The problem is that capital will always fight for less regulation. That is literally how we have ended up here.
Capital will never share the fruits of your labor freely. Regulations are useless as long as capitalists just pay politicians to write laws that benefit them.
It is similar to gun regulations. Studies show that cops largely choose not to enforce gun laws on white right wing nutjobs because they refuse to police “their own.” While the people who gun laws are enforced against tend to be minorities, whether they are black, disabled, or trans. Cops are more thn happy to take their guns away.
Similarly, cops are happy to test pregnant women who have had miscarriages for use of abortion drugs, because of course women getting abortions is more important than, you know, enforcing gun laws.
Regulations only work if they are evenly enforced, and we haven’t even figured that part out.
Slavery called, and wants to remind you that it was a legal, formal, and accepted part of capitalism for a loooooooong time. Blaming it all on Reagan is ignoring massive swaths of US history.
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 was also called “The Bombing of Black Wall Street” because it was the most concentrated area of black wealth in the US. Capitalism and Democracy decided the best way to deal with that was to bomb the living shit out of all of them, because the majority white citizentry couldn’t deal with the idea of successful black citizens.
Beyond that, this also ignores the entirety of the labor movement that won you things like a 40-hour work-week and labor laws preventing children from being employed.
And everything was regulated and limited until Reagan came around? Give me the biggest of motherfucking breaks. Upton Sinclair would love to have a word with you.
Read a fucking book about US history before Reagan (The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a great one, it’s actually about the importance of unions, but most people’s main take away is that the food industry was wholly unregulated at the time). Capitalism has always been evil, has always been willing to turn a blind eye to horrible abuse as long as it makes money, and in general is unable to be constrained. The fact that we’re re-living the labor disputes of the early 20th century during the previous gilded age is proof of that. We already fought these battles and won, but now we have to fight them again, against the same class of rich twats as before.
The other side of this problem is that most attempts so far at actually getting rid of capitalism end up being pretty horrific, and then end up back at roughly the same place anyway, but with more autocracy because people will be rightfully pissed off about having violent revolution imposed on their otherwise decent lives.
The reality is that capitalist forces are a byproduct of scarcity and economic complexity. As long as you have these things you will have something resembling capitalism. You can call it something different but you’ll still just be meditating scarcity via a monetary proxy in some form or another.
This is the biggest thing orthodox/ML socialists really hate to acknowledge, but there is about a century of hindsight and academic thought which builds on Marx, mostly coming to a similar conclusion. It’s extremely bizarre and frustrating to hear MLs reject entire libraries of reformed socialism outright, seemingly because it doesn’t route through violence, and for me at least, it really says a lot about what their real priorities are.
The problem is that capital will always fight for less regulation. That is literally how we have ended up here.
Capital will never share the fruits of your labor freely. Regulations are useless as long as capitalists just pay politicians to write laws that benefit them.
It is similar to gun regulations. Studies show that cops largely choose not to enforce gun laws on white right wing nutjobs because they refuse to police “their own.” While the people who gun laws are enforced against tend to be minorities, whether they are black, disabled, or trans. Cops are more thn happy to take their guns away.
Similarly, cops are happy to test pregnant women who have had miscarriages for use of abortion drugs, because of course women getting abortions is more important than, you know, enforcing gun laws.
Regulations only work if they are evenly enforced, and we haven’t even figured that part out.
Prior to Reagan capitalism was regulated and limited. Then he and Thatcher let the dogs loose.
Slavery called, and wants to remind you that it was a legal, formal, and accepted part of capitalism for a loooooooong time. Blaming it all on Reagan is ignoring massive swaths of US history.
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 was also called “The Bombing of Black Wall Street” because it was the most concentrated area of black wealth in the US. Capitalism and Democracy decided the best way to deal with that was to bomb the living shit out of all of them, because the majority white citizentry couldn’t deal with the idea of successful black citizens.
Beyond that, this also ignores the entirety of the labor movement that won you things like a 40-hour work-week and labor laws preventing children from being employed.
People literally fought and died, shed their blood, to get you better working conditions, when the business owners were hiring the fucking Pinkertons and calling in the National Guard to fucking murder workers for standing up for their rights.
And everything was regulated and limited until Reagan came around? Give me the biggest of motherfucking breaks. Upton Sinclair would love to have a word with you.
Read a fucking book about US history before Reagan (The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a great one, it’s actually about the importance of unions, but most people’s main take away is that the food industry was wholly unregulated at the time). Capitalism has always been evil, has always been willing to turn a blind eye to horrible abuse as long as it makes money, and in general is unable to be constrained. The fact that we’re re-living the labor disputes of the early 20th century during the previous gilded age is proof of that. We already fought these battles and won, but now we have to fight them again, against the same class of rich twats as before.
That’s fair.
I should have added that regulations were implemented post-WW2. My bad on forgetting to add that in prior to posting.
The other side of this problem is that most attempts so far at actually getting rid of capitalism end up being pretty horrific, and then end up back at roughly the same place anyway, but with more autocracy because people will be rightfully pissed off about having violent revolution imposed on their otherwise decent lives.
The reality is that capitalist forces are a byproduct of scarcity and economic complexity. As long as you have these things you will have something resembling capitalism. You can call it something different but you’ll still just be meditating scarcity via a monetary proxy in some form or another.
This is the biggest thing orthodox/ML socialists really hate to acknowledge, but there is about a century of hindsight and academic thought which builds on Marx, mostly coming to a similar conclusion. It’s extremely bizarre and frustrating to hear MLs reject entire libraries of reformed socialism outright, seemingly because it doesn’t route through violence, and for me at least, it really says a lot about what their real priorities are.