Like any vestiges of the new deal have been nuked. There’s just the extreme poor and the extreme rich. The immigrants who do all the work are being deported. The big push is to automate everything via ai. So like I get all that, and I can see the usa just being a like “luxury” country that exists as a haven for the epstein class and gusanos, right? Am I wrong? Where does that leave the poor born here? Will they just stick us in concentration camps?
reshaping
America is a vacation resort for about a thousand people, and everyone else is the staff.
Hey that sounds like Larp
There actually was a call to arms among the ruling class in the early 70s after the porks ate shit from not only the civil rights act, but similar counterculture movements in France and whatnot. Google The Powell Memo, or watch a video or two covering it.
Basically porks whined they didn’t get enough of what they wanted, so the capitalist class must work together and form class solidarity to then take over the US in earnest as an oligarchy.
This has been the plan and been designed since the 80s.
What you’re seeing is the results.
Like Tony Soprano said, we all were born after the good times.
good times for who? Blacks Indigenous and Asians were never born in America’s good times.
That’s true, I guess I still have some brain worms kicking around from ideolizing the new deal without realizing for a lot of people it never benefitted them.
I think it’s a figment of human psychology to center our own experiences, but that’s why we hang out and remain open to our comrades who will bump us around a bit when we drop that awareness.
I don’t think that’s necessarily brainworms because you’re not wrong just because the benefits of imperialism were always withheld from minority groups in society. There has been a very real shift especially since the dissolution of the USSR away from placating the majority of the proletariat with the promise of a decent, stable life. Wage earners as a single block in the US in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s and 90s really did have significantly better prospects and stability in stark comparison to the kind of precarity faced by everyone below a certain wealth threshold now, with that threshold continuing to creep upwards. That doesn’t mean there weren’t always sizeable segments of society for whom that wealth and well-being was withheld because of course it was. But it is also true that the number of people on the “have-nots” side of the ledger is increasing and deepening and you are not wrong to notice it.
People coming in this thread and saying only “Reshaping?” as if your observation about the growing wealth disparity is inaccurate and always how it has been are engaging in bad analysis because yes, there has been a massive reshaping of the social strata into an even more obscenely top-heavy form, it’s getting worse and it’s accelerating. We can recognize the role that the spoils of imperialism played in allowing for that relatively affluent proletariat in past decades and we can recognize how black and indigenous people were always prevented from benefiting from it without having to say “don’t believe your lying eyes, things haven’t changed, they’ve always been this way.” The New Deal has been rolled back, the livelihoods of vast swathes of wage earners have been corroded, and pointing that out is not brainworms.
It highlights the limitation of a purely wealth-based analysis of class. Of course, neoliberal parties on the so-called left have focussed solely on wealth as the pejorative force in politics for a generation. Wherever it be taxation, climate, policing or have you, the bourgeoisie permits these issues to be debated and even agitated against as long as the axis that revolves around it is money.
It is particularly useful in the imperial core, as there is a much wider range of material wealth within the proletariat. By creating a culture which endlessly subdivides the proletarian class through wealth and social status, it becomes impossible to form a coherent political analysis that can challenge capital! Just look at how the terms “working class” and “middle class” are discussed, and how they become badges of honor that one holds with a deathly grip when the economic base shifts beneath their feet.
Of course there is still real material differences between the upper and lower bounds of the proles at large; Marx & Engels observed these over 150 years prior. Their analyses that brought about the terms lumpenproletariat and the petit bourgeoisie are, by contrast, are rooted in materialist analysis rather than the value of the fiat currency (!!!) they command.
We will never undergo a revolutionary moment with we do not tackle the proto-caste system that has been manufactured around us over our lifetimes.
TLDR
This has been the plan and been designed since the 80s.
What you’re seeing is the results.
How does someone with no job or ownership of the MoP but $3 million in stocks compare to someone self-employed in a solo business proprietorship?
I think the former has much more influence than the latter.
Aren’t stocks just partial ownership of a company and, by extension, it’s means of production? You get dividends extracted from the workers and can participate in some major company decisions.
Stocks are ownership of a company as much as voting is ownership of a country.
Reshaping?
It probably doesn’t even serve most millionaires any more.
Not really enough to retire and one medical emergency away from loosing their house.
“Always has been”
K shaped economy, so yea.
Yeah, I think anyone who’s not a property or small business owner is shit out of luck and going to be part of the slave class, no matter how good of a middle/upper class job they currently have. This has probably been one of the worst years for the proletariat.
If the working class are not required by the bourgeoisie, they do not care what happens to us. Maybe they just ignore the hellscape the (former)working class becomes, or maybe they chemically kill us off. I suspect a section of the ruling class will want real human servants because it won’t be any fun abusing a robot maid.
Any new restaurant, gym, or apartment in my city is catered towards the boug.
Fancy restaurants in which their atmosphere looks like they were grown in a lab, $40/plate minimum.
Luxury gyms that are hundreds of dollars a month, cryo-therapy and red light therapy, all the shiny bells and whistles.
Luxury apartments that cost ~$3000+/month and have luxury floors, rooftop swimming pools, gyms, events, marble floors at the entrance.
Right now there is nothing to squeeze out of the bottom 90% of earners in this economy, so everything is geared towards extracting wealth from the top 10%.
Many people near the bottom of that income range are a paycheck or two away from losing it all though.
“reshaping”
