this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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You think we're gonna fight corporations as individuals if we strangle government?
No. Government is our protection from those who would want to consolidate power, especially corporations. I understand that the government often fails at that protection, but it's still a hell of a lot better than being completely defenseless.
The whole point of the founding fathers was to spread power and attempt to keep it spread. They wanted to avoid both the abuses of monarchy and the eventual decapitation of leadership (seeing as how that'd be their heads).
It ain't going well for the little guy lately - the thread in my Lemmy right below this one is "Amazon, SpaceX and other companies are arguing the government agency that has protected labor rights since 1935 is actually unconstitutional".
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the working man that labor unions were gasp COMMUNIST
Wouldn't it be an interesting few years if governments banned companies from owning companies (maybe with carve outs for pension funds)
Government is our megazord. Got it.
Edit: added wiki link for the curious. In short, episodes of the Power Rangers often end with the rangers battling a monster that inevitably revives as a much larger, Godzilla-scale version.
As the rangers are suddenly too small to fight the larger foe that towers above them, they must instead organize their individual vehicles into one giant “megazord” — a large mech, like a gundam crossed with a transformer — in order to defeat the enemy.
That only works if it can be meaningfully said that the working class directs the state, rather than the owner class. In America, the Owner Class dominates the state via lobbying and being able to contribute to election campaigns.
The working class directs the state. The owning class directs the working class. The owning class doesn't give two shits about abortion beyond how they can use it to get the people they want elected.
It's why they bother with Fox News and all this propaganda. At the end of the day they still need votes.
The Working Class does not direct the state, because they must pick between candidates chosen by the Owner Class. The system itself is designed to protect the Owner Class, and it does so through picking representatives to prevent truly democratic processes.
Fox, CNN, NYT, all of the major media outlets owned by the same group of companies serve as the bread and circuses to distract the Workers.
Yes, the owning class are the ones who picked George Santos. Not just anyone can run. He was the chosen one.
Things are difficult, yes. They're not completely hopeless.
George Santos never rocked the boat and was never a threat.
Reform into a worker-controlled system is largely impossible, but that doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. The system needs to be replaced.
The Founding Fathers built the state to support the interests of the Owner Class, because they were Owners.
One might argue that the government is there to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. James Madison certainly did
Thus the beheading part. Spreading power was good for everyone.
I'd rather have a billion USD as an American citizen than have 10 billion USD as a Russian oligarch. For some reason the GOP doesn't seem to understand why.
Yes. The point of government is to fight things too big for us to fight ourselves. That is the only reason government has to exist. All the other things are nice to have features, but a government is a fighting force.
That doesn’t mean we give up our own weapons though. We need an army to fight the other armies, law to fight the power of money, and government for those. But we also need weapons of our own to prevent the government from physically fighting us.
Our weapons keep the government polite. The government keeps other governments and other large organizations polite.
It’s the minimum structure necessary for a society where respectful interaction is the norm.
All these weapons and power structuring aren’t about dominating. They’re about maintaining a power balance to prevent domination … and make space for respect and trade.
Government therefore exists in order to:
It all starts from needing a way to enforce nobody is dominating anyone else.
And the most important and effective weapon is collective action. The reason people look weird at Americans about gun culture is because alone, you can have as many guns as you want, the police will bash your head in either way. Together, you don't even need guns, you can cripple the government in a week by just not going to work.
And that ability is incredibly heavily regulated in the US. From our perspective, the US is the country where people don't have the ability to fight the government.
That said, guns can be good against nazis at your door, but at that point, the government has long failed at taking out the trash.
What i take away from this is that when an individual becomes too powerful (e.g. rich) it becomes a threat for the government and the government should consider it a threat and intervene. Yes, I'm talking about the billionaires.
That's why it's important to study the mechanisms of the state to see who actually controls it.