncan MacMillan; the two men who wrote the stage adaptation. Politics aside, it’s a fitting quote.
Fair enough! Just wanted to point it out as I think he leads a legacy dangerous to the left.
Essentially, we get to eat cake every so often, while bread rapidly becomes unaffordable.
If you just give everyone unlimited bread sticks most people never even make it to the entree, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
There are significant barriers in place for revolution in the US. The Proletariat is still under the belief that supporting US Imperialism will benefit themselves more than Socialism. Additionally, theory is frequently coopted by Trots and other impractical forms, resulting in people endlessly seeking to critique society, not change it (your Noam Chomskys and the like). Moreover, labor organization has been millitantly crushed.
I recommend starting with theory. I have an introductory Marxist reading list if you want a place to start.
For elaboration on Chomsky, I recommend reading On Chomsky.
i saw someone else try to share a similar message on tiktok yesterday and the overwhelming majority of the american users referred theory as little more than “book clubs for intellectuals” despite the chinese & latin american users trying to defend its usefulness on the same post.
getting my feet wet with this reading list is making it clear to me that i’m still a heavily propagandized american liberal and some of the tiktokers who called it a book club had seemingly more knowledge of theory that I did, so i wasn’t qualified to speak up. what would your response be to such a criticism?
People who denounce theory denounce revolution. It’s plain and simple. Back in pre-revolutionary Russia, the SRs declared “an end to theory” as a unifying factor to be celebrated, and declared assassinations “transfer power.” This is, of course, ridiculous, theory is important because it is useful despite disagreements over it, and assassinations do not “transfer power,” but create a void filled by those closest to it, always bourgeois, never proletarian. The Bolsheviks ended up being correct, that theory, discipline, and organization is what brings real revolution, and the SRs have mostly been forgotten. I recommend reading Revolutionary Adventurism.
It’s important to recognize that Westerners have an implicit desire to maintain the status quo, having been taught all our lives that we have the “best possible” system yet. The western leftist idea of “no true Marxism yet” fits conveniently with that narrative, it’s deeply chauvanistic and moreover anti-revolutionary. Looking at the most popular trends of Marxism in the west, we see many Trots and “orthodox” Marxists, some of the least successful in producing real revolution globally, while in the Global South Marxism-Leninism is dominant.
The “book club” Marxists are equally dangerous as the “adventurist” Marxists (or Anarchists, if you prefer). It is only through uniting theory with practice that we will succeed. You cannot be anti-theory and you cannot be anti-practice, you must unite both. I want to commend your discipline in not speaking up, one of the guiding principles of Marxists is “no investigation, no right to speak.” Muddying the waters with low quality input is pollutant, asking good questions and practicing self-restraint when speaking on what you don’t know clarifies the waters of discourse.
I highly recommend reading Masses, Elites, and Rebels: the Theory of “Brainwashing.”
To add on to what else has been said, you can just be blunt and obnoxious about it. Tell them “If a bunch of barely literate peasants in China can figure out Kapital on their own despite it being written in another language, you can read a pamphlet or two.”
People smarter than anyone alive have done more in worse conditions and did us the courtesy of writing down what worked and what didn’t. The Bolsheviks, Black Panther Party, anarchists in Civil War Spain and Nazi Germany, etc. were in life or death situations trying to mobilize leftwing revolution. The least anyone calling themselves a socialist can do is read what they wrote. If you say “I don’t need to read theory because it’s just a book club,” you’re being an arrogant, egotistical asshole.
We also live in an age where there are audiobooks and videos that will read this stuff to you for free, something our predecessors didn’t have. People with disabilities have used these tools to help them understand theory when they struggle with reading. There’s really no excuse.
The top 10% have 70.7% of wealth in the US currently (from the federal reserve website)
France didn’t have the sophisticated propaganda machine the US has.
One could argue that the Church had been extremely efficient at manufacturing consent for centuries. It was still the case for most of French society in the late 1780s. It also led to a civil war between Revolutionaries and traditionalists (including peasants).
Really, I think anyone considering themselves a Leftist needs to read False Witnesses and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing.” Both are excellent examples of why people don’t change their minds when seeing indisputable evidence, they willingly go along with narratives that they find more comfortable. It explains the outright anger liberals express when anticommunism is debunked. That doesn’t mean Communists don’t do the same thing, but as we live in a liberal dominated west (most likely, assuming demographics) this happens to a much lesser extent because liberalism is that which supplies these “licenses” to go along, while Communism requires hard work to begin to accept. This explains the mountains of sources Communists keep on hand, and the lack thereof from liberals who argue from happenstance and vibes.
Poverty in 1700 is very different from poverty in 2000, which allows for significant, but not unlimited, skewing.
