Workers of the world, unite!

What an idea. It remains as true as when Karl Marx wrote about it in the 1800s and Charlie Chaplain brought to the mainstream media in the dawn of the 1900s.

The story started a long time ago when human society moved from communal living into the model of the "nuclear family". As the industrial revolution increased individualism the popularity of the fuck-you-I-got-mine attitude enjoyed its golden age.

The nuclear family and the rise of industrialization resulting in the creation of unprecedented wealth created a paradox. How were we supposed to compare the value of raising children with the value of running a factory that produced 1,000 pairs of shoes per day? How to compare the value of maintaining a home with the value of building a machine that could mine as much ore as 500 workers in a day? The result was the enslavement of half of the human race. Women were pushed into wholly dependent, subservient, and labor-intensive roles, acting as the heart, soul, and home-o-matic of the nuclear family. This was not unique to the industrial revolution - but it was intensified by it because the monetary value of men's and women's work was raised to its greatest disparity.

Sexist attitudes - what a waste of human potential! Imagine being some ruler who searched for genius minds to advance your society, and you chose to ignore half of your population of candidates. Why did you do this? Because it was the easiest way to control the working class and guarantee the ability to continue to externalize costs, the same reason to amplify racism. After all, dealing with one Big Bill Haywood was quite enough for the "captains of industry".

And anyway, having to machine gun your own citizens because they aren't exploitable enough is just bad policy. When those enslaved domestic servants took their industrialized way out as factory workers, they were of course immediately, and ruthlessly exploited as "second-class" labor, which served both to isolate them from other labor unions, but also to allow capitalist dragons to further exploit the first class labor.

All the more reason then, for us to be most wary of those who would make racist/sexist "jokes" that paint groups with the broadest of brushes, seeking to find some fault line between the by-default-united front of laborers and crack them apart. All the more to be wary of news agencies that change the wording of their stories based on the race or sex of those involved. Or, as the phenomenon is observed by an average internet user, as a weird ability we've somehow gained.

Yes, I speak of the Wedge Issue. Good old LBJ let the mask down a bit much for the mode of the modern era, and the point remains as relevant as ever. Where do we stand today with the unity of the workers against the idle rich? Still feeling better about ourselves at the expense of other workers, while captains of industry ride their tit-for-tat media wave to heroic proportions. Whoa, that wasn't even the Elon Musk twitter meltdown I was thinking of when I went to get that link, this was. Our cup runneth over.

But what to do then against these overlords? How can we succeed but by hoping to one day become dragons ourselves?

Unions got a bad rap, on purpose. That's a start, I suppose. A union for everything. A union at the local level. An intensely local "Credit" union - what would that look like? Well, take a look at 10 of your friends that you know the most about. Take a guess at their debts and assets, income and cash flow. Consider that debt under 6% per year (such as a mortgage) is, under our current system, "good debt" in that you're better off making regular payments against it than paying it off outright.

To that end, the goal of a small-scale credit commune should be to

1. Eliminate all high interest debt in the group

2. Pool capital in large enough slush funds to as to pay off debt with interest earnings rather than direct money

What does that mean exactly? Well it looks like this, let's say you got a serious ride-or-die group of allies (in the war of Capital). Together, you have, for example:

Debts: (interest rates change over time, consider the debts at "low, medium, high" rates to generalize)

• 10,000 at 27% interest (credit card)

• 80,000 at 9% interest (student loans)

• 110,000 at 5% interest (mortgage)

Funds:

• 50,000 total liquid money in bank accounts

Now, you could look at that and apply the 50,000 right away to knock out the 10k credit card and a good chunk of the 80k student loan. And another credit-ally move could be to roll that 90k into a home equity loan at around 5% interest and then invest the 50k in higher yield such as stock market index funds. Either way, the labor income of your credit-comrades is freed from paying unfair usury to dragons, and together your economic power is greatly improved. In 30 years, you will have been able to weather expenses, fund your lives while maintaining your cash pool. Pay the minimum interest to the dragons, pay the rest to each other, or better/extremer yet, form that local money union.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, to find out there are plenty of laws that will try to prevent you from doing things like this. You may have been thinking during that example "but who could I trust with that much money that way?" - well our current legal system contains just such a structure for you and your spouse, but not your credit-allies. Laws that enfranchise the nuclear family at the expense of the credit-comrade, laws that limit the transfer of wealth - of course, outside the modes that are available to the dragons or through "approved" channels like nuclear family inheritance.

Not that it's impossible, but rather that it has been made far more difficult than reason would dictate - a world run by individual credit, for the individual and the nuclear family. People who are proud to have "made it" despite their out-group background, coming after their long and arduous journey into the track laid down by the dragons to vent off these very would-be revolutionaries - for if the most extreme talent and hard work still failed to pay off, where could these brilliant minds then turn but to revolution? You may ultimately find yourself landing in those rich neighborhoods after all your struggling, feeling like the world finally makes sense - while your next door neighbor may well have been raised on the backs of your parents' exploited labor, and early deaths.