They keep raising prices, stating that it’s due to inflation, but then they keep having record profits.
Meanwhile, the average American can barely afford rent or food nowadays.
What are we to do? Vote? I have been but that doesn’t seem to do much since I’m just voting for a representative that makes the actual decisions.
I don’t think that’s the initial point of OP.
The point is that quality of life and real income are in strong decline, and it doesn’t seem like it will get better in any observable future, should policymakers stay the same.
Sure, there are easy methods to cut expenses or even make some beer money, but a)many have already implemented it, and b)everyone already could.
The question can be formulated as “how can we improve the living situation for everybody?”. So that you wouldn’t need to figure out how to live cheaper or get some side hustle as you see your income shrinks.
Yeah, lots of people in here saying “stop supporting corporations” as if it is not only easy, but simple to do.
Wanna cook whole foods? You growing your own or buying them from the Amish?
Wanna fix your own house (something I am currently doing), good luck finding a hardware/lumber supply that isn’t owned by one.
Want to use the internet?
It isn’t so simple. I think doing what you can with what you have is all anyone in the working class can really do. For some people it’s more, others less.
In the end, it seems like human history is a series of people with wealth and resources screwing over others, with brief bursts of progress.
Ugj.
The point is, the change needs to be systemic, not just us choosing not to use corpo’s products. It’s impractical and often outright impossible, and personal choice never was the solution (that’s not to say you shouldn’t try if you really are able to).
Guess why there are all those financial gurus and politicians blaming people for “dumb spending”, “lazy working” or “not supporting the causes with their dollar”? Because they know full well it isn’t really feasible, but know this keeps us in the rat race while taking full blame upon ourselves rather than true villains.
Corporations (and in my personal opinion, capitalism itself, because it’ll always try to find a loophole) should legally die or face very strong taxation and pushback. Stop supporting corporations on governmental level, and then we’ll have a bet.
Honestly, if we all grew and shared our own food, that alone would be enough to turn the tide and improve our lives.
We could use the money we save from groceries and use it to buy land, and with that land take back economic power from corporations, politicians and the ruling class.
We could organize and pick representatives amongst us that aren’t part of either party to take local offices and use their powers to change zoning laws to enable more housing to be built, and to allocate funding for such, and to pass laws banning anyone other than primary residents from buying the properties.
Assuming you want to do it legally. Arguably one individual could accomplish a lot more with the proper use of a .50 cal.
I’d argue you can’t outplay corporations in their own game. If you start saving on groceries and make it a trend, they’ll just find a way to cut your income once more. Because why paying so much if you can now get on with less?
Besides, the sum saved from sharing food is not nearly enough to buy any significant amount of land anyway, and you also need all the machinery and equipment to make it work, and even then this entire thing should be set at an enormous scale to combat the scale benefit of existing corpos (which would be very tough considering such scaling will cause immense oversaturation of the market and fierce price wars, to which independent businesses are not ready due to lack of reserves, i.e. corpos will just dump the price, see your community die off without money, and raise prices back up again the minute it happens, as they constantly do to manage competition).
Local representatives could work, but first something needs to be done with human perception of independent parties.
Honestly, .50 cal seems to be the most risky, violent, but most workable option. No wonder most such big changes were accompanied by bloody revolutions.
That’s not true, people have been making their own stuff for thousands of years before these corpos came up and we can do it again.
And we can collectively set up our own nonprofits we all own and that actually serve us, too.
You just have to believe it’s possible, which it is. And you have to believe in yourself. If you think those are lies, your worldview is just negatively skewed. People can and do make change all of the fucking time. It’s time for our generation to be among them.
For those thousands of year people lived in extreme poverty, because “just making stuff yourself” is actually extremely inefficient. There’s a reason industries started to centralize in the first place - the scale effect is huge, and we can’t expect to beat well-coordinated, centralized entities by just “doing stuff for ourselves”.
We need to organize and unite, but as I said, in a capitalist competition, unless you accrue capital bigger than the corporations (which is, well, problematic), you’ll just die to a price war (unless you convince everyone to go starve).
The only way is to change the system, to put already existing production capabilities to serve general population. This means strikes. This means protests. This means instating the new government if need be. Those are exactly the methods that drove us to more equality and prosperity in the past, the thing you talk about.
We cannot move further in an existing frame, and “just believing your dream” won’t change objective economic issues discussed in every economy 101. People who ignored basic economics for their idea ended up very poorly.
Making stuff ourselves and breaking free of the corporate vice grip is the only way we can make doing that viable.
Unless you thought corporations won’t just stop producing until the people surrender.
The only way is to capture the means of production - they’re only owned by corporations because some legal papers say so.
Corporations can and constantly do kill independent initiatives. It’s actually super easy, and doesn’t require anything but big cash reserves allowing them to wage price wars.
Besides, it is simply impractical to reinvent existing economy, and it will get to the same point over time. We can skip this and move directly into the factories that are already built.
That’s impossible because it will require bloodshed in which millions of people will die, whereas a non-profit cooperative effort can provide people goods for free, especially when fully automated. And corporations can’t beat free.
You might want a war but the rest of us don’t, and we can solve our problems through peaceful means.
There are examples of peaceful transition to socialist rule - Alliende’s Chile, for example. Ironic that capitalist rule was reinstated there by force in a coup led by CIA (which we know from CIA’s own unclassified archives).
The cooperative can share food for free, but how will it obtain the equipment, fertilizers, seeds and everything else needed to sustain modern efficient agriculture, if it doesn’t have money to do so? How will it pay its workers, or are they expected to only live off what cooperative produces? (Which means recreating entire parallel economy, something that is both not feasible with any donations anyone can make and is a stupid waste of enormous resources).
I do not want war, and I hope for the peaceful transition of power, but your “solution” ignores basic laws of economics - science that can’t be ignored by “let’s abolish money”, because it’s about resources first and foremost. You suggest that we somehow rebuild the essentially communist world from scratch - but do you understand we need the worth of entire world of resources given to us immediately for that? We cannot outcompete capitalists in a capitalist world by giving everything away, we’ll quickly run out of money or resources. Thereby, we cannot grow in the economy, and will die off unless we completely overwhelm markets by the amount of goods bigger than one currently produced in an entire world, and attract everyone to work for us.