grazing7264 [they/them, comrade/them]

When organized labor is weak and non-militant, capital can get away with a lot more, so it does get away with a lot more.

It strips away anti-corruption, regulations, and social democracy as soon as it can get away with it.

If stock buybacks are Capital’s path of least resistance it will self organize, like iron shavings to a neodymium magnet, and make it happen. There is no human agency in the circuits of capitalism and never will be.

If this woman tried to not do stock buybacks, she would be fired by her peers/board and replaced.

If this woman was even capable of considering doing pay raises instead of stock buybacks, she would have been clocked and removed from the circuit like an intelligent species crashing into the fermi paradox/great filter.

You are being proletarianized. No remaining vectors for new growth, means corporations are now also cannibalizing white collar workers.

The welfare states in northern Europe were created as a bulwark against the threat of unions “going Bolshevik,” that threat has been gone since 1991 so those concessions are being revoked. Elevated wages are also being revoked. Very explicitly in the case of France and Germany.

Americans are buying up EU assets for cheap, the USA is cashing out on their investments during the marshall plan. Either workers (through their unions) regain enough leverage through strikes or capitalists take everything since workers have no leverage.

Crazy rent price increases in metropolitan centers are also really just clawbacks on white collar wages.

I don’t know what that community looks like but mutual aid and community organizing will get a lot further than prepping

Production will always win out over scavenging and accumulation

This is also the root of why leftists hate bazinga solutions for climate change, it’s seen as a dead end and the obvious fix is at the production level, the root cause of climate change. Communists have a focus on means of production, the hammer and sickle right on the flags are means of production.

Communists love tech, Soviet culture was dominated by futurists and despite being destroyed 3 decades ago still hold the world record for most space launches.

The disgust towards SpaceX is also based on a love of technology. Mediocre Internet isn’t worth rendering our observatories useless and polluting prime orbital lanes.

Chinese socialism is also obsessed with tech, megaprojects everywhere, highly resilient public GMO crops massive investments in green energy and novel production techniques. Most of the CPC leadership have engineering degrees. Xi specifically engineered an off-grid bioreactor for winter heating (using animal waste no less) during his volunteer service at the countryside, he was in his 20s and almost got blown up while repairing it.

I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.

You would be entirely correct, these technologies are heavily subsidized by the surveillance state, and a convergence of capitalist interests that libs like to call surveillance capitalism.