…nothing lasts forever; especially not empires.

  • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    Yet again, I agree! But wouldn’t you also agree that the system always had this in-built inequality? What I meant to say was that, while it was less immediately obvious at the start, the subsequent pooling and acceleration of said pooling were always going to happen within this system.

    And that’s why I suspect that this was the plan all along, because it has been visible from the start, it didn’t require a retrospective if one was paying enough attention. And those who did got very, very rich.

    But even if everyone would have been paying attention*, there would be no room for equality, otherwise the entire pyramid would collapse, taking everyone’s “more than” with it.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Yes, I absolutely agree that the disparity we see today is a direct result of the former social relations. The agrarian slave-driven economy in the south was certainly going to result in conflict with the industrial economy based on wage labor in the north, especially as the north needed new wage laborers to expand industrially. Historical progression is a process of endless spirals, tendencies and trajectories accumulate over time until a quantitative buildup results in a qualitative change.

      However, I don’t see it as something that was intentionally planned. Capital doesn’t think that way. Capitalist production is an ever-expanding circuit that must constantly be repeated, anything going against that system of voracious profit gets dashed. Long-term planning is characteristic of socialism, not capitalism, nor the semi-yeoman style of settler-colonial capitalism or slave driven agrarian economy.

      This is important, because understanding how we got here today can tell us where we are headed. The historic task of the US proletariat in the age of dying imperialism is to topple the capitalist state and replace it with a socialist state, focusing on decolonization and anti-imperialism. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. This is only increasingly possible because the US working class is becoming increasingly proletarianized due to monopolist capture of the land, and imperialism is weakening to the point where we cannot be bribed as much by its spoils.

      We aren’t here because of some 5-D chess from the old bourgeoisie, nor did the settlers have ignorance of the system. The US settler class was bribed using the spoils of genocide, and its only increasingly true now that there isn’t really a semi-yeoman class. The immense brutality of settler-colonialism can’t keep the US afloat anymore, nor can imperialism.

      I’m just trying to help provide a Marxist perspective, as it genuinely gives us a chance of completing the US proletariat’s historic duty. I’m a Marxist-Leninist.