Land of the fee and home of the slave
Who knows. But we’re going to out last you.
Mutual aid societies, time banks, and various expressions of the gift economy are popping up everywhere. People are eating out less and (young people especially are) drinking less.
We are doing some things, but it looks more like a rejection of consumerism than armed revolt.
Armed revolt is a massive undertaking involving trusting thousands of other people.
One guy trying to revolt is a “crazy person with a gun” who gets killed or arrested and then their one singular chance at life is over.
Even with a proper armed revolt there’s still the chance for it to be put down by the military and or law enforcement.
Either way it’s a big ask and it’s not going to happen until it gets to the point where enough people aren’t afraid of losing their lives (or may lose them anyway).
quite a bit, bananas aren’t even a dollar a pound most places gas is less than $5 most places
I’m in California. Arco gas near me (the “cheap” gas) hit $6.09 yesterday.
California is pretty well known for high gas prices.
But to actually answer your post question: when people start starving en masse
What they are “doing” is becoming more fascist, because they feel like it’s a change. It’s not a change that’s going to make things more affordable, it’s just that choosing to be bad people is something they can control.
“These secretly corrupt politicians are not creating the world I want to live in! Let’s see what happens if we replace them with even more openly corrupt politicians and see what happens!”
Nothing gonna happen while people have food in their bellies and TV to watch.
Americans don’t care enough about their rights or their democracy to put a stop to rising fascism. They’re gonna have to suffer more first. Sucks that it had to come to this, but that’s what happens when a nation doesn’t take education seriously enough.
How many people have been murdered protesting this shit?
Nothing gonna happen
Man, shit is already happening
Has anything fundamentally changed due to what’s happened so far?
He’s not going to listen to you.
Where’s your truck bomb then, Mr. Braveman?
and TV to watch.
I think the internet, and social media in particular, play the bigger part here. People talk online and feel like they’ve done something about it. In most cases, they have not, but now they’re not going to go out and protest and be angry somewhere in most cases.
“I’m white and straight, I’m safe!” -at least a third of Americans
Time to start recruiting… 😈 🍆 🌈
That’s true for most places during a fascist take over. Most humans just want to be left alone to live their life.
Bread and circuses are being enshittified now, look at the Trump Diarrhea outbreak, Measles Outbreaks, and screw worm as far as bread go. For circuses there’s streaming, NFL, ticketmaster and theaters.
about rising prices
You’d think that the lies, rape, pedophilia, corruption, concentration camps, trade wars, actual war, ICE, surveillance would have already been enough “push”.
So, “how much further” isn’t even on the cards.
Morals are optional in America (or at least that’s what I’ve been shown), but money… money is everything!
Well, you’re not storming the white house yet, but instead posting on Lemmy, which as platforms go is one with extremely limited reach. So probably quite a bit further. Nobody wants to be the first one to take action, so if you’re not doing it, why would anyone else?
Yep. General strikes when.
The consumer has only one lever remaining to them, and that’s to stop consuming. There’s obviously things you can’t not consume, ofc, but the right to repair movement gives us a glimpse of the way. Until we take matters into our own hands and corporations see their profits diminish, there will be no change. Didn’t you know? CEO’s are gods now, and can’t be concerned with amoeba like us.
My family pulled that lever agout two years ago. Even previous to that we had reduced a lot.
More than consumers, we are workers, and can shut society down by not working. Revolution also works.
I don’t think it’s just the US. Price of everything is going up everywhere.
Consumers stopping consuming is devastating for the economy and will immediately bite them back harder. What’s far better is them having the means to consume and also doing so.
Many people have been doing many things. Are there specific actions you’re asking about when you say “do something”?
He’s trying to get the Internet to write his congressman
Nobody has waived the magic “all of this stops” wand yet.
Fucking wizards just being lazy.
Careful, people don’t like to be told that we are doing things.
How dare you try to interrupt the powerlessness circle jerk with this reality based take!
Probably the same level as the French, people are starving and death is preferred to what life is.
The American obsession with inflation is interesting, considering the unanimous agreement among those with an above-kindergarten-level understanding of economics that modest inflation of a few percent is generally the optimal state of affairs, for a variety of reasons. (There is a summary on the Wikipedia article on inflation, for those interested.) No reasonable case can be made that inflation ranks among the top 1000 problems in US society or its economy. I say it’s an American obsession, as it’s really not popularly discussed among laymen to the same degree in most other above-average economies.
From an anthropological/sociological perspective, it’s a fascinating question what drives this obsession. I’m not qualified to give an authoritative answer, but I may speculate that weak unions and a lack of collective wage agreements drive job-hopping as a major source of keeping up with inflation. This results in people associating their wage gains with their own career advancement and skills, rather than with inflation causing their own labour costs to increase. On the other hand, when wages are indexed to inflation automatically, at least to a large degree, then people care less about inflation eroding their wages. People perhaps do not have sufficient abstract reasoning skills to realize that when their wages are flat and inflation is a few percent, it’s in fact not so much inflation eroding their wages, but employers actively deciding to cut their real wages.
it’s not that hard man. it has to do with the 1970s economic crisises, which gave the entire country and policy makers ptsd.
stagflation was a real thing and it freaked the hell out of people.
no one says boo when inflation is one or two percent. I also think folks are well aware its not about inflation but about their ability to live a modestly decent lifestyle.
Hence “Inflation” is a loaded term that has come to encapsulate other issues consumers are feeling, like wage stagnation, wealth inequity, seemingly high taxes with rising debt and borrowing costs, enshittification, supply issues, purchasing power issues, and other systemic problems like that.
I don’t like it. It’s unscientific and masks too much. But when Americans say “inflation,” I really think they’re expressing feelings for much more than that.
it’s mostly folks pissed off about the price of gas. which affects the price of everything else indiscrimately because most of our goods are distributed via trucks.
if gas goes down, inflation cools. generally other fuels/oils also go down.
It’s diesel, not gas, that is the inflexible fuel. The average American may skip a road trip, or opt for a hybrid or EV on their next vehicle purchase. It’s the truckers and the farmers that have no option but to use diesel and are getting hit hard with the record prices.
I agree that this will be a major contributor to overall inflation, but there are still other meaningful factors. One example being the current administration’s lack of focus on regulatory oversight. This is letting large corporations manipulate markets to raise prices far above their increased production costs as well as keep prices high after the conditions that originally caused the increase in operating expenses have been alleviated.
People are doing things. They aren’t all broadcast to the internet. Find a local group that aligns with your ideals (or the closest fit you can find; something is better than nothing in this case) and go to a meeting and meet people. You’ll get ideas about what to do from there.
The Statesian working class isn’t politically educated or particularly organized. They do rise up, such as during the BLM protests, and the mass opposition on the ground to ICE and flock, etc, but the demands are always funneled into electoralism due to a low level of political theory and class consciousness. The primary task is to create a working class party of disciplined revolutionaries that can actually educate the rest of the working class, struggle alongside them, and in times of crisis, bring that struggle forwards to a successful revolution.
Really, what’s needed is a trigger. Quantity turns into quality at certain points, but it’s difficult to predict the social moment of this. I think the AI bubble crashing, the oil crisis due to the Iran War, and the continued erosure of the US on the world stage as compared with China all could push us to this revolutionary moment. That’s why getting organized is the primary task right now.
As always,
Educate!
Agitate!
Organize!
Well said comrade.
🫡
We need to create a benevolent ruler class and hope they stay benevolent. It’s worked well every time…
You are politically and historically illiterate, and a coward.
There you are again. Poster child of why .ml isn’t liked or respected by the majority of Lemmy instances/users. You just appear every so often and say stupid unsubstantiated shit. Boooooooo
I’m right and my assertions about you are all extremely substantiated
Not true.
Is true.
No? Classes aren’t simply categories of people, they are social relations to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Socialism works, and is far more effective at meeting people’s needs than capitalism.
Well, modern class structure is way more complicated than just owners versus people who sell their labor. Making simple claims about extremely complex system is all you’re doing. Shit is straight out of the populist handbook. Workers can own substantial capital through pensions and investments, managers can have significant control without ownership, and small business owners can simultaneously be owners and laborers.
I don’t see how any of what you said invalidates what I said. I’m keeping it simple because this is Lemmy, and I’m not going to type out a summary of the entirety of Marxist theory on social class without reason. Of course workers can own some capital and the petite bourgeoisie exists, this has been known for centuries, and isn’t new. Complexity has increased, but that does not diminish the fact that society is generalized into capitalists and workers, even if subcategories exist.
Essentially, society has never been composed of people who only own capital and people who only sell their labor. This has also never been the Marxist position either, so you’re fighting a strawman neither of us believes.
Yeah I’m only halfway through blackshirts and reds, I’ll get there. Your link does discuss people who only own capital and only sell their labor. Being slaves and masters. You haven’t clearly explained how removing classes could look. Capitalism provides the ability to blend, climb or fall. You haven’t talked about how to remove classes or how that turns into a utopia of equity and friendship. You’ve made the same nebulous populist statements that have put dictators into power historically. What is the value making the distinction between subclasses brings?
The point is that variations exist within classes, they aren’t rigid binary lines but instead a bimodal distribution.
As for removing class, by collectivizing all production and distribution. There’s no such thing as a “utopia of equity and friendship,” nor have socialist countries been ruled by dictators. The achievement of a classless society is one where all production and distribution is held in common through gradually appropriating property under a socialist government.
Socialist countries have never been run by dictators?
