I’d like to thank everyone for my most upvoted post on lemmy ever. Not only have you upvoted it to the top for like 2 days you commented the shit out of it. I’d like to take this opportunity to say fuck the mods of this instance. This was my second post coming off a 30 day ban and I want to say these fucking mods have been nothing but removed. I’ve never been more attacked on any other instance, subreddit, forum, etc. then I have been in this fucking instance. Not only have I been attacked I’ve been told my memes arent memey enough again and again.
I’ll be honest, I do not know how to make a meme but I keep posting just to piss in these mods cheerios.
Thanks lemmy.world/politicalmemes for being the worst community I’ve ever been a part of.
Historically, yes they are. They are the ones with nothing left to lose except their lives. And are more likely to revolt. Anyone with a couch and xbox isn’t nearly the threat to those in power. I believe that’s called ‘Bread and Circuses’
Historically, they fucking aren’t. Revolutionary action doesn’t come from the starving and homeless. Most revolutions are driven by the comfortable middle class. The working class is often in support, but the working class is generally neither starving nor homeless when they lend their support, because starving and homeless people are generally worried about things other than the overall political situation.
They’re also the ones whose primary thoughts of gain are centered around immediate, not long-term or abstract, needs. Desperation drives one to desperate acts - with desperate goals. A starving man doesn’t overthrow a government, a starving man steals bread.
When? When has this been true? How many incidents of mass starvation have seen the quiet acquiescence of the population?
What.
What kind of inane bullshit is this.
Is this the left-equivalent of “Modern ‘poor’ are so rich they even have refrigerators”?
Bread and circuses were used to keep the middle and upper-working-class of the city of Rome from protesting the loss of their political power. Not to keep the starving or homeless satisfied; nor did such measures include the slaves of the city, who generally had much lower living standards than the established working families who attended the assemblies of Rome. It also didn’t keep the middle and upper-working-class of the city from violence and revolt against the establishment.
Is anyone into Xbox/Netflix/Amazon boycott for 2 years? Walmart? Target? I know there are a few who trulyhave no choice, his many who do are willing to go through the inconvenience? How many are doing shadow work to deal with triggers, distress tolerance/self soothing work? That’s what it’s going to be, before revo.
Been boycotting a few of those since their inception and the others for 15 + years. I talk with people about how bad walmart,target , Amazon are for our area and local business when they opine about the “good old days” and they say " wow, yeah your right , wow . But I can order a charger for my cell phone and have it at my door tomorrow".
Most people are just receivers for advertising at this point. It’s scary
Great job! Keep talking to people! These corps got rich with our meager contributions, they can get poor without them!
I won’t stop but the problem is they have become so conditioned they actually need to be deprogrammed before it can sink in .
That’s harkening back to my original comment. Anytime they whine about what’s happening, to sum up Parkrose Permaculture, 1. Call your representative, even Republican. Do not have to state voting habits, just “This is hurting our state’s economy, and your reelection.” 2. Stop buying from these companies. 3. Get out in the streets, OR volunteer time in some manner. Contact 50501 or DSA or CPUSA, or your local union, etc. “I have experience with spreadsheets/organization/logistics/etc, how can I help?”
My Amazon boycott has been going legit since October, when Bezos quashed the WaPo endorsement. Won’t pretend that I don’t miss some of the convenience, and I sure as shit wasn’t a lucrative customer padding their profit margins, but a man has to have some standards.
Same reason why I gave up Pepsi shortly after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War. I don’t expect corpos to have a conscience, but I sure as shit still ain’t gonna back the worst of the offenders.
Great job! Keep talking to people! These corps got rich with our meager contributions, they can get poor without them!
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Yes, and a million starving men will kill the people keeping all the bread so they can eat. The Russian revolution, for example, was directly caused by the lack of food in Russian cities, and the revolutions of 1848-1849 were in part caused by the hungry forties.
Brilliant, I suppose that’s why famines are so often accompanied by redistribution of wealth, once the rich have been killed so the poor can eat. Inequality plummets after famines, what with all of those dead elites. /s
The actual conditions of food availability had been considerably worse without murmur of revolution, numerous times before. And quite a few times after, for that matter. Much of the initial unrest was because of the prospect of rationing was the final irritant in a weak government’s loss of popularity, not because people were starving. Furthermore, the strata most likely to experience anything resembling actual starvation was the peasantry, which was largely indifferent to the prospect of revolution, and would end up as a primary support base for the counterrevolutionaries in the years to come.
Insofar as they caused economic distress by increasing food prices. Insofar as actual starvation is concerned, no. There’s a reason why the Communist Manifesto, itself written during the Revolutions of 48, mentions the lack of revolutionary potential of the peasantry, who would’ve been the most food insecure of the classes.
Here’s Wikipedia on the Irish potato famine:
Peasant uprisings almost always (or just always???) end in failure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
What? No. The Russian peasantry was having the time of their lives during WWI (well, the ones not conscripted into the war anyway). It’s a long story, but because of inflation, strained supply chains and government failures meant that while the food was there, it just wasn’t getting to the cities. Also do note that the Russian peasantry, while not as revolutionary as the urban proletariat, were absolutely not indifferent to the prospect of revolution. These were the people breaking into, ransacking and burning down their local nobles’ manors. They were also electing these guys.
Those are literally the same thing. Economic distress is just an expression of the human desire not to starve.
I don’t see why peasants would be any more affected by lack of food than the urban proletariat, but that could be just my ignorance. Also Marx’s reasons for making that conclusion were based on peasants’ relationship with private property and religion, and not about how they’re somehow more at leace with rhe prospect of starving to death.
As we all know, Ireland was utterly lacking in peasant uprisings before the Potato Blight.
That the greatest period of starvation in Ireland’s modern history, during a period of continent-wide unrest had one rebellion with two deaths might suggest that starvation is not the revolutionary impetus you think it is.
The food wasn’t there, because some ~90% of the conscripts sent off to WW1 were peasants, in a system that was already in a very precarious position regarding labor and backwards technology being unable to compensate for shortages of labor. Not only that, but WW1 resulted also in the massive buy-up of horses, also key to peasant life and agricultural production. Even in peacetime it was noted that rural peasantry were malnourished, even by the low standards of the Russian working class, and the situation did not improve during the wartime years.
… land-reformers who split with another, more radical socialist party, and who had only marginal support from the peasantry after 1907? How… revolutionary?
Oh great, increased car payments are just an expression of the human desire not to starve too.
Not ignorance so much as “still not getting what I’m saying”.
Yes, but if the peasantry, who are objectively in a worse food situation than the urban proletariat, are starving, according to your hunger-based analysis of revolutionary impetus, they should be immensely revolutionary. Yet history shows, time and time again, that this is not the case - and Marx, living during the Revolutions of '48 you claim were driven by hunger, himself noted the lack of revolutionary sentiment in the peasantry. If starvation was what caused men to rise up and kill their superiors to feed themselves, the starving should be at the forefront - yet the most starving demographic of the period did not rise up. Marx, largely correctly, connected this with the unique interests of the peasantry as a class - starvation had nothing to do with revolution.
That’s fair. In that case allow me to weaken/correct my position: While starvation isn’t the revolutionary impetus, it’s not nothing and does contribute to revolutions.
Source. They still weren’t “having the time of their lives,” to correct my previous assertion, but they weren’t going hungry either.
Conservative counterrevolutionaries don’t vote for socialist revolutionary parties, which the Trudoviks were. They split with the SRs over the question of whether they should participate in the Duma so they definitely weren’t merely land-reformers. Also where did you get that they had only marginal support from the peasantry after 1907?
I mean yeah why not? If we assume there’s a person X who’s financially in a bad spot, then the reason person X would have issue with the idea of increased car payments is that the money for the car would have to come from somewhere else. Fundamentally there’s not much difference between a working person getting a pay cut (or facing rising food prices) and a farmer having a bad harvest.
Were the peasantry in an objectively worse food situation than the urban proletariat? If you have a something supporting that claim please link it.
Peasants didn’t really revolt in the same way urban workers did, and urban workers were absolutely more revolutionary (though in some places the gap shrank with time), but peasant uprisings did happen during in 1848-1849.
Source.
Also on the 1848 revolutions as a whole,
There’s a reason I said “in part”. I know that the hungry forties were only one contributing cause of the revolutions of 1848, and I don’t think you’ll find a reputable historian that considers them irrelevant.
That genocide is a poor comparison. The Irish were invaded and colonized by the English, a foreign power that maintained its political and cultural separation from the subjugated. Struggle against an external force is vastly different than struggle against an internal one.