Friedrich Engels: The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leila Khaled: It only benefits imperialism and reactionary regimes to turn political conflicts into religious and sectarian conflicts. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Juvenal: The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the forces of democracy take decisive, terroristic action against the reaction from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Wealth in capitalist society is growing at an incredible rate—side by side with the impoverishment of the mass of the workers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Carpenter: Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but always added to and always administered by the ruling class. Today the code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability-and if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because it is the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future-of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age and its distinctive watchword is-property. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eugene V. Debs: The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact - and it cannot be repeated too often - that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paulo Freire: All the actions of the dominant class manifest its need to divide in order to facilitate the preservation of the oppressor state. Its interference in the unions, favoring certain "representatives" of the dominated classes (who actually represent the oppressor, not their own comrades); its promotion of individuals who reveal leadership capacity and could signify a threat if they were not "softened up" in this way; its distribution of benefits to some and penalties to others: all these are ways of dividing in order to preserve the system which favors the elite. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thomas Müntzer: The league at Allstedt wanted to establish this principle, Omnia sunt communia, 'All property should be held in common' and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Huey P. Newton: Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic-by whatever means-has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andrew Collier: Capitalism is an exploitative system, as Marx has argued so cogently, and as anyone who studies the inequalities within and between the countries of the world today must see. It is therefore a priori likely that its ideology conceals realities that if known would make the exploited militant. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eugene V. Debs: What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest - this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: For the liberal bourgeoisie needs the lie, since to it that is no lie, but the greatest of truths, the truth of its class interests, the truth of bourgeois liberty, the truth of capitalist equality, the holy of holies of the huckster fraternity. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
I'm as much eat the rich as the next girl, but I do get tired people applying it casually to entertainers or artists...
It's not a score thing, it's not hit this number in net worth and suddenly you're on the dinner plat. It's based on the fact specifically on the abuses it takes to get there, entertainers being one of the few exceptions on multiple fronts.
Here's the thing about entertainers: * they're typically not the ones responsible for paying the workers, outside of a small few, actors don't pay the film crew (they're paid by the same people as the crew), and singers/musicians don't pay the majority of the crew (they're paid for by the venue, those they do pay for are probably going to be better compensated for their expertise). The stories of actors donating parts of their salary to crew... that's legit charity as it's not their responsibilities (that responsibility falls on the producers and studio execs). * they have wildly inflated net worth, because net worth of a performer is typically about how much money they can make, but not necessarily how much money they get. * they have inconsistent pay * often those numbers hide other expenses, if they have their own staff or equipment or resources or such... those costs come after the number you're being quoted typically (ie. a musician makes $500 mil on the tour? Their personal crew, tour bus, etc are all paid out from that). This is because a performer is an instance of them being their own business which means they have astronomical expenses under their name.
Of course this doesn't mean they can't be awful, it's not uncommon for them to start their own side businesses (considered a good plan because their stardom likely won't last forever), and it's in those businesses where they often become "The Rich".
Also, confirmation bias makes us think all artists in a given category are as well off as the richest outlier—Taylor Swift is a typical musician, J. K. Rowling is a typical fantasy author, and so on. Whereas: in fact? They won the lottery, and the rest of us—even relatively well-known names—are several digits elss well off (we're comfortable but we're not millionaires never mind billionaires).
@Charlie Stross This was mostly brought about by seeing posts around Taylor Swift because her estimated net worth crossed a billion recently... and while I'm vaguely sure there's plenty to call her out on (honestly I pay no attention at all to her), just crossing the net worth threshold as an artist is not a valid cause (now, if you comment about her real estate business on the side... but that's a drop in the bucket by comparison)
In any case, those "net worth" troll-bait websites are worthless. I got some flak from an idiot on mastodon a couple of months back who had seen my name on one and decided I was a millionaire. I looked it up and it was something like a 500% to 1000% over-estimate. (They pull those figures out of their ass: it's simple clickbait.)
@Charlie Stross it's entirely guesswork I agree, but I do think it's also a combination of people not knowing what net worth even is...
Like for you they'd be talking thinks like your "fair market value" if you were to sell off all rights to the laundry files.
Net worth includes a lot of ridiculous number... for the typical person it includes the estimated amounts they can get if they were to sell their car, their home, every single possession of any remote worth to them...
The "net" part of it is what the number is minus debts.
The guesswork of course is just them guessing what you could theoretically sell your whole life for and a guess of how much you owe in debts.
A lot of people think it means income or how much money someone has on hand.
Antoine Bechamp: Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed. Nothing is the prey of death, all is the prey of life. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: The so-called constants of physics are for the most part nothing but designations of the nodal points where quantitative addition or withdrawal of motion calls forth a qualitative change in the state of the body in question. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: ELECTRICITY, like heat, only in a different way, has also a certain omnipresent character. Hardly any change can occur in the world without it being possible to demonstrate the presence of electrical phenomena. If water evaporates, if a flame burns, if two different metals, or two metals of different temperature, touch, or if iron touches a solution of copper sulphate, and so on, electrical processes take place simultaneously with the more apparent physical and chemical phenomena. The more exactly we investigate natural processes of the most diverse nature, the more do we find evidence of electricity. In spite of its omnipresence, in spite of the fact that for half a century electricity has become more and more pressed into the industrial service of mankind, it remains precisely that form of motion the nature of which is still enveloped in the greatest obscurity. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fred Hampton: We understood that politics is nothing but war without bloodshed and war is nothing but politics with bloodshed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Notice the way in which the capitalists are trying to escape from the economic crisis. They are reducing the workers' wages as much as possible. They are reducing the prices of raw materials as much as possible. But they do not want to reduce the prices of food and industrial commodities for mass consumption to any important extent. This means that they want to escape from the crisis at the expense of the principal consumers, at the expense of the workers and peasants, at the expense of the working people. The capitalists are cutting the ground from under their own feet. And instead of overcoming the crisis they are aggravating it; new conditions are accumulating which lead to a new, even more severe crisis. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis: And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertolt Brecht: Comrades, do get it into your heads, this ‘lesser evil’ which Year after year has been used to keep you completely out of the fight Will very soon mean having to stomach the Nazis. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kwame Nkrumah: A non-racial society can only be achieved by socialist revolutionary action of the masses. It will never come as a gift from the minority ruling class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Tom Clancy: The control of information is something the elite always do, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Charlie Stross
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Shiri Bailem
in reply to Charlie Stross • •Charlie Stross
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LisPi and Shiri Bailem like this.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Charlie Stross • •@Charlie Stross it's entirely guesswork I agree, but I do think it's also a combination of people not knowing what net worth even is...
Like for you they'd be talking thinks like your "fair market value" if you were to sell off all rights to the laundry files.
Net worth includes a lot of ridiculous number... for the typical person it includes the estimated amounts they can get if they were to sell their car, their home, every single possession of any remote worth to them...
The "net" part of it is what the number is minus debts.
The guesswork of course is just them guessing what you could theoretically sell your whole life for and a guess of how much you owe in debts.
A lot of people think it means income or how much money someone has on hand.