It’s very good. I would make it clear, somehow, that workers are paid the value of their labor-power (the cost of reproducing themselves as workers), not “less than the full value of their labor.” The difference between those two things is surplus value. It may be to pedantic but it stood out to me.
We shouldn’t define the stagnant working class wage as the ceiling. We should pull marginalized people out of the basement while building a path toward working class power together. Then the only ceiling is the one above the boss’s head.
Is that actually your good faith interpretation of what I said? That’s a strawman. The argument isn’t “white men need to earn more.” The argument is that all wages have stagnated relative to productivity, and that convergence toward a stagnant floor isn’t the victory it’s being presented as.
Treating convergence toward a declining floor as progress seems disingenuous (it’s only progress in a narrow sense). If white men’s wages stagnate for 50 years while Black wages inch closer to that stagnant level, you can call that “closing the gap.” But nobody’s winning.
The postwar arrangement where labor got a cut was a historical anomaly produced by specific conditions (destroyed competitors, strong unions, Cold War pressure). Once those conditions dissolved, capital clawed it back. 6/6
The top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 90%. That gap has widened every decade since the 70s. Life expectancy in the US declined pre-COVID, driven by what Case and Deaton called “deaths of despair,” suicide, overdose, alcoholic liver disease, concentrated in deindustrialized working class. 5/6
The 2008 financial crisis destroyed roughly $7-10 trillion in household wealth, disproportionately hitting Black and Latino families whose wealth was concentrated in housing. The recovery funneled money upward through QE and asset inflation. Stock ownership is concentrated in the top 10%. 4/6
Healthcare spending went from ~6% of GDP to ~18%. Tuition at public universities increased something like 1,200% since 1980 in nominal terms. Household debt replaced wage growth as the mechanism for maintaining consumption. Credit cards, student loans, medical debt, mortgage debt. 3/6
The cost structure shifted. Housing, healthcare, and education all massively outpaced both inflation and wage growth. A house that cost roughly 2x median income in 1970 costs 5-7x now depending on market. 2/6
Real wages decoupled from productivity around 1973 and never reconnected. Productivity roughly doubled since then, real hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers is essentially flat in inflation-adjusted terms. 1/6
the postwar arrangement where labor got a cut was a historical anomaly produced by specific conditions (destroyed competitors, strong unions, Cold War pressure). Once those conditions dissolved, capital clawed it back. 6/6
The top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 90%. That gap has widened every decade since the 70s. Life expectancy in the US declined pre-COVID, driven by what Case and Deaton called “deaths of despair,” suicide, overdose, alcoholic liver disease, concentrated in deindustrialized working class. 5/6
The 2008 financial crisis destroyed roughly $7-10 trillion in household wealth, disproportionately hitting Black and Latino families whose wealth was concentrated in housing. The recovery funneled money upward through QE and asset inflation. Stock ownership is concentrated in the top 10%. 4/6
Healthcare spending went from ~6% of GDP to ~18%. Tuition at public universities increased something like 1,200% since 1980 in nominal terms. Household debt replaced wage growth as the mechanism for maintaining consumption. Credit cards, student loans, medical debt, mortgage debt. 3/6
The cost structure shifted. Housing, healthcare, and education all massively outpaced both inflation and wage growth. A house that cost roughly 2x median income in 1970 costs 5-7x now depending on market. 2/6
Assuming you’re US based (but the pattern holds almost everywhere). Real wages decoupled from productivity around 1973 and never reconnected. Productivity roughly doubled since then, real hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers is essentially flat in inflation-adjusted terms. 1/6
losing the ability to feed themselves independently, and being forced into wage labor on pain of starvation. Is that different from your understanding?
accelerated through the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries. Marx covered that in Capital Vol. 1, Part 8, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class documented the peasants losing access to common land,
I don’t stand behind my original comment. It was reductive (lupenmarxism is fair). And I’m absolutely repeating words I’ve read. Is originality a prerequisite to discussion for you? From my reading enclosure in England started in the 15th-16th century.
My name isn’t Saoirse, my name is Seoirse. They’re entirely different names.
The Pentagon lobbied itself out of emissions reporting. The number could be higher.
US beef (full lifecycle): ~243 Mt CO2e/yr. US military (Pentagon + defense industry): 339 Mt CO2e/yr. Excludes war destruction, reconstruction, conflict fires, and displacement. (Source: Brown Costs of War Project 2019/SGR 2022 drawing on Crawford’s Costs of War data, Nature Food 2024)
It’s also much easier to disagree with a leader in hindsight. I think the Left SRs were right about pressing the revolution forward into the trenches to support the German revolution. But I have the privilege of knowing how it all played out.
Comparing leaders based on how morally pure they can be framed is a silly premise to begin with. Every head of state presides over violence. The useful question is what structural interests they served and what material conditions they operated within.
Like US president Lincoln: suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists + editors, shut down newspapers, largest mass execution in US history (38 Dakota men), approved scorched earth tactics (Sherman), military tribunals for civilians, suppressed NYC draft riots with federal troops.
That’s not why the local Bolshevik leadership did this, nor was it directed by Lenin. But it did happen and is, in my opinion, indefensible even given the circumstances. The point is, no leader comes out clean under siege or civil war conditions.
The new Lancet study on the genocide in Gaza finds that total deaths were 1.71 times higher than reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health as of January 2025.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
on the 24th of Feb, 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, was deposed in a coup backed by the US and UK. The coup was part of a coordinated effort to destroy socialist and Pan-Africanist movements on the continent.
Is decoupling between economic growth and environmental pressures happening, yes, or no? And if not, could it ever happen? In this paper, I show how to spot fake green growth miracles.
timotheeparrique.com/a-response-t...
That is exactly what is happening in Romania now. it’s just the standard phase of modernization and export of production where efficiency improves but pollution still rises (Relative Decoupling). For the green growth model to be feasible we need absolute decoupling. I would argue this is unlikely.