Americans have historically been obsequiously subservient to the big man.
From Washington to Rockefeller to Bill Gates or Elon Musk, if you're the richest man in the country people will practically worship you as a demigod rather than revolt at your presence.
We may say we love Jesus, but our real God is Mamon
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut
Rockefeller hid in his guarded home for years before he and Carnegie did their philanthropy PR stuff. Carnegie fled to England, and was putting out press releases that supported the Unions, while at the same time telling Frick to gun down the strikers. The gilded age was full of violence that created folk heroes to this day. Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy George, Al Capone. These people were absolutely loved by the masses because they would destroy all the paper that said that old widow Johnson still owed on her mortgage. Bankers were beaten, hung, and shot for attempting to evict poor people.
We may have revered Washington, but since The Gilded Age, lots of us were taught by our grandparents and great grandparents that the greedy have no end to their greed, short of a bullet to the brain.
Was curious what that term meant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon?wprov=sfla1 for anyone else who was wondering :)
Hah never thought I'd see that name on social media
The reason there isn't a revolution in the USA is mostly down to atomization. Suburban growth directly leads to insular communities with no sense of responsibility to the rest of their brothers and sisters. Working class families in the burbs have functionally 0 ability to organize.
To add that on, I like to underscore the gravity of the situation here with details:
The interest on his earnings alone is equivalent to 130,000 workers at the start of the top 10%. That's the entire workforce of American Airlines for comparison.
If the average person was paid like the 0.1% for 1 year they could retire and live off 65k/yr forever.
This chart is broken down by quintiles but it illustrates the disparity well imo.
Half of the wealth of the top 20% here (excluding top 1%) is in businesses or real estate they own. Most of that will be their own house and a small business, though ~~leeches~~ "landlords" mostly fall in this category too.
For the top 1% that's more like 20% of their net worth.
No dude you mixed some numbers up - 5%/yr of 440 billion is 22 BILLION dollars per year.
Unless you meant he could put 0.1% of his wealth (440 mil) to pull 22 million a year.
In fact, he could out less than half of his total net worth, 200 bil, into a basic savings account returning 0.5% a year and live off of a billion dollars a year, which is equivalent to the median income of 16,666 others.
While you were writing this comment I was updating my original comment because I messed up! Correct: 22 BILLION.
What’s interesting is that this doesn’t even tell the whole picture.
Because those people earning $170k/year? More than likely their net worth is negative. They owe more than they’re making, and even at that income rate and excluding long term debt, they have just enough in savings to last three months max.
Yeah and those are national statistics.
You don't hit the top 10% in New York state until you break 330k
Neighborhood politics, social gatherings, community hotspots has massively declined in the last two generations,
It’s really hard to organize anything face to face?
It is and while I don't think that was Eisenhower's 5d chess play it is more or less directly from cold war era policies that encouraged Americans to live anywhere besides a city.
Yet if you keep the comparison until present times, you can only acknowledge the fact that the French once again rioted very violently and for months back in 2018-20. The "yellow vests" were mostly lower-income workers from far away suburbs and villages. Facebook let them organize and have a real impact on national politics and policy.
It was also a significant amount of right wing agitprop opposing any reduction to fossil fuel usage...
Are you sure it's not 220 mil or 22 billion a year
Whoops it's 22 billion not million.
France didn't have the sophisticated propaganda machine the US has.
Really, I think anyone considering themselves a Leftist needs to read False Witnesses and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing." Both are excellent examples of why people don't change their minds when seeing indisputable evidence, they willingly go along with narratives that they find more comfortable. It explains the outright anger liberals express when anticommunism is debunked. That doesn't mean Communists don't do the same thing, but as we live in a liberal dominated west (most likely, assuming demographics) this happens to a much lesser extent because liberalism is that which supplies these "licenses" to go along, while Communism requires hard work to begin to accept. This explains the mountains of sources Communists keep on hand, and the lack thereof from liberals who argue from happenstance and vibes.
Poverty in 1700 is very different from poverty in 2000, which allows for significant, but not unlimited, skewing.
One could argue that the Church had been extremely efficient at manufacturing consent for centuries. It was still the case for most of French society in the late 1780s. It also led to a civil war between Revolutionaries and traditionalists (including peasants).
Elon Musk could transfer $1 million in stock to each of his 153,473 employees,
which would cost him $153 billion and he would still have a net worth of $302 billion!
He'd still be the richest man in the world and would still have $56 billion more than Jeff Bezos!
And some of that money he has came from under-paying factory workers at his Fremont, California assembly plant. For a long time the hourly rate was $22 (not sure what it is now) but auto plants in the Midwest were paying that or better and he was paying $22 per hour in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.
Elon is now worth more than Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates combined.
Tbf, if he transfered that stock, the price of it would crash as the employees sold it. He'd have to do some kind of slow transfer over several years.
The French people do not tolerate shit, the Americans on the hand will wallow in it and say work harder for less.
It's one of the main reasons our owner class has sought to mock the French with "surrender" slurs and "freedom fries."
They'd very much like the citizenry to forget Frances contribution to America and "western culture" over the last 200 years lest they get any ideas.
100%
In France, they set shit on fire at the drop of a hat. Can't have that in 'Murica.
why would you crop out the source declaration?
“Data for Boston 40% in France is extrapolated from a single data point.”
Oh I see, this is reliable data.
There are significant barriers in place for revolution in the US. The Proletariat is still under the belief that supporting US Imperialism will benefit themselves more than Socialism. Additionally, theory is frequently coopted by Trots and other impractical forms, resulting in people endlessly seeking to critique society, not change it (your Noam Chomskys and the like). Moreover, labor organization has been millitantly crushed.
I recommend starting with theory. I have an introductory Marxist reading list if you want a place to start.
For elaboration on Chomsky, I recommend reading On Chomsky.
i saw someone else try to share a similar message on tiktok yesterday and the overwhelming majority of the american users referred theory as little more than "book clubs for intellectuals" despite the chinese & latin american users trying to defend its usefulness on the same post.
getting my feet wet with this reading list is making it clear to me that i'm still a heavily propagandized american liberal and some of the tiktokers who called it a book club had seemingly more knowledge of theory that I did, so i wasn't qualified to speak up. what would your response be to such a criticism?
People who denounce theory denounce revolution. It's plain and simple. Back in pre-revolutionary Russia, the SRs declared "an end to theory" as a unifying factor to be celebrated, and declared assassinations "transfer power." This is, of course, ridiculous, theory is important because it is useful despite disagreements over it, and assassinations do not "transfer power," but create a void filled by those closest to it, always bourgeois, never proletarian. The Bolsheviks ended up being correct, that theory, discipline, and organization is what brings real revolution, and the SRs have mostly been forgotten. I recommend reading Revolutionary Adventurism.
It's important to recognize that Westerners have an implicit desire to maintain the status quo, having been taught all our lives that we have the "best possible" system yet. The western leftist idea of "no true Marxism yet" fits conveniently with that narrative, it's deeply chauvanistic and moreover anti-revolutionary. Looking at the most popular trends of Marxism in the west, we see many Trots and "orthodox" Marxists, some of the least successful in producing real revolution globally, while in the Global South Marxism-Leninism is dominant.
The "book club" Marxists are equally dangerous as the "adventurist" Marxists (or Anarchists, if you prefer). It is only through uniting theory with practice that we will succeed. You cannot be anti-theory and you cannot be anti-practice, you must unite both. I want to commend your discipline in not speaking up, one of the guiding principles of Marxists is "no investigation, no right to speak." Muddying the waters with low quality input is pollutant, asking good questions and practicing self-restraint when speaking on what you don't know clarifies the waters of discourse.
I highly recommend reading Masses, Elites, and Rebels: the Theory of "Brainwashing."
To add on to what else has been said, you can just be blunt and obnoxious about it. Tell them "If a bunch of barely literate peasants in China can figure out Kapital on their own despite it being written in another language, you can read a pamphlet or two."
People smarter than anyone alive have done more in worse conditions and did us the courtesy of writing down what worked and what didn't. The Bolsheviks, Black Panther Party, anarchists in Civil War Spain and Nazi Germany, etc. were in life or death situations trying to mobilize leftwing revolution. The least anyone calling themselves a socialist can do is read what they wrote. If you say "I don't need to read theory because it's just a book club," you're being an arrogant, egotistical asshole.
We also live in an age where there are audiobooks and videos that will read this stuff to you for free, something our predecessors didn't have. People with disabilities have used these tools to help them understand theory when they struggle with reading. There's really no excuse.
I know it's cliche by this point. But this one misattributed^1^ quote has become more prescient than ever.
They've learned that giving us new shiny shit every year will keep the majority of us mollified against all kinds of injustice.
^1^ - Commonly credited to George Orwell's novel. It's actually from the stage play adaptation.
I wouldn't glorify Orwell, he was violently reactionary, even Anarchists fighting alongside him questioned why he wasn't on the "other side." He had a deeply aristocratic worldview, admired Hitler, and despised the Working Class for their "stupidity." I recommend reading On Orwell as well as A Critical Read of Animal Farm.
Not glorifying Orwell. I'm aware of his history. The quote actually belongs to either Robert Icke or Duncan MacMillan; the two men who wrote the stage adaptation. Politics aside, it's a fitting quote.
Fair enough! Just wanted to point it out as I think he leads a legacy dangerous to the left.
Essentially, we get to eat cake every so often, while bread rapidly becomes unaffordable.
If you just give everyone unlimited bread sticks most people never even make it to the entree, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
The revolution was about missed meals and lack of food. The US isn’t there yet.
I’m not sure I would characterize it that way. It was a bourgeois revolution, lead by the bourgeoisie, who were not starving. Same with the American Revolution. These were revolutions led by & funded by people who owned the means of production.
Wasn't it socialist China that brought those numbers up?
Yep, and if you remove the PRC disparity gets higher.
From what I've been seeing throughout the years, I'd say give it time. Change usually takes a bit to get started and things usually hit a low point before a breaking point.
The next four years of Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum running things could trigger something especially if they try to go through with that P-'25 BS. As it is, the indiscriminate mass deportation in it that they are planning (including natural-born) could easily be a bit of a powder-keg for starting a massive protest.
The top 10% have 70.7% of wealth in the US currently (from the federal reserve website)
They let us eat cake.
Information control. Most people believe socialism is just taxes.
It's less misinformation and more willing disbelief. People accept narratives that go along with what they believe supports that which benefits them. I highly recommend reading Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing". People aren't stupid, they seek approval for their actions and support, which explains the anger expressed at factual debunking of their worldview.
I mean...there was an attempt. The chronically online seem to think a revolution in the USA would be socialist, but these are Americans we're talking about. Its either be back to 1800s style libertarian ethics or fascism, corporatism, something like that, decimating government power not increasing it.
partially because total wealth is much higher?
This is overall distribution by percentage, so aggregate total represented wouldn’t have an impact. If it were to have an impact, I think we’d have hoped it would mean the slope was more even.
This is overall distribution by percentage, so aggregate total
what I mean is that if total land area is 1 acre, and 80% of people own 1% of the land, they're starving
if total land area is 5000 acres, and 80% of people (same population size) own 1% of the land, then everyone is well fed on the same inequality
