Asklemmy

I'm so sick of this patronizing head-pat "everything else is just as bad, we tried" response.

The fact of the matter is that the easiest way to do this under our system is making companies employee owned.

I worked for one for several years, and yes it was subject to many of the same administrative issues as every other company, but every single employee earned stock every month that kept increasing in value. A guy who had worked there for about 30 years as a worker -not a manager- was retiring with a stock portfolio worth millions. They also had the normal crappy 401k and social security they could have earned anywhere else, but because it was employee owned, they had all that company stock too.

So we have shown it can work to have the workers own the means of production. Is convenient to present government ownership as the same thing so it can be easily criticized, but it isn't really.

The flaw in your logic, is that you are arguing for a kind of essentialism in human beings. You say

The only thing that has a prayer of keeping anything in check is a citizenry that stays aware, mistrusts whatever the government is, understands the cycle, and continuously fights for rights by making it a credible threat that the people WILL revolt unless the leaders do the right thing.

As if these changes in society would not mark a radical difference in the composition and structure of society. You go on to speak to your skepticism that the mechanisms of control exerted over the masses will ever be overcome. And I admit, they are very scary and concerning. But there is no theory of change in what you are describing. The world is made of people, but the people you describe are still an abstraction. You aren't considering how the system that the capitalists are constructing is already changing people. you are assuming that the conditions that the ruling classes are imposing on the masses will work as expected to repress the masses. But their repression changes society. Changed society creates changed people. Changed people change society.

Despite 109 years (since the Balfour declaration) of coordination and action among the ruling class for the creation of a state to destabilize the middle east for resources, and a near global imperialist consensus for the creation and "right to exist" for Israel, support for them has never been lower.

In 2008 the global economy crashed. The culprits were widely known, the whole political and media apparatus justified the bail outs, while the people were against it. Deep recessions hit every sector. It took 4 years to manage a large but individualistic and disorganized protest movement against it. Since then, we have seen many more mass protest movements, George Floyd 2020, Pro Palestine student encampments, and now protests against ICE. Each iteration, more organized, more resilient. The DSA, a group of only about 6000 members from the 80's - 2010s, has now grown to 120k members, the largest socialist org in American history. Its worthy of criticism and is lacking in many crucial areas, for example the labor movement is significantly weaker than it was in the 30's. But in January, the ICE OUT strikes in Minneapolis was a bona fide general strike. It was brief, and doesn't compare to the general strikes of '32 - '34 where the city of Minneapolis was basically taken over by communist teamsters. But its significant and legitimate.

If people aren’t willing to keep fighting for justice and they stay complacent ALL systems trend towards corruption.

I mean this in the most gracious way possible, but this is a bit of a self report. People are willing to keep fighting for social justice, in larger numbers than we've seen in 100 years. Education and awareness is better and more coordinated, organization is better, politics are clearer. There are still major challenges, around race and gender especially, but 4th wave feminism has changed the discourse irreversibly, 2020 protests were the largest and most diverse protests ever, although fairly rational demands like "defund" are getting killed in the discourse, and trans people and gender theory are here to stay. There will be repression, but the more repression they cause, the more people organize against it.

The fact is, the system is not rational, and the people running it are running it based on their own class interests. Those interests are opposed to our interests. Capitalism is the most unstable system ever conceived. In a way, that is how it is able to spread and subsume, it destabilizes old structures and transforms them into racist, imperialist profit motive. But now it is destabilizing itself in its search for profit. The liberal period is over and we are entering a period of direct domination and resistance. As there is more and more to organize against, we will forge the social structures that create the future society.

This is a much better view of history than "the cunning will always rise up." We could use you in helping to ensure that doesn't happen. Democracy, real mass democracy, is the only defense we have. Don't sit on the sidelines and poo poo about doomed preconceptions, your perspectives could help the movement rather than carry water for the imperialists