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I think a lot of rich people don't understand that being rich precludes them from being a part of the working class. They think that because they're working, that must mean they're a working class person. And then that leads to shit like this, rich folk calling other rich folk working-class.
Obviously, there are more reasons for people calling the CEO a working class hero, but I think what I said is still one of those reasons.
Yeah the "hero" part doesn't equal "I made it big therefore I'm a hero"
A real working class hero is a person who did make it big and gave back to the ones beneath them.
On 9/11, Steve Buscemi, formerly a firefighter, son of a garbage man and a hotel worker, decided to don his old uniform and go back to his old station and help the rescue crews with no regard to his own safety. He worked 12-hour days taking living people and corpses (including the bodies of other firefighters) out of the rubble and did not bother doing anything like letting the press know about his selfless act. In fact, he said nothing about it. A firefighter posted on Facebook to thank him and that's how the world found out.
That is a working-class hero.
Brian Thompson was personally responsible for causing far more deaths than what happened on 9/11.
Exactly. This guy made it big and did nothing to use his power to help people. Hell, if anything, he made it worse. He oversaw the cruelest company in a cruel industry.
Like Luigi
No one is working class as long as they can live the rest of their life in relative luxury/comfort with zero sources of income. If they choose to continue to work, it's because it's their choice to enrich themselves further, not because they will lose their home or need to start living off rice and beans.
Even retirees who live off a few thousand a month from their pensions, retirement funds, and investment returns are no longer working class in my opinion.
They probably don't consider him in the same class as them at all. I wonder if he wasn't even a 1%-er, maybe more like a 2-3%-er. If you do literally anything other than laying in your money pile eating and shitting and having your mouth and ass wiped with $100 bills you're probably a pleb to them.
More like working class traitor.
If you wrote a story about a class traitor murdering another class traitor in class, you'd get a failing grade for how ridiculous the concept was.
Yeah this whole story is first grade script material.
So did Abe's assassin. Reality doesn't have to be believable.
Vigilante violence doesn’t lead to enduring systematic change.
Normally I agree with most of jacobin's articles but I don't agree with this. It's pretty obvious that things have already changed, even if it's just temporary. (Speaking as a non American spectator at least tbf)
It's strange to cite what may be "just temporary" changes when you're quoting "enduring systematic change"
Yeah that's fair, I did actually notice what I wrote kind of argued against itself 😅. My counterpoint would be that it's clear there's more work to be done to make it not temporary
We could just depose them all and find out. I mean, that’s what they do to us.
This is a historically illiterate reply. The French Revolution was enacted by organized political resistance, not random assassinations. As the author points out, such acts never achieve any substantial or lasting change.
The only recent-ish example I can think of that actually applies is Gavrilo Princip, and the consequences were mostly accidental.
And also wildly catastrophic
Well I meant lasting positive change. This means building better systems—there’s just no other way to do it. Some assassinations have clearly altered the course of history but they didn’t really improve society.
I keep telling people here that you usually cannot cure a systemic issue with violence but they refuse to believe it.
Organized vigilante violence, then.
Has he heard of the French revolution? That was a bit of lasting change
looks at current French government
Looks at Napoleon being crowned absolute monarch 15 years after the king was executed.
Vigilante violence can be distinguished from revolutionary violence because it is carried out without a Party. It's just random people on their own deciding to do violence i.e. adventurism. It can't bring enduring change.
No, but it can inspire a populace to rise up and challenge their oppressors.
It can also lull a population into complacency rather than getting organized, and it can provoke the government into counter-revolution before the masses have reached a revolutionary stage. Adventurism can strangle any potential revolution in the crib.
Did you actually read that link?
The extent to which suffragette militancy contributed to the eventual enfranchisement of women in 1918 has been debated by historians, although the consensus of historical opinion is that the militant campaign was not effective.
In fact:
In May 1913 another attempt had been made to pass a bill in parliament which would introduce women's suffrage, but the bill actually did worse than previous attempts when it was voted on, something which much of the press blamed on the increasingly violent tactics of the suffragettes.[116] The impact of the WSPU's violent attacks drove many members of the general public away from supporting the cause, and some members of the WSPU itself were also alienated by the escalation of violence, which led to splits in the organisation and the formation of groups such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914.
And women didn't get suffrage in the UK until 1918.
Yes. And I feel the amount by which the 'terrorists' made it a public issue was more important than the quoted analysts believe. It may have been so overly strong that it scared some away. But it also showed that it was a real issue to solve NOW. No more putting it off untold decades; and that is what I would hope from militant activism today. May America get Universal Healthcare like the rest of the developed world within 5 years now. And we will know who to thank.
May America get Universal Healthcare like the rest of the developed world within 5 years now.
You forgot who Americans elected as president last month, didn't you?
I get it!
Random acts of violence won't work.
Random acts of violence
Random acts
Yeah he wasn't one.
Doesn't matter that he came from money. He saw an imbalance of power and did something about it.
They're talking about Thompson, the guy that got shot. He is the one they are trying to paint as a working class hero because he wasn't born wealthy. It's just ignoring the reality of life in America and his part in it.
Yeah, an odd interpretation of "hero", that he found success for himself and I suppose those closest to him. Even if his success story was getting rich from some more innocuous retail success, it is hardly heroic.
Some may think it's a nice story about working hard to get ahead, but that wouldn't be heroic.
Also doesn't really need to be, a decent life (generally speaking, not making a statement about this CEO0) that shied away from heroism is hardly shameful. Just don't like folks ascribing heroism to merely being successful.
It shows that the owner class cannot understand that other people might not consider getting more for yourself at the expense of others to be an admirable thing. In their circles, exploiting others for your own gain is the only way life is lived, and the only way to impress others, and they jealously admire those who got more. So they expect everyone to admire does this, and working class people to admire an originally working class person who did this. They just don't understand that from an informed working class perspective (as opposed to one drowning in capitalist propaganda), getting rich at the expense of others just makes you an asshole.
I wouldn't even necessarily begrudge the word "admirable" to describe getting wealthy through ones own efforts, but "heroic" is just too off the mark.
It really depends what you understand to be "through one's own efforts." Capitalism stretches this concept to the point of absurdity.