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#class-warfare — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #class-warfare, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. A quotation from Victor Hugo

    “Their vanity is full of phantoms which move as in a sublime night, armed with helm and cuirass, spurs on their heels and the sceptres in their hands, saying in a grave voice, ‘We are the ancestors!’ The canker-worms eat the roots, and panoplies eat the people. Why not? Are we to change the laws? The peerage is part of the order of society. Do you know that there is a duke in Scotland who can ride ninety miles without leaving his own estate? Do you know that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a revenue of £40,000 a year? Do you know that her Majesty has £700,000 sterling from the civil list, besides castles, forests, domains, fiefs, tenancies, freeholds, prebendaries, tithes, rent, confiscations, and fines, which bring in over a million sterling? Those who are not satisfied are hard to please.”
    “Yes,” murmured Gwynplaine sadly, “the paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
     
    — Leur vanité est pleine de fantômes qui s’y promènent comme dans une nuit sublime, armés, casqués, cuirassés, éperonnés, le bâton d’empire à la main, et disant d’une voix grave: Nous sommes les aïeux ! Les scarabées mangent les racines, et les panoplies mangent le peuple. Pourquoi pas? Allons-nous changer les lois? La seigneurie fait partie de l’ordre. Sais-tu qu’il y a un duc en Écosse qui galope trente lieues sans sortir de chez lui? Sais-tu que le lord archevêque de Canterbury a un million de Francs de revenu? Sais-tu que sa majesté a par an sept cent mille livres sterling de liste civile, sans compter les châteaux, forêts, domaines, fiefs, tenances, alleux, prébendes, dîmes et redevances, confiscations et amendes, qui dépassent un million sterling ? Ceux qui ne sont pas contents sont difficiles.
    — Oui, murmura Gwynplaine pensif, c’est de l’enfer des pauvres qu’est fait le paradis des riches.

    Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
    The Man Who Laughs [L’Homme qui rit; The Laughing Man; By Order of the King], Part 2, Book 2, ch. 11 (2.2.11) (1869) [Auth. trans. (1871)]

    More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/hugo-victor/82457/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #victorhugo #themanwholaughs #aristocracy #classwarfare #economicinjustice #exploitation #meme #oligarchy #poor #poverty #power #rich #riches #wealth

  2. "Let me just define what logistics is first. It’s originally a term from the military. It’s talking about the deployment of goods to battle sites like weapons, arms, shelter, and food. Well, you know, just like getting the kind of things that you need to fight a war beyond just military strategy. And in this context, it just means the movement of goods around the country, getting things where they need to be in order to be sold.

    It used to be a pretty simple industry. If you procured something from a supplier or a vendor, you’d store it in a warehouse for a while. It was a very manual operation.

    I think one defining feature of the retail revolution, wherein companies like Walmart and Home Depot and Amazon eventually came to dominance, is that they have really perfected the logistics process. They’ve made it tremendously sophisticated compared to what it was in the postwar period.

    I’ve tried to track Amazon’s automation game, its deployment of different robotics technologies, in order to combat a dominant narrative that you hear in the organizing world and in the business world that Amazon and other logistics companies are on the cusp of what they call “dark warehouses,” which is to say warehouses where packages are primarily sorted by robotics technology, and you’ve got like a skeleton crew of maintenance people. But for the most part, human workers are not part of the equation."

    jacobin.com/2026/04/amazon-lab

    #Amazon #Unions #ClassWarfare #Automation #AI

  3. A quotation from Melville

    Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

    Herman Melville (1819-1891) American writer
    Story (1854-06), “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “Picture First,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 9

    More about this quote: wist.info/melville-herman/8281…

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #melville #hermanmelville #classwarfare #criticism #economicinequality #economicinjustice #perspective #poor #poverty #wealthy #welltodo

  4. @wdlindsy

    The rule of law's continued failure

    Had Bennie been removed for his corruption we wouldn't be here, at world wars edge
    Fast forward
    Had Donnie been held accountable for his corruption the world wouldn't be here

    This has always been Powers plan.

    Law & Order for us, the taxpayer paying for all of this, and do whatever the f~ck you want for them

    #classwarfare #EatTheBillionaires #endcitizensunited

  5. "It is not always clear to management, staff, clients, and customers what the proper level of staffing should be. And it is not always clear why a business is understaffed: Can the firm not find enough qualified workers, or is management deliberately trying to cut costs by heaping more work on fewer people? But in recent years, both the extent and impact of understaffing have emerged, and it is not just disgruntled workers making the case.

    A 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers found 53 percent believe their workplace is “always” or “often” understaffed. Surely, workers will often agitate for adequate staffing, while bosses will push employees to do more with less. But researchers looked into public-health agencies and found many need to hire 80 percent more workers to be fully staffed. Mt. Sinai Health System in New York was ordered to pay $2 million in 2024 due to critical understaffing in emergency departments, labor and delivery units, and oncology. A Journal of the American Medical Directors Association article correlated low levels of staffing at nursing homes (especially in poor neighborhoods) with increased use of antipsychotic medications.

    The Department of Transportation’s inspector general determined that 77 percent of “critical facilities” for air traffic controllers are staffed below the required 85 percent threshold, with New York and Miami at 54 percent and 66 percent, respectively. State officials in Texas reduced the capacity of the county jail serving the Houston area due to chronic understaffing. In countless news reports of unionization campaigns and strike threats, from Starbucks to major hospitals to railroad workers, you will see “understaffing” mentioned as a key concern. The trend affects white-collar workers, too; 83 percent of millennials report that they take on up to six tasks beyond their job description due to turnover."

    prospect.org/2026/03/19/unders

    #USA #Understaffing #ClassWarfare #Capitalism #WageSlavery

  6. "So the point Marx made was that, in the process of producing goods, whatever technology capitalists use, they have to deal with the fact that their workers may not have the same goals and drives as they do.

    In other words, there is an underlying conflict and divergence of interests between workers and capitalists. He has committed to paying these workers, and he wants to make sure he gets the most out of that investment. His fundamental concern, just like with a machine, is now that he has spent the money on it, he wants to get as much value out of it as he can. He wants to get as much bang for his buck. So that means when he sees a worker, he sees the wage as an investment that he wants to get the maximum returns out of.

    Well, what is it that the capitalist paid for in that investment? He paid for work. He wants them to do the work at the maximum, fastest, and best quality possible.

    Now, for the worker, sure, he’s happy to have a job. He came to work. He wants to keep the job. But that doesn’t mean that at the job he wants to give his employer the quality, extent, and pace of work that the capitalist wants. Why? Well, because oftentimes the pace of work is killing him. And oftentimes the machinery is dangerous. And he also knows that if he works really fast, really hard, really well, he’s increasing the productivity of his boss, which means some of that labor is going to become expendable, because as your productivity goes up, you don’t need as many people working it. So he literally might be working himself out of a job!

    The way to summarize this is, what capitalists want is for the worker to give up as much work as possible. What the worker wants is to give just as much work as he can get away with. In other words, the worker wants to give up only as much work as he absolutely has to, which means he’s probably going to want to give up less work than what his boss wants."

    jacobin.com/2026/03/work-deski

    #Capitalism #Marx #Marxism #Labor #Automation #ClassWarfare

  7. "Most wavering Trump voters are not becoming Democrats — they are disengaging from politics entirely. Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.

    This is the pattern that should alarm anyone who assumes that defection from Trump automatically signals support for Democrats: a large bloc of young, low-income, non-white working-class voters who tried the political system, found it wanting on both sides, and are now preparing to check out. These are not people moving left. They are people losing faith that politics can deliver for them at all.

    The strategic implications are clear. There is a constituency of working-class, lower-income, disproportionately non-white voters who voted for Trump but are not loyal Republicans. They are gettable — but not with the standard Democratic playbook of appeals to norms, institutions, and preserving a democracy that many of them feel has given them little reason to defend.

    These voters responded to Trump’s promise of material improvement. They are now wavering because that promise has gone unfulfilled or because the administration’s cruelty on immigration has become impossible to ignore.

    What would reach them is straightforward: a politics that takes their economic grievances seriously and offers concrete material programs — lower prices, better and more stable jobs, cheaper and higher quality health care, and affordable housing. The fact that they are disengaging rather than switching parties is an indictment of the Democratic Party’s failure to offer a credible alternative.

    Trump’s coalition was always more brittle than it looked. The question is whether anyone will organize the people it is leaving behind."

    jacobin.com/2026/03/trump-coal

    #USA #Trump #Trumpism #MAGA #Politics #DemocraticParty #ClassWarfare

  8. "At an Amazon fulfillment center in Spain, we used a flurry of brief walkouts late last year to force the company to improve wages and time off.

    We struck for three days in November and in December in a series of “flexible strikes,” timed to hit production with intermittent walkouts during the holiday “peak” season. On December 22, the union committee announced a settlement, negotiated through government mediators.

    The facility, RMU1 in the city of Murcia, employed 2,000 workers at the time, and our union the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was one of four unions that represented them. [European countries don’t have the same “exclusive representation” system as the U.S., so multiple unions can have a presence at the same worksite. –Editors]

    About 75 percent of the workforce, made up of workers from Spain and immigrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Morocco, participated in the strike, reaching beyond the ranks of the CGT to include other union members.

    Our experience shows what’s possible, even at a multinational corporation designed to neutralize organizing. Building from below, workers can organize a well-planned strike—over the objections of more conservative unions—draw on their knowledge of the production process, hit the company where it hurts the most, and wrest real gains.

    Here’s how we got Amazon to negotiate with us when it didn’t want to."

    labornotes.org/amazon-workers-

    #Spain #Amazon #GGT #Murcia #CGT #Labor #WageSlavery #ClassWarfare

  9. A quotation from Victor Hugo

    “Their vanity is full of phantoms, which move as in a sublime night, armed with helm and cuirass, spurs on their heels and sceptres in their hands, saying in a grave voice, ‘We are the ancestors!’ The canker-worms eat the roots, and panoplies eat the people. Why not? Are we to change the laws? The peerage is part of the order of society. Do you know there is a duke in Scotland who can ride ninety miles without leaving his own estate? Do you know that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a revenue of forty thousand pounds a year? Do you know that her majesty has seven hundred thousand pounds sterling from the civil list, besides castles, forests, domains, fiefs, tenancies, feeholds, prebendaries, tithes, rent, confiscations, and fines, which bring in over a million sterling? Those who are not satisfied are hard to please.”
       Yes,” murmured Gwynplaine, sadly; “the paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
     
    Leur vanité est pleine de fantômes qui s’y promènent comme dans une nuit sublime, armés, casqués, cuirassés, éperonnés, le bâton d’empire à la main, et disant d’une voix grave : Nous sommes les aïeux ! Les scarabées mangent les racines, et les panoplies mangent le peuple. Pourquoi pas ? Allons-nous changer les lois ? La seigneurie fait partie de l’ordre. Sais-tu qu’il y a un duc en Écosse qui galope trente lieues sans sortir de chez lui ? Sais-tu que le lord archevêque de Canterbury a un million de Francs de revenu ? Sais-tu que sa majesté a par an sept cent mille livres sterling de liste civile, sans compter les châteaux, forêts, domaines, fiefs, tenances, alleux, prébendes, dîmes et redevances, confiscations et amendes, qui dépassent un million sterling ? Ceux qui ne sont pas contents sont difficiles.
       — Oui, murmura Gwynplaine pensif, c’est de l’enfer des pauvres qu’est fait le paradis des riches.

    Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
    The Man Who Laughs [L’Homme qui rit], Part 2, Book 2, ch. 11 (1869) [tr. (1888)]

    More about this quote: wist.info/hugo-victor/82457/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #victorhugo #classwarfare #economicinjustice #exploitation #poor #poverty #power #rich #wealth #meme

  10. "Rogue Elephant neatly sets out its core argument from the very start. Trump has seized the Republican Party, seemingly against all odds, for two main structural reasons. First, due to a range of historical and institutional factors — most prominently the loose regulations around political donations — the two big parties are not as cohesive and centralized as, for example, their European counterparts. This creates windows of opportunity for insurgent candidates to emerge and get elected independently of the party establishment, sometimes in open opposition to it. Throughout the postwar era, these candidates have steadily pushed the GOP more to the Right, on both economic and so-called “cultural” issues, thus paving the way for the Trumpist far-right project we have seen unfolding for the past decade.

    Second, while the Republicans are resolutely the party of business, the US capitalist class has rarely organized as a single class united by an awareness of its common interest. The few times when that did happen were in reaction to the political organization of labor and heightened class struggle. When class unity is weak on one side, it is on the other side too, as has been the case for most of US history (at least when compared to other advanced capitalist countries).

    The big exception came in the 1970s and ’80s, when big business mobilized against the legacy of the New Deal and threw its full weight behind the Reagan administrations’ neoliberal project. But that unity did not last long and was followed by growing cleavages among different fractions of capital."

    jacobin.com/2026/02/capital-tr

    #USA #Trump #Capitalism #GOP #RepublicanParty #ClassWarfare #Politics

  11. Amazing how we have to rely on other Judicial Systems to help us out with this chronic problem
    #andrew #jeffrey #EpsteinFiles #classwarfare

  12. "This might at least help to pose the problem, which is not so much that workers as a whole are turning to the right as that the class is fundamentally fractured by the material interests deriving from the market position of its component parts as Weber noted long ago. Framed in this way, the necessary strategy would seem to be not to accommodate the rightward drift to little avail, but to find a basis on which to suture that divide, one that speaks both to highly specific, culturally inflected market interests as well as class-wide interests rooted in the common experience of wage labour.

    This politics must start from the observation that the economic interests of wage earners under capitalism are highly differentiated and can point in different, even contradictory political directions. Class interests and economic interests are by no means identical. It is not a matter of appealing to ‘economic’ interests over ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ interests (misleadingly termed ‘identity’ politics). Rather, it is a matter of developing a materialist politics that is at once specific and general, and which addresses workers’ lives in the experientially accessible realm of market relations, and their potential in the experientially distant structure of ownership."

    newleftreview.org/sidecar/post

    #Politics #Left #LeftWing #Capitalism #ClassWarfare #PoliticalEconomy #WageSlavery #IdentityPolitics

  13. A quotation from Franklin Roosevelt

       We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
       They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
       Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) American lawyer, politician, statesman, US President (1933–1945)
    Speech (1936-10-31), Madison Square Garden, New York City

    More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-franklin-d…

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #franklinroosevelt #franklindroosevelt #franklindelanoroosevelt #fdr #banking #bigbusiness #businessinterests #classwarfare #corporations #defenseindustry #militaryindustrialcomplex #monopoly #oligarchy #plutocracy #profiteering #regulation #stockmarket

  14. Coitadinhos desses investidores e accionistas "pobrezinhos" vulgo capitalistas...

    ----

    Pity those "poor" investors and shareholders AKA capitalists...

    "Gross domestic product measures all the value added in the economy. For example, the value added by a manufacturer is its sales minus inputs such as parts and raw materials. That value is then distributed either to labor as wages and benefits, or to capital as profits and interest. Some value added is also allocated to depreciation, the cost of replacing assets as they wear out or become obsolete.

    The shift to capital from labor has actually been under way for more than 40 years. Labor received 58% of the total proceeds of economic output, as measured by gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP), in 1980. By the third quarter of last year that had plummeted to 51.4%. Profits’ share, meanwhile, rose from 7% to 11.7%.

    In the 1980s and 1990s, the demise of unions and the spread of outsourcing sapped workers’ bargaining power. The nature of capital also changed: Businesses spent less on long-lived buildings and factories and more on computer equipment, software and intellectual property that must be replaced every few years.

    And then there is automation. Its impact showed up first in manufacturing as machines, robots and computers took the place of workers. In 1980, 66% of value added in factories went to labor as wages and benefits, said Pascual Restrepo, a Yale University economist. By the 2000s, that was down to 45%.

    This was great for manufacturing productivity and consumers who got cheaper products. But it meant that workers who might have landed good-paying factory jobs took lower-paid work elsewhere. This can explain about half the drop in labor’s share of output between 1987 and 2016, according to a study by Restrepo and Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

    wsj.com/economy/jobs/capital-l

    #Capitalism #USA #Labor #ClassWarfare #Inequality #WageSlavery #Capital

  15. Once again, we see the same playbook: when "fiscal responsibility" is needed, it's always education, healthcare, and social services on the chopping block. Never corporate subsidies. Never tax loopholes for the wealthy. Never the billions in concessions to mining companies.
    Liberals talk about "tough choices" while protecting the comfortable and squeezing the vulnerable. The pattern is crystal clear—austerity for the many, prosperity for the few.

    #Auspol #Austerity #ClassWarfare #EatTheRich #LnpFail

    au.finance.yahoo.com/news/pres

  16. A quotation from George Orwell

    One ought not to pay any attention to Hitler’s recent line of talk about being the friend of the poor man, the enemy of plutocracy, etc etc. Hitler’s real self is in Mein Kampf, and in his actions. He has never persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a centralised economy which robs the capitalist of most of his power but leaves the structure of society much as before. The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor, masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine Socialism, the moneyed class have always been on his side. This was crystal clear at the time of the Spanish civil war, and clear again at the time when France surrendered. Hitler’s puppet government are not working men, but a gang of bankers, gaga generals and corrupt right-wing politicians.

    George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
    Essay (1941-02-19), “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” Part 2 “Shopkeepers at War,” sec. 3, The Searchlight Books [ed. Fyvel and Orwell]

    More about this quote: wist.info/orwell-george/81894/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #orwell #georgeorwell #autocracy #classwarfare #economicinjustice #economicsystem #nationalsocialism #Nazi #plutocracy #rulingclass #socialism #upperclass

  17. Epstein Emails Expose How America’s Elites Really See the Rest of Us

    Anand Giridharadas explains how the Epstein emails expose elite contempt, inequality, and a culture that normalizes exploitation and moral indifference.

    #AnandGiridharadas #billionaireCulture #capitalism #ClassWarfare #democracy #EconomicJustice #elitePower #EpsteinEmails #IndependentMedia #Inequality #paidLeave #ProgressivePolitics wp.me/p1OjMZ-oFo
  18. "Do we really live in the best and only possible economic reality? During the economic boom of the post–World War II period, a golden age of capitalism, this perspective might have seemed vaguely plausible, at least for those living in Europe and the United States. However, in the current moment, when the majority of the global population suffers from profound economic and social injustices and the planet is on the brink of ecological collapse, this pseudoscientific best-of-all-possible-worlds idea can’t be right. There is a more powerful, humane approach to understanding society.

    We must redemocratize the economy so that citizens can reclaim the most important choices that regulate the very foundations of their lives. That is a better way forward than anything capitalism has or can offer. What is the first step in this direction? It is a radical change of perspective. There is nothing more political than the lens through which we view the world. Only if we learn to look at the world differently can we act differently.

    My fundamental intuition is that there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems; contrary to what technocrats typically suggest, our economy is neither a force of nature nor an external object that we can manipulate as if it were a machine. On the contrary, the economy is us: flesh-and-blood people. This means that “capital” as a “commodity,” as money to invest, as wealth expressed in gross domestic product, exists thanks to specific social relations, and in particular thanks to the fact that most people have no alternative but to sell their ability to work for a wage and inevitably be paid less than the value they produce. This is the capital order, the backbone to our society that we do not criticize or even discuss. It is only through the lens of class that we can escape this trap..."

    jacobin.com/2026/01/economics-

    #Economics #Austerity #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism #Inflation #ClassWarfare

  19. “Reform UK does like one kind of immigrant”

    by Another Angry Voice on Substack

    @uk_politics

    #ReformUK [Ltd] welcome Nadim #Zahawi with open arms. [..] The #UK #establishment order is obviously more than willing to allow people of immigrant backgrounds to rise to the top, as long as they play along with all the #greed, #corruption, #dishonesty, #classwarfare against ordinary Brits, and anti-immigrant rabble rousing”

    open.substack.com/pub/anothera

    #Press #UK #Farage #FarRight #Racism #Defection

  20. The Dream Class

    The teacher of this class
    used to be my landlord,
    a painful collision
    of a time nothing went right
    and a childhood place
    of false opportunity.
    The walls my classmates have built
    are so high
    I will never get over them,
    a brutal lesson
    I paid through the nose to learn.
    If that’s the case, then
    why am I here?
    The same question
    a police officer terrified me with
    in a park not too far from here.
    My presence
    breaks the law.

    #poetry #americandream #classwarfare

  21. A quotation from Teddy Roosevelt

    It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that we should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

    Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) American politician, statesman, conservationist, writer, US President (1901-1909)
    Speech (1903-09-07), “The Square Deal,” Labor Day, New York State Agricultural Association, New York State Fair, Syracuse

    More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-theodore/6…

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #teddyroosevelt #theodoreroosevelt #class #classwarfare #commoninterest #community #government #mutuality #nation #politics #representation #representative #specialinterest #welfare #generalwelfare

  22. A quotation from Franklin Roosevelt

    These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) American lawyer, politician, statesman, US President (1933-1945)
    Speech (1936-06-27), Acceptance, Renomination for President, Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia

    More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-franklin-d…

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #fdr #franklinroosevelt #franklindroosevelt #franklindelanoroosevelt #America #classwarfare #elites #oligarchs #plutocrats #power #privileged #rich #wealth #wealthy