See the stickied comment below for an explanation and statement of our purpose, based on simple back-of-the-napkin math
E: if someone could please link this community to r/aspen and r/roaringforkvalley I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve been IP banned by the all powerful AI mod monster, like many folks on Lemmy
Full blown revolution is relatively unlikely to occur, or I think we would have seen it by now. People want change in society but they want to see it done peacefully, and I think the No Kings protests were evidence of that.
Violence against individual billionaires a la the French Revolution will never work, because its just attacking a hydra. Kill a multi billionaire and then their wealth just gets spread to their kids. Their kids will still accumulate wealth faster than they can spend it.
I think an evidenced based argument made, and particularly targeted at the 1%, would show them quite clearly that A) their wealth means nothing if people are actually pushed to full blown revolution, B) if nobody can afford cost of living by a mile, then they are losing money because we cant spend money on shit that they own, and C) nothing about their current income, taxation, or standard of living has to change whatsoever, because were literally just targeting people with over $12B. Like all the 1%, which starts with anyone worth over $13M, up to $12B, can just go on living as they have and being as wealthy as they have. The 1% are not the problem. The entire reason for our economic woes can be tied down to 250 people in the world.
While I totally agree that the base ideas here of taxing the rich and raising wages are the bread and butter of a lot of political movements that have failed, I dont think they take this exact approach in policy goals or in messaging. Saying “tax the 1%” is taking most of the wealthiest people who could, and probably would (if it saves their asses), actually help us with that problem easily and pushing them out from under the tent. If anything I almost see this as a prototype for a political party that could actually be successful in bringing people together. We should all be fighting against the 0.0001% for the sake of each other. I just want to afford cost of living. I could care less if that means someone with $100M gets to keep having $100M. They arent the problem
But the history of mass, peaceful protest in the west leading nowhere is endless. In the very US you had the occupy wall street movement. In Spain we had the 15-M protests, in France the Gilets Jeunes, in Greece they had massive protests too, literal millions on the streets… and nothing happened. And I’m only talking about the past 15 years or so. You could go back further to see the tens of millions of people all over the west who protested against the Iraq invasion to no avail, if you go just a few years further back.
The problem isn’t that nobody over the past 50 years of the western world has come up with a clear enough slogan, the problem is that quite literally every institution in the west is designed around maintaining the status quo, and when the time comes they won’t be afraid to use violence to maintain it. If you somehow get a big enough following of peaceful protesters/voters who want to tax the rich, the rich will respond with violence, as it happened for example in my home country Spain in 1936 when the fascists did a coup to a relatively non-revolutionary leftist government.
The list of countries where fascists or otherwise violence were summoned to stop otherwise peaceful social leftist movements is endless: you have Nazi Germany (born after the murder of Rosa Luxembourg by the socialdemocrats), Fascist Spain, Allende being murdered in Chile and Pinochet taking control, you have Iran under Mosaddegh being toppled in the 50s… The list goes on and on and on and on all over the world. The countries which actually managed to reduce wealth inequality aren’t mainly Socialdemocrats ones: you have the Soviet Union, Cuba or Maoist China solving wealth inequality for about a billion people, saving hundreds of millions of lives from hunger and exploitation in the process. There are a few counter-example mini-states such as Finland or Norway but they’re a minority, and historically the reason why they managed to achieve these victories was because of the example (and threat) of the Soviet Union.
Again: I fundamentally agree that the richest among the top 1% must be extremely taxed (ideally their capital expropriated and nationalised or redistributed), but I don’t think that’s happening unless under threat of socialism or directly under socialism. You make a valid point when you say “Full blown revolution is relatively unlikely to occur, or I think we would have seen it by now”, but in my opinion that’s just because the west has been happily exploiting the work and resources of the global south. This dynamic is coming to a halt thanks to China and to the multipolarity of the world, and in the process, the west will collectively lose a lot (as it already happened in Europe and will keep happening, purchase power in Spain as of 2023 was 10 less than in 2006). With the decrease of material wealth in the west, fascism will pop up to keep the profits of the ultra-rich at the expense of the working class, and only socialism can defeat fascism.
The reason revolution has not happened yet in the Global North is because through Imperialism, cost of goods are kept low enough that workers are more interested in perpetuating the system than they are overthrowing it. As Imperialism continues, though, concentration gets higher and exploitation more severe, until these countries break away and nationalize their industries. This reflects in worse conditions back in the Global North, and strengthens revolutionary fervor (hence the rising class struggle in the US).
You’re correct that random assassination won’t work, the system has to be replaced. You agree with Lenin, here, who argued against adventurism. Instead, the state must be smashed and replaced, the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. Public ownership must become the principle aspect of society, not private.
People have tried making arguments to the bourgeoisie, like Robert Owen, Saint Simone, etc. These were the Utopian Socialists, and they all failed, because economic systems are material, not collections of ideas. They aren’t recipes, but physical objects, that behave according to the laws of physics. Policy is a reflection of that underlying base, not the driver. Policy shapes the base, but the base is primary.
Finally, it’s the working class that has power through numbers and trained through Capitalism into socialized (read: cooperative, systematized labor) into a class that can run society as a whole. The 1% have money, but the working class has physical power.