People get pedantic when they don’t agree with the main point. I’m not mad, it’s to be expected.

Wow, I’m three days late, sorry.

But of course no one can fight back alone. This is why you have to start grassroots and build up to national movements. Start with mutual aid: helping members of the community with the expectation of being helped in return. Food drives, worker’s co-ops, free daycare services, etc. Once we have community we can push the issue when the time is ripe (e.g., a BLM-level protest). Labor strikes, rental strikes, expropriating food and clothes etc.

Doesn’t have to be law to be hypocritical. The point is this country is and always has been morally bankrupt. Our espoused values of freedom, democracy, and justice are in contradiction with our history.

Hell, slavery never ended. It’s in the prison system, as specified by the Constitution.

We aren’t that far from slavery. Let’s consider the analogy of the slave owner and the slave. The slave owner lives on the labor of his slaves. The slave owner takes the value of the slaves’ labor and returns a fraction of that value to the slave in the form of food, clothing, and shelter. (Suppose it would be unprofitable to let the slave die.) Now, the slave owner can work with his slaves in the field if they so choose. And maybe the slave owner has a pleasant demeanor and treats the slaves (relatively) well. But no matter how he works in the fields and no matter how nice he is, the slave owner is still living off of the value of the slaves. Moreover, in a system of widespread slavery, he needs slave-labor in order to compete with other slave owners.

One may object that there are several disanalogies here. The modern-day worker can choose who gets the value of their labor. The experienced worker can negotiate higher wages based on higher earning potential. The successful worker may acquire enough money to go into business for themselves and hire others.

Perhaps these are fair objections but they do not touch on the point of the analogy. There is a fundamental distinction between the slave owner, who lives on the labor of slaves, and the slaves who labor for the slave owner. Similarly, there is a fundamental distinction between the capitalist, who lives on the labor of workers, and the workers who labor for the capitalist.

It’s the same flavor.

The capitalist already has money to buy other people’s labor. They then give a fraction of what the worker’s produce in wages and takes the rest for profit… and we call them “job creators”.

Almost everyone else has to sell their labor to the highest bidder to survive. You sell yourself by the hour or else you go homeless/hungry/broke. Altogether, the system is either exploit or be exploited. We need to stop pretending capitalism is the best of all possible systems.

BRB gonna replay

I have played rimworld before, fair point. Haven’t heard of SAELIG but I’ll check it out!

Can’t find another game quite like it tbh

The book series is very long iirc. Is it worth reading?

invented the dumb-waiter so that his abolitionist friends didn’t have to observe the slaves

The amount of physical and linguistic inventions that go back to slavery is astounding. The other day I learned that the ice cream truck jingle comes from the song “N**** Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!”. When you start looking our racist history is everywhere.

I agree with everything in the first paragraph. However, every time we fight against the oligarchs they learn better strategies to divide and conquer us. We are a much more isolated people than we were 50 or 100 years ago. Individualism and consumerism are ubiquitous while our sense of community is virtually non-existent. So people feel powerless to confront fascism because no one can do it alone. This isolation is arguably by design.

And the thing is, if you can’t rally the people to vote for incremental change, revolution is a non-starter.

Time will tell. But there are historical examples, in other countries, of the corruption and hypocrisy being flaunted so blatantly that the people rise up and demand sweeping systemic changes.

In the U.S., we have forgotten our collective power. Our peaceful protests are ignored and even destruction of property is consider taboo. We haven’t seen wide-spread violent dissent since the Civil Rights / Anti-Vietnam movements. Conditions were ripe then, but the government deployed a combination of modest concessions and state enacted violence: carrot and stick. The way this Trump term is going, they might not give us the carrot next time.

I dont get the last panel

Absolutely. We spend the entire work day apart from each other. Between sleeping and going to work, the amount of time you actually spend with your partner is minuscule. So it feels necessary to “catch up” with them.

Sure, but this doesn’t address the problem I’m noting above. We fought hard for worker’s rights, so they granted them and then dismantled/neutered the unions. Public outcry forced the fracture of Standard Oil and now the monopolies are worse than ever. It’s one step forward and two steps back.

I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand I am tired of the unnecessary suffering that is common in the richest country in the history of the Earth. A step in the right direction is better than nothing.

Or is it? Every time we increase the social safety net, our righteous anger subsides. We stop boycotting, protesting, striking, organizing, etc, because faith in the system is restored. And then we delay the necessary work of dismantling this system that is based on greed and exploitation. Inevitably, the oligarchs bide their time and then strip away rights and economic opportunity as soon as we stop paying attention.

We’re fast approaching a time where owning media is considered a luxury.

is it really bad? If the workers are treated well, its a win win situation

“If the slaves are treated well, it’s a win-win”

I’m not just using strong words. I suspect you miss the point of the analogy (i.e., the owner vs the worker).

No matter who you are, you are a slave of the economy.

Because the economy is centered on capital and profit. If our economy was based on community need rather than shareholder profit, workers would always be working for themselves.

It’s not the cashier’s fault, but why would I keep going to that grocery store