I feel like options are drying up for petite bourgeois scum. Restaurants can’t compete with fast food chains (shitty as they are), climate change is fucking the resource extractive petite bourgeoisie (lobstermen for instance), and now the haute bourgeoisie is snapping up every housing unit in the country. Proletarianization is inevitable for the petite bourgeoisie (which usually turns to fascism as a result) while the proletariat and labor aristocracy will have no reason to expect anything positive from capitalism. There will be no upward mobility—revolution will be the only way out.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
It comes from the Manifesto, where Marx talks about how this represents the beginning of the movement towards class struggle. Still, it seems very prescient to what is happening in the west.
Bezos went on to add, “Look, I don’t like it any more than you do. But the Bell Riots are slated to happen in less than a year, and all those COVID protections really set us behind schedule.”
Who knew Bezos was such a committed Trekkie?
I am trying to buy an apartment building with friends to live in it and to remove it from the rental market, and I am learning that it’s basically impossible. Like, it IS doable, but every single building of any size that goes on the market is immediately snatched up cash by basically anyone and everyone with the cash to do it. It’s apparently been that way for years. I don’t and won’t ever have the cash to buy an entire building, so my group can’t compete.
We’re told that it is possible but that we have to get lucky and basically find a building that falls through the cracks somehow. I’m told to expect it to take a year or more. The worst part is I am seeing some of these buildings and many of them just…stay empty. Folks buy them and then they just don’t bother renting them out or living in them. Or they’ll rent out half the units and leave the other half empty to try to drive rents up. Housing has stopped being housing long ago in the US and is now purely an investment. The land is worth more as an investment than the hassle of renting and folks that have more money than they need don’t really care about making an immediate return on that investment, so they’re valuing the land itself rather than the buildings.
It’s disgusting and absolutely nothing is being done about it. I’m over here trying to do the “right thing” by actually participating in the housing market and I can’t. Nobody can. It’s only going to get worse.
There was a “What If” Marvel comic from way back in the early '00s in which The Red Skull gets his hands on the Infinity Gauntlet. One of the first things he does is teleport himself to the center of Berlin, snap away all the food except for a single apple, and then instill everyone in the city with ravenous hunger. His theory is that the subsequent fierce fight for the food will reveal the most fit and able humans, while eliminating everyone else.
Idk why that image leaps into my brain when I read this. Just something I’m forced to think about.
Not all apples are created equal.
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