Exactly what I thought, the first verse and most of the chorus is legit working class anxiety. The rest is blaming other victims of the system, and while it references "rich men," it contains no criticism of their wealth, the reference to taxes is more the opposite.
banneryear1868
joined 11 months ago
These lyrics reflect completely legitimate working class anxieties but supports the system that perpetuates them. "Taxed to no end," the corporate tax rate has been brought down by lobbying for decades. The obese focus is on one hand legit since eating like shit is cheap, but it has blinders on about why that is, since it's not convenient to their point.
These parts are all completely legit, although the lyrics are pretty bad. The same things have been said by much better voices in much better ways.
I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down
Overall it's a great example of politics in America right now and how the working class is exploited by the right wing, as well as how liberal media, in the mainstream "dialogue," fails to address the working class anxieties and instead focuses on the "controversy" of the song. The coverage isn't really about the lyrics, it's about the way people are interpreting them politically, and it all favors and perpetuates the exact same system.
Exactly markets aren't the distinction, communist and socialist democracies all have markets. A really interesting model of that was Allende's Project Cybersyn in Chile before the US sponsored fascist coup that put Pinochet in charge. There's highly regulated markets within capitalist countries as well, bulk energy is largely very "designed" and regulated markets.
The Marxian view of socialism would consider it as a transition state between capitalism and communism. While someone may be ideologically communist, they will likely have more political opportunities catering to socialist policies in capitalist democracies with a "left" party. Revolutionaries don't believe this is possible, and argue capitalism's structure won't be threatened by socialist policies unless a revolution occurs, and might even consider comrades who support socialist parties as "not real" communists. Germany's socialist party supporting ww1 is often used in forms of this argument.
Ultimately in a lot of these capitalist democracies, there are individual leftists but no real political power, this is certainly the case in the US. Working to raise class-consciousness and labor organizing is basically the front of whatever left exists there. It's a bleak time to be on the left, and sometimes I wish I could have the enthusiasm of the self-righteous liberals who naively think that if everyone regardless of identity was distributed equally in the capitalist system everything would be right and fair.
Control measures are inevitable, like account length requirements, etc. I don't see any way around that to have a usable usergenerated site. A lot of the previous reddit alternatives were full of racism because of who reddit pissed off on the site, but people like that need an audience and they don't generate good content. The nerds who do always have to deal with trolls.
It's nice to see the latest upswing in labor actions in the US, but the labor movement isn't what it used to be that's for sure. Even the way the history of labor is taught now is completely whitewashed and decoupled from any notion of class conflict. Take the history of civil right's organizers for instance and the connection with labor, MLK is the big one but also Randolph, the famous "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington ("-for Jobs and Labor" is usually left out of the title nowadays.) Also the Jim Crow order is purely seen as a racist order, which is accurate, but the means by which it was designed to deal with the Populists in the late 19th century because of the threat they were as a political force. It's even in the culture war shit that goes on now, Bud Light for instance, none of that "conversation" ever touched on the fact they were basically forced to first hire queer people because of Teamsters labor pressure and gay bar boycotting their beer.
I think the militant conflicts like Harlan country are pretty well known but again it's like the class notions are removed in today's recollections and how it's taught. It's focused on some individuals who wanted better wages vs the bad guy running the mine, not about the inherent conflicts between these workers and the owners by design of the economic system, and how that still pervades today. It's seen as something from the past.
I'm unionized in Canada as well as a power sector worker, although I work in IT. The contract negotiations are very compensation-focused not necessarily focused on enhancing what is already law.
One of my current projects, the PM for the US company went off for maternity leave, and I was surprised she was back like a few weeks later. It's basically a year standard here, and 18 months isn't completely unusual depending on employer benefits for top-up on your salary.
There's definitely some startups and tech jobs in the US that operate on a more relaxed basis, but most startups in general fail and only exist because of the low interest rates VC firms can fund them with. A lot of the large tech companies are happy to outsource where it's possible from a business perspective, to companies in places that allow for cheaper and more exploitable labor. Countless encounters with that in my career, this past week a Tableau support ticket that was first assessed by a woman working from home late at night in Bangalore with her kids crying in the background, and they didn't even give her a proper headset. Whenever you get a support tech from a US tech company in another country ask about their work.
This is just how it is in Canada too, at least in Ontario we have a recent "right to disconnect" law. Whenever I work with US tech companies and have to leave for a meeting they're like "oh we can just continue this on the weekend or after hours" and I'm just like okay but I work 9-4 so I won't be there.
Color blindness itself is basically a way to decouple yourself from the political economy you are a subject of, which is in no way "color blind" and has more or less created these system of classification. I don't even subscribe to DiAngelo's individualist notions of "white fragility," I think they can even serve to reify the notion of race, but people saying they're color blind is such a dismissal to address the world around you.