Stumbled on this chart recently:
Kind of tells its own story.
It’s worth reading the Communist manifest. People have weird ideas about it, but a lot of it is really unexceptionable. For example, Marx and Engels demanded pensions for old folks.
Capitalists looked at this and said, “oh, we can do this if the alternative is worse” and introduced them. Someone as hard headed as Bismarck responded this way.
The threat of a credible enemy ideology which treats ordinary people better than capitalists do forces capitalists to change. For a long time we haven’t had that, but the single party “Marxist but with capitalism” CCP offers another, and yes, they do, overall treat their workers better, as well as being better at capitalism than capitalists. No one is as obsessed with how markets actually work as Marxist economists.
Let’s look at another of my favorite charts:
Oh hey, having powerful organizations taking the part of workers matters.
Something happened right after Reagan took power:
Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers
Then there’s this:
(The numbers have gone down since then, but are still vastly high, and far, far higher than China.
Break the unions and lock up the people who won’t obey bullshit (aka. drug) laws.
Class war is real, and constantly ongoing, and elites have won that war.
Power and fear is all that capitalists ever respond to.
Always remember that.