Just saying. How’re yall doing, by the way?

  • immuredanchorite [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Its fine, everyone starts from somewhere.

    The fact that all property relations rest on violence or the threat of violence is intentionally made invisible by the ruling class under capitalism. This is done through propagation of ruling class ideology in education, movies, television, radio, newspapers etc. Marxists refer to this as the superstructure And that is a whole other rabbit hole… It comes in many forms, but within a society you will hear familiar arguments about why poverty exists alongside opulence, why poverty and its manifold problems are the result of individual moral failing or lack of proper work ethic etc. These are typically nebulous ideas that change over time to whatever will best allow the status quo to persist and they intentionally ignore the basis of these problems and their root cause within the organization of production within our world (the social basis of production). In the USA prior to the civil war, convoluted ideas of race science were created to support and justify an unjust system of chattel slavery and racial caste, for example. Today, emphasis is placed on individual moral failing: poor work ethic, drug addiction, lack of religion, or other vague but incorrect ideas that are often have their root in racism, ableism, sexism, classism etc. Typically ignoring that, for instance, some of the richest people in the world don’t work, use drugs with abandon, lack religion etc.

    If you live in a well developed capitalist country, particularly in western Europe and the US/Canada, your “comfortable” lifestyle is created and maintained by violence in a number of ways, both historically and currently, domestically and abroad. All political economic systems rest on the authority of the state to maintain property relations through the state-sanctioned use of violence. When someone is evicted, for instance, the constable or sheriffs will show up and forcibly remove a tenant. Contracts are upheld and property itself is legitimized through the state, and so the state is able to set the terms of what type and means of acquisition and ownership are allowed. If they are not, or the state finds them illegitimate because it challenged their authority, then it can be met with violence (jail, beating, dispossession, displacement, ostracism, execution, to name a few current & historic means). Marxist-Leninists and other types of communists rightly point out that this is a feature of all states, and nearly every observed society, but they also point out that this violence has a class character that is determined by the social relations that underpin the dominant mode of production (i.e. the state is a device of the ruling classes to maintain the current order and subject the other classes to the current system) They seek to abolish this class system, and hopefully all oppressive systems with it… but that is something the current ruling class will resist, and so creating a political system where the oppressed classes use the state to repress the former ruling class (capitalists, landlords, petit-bourgeois reactionary types, etc) and maintain the ruling position of the working class in order to build a world without class domination and without opression

    Capitalism itself is an exploitive and extractive system. You are correct to point out your boss steals from you the full value of your labor for their own profit, and this level of exploitation may seems benign or relatively acceptable if you have a comfortable life, but it is still violent and your relationship with your boss also ignores the bigger picture. Outside of your job there are much more oppressive arrangements within that system and many people are homeless, living in poverty, hungry and sick, despite an abundance of labor and resources to stop all of these social ills. People in the “developed” economies mostly have that “development” at the expense of highly violent and exploitive methods that extract wealth and labor from others. western europe, the us, and others typically spent the past few hundred years pillaging the rest of the world and groups of people within their own borders as well.

    Colonization and imperialism are imposed upon the world with great violence, and then once that order was set up, it was maintained in a transformative process that had to adapt to changing conditions and social movements that sought to break its control. None of this was non-violent on the part of the imperialists, but it has changed into a more abstract or indirect form through financial instruments, debt, or large clandestine efforts to shape governments abroad. Their relationship is still extractive and violent and imposes poverty, famine, war, and displacement on people throughout the globe. If you are in a comfortable job in a developed western nation, it is more than likely that you either benefit from this violence directly or indirectly. If you are in a country that is a willing subject to US imperialism, a junior partner, then often your lifestyle has come in the form of a bargain, where your political and economic system were shaped by the United States in exchange for favorable terms: but without it would be subject to violence or sanction.