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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war" far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual, real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.

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Far more people need to say this.

Remember folks, this week Boris informed the covid inquiry he has "forgotten" the pin to the phone all his WhatsApp messages from that time are on.

If it was one of us, they'd use the bit of RIPA that carries a minimum two year sentence for not giving up an encryption key or password when asked to by the police.

> Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.

They're very much not. Wat a complete nonsense.

You're right – in the short term.

In the mid- to long-term, I'm not so sure.

What about those new movies?

What about them?

When you say those words people think you are a building-burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich, as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class war.

I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!

Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?

I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys.

So I'm both? Who do I fight for?

Well, I suppose you get to decide whether you want to fight for the slaves or the slave owners.

I will remind you that fighting for the slave owners never led to anything good.

This is the problem with trying to fit a political doctrine written more than 100 years ago by an academic who spent most of his time in libraries into modern life.

There is a reason 'it was a good idea so I wrote it all down, thought of everything, and then forced everyone to do it' has never worked.

You don't need to follow everything to a T to grasp the fact that 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists, the ruling class, to keep them satisfied.

I'm sorry you think that your life is only meaningful in that it provides labor to capitalists.

Do you mind pointing out where that was stated or implied?

Anything and everything I do is to satisfy my own curiosity and desires, but that's only because I got lucky. Everyone who didn't get lucky, well, they have to slave away in jobs that may not be fulfilling, or are menial, etc; and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Other people's lives are meaningless then, but not yours. Got it.

PS: Have you ever considered how paternalistic your view is?

I have never claimed nor implied that their lives are meaningless (point where). On the contrary, because everyone's life is meaningful and important, they shouldn't have to slave away or do scutwork just to survive. This is what I am advocating for.

I want people to live, to be free, to enjoy the same things I am. This is literally the opposite of paternalistic.

I am also not a tankie if that's what you concluded from my first remark.

> 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists

I'm honestly curious why you wrote this and if you can explain what it means, because to me it means 'people who labor for others are wasting their lives as slaves and we need to remedy this'. What have I misread?

The desire to survive is a fundamental instinct of all animals, and thus you'd do almost anything to survive. Effectively we are slaves of our own biology and wiring. Thus, due to resource allocation, most of us have to or had to work in order just to survive.

Our utility and thus QoL is measured in how the surrounding system values us. In a capitalist society that is visible through our salaries and our income as provided by other parties. In a marxist-leninist-like society, your value depends on your connections and how much you get done for the rest of the ruling party.

Thus, because we need to survive, we are forced into working for the system in any of the different ways it materializes.

When we are no longer useful to the system as productive members, we are forced into becoming useful for it.

Rooflessness is very much a solvable problem, but the roofless' purpose within the system to exist as examples for avoidance. "Stay in life or you will end up like them". "Be productive", "work hard in this rat race", "keep grinding", or you will end up like them.

When we are old and no longer productive, we are sent to hospice care, which costs a lot of money, it involves very expensive healthcare, and thus any money we have accumulated go to our care and back to the system, recycled to be used by consumers, and recycled all over again. Our kin and their love for us gets exploited, we become money sinks.

What for? We spend 40 years working to do what, live hopefully 20 years later, old frail and weak? To become a money pit? So that our loved ones and their love for us gets exploited?

---

I am laboring for others, but that doesn't mean I see myself as a slave. I am very lucky. I get paid a relatively excellent salary, and I get to work a nice and interesting job that satisfies my curiosity.

But very few people are as lucky as I am. Most people are not living and thriving, they are surviving, and I don't want that.

It's not the fact that they labor, it's the fact that they need to do that in the first place.

In the end, the only way to allow people to "thrive" and not "survive" is by reallocating capital from those that are already "surviving", right?

So the solution is to steal from those that have. How is working for capitalists different than working for those that don't want to work? In the former, everyone has a shot at winning. In the latter, nobody does.

Where does most of your income come from?

From work, but I hope at some point it switches around. So I'll be a good person until then, and after that I'll become a bad person it sounds like

You could already be a bad person, but for now, you're being taken advantage of about as much as you're taking advantage of others.

I think squatting land to make people rent from you to be able to live is already pretty bad, so you could easily already be a bad person, but the concepts of individual ownership over public goods is the really problem,

Are you really suggesting that land is a public good? If it was, how would anyone ever develop it? How could I keep anyone away from my family at night?

What happens when you stop working?

Unless you are born into generational wealth, you are by construction a Prole.

If you need to or had to work for a living until you could afford not to, then you are a Prole.

Whether you choose to "betray" this class - and fight in support of the people who make the rules, the slave owners, those who play god without permission - is a different thing.

Only dummies think in classes. People are people.

A class defines a set of people with some shared characteristic. In this case, this class contains about > 99.99% of the humans that have ever existed.

Some people find this helpfully confusing: it allows them to remain in denial of the obviousness of how horrendous the ruling class is.

The obvious response is to own it and be an actual commie. Join a revolutionary party, organise in a trade union, set up mutual aid, learn self defence, etc.

I am all for this, the problem is that that behaviour on their end shuts down any discussion and mutual aid becomes harder.

You don’t have to lead with it necessarily. I don’t, but I don’t hide it either.

People pay attention to their material interests. In most cases, you can get through to working class people despite ideology. Can’t win everyone over either and that’s ok too.

The problem is that most large left-wing movements tend to be about highly centralized socialism that is at best soft authoritarian (and in practice tends to quickly devolve into something much worse). I understand why - once you take away the cudgel from the people who currently have it, using it yourself to quickly solve problems is just too tempting. But it does mean that many (most?) of those parties are not a viable solution.

Class struggle doesn’t end in one stroke. When the working class wins state power over the capitalist class, the former doesn’t stop existing. The cudgel is to keep internal and external capitalists from counter revolution.

Ultimately, results matter. My country started semi feudal and it was under socialism that it industrialised, electrified, developed universal health care, built homes for every working family, etc. Sadly the coup in 89 ended that, but it doesn’t have to have been perfect to have been good.

Which country? 89 makes me think not Russia.. Romania?

It is worth pointing out your observation applies to lots of post-colonial societies, too. Socialism took Tanzania's literacy rate from about 10% at independence to 80%+ in a generation, and IIRC it also doubled its agricultural output in that time by organising farming along collective lines. Life expectancy rose substantially too, though I forget by how much.

(So much for empires being about spreading civilization, eh?)

România indeed. Similar astonishing improvement in all socialist countries, for sure.

How old were you in 1989?

My passport still says "place of birth: USSR". As a child, I lived on a street named after a prominent Bolshevik who was famous for using poison gas to crush a local peasant rebellion against the Soviets when they started to confiscate grain at scale to the point of starving whole villages out. Even if all the achievements you claim were true, the ends still not justify such means; but the achievements are mostly a lie anyway. Many other countries saw development from mostly rural to mostly industrialized during the 20th century and got all the benefits you described without a pile of "enemy of the people" corpses to go along with it, so socialism has very little to do with it.

FWIW I don't even think USSR and its satellite states were socialist in any meaningful sense. Socialism, after all, is the common ownership of the means of production. But most of the populace on all those states were excluded from governance, and thus from any effective ownership. So, in practice, it was collective exploitation of the workers by the elites under threat of direct physical force - strictly worse than wage slavery. Some orthodox opposition Marxists in USSR even claimed that it was the perfect example of what Marx originally called the "Asiatic mode of production".

Who is 'they' in this context? Even borderline schizo far-right conservatives on the vast majority of sites seem to agree, at least in part, that the class war plays some part.

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