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- cross-posted to:
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French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his new government almost three months after a snap general election delivered a hung parliament.
The long-awaited new line up, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, marks a decisive shift to the right, even though a left-wing alliance won most parliamentary seats.
Despite the partnership between Macron’s centrist party and those on the right, parliament remains fractured and will rely on the support of other parties to pass legislation.
This didn’t stop slavery last time, it won’t stop it again. They don’t need the peons as long as they maintain enough of a “middle class” of people who are paid just enough to feel as if they’re in touching distance of the top (temporarily embarrassed millionaires who in reality are much closer to homelessness) so they both continue to overconsume, and become reluctant to fight to change the status quo because it gives them the privilege of not being a slave. And it’s working.
Slavery in the US before the civil war didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were slaves in the south that didn’t consume anything, producing goods that in a large part were exported to britain. And the money from that was used to buy more slaves and land. But some of it was used to buy goods and expertise from the north that the slave economy was lacking, which in turn drove industrialization in the north.
But i stand by my point that over time the artificially low prices due to slave labor causes outflows of money from the rest of the world, depriving workers in other countries of money/wages and causing them to spend less. So all those slaves would overproduce things that there isn’t demand anymore and it’s still worse for the rich fucks than if they had paid slaves a fair wages.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying such a system can’t exist or work, just that in the long run it’s worse for everyone, even the rich who thrive on exploiting poor people.
Sadly the billionaire class don’t seem to understand this and there’s not much to do other than teaching them by force every 50-150 years.
Neither is what’s happening today (more like has continued to happen since), and now there are literally billions more people available to exploit.
Only they wouldn’t continue to produce things there wasn’t a market for, so capitalists either continue investing trillions in to advertising and other ways to create a market and propagandise people to overconsume, and or diversify what they produce/commodify, like they have over and over and over again.
This is where you’re most mistaken:
A. they understand perfectly well, they just don’t care. You really don’t seem to have a great understanding of how the super rich become, and stay that way.
B. there is plenty to do, it just requires working outside of the rules those in power have set out for society. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without capitalism (E: or even its predecessor, feudalism), the idea that we must accept it as some inevitable fact, submit to it and just let it deteriorate to fascism once or twice a century and then just slap it on the wrist and wait for the next time is defeatist and honestly a little pathetic.