change my view

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/238912

If you’ve ever looked at how rightwing movements operate, it appears they throw a lot of money around. And because of the world we live in, it gets results, ex the canadian trucker protest having basically all the same amenities as a festival, nearly a theme park. Advertising budget. Funding institutions/youtube channels to spread bs.

I think the first thing a leftist should do is, in order:

  1. get a good enough income for themself. This can include mutual aid or even things like food banks, depending on your philosophy.

1b) study some finance, ex the finance diet and use tricks from financial sources to boost income. This includes stock market/saving for retirement. I can elaborate later if u want on why savings are important. Including trying to use tax loop holes for our advantage. The rightwingers get an edge from this, we need to even the playing field

  1. take care of other important things like enough exercise, good diet, dating

  2. actual left things. But starting with making sure other lefties are well off financially. I’m not sure how to do this and not create capitalists. But technically if you have 0.0001% of stocks, you (the worker) owns 0.0001% of the means of production of that company. A good approach might be starting a worker co-op, where you give people a good wage and recruit youngins right out of high school. That way they learn what a just economic system is and when they branch of to other companies, they will hopefully expect just treatment and be more ready to push for a union in their new workplace.

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    3 years ago

    Counterpoint:

    Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

    There’s no virtue in being poor, but it’s all to easy for becoming rich (and I have a low bar for that) to change you in ways you do not expect.

    Fortunately, it’s not really up to the individual leftist whether they actually become rich or not, and the vast majority never will. No amount of “using tricks from financial sources” will change that.

    (edit: hit enter way too early)

    • TheConquestOfBed
      4·
      3 years ago

      Exactly. The proletariat isn’t going to de-proletarianize itself just by ‘being good citizens’, otherwise they would have already risen out of the wealth inequality built into the system. OP is trying to defeat liberalism with liberalism.

      What the proletariat has which the bourgeoise don’t have is numbers. The bottom rungs of society are larger than even the labor aristocracy. So appealing to a broad base (not by adopting lib/fash aesthetics as so many leftists seem to desire) means spreading the load out among those greater numbers. A small amount of effort/resources from a large number of people can equal the efforts of a small number of very rich people. A very basic succdem analogy is the Bernie Sanders campaign where the average donation was $27. A more extreme version would be the liberation of Vietnam where a great mass of people in extreme poverty beat the odds of the imperial machine. Ho Chi Minh and Sanders achieved this by appealing to people’s material interests and not through aesthetics or big self-interested donors.

    • sascuachOP
      11·
      3 years ago

      using tricks from financial sources

      Personally, I didn’t have a budget/spending plan and had more trouble with money before. Having a budget helped me out. Building up some savings in my account has helped a lot when I’ve been in-between job. Most people irl i’ve spoken to don’t know very much about budgeting or the concept of saving up an emergency safety net. I think all people should ideally have knowledge of this and attempt to work towards it.

      • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.ml
        3·
        3 years ago

        There’s a liminal group of people for whom a budget will be the difference between not building a safety net, and building a safety net; it’s just not very large.

        The rest? Well, they’re somewhere around here right about now: https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the-pasta-kevin-jack-monroe/

        It really winds me up when advice that would be handy for the former gets used as advice for the latter - the old “financial literacy classes at food banks” jobbie, for instance.

        • sascuachOP
          1·
          3 years ago

          Will a budget/spending plan fix systemic issues like you see in your link, https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the-pasta-kevin-jack-monroe/, no. But if someone goes from no ‘spending plan’ to having one, it will probably help, since it helped me.

          Might be bc we live in different places, but I never see “financial literacy classes at food banks”, however when I occasionally see job ads at poverty focused places, I found those quite helpful - it’s how i got into the work im doing currently