Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

A good chunk of the left (not the Dems, the actual left) understands the US legal system. It’s just that it’s hard to win in a pay-to-play system when everyone who can pay is against you.

Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.

Western MD, upstate NY, somewhere in Illinois that’s not Chicago, western Oregon that’s not Portland…just off the top of my head. Those are all decent places in terms of long-term climate change issues, as well. Basically, pick a blue state, go to a red rural part. Blue state laws, red state prices. I’d be careful long-term considering Michigan and Virginia safely blue, as well.

That and the cancerous need for infinite growth on a finite planet, which is destroying our home…

If you’re worried people will think you’re a Nazi, maybe it’s not the other people you should be worried about.

If you think Karl Marx was an idiot (not just wrong, but an idiot), you don’t understand the conversation well enough to participate.

You mean besides the decades the US and USSR didn’t blow the entire world to pieces or even enter direct conflict, which would likely have killed millions more than the proxy wars that occurred with diplomatic intervention? I’m sorry, I just can’t take anyone who truly thinks that diplomacy is always useless seriously. It strongly suggests they’ve never read a history book.

Then I’m happy to be wrong (fewer Nazi sympathizers is always better), and you have nothing to worry about. But that you consider a potentially over-broad definition of Nazism a major problem in this political climate suggests that even if you are antifascist, your priorities are skewed.

Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.

Diplomacy is like an oxygen supply: You only notice it when it fails. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t generally work.

First, left and right are relative terms. We are currently in a fight for survival. If you want to die on the hill of your purity test, you’re welcome to. I’ll collect allies, people who may have the right values but incomplete information, and do what I can, and we’ll see which approach is more effective for the people, the workers.

I’m not saying the US doesn’t disappear people. It absolutely does. The threshold’s just usually a bit higher than in, say, China. China’s better at meeting basic needs for people at the bottom, and the US will usually only throw you in a black site if you actually foment revolution, rather than simply criticizing the government. It’s amazing how many people assume you have to pick an existing model to root for here. I repeat, I think everyone are bastards, and that we can and must do better.

If they provide a service(an easy-to use, legal platform) in a capitalist system they didn’t create, I can’t get mad at that. What’s fucking stupid are their assumptions about inelasticity of demand. People have free choices, and if you make the paid choice sufficiently onerous, you’ll lose customers. Natural consequences.

Please point out where I called you a fascist, or stop pretending you’re being persecuted.

None, afaik. We need to do better. I don’t oppose ending capitalist states and forming socialist ones. I oppose violations of human rights by both corporations and governments. If we can’t set the bar above “marginally better for most people than late stage capitalism, but we’ll disappear you if you speak out against us,” we’ve already lost.

It wasn’t even a rule, but somehow I got lunch detention for losing a copy of The Two Towers with my name written in the front and not realizing they’d found it and had it in the lost and found. This was the same middle school that only had windows in the science classrooms (because that was legally required).

Given that the corporations own the politicians who make the laws that structure our lives and allow planned obsolescence and a lack of transparency in things like phones, still going to put 90% of the blame on the rich here. Your perspective might be correct in a functional democracy, but that’s not where most people (nor even most Westerners) live.

Are we talking about a revolution or a government, here? If you believe the revolution is ever-ongoing, fine, substitute your own words for the taking-power part and the governing part. If the taking-power part, I’m not sure we can know. Look at the Iranian Revolution. There were leftists involved with the taking-power part, but not so much with the governing part. As far as a government for the people, there are probably many different ways it can turn out, but the essence is fulfilling people’s basic needs while also respecting their human rights. No one’s gotten it right yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.