The fact that there isn't a revolution happening in the US right now is crazy

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut

Rockefeller hid in his guarded home for years before he and Carnegie did their philanthropy PR stuff. Carnegie fled to England, and was putting out press releases that supported the Unions, while at the same time telling Frick to gun down the strikers. The gilded age was full of violence that created folk heroes to this day. Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy George, Al Capone. These people were absolutely loved by the masses because they would destroy all the paper that said that old widow Johnson still owed on her mortgage. Bankers were beaten, hung, and shot for attempting to evict poor people.

We may have revered Washington, but since The Gilded Age, lots of us were taught by our grandparents and great grandparents that the greedy have no end to their greed, short of a bullet to the brain.

Was curious what that term meant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon?wprov=sfla1 for anyone else who was wondering :)

Hah never thought I'd see that name on social media

Really, I think anyone considering themselves a Leftist needs to read False Witnesses and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing." Both are excellent examples of why people don't change their minds when seeing indisputable evidence, they willingly go along with narratives that they find more comfortable. It explains the outright anger liberals express when anticommunism is debunked. That doesn't mean Communists don't do the same thing, but as we live in a liberal dominated west (most likely, assuming demographics) this happens to a much lesser extent because liberalism is that which supplies these "licenses" to go along, while Communism requires hard work to begin to accept. This explains the mountains of sources Communists keep on hand, and the lack thereof from liberals who argue from happenstance and vibes.

Poverty in 1700 is very different from poverty in 2000, which allows for significant, but not unlimited, skewing.

One could argue that the Church had been extremely efficient at manufacturing consent for centuries. It was still the case for most of French society in the late 1780s. It also led to a civil war between Revolutionaries and traditionalists (including peasants).

What’s interesting is that this doesn’t even tell the whole picture.

Because those people earning $170k/year? More than likely their net worth is negative. They owe more than they’re making, and even at that income rate and excluding long term debt, they have just enough in savings to last three months max.

No dude you mixed some numbers up - 5%/yr of 440 billion is 22 BILLION dollars per year.

Unless you meant he could put 0.1% of his wealth (440 mil) to pull 22 million a year.

In fact, he could put less than half of his total net worth, 200 bil, into a basic savings account returning 0.5% a year and live off of a billion dollars a year, which is equivalent to the median income of 16,666 others.

Neighborhood politics, social gatherings, community hotspots has massively declined in the last two generations,

It’s really hard to organize anything face to face?

Are you sure it's not 220 mil or 22 billion a year

Not sure where you're getting your income percentiles from.

This site shows that 90th percentile (top 10%) household starts at $230k and 99th percentile (top 1%) starts at $631k.

For individuals the same site shows that the 10% starts at $150k and the 1% starts at $430k.

The internet is also a big reason. Why put effort into fighting back when you can just bitch about it on social media?

Tbf, if he transfered that stock, the price of it would crash as the employees sold it. He'd have to do some kind of slow transfer over several years.

And some of that money he has came from under-paying factory workers at his Fremont, California assembly plant. For a long time the hourly rate was $22 (not sure what it is now) but auto plants in the Midwest were paying that or better and he was paying $22 per hour in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.

All those employees were given stock options as part of their total compensation which those other auto factories did not give to everyone.

All the early floor workers would be multi millionaires if they kept their initial stock, not counting using the employee program to buy more at a discounted rate or further employee incentives.

Anyone who joined a little after the Model S was being sold and the early model 3 time up to around mid 2020 would have around a quarter million if they didn't aquire any additional stock.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla as a company created the most employee millionaires of any recent USA company due to giving every employee stock as part of their compensation.

Early SpaceX employees are in a similar boat, but it's harder to get rid of their shares since it's private so it's harder to quantify it.

Yeah, the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else literally does not matter at all, when it comes to 'motivation for revolution'.

The overall level/amount/condition of poverty is what matters. And let's be real, things are not nearly as bad in the US today as they were in France before the French Revolution. Not even close.

Fact is, if you magically bumped everyone up so that no one was making less than $75k a year, the wealth gap would be essentially identical to what it is now, because the gap between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the gap between 75k and hundreds of billions. But no one would be suffering in poverty, so would anyone care about the wealth gap, then? I seriously doubt it.

It only takes about 3% of the population to push effective revolution. That's still over ten million people. We might be getting close.

McDonald's charging $10-20 for shit-tier burgers in some of the US:

McDonald's is expensive now.

A double cheeseburger was a dollar a few years ago, sure. But it's almost that much for a single nugget these days.

A hash brown is 3.50 at the one by my office.

Ahhh so the Wall-E form of public control.

I can see it

Conspiracies happen in secret. There's no hidden agenda, just the publicly-stated agenda.

Just offer free food and specially free opiates if they start a revolution. There's many means to a end

It's one of the main reasons our owner class has sought to mock the French with "surrender" slurs and "freedom fries."

They'd very much like the citizenry to forget Frances contribution to America and "western culture" over the last 200 years lest they get any ideas.

the propaganda machine seem to do its job better in the us

“Data for Boston 40% in France is extrapolated from a single data point.”

Oh I see, this is reliable data.

Why would you post an image of text?

I wouldn't glorify Orwell, he was violently reactionary, even Anarchists fighting alongside him questioned why he wasn't on the "other side." He had a deeply aristocratic worldview, admired Hitler, and despised the Working Class for their "stupidity." I recommend reading On Orwell as well as A Critical Read of Animal Farm.

Essentially, we get to eat cake every so often, while bread rapidly becomes unaffordable.

funny how such a big anticommunist meaning to predict socialism just ended up predicting capitalism

i saw someone else try to share a similar message on tiktok yesterday and the overwhelming majority of the american users referred theory as little more than "book clubs for intellectuals" despite the chinese & latin american users trying to defend its usefulness on the same post.

getting my feet wet with this reading list is making it clear to me that i'm still a heavily propagandized american liberal and some of the tiktokers who called it a book club had seemingly more knowledge of theory that I did, so i wasn't qualified to speak up. what would your response be to such a criticism?

As if the US is currently a Democracy

Yeah there is no single explanation for revolution. Looking strictly to wealth distribution is reductionistic at best. I mean, wealth distribution was arguably better in the U.S. in the 1860s than it was in the prelude to Revolutionary France and yet we had a Civil War lmfao. There are endless examples that disprove this rule. The reality is: popular unrest is extremely complicated, and the factors that lead up to it are varied with fluctuating levels of influence at different stages of development. Sure, perception of wealth is a key component... but its hardly an explainer.

America is a frog getting slowly heated in a pot of water. The only hope is to turn up the heat fast enough and high enough that the frog jumps out of the pot before it gets cooked

Despite the current wealth inequality

It's not "despite" the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).

After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.

Someone's always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can--cash money simply can't do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.

Careful, bub, there are people lurking who think this quite seriously

I’m not sure I would characterize it that way. It was a bourgeois revolution, lead by the bourgeoisie, who were not starving. Same with the American Revolution. These were revolutions led by & funded by people who owned the means of production.

This is faaaar too low. The French Revolution was really triggered by famine and people not having enough food.

please provide image

It's less misinformation and more willing disbelief. People accept narratives that go along with what they believe supports that which benefits them. I highly recommend reading Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing". People aren't stupid, they seek approval for their actions and support, which explains the anger expressed at factual debunking of their worldview.

Maybe. There was occupy wall street and an assassinated CEO this last week though