In the past, concessions would be given to workers to stave off talk of revolution. Think of the new deal, etc.

These days, whether through incompetence or ideological intent (the end result is the same so the distinction doesn’t matter much to me), the ruling class just will not allow any pumping of the brakes, any tiny release valve to stop the pressure building.

I find it a fascinating phenomenon that they are incapable of doing something positive for society, even to save their own skin. It baffles me, especially considering how successful it has been in the past.

  • Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    There is no reason to ascribe weird religious beliefs to the ruling class. Different members have vastly different weird beliefs and they don't matter. In fact I can assure you that if the few people I have met are any indication, they don't think about any of these things, they just think "fuck you I got mine, stop bothering me, poors", or they justify it to themselves by telling themselves that this is all for the best because otherwise the poors will fuck themselves over. No need for them to overthink it, after all capitalist realism and treating all this stuff as normal is the norm even for working class people, except working class people have reasons to challenge these ideas, and they have reasons to have them reinforced. There is no table they sit down on to deliberate what they're gonna do with the world, but there is a seemingly chaotic net of demands that converge to some specific thing. The state and its branches comes to figure out how to satisfy all of them, although there are still some secondary contradictions within the capitalist class which give rise to different factions.

    The reason there aren't many concessions coming is because no one seriously feels like the current order is threatened enough right now, and definitely not more than can be controlled by repression. Americans can't even organise a strike. So what's the threat? Why should Biden care? Because people may roast them on Twitter? They can take some roasting.

    Over here many laws have been scrapped because of large protests and strikes. Then there is other laws that cause many protests and strikes but can not be scrapped because they are forced by "higher ups" in the EU and require an immense amount of pressure to budge. But still you can see some results, you can frequently see the state fumbling in response to large events like that. Is it because they are "smart" here? No, in fact they are considerably less smart, and the state is very weak compared to the US. So the state being considerably weaker with weaker institutions combined with the fact that compared to the US labour unions and the left hold much more power, plus the fact that the country was pushed close to instability right after the crisis started which scared it out of them, mean they can't ignore everything. Where they have enough power that has never been challenged they don't have to do that.

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Maybe not religious exactly, but some of them use an 'everything in its place' hierarchal way of thinking that is common in older religious institutions to justify their positions of power. Sort of like monarchists but replace 'son of the King' with 'son of a billionaire'.