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:
- 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
take care of other important things like enough exercise, good diet, dating
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Please Engels, I just need a few more pounds this month. Jenny is out of stuff to pawn and my kids are sick.
But technically if you have 0.0001% of stocks, you (the worker) owns 0.0001% of the means of production of that company.
Just a contention I have, but I don’t think it really works this way. At that point, you’re just being a stockholder. You’re just profiting off the labor of other workers.
Of course, we all benefit from exploited labour one way or another, as is the way of capitalism. I think you would just need to be real with yourself and recognize what you’re doing for what it is.
One of us doesn’t understand stocks. From what I know, if me and like 10 million left friends bought all the stocks to like best buy, we’d have near complete governance of best buy.
That’s how stocks work right?
“Leftists” just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps basically
the take lacks all awareness for the history of colonial/imperial crimes that rightwingers are just there to defend politically for their monarchist funders… this is not the take of a leftist imho. this is ancap bullshit by people who don’t know or consciously disregard historic evidence
More like having a budget/spending plan and emergency funds in the bank account.
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.
Exactly what China is trying to do, and this is why it has results.
We have a very idealist problem which is basically “we don’t like this, so we pretend it doesn’t exist”, to a point it harms us. Like when Anarchists don’t like the notion of power control or subjection, so they pretend it’s not something that has to be tackled and used.
Exactly what China is trying to do, and this is why it has results.
I approve lol
I haven;t read much into china’s tactics but now that you mention it, it does sounds like what cnn headlines say. (Cnn says stuff about china improving standards of living for chinese)
To think Rightwing groups have money because their members are “so motivated and discplined” is just complete and utter hogwash and misunderstanding of the continueity and transfer of wealth in this society since colonialism/imperialism/the holocaust and the empire of vertically integrated drug money laundering that the “west” has become since it started cooperating with the likes of REINHARD GEHLEN & KLAUS BARBIE
It’s all WW2 loot and drug money. colonial loot hidden in the shell companies and corporations under f.e. Dupont(heritage of the congo genocide, rubber slavery, e.t.c.) insurance and banking money stolen in financial crashes, bubbles and ponzi schams to which nobody was ever jailed but maybe a single public fall-guy… and no institutional changes to the system but evening out the bad PR and taking the money from the tax payer. just think about AIG/ENRON
Rightwing groups
At least over here, trades people are big rightwing simps. Trades people who i’ve spoken to irl come from modest backgrounds, like their parents aren’t bankers or business owners. They come out for protests together (antimask protests). A lot of the trades people ive spoken to enough are ex cons too.
Not 100%, but to an extent, leftwingers ive met are in lower paying jobs like cashiers. Not that I know each person’s situation
trades peop
often rely on secrecy in order to stay ahead of competition, which fosters a climate of criminal&clandestine behaviour - the battle for extra scraps gets extra dirty. And: to be part of a larger association, small trade groups tend to be very much vertically integrated into syndicates they can’t even begin to comprehend.
Richard Sennett once wrote a nice book about the flexibility of work environment and obfuscation through modularisation in a flexible work environment… which more people should have read in the 2000s but everyone was like, “yay, Fukuyama, history is over, let’s party…”
