In the fight to defeat lifestyle and wage inequality, we must understand how we got here by understanding the history of humans and how they have been controlled. First, it was just savagery, which lasted more than a million years. Then barbarism came along and lasted five thousand years. And then it was slaves where we belonged to the master for life, followed by the feudal serfdom or tenant, who were also likely bound for life to the lord and his land.
From there we went to capitalism, which is only 450 years old. In this time the industrial age was launched around the start of the 19th century, which brought large numbers of new wage slaves from the countryside to the cities and factories creating capitalist captains of industry and later masters of entire countries and their continents as their riches increased, riches that included wage slaves. Their riches also came from using our Commons to get ahead and using the wealth accumulated from our Commons and our labor swelled their riches and power to majestic proportions.
To understand how capitalists make their money off the backs of wage slaves, consider how most people go into the labor market through a personnel office or an employment agency, and the employer buys people’s labor at a prevailing wage whether by the hour, day, week or month. Then applies it under his supervision who is the Boss (the word boss was imported from the Dutch) to produce goods, which is sold at a profit. That profit is derived from the fact that wage slaves produce more valve then the capitalist pays for their labor.
If the bosses can keep labor low like the last 30 years, they get very rich and the workers are now with very little. If this is not revisited, we will see capitalism swept aside just like feudalism, which swept aside barbarism and savagery. How and by whom is this revolutionary transformation to be effected?
The wage slaves of the world are demanding a change in the inequality and if they don’t, capitalism could be relegated to the museum of antiquities. The workers will not stand for the exploitation and abuses any longer. Wages must be raised to $15 to $18 an hour, free education, universal healthcare, pensions and jobs for all who want to have one and the protection of unions.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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