Malcolm X was a fringe figure: the NOI got lots of press but didn’t really do all that much besides indulging in infighting and encouraging local Black businesses. Their approach to politics was separatism. H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, the Panthers, and many others were more closely involved in direct action.
The regime we have is made up of real capitalists, who behave as capitalists often have throughout history. The kind of capitalism that’s fake is the Chicago-school free maket kind, which has never existed in real life, because it embodies a contradiction in terms. The market is either “free” as in freedom from regulation, or it’s “free” in terms of no oligopolistic barriers to entry. It can’t be both simultaneously. Tuly free markets have a lifetime comparable to free hydrogen atoms: they quickly settle to an equilibrium state that’s less free (by either definition).
Unions will not increase the average wage.
Unions (and redistributive policies) can increase median, not just mean wages. That’s the figure that matters to the “average” (50th-percentile) worker. The trillions of dollars hoarded by billionaires do nobody any good but the billionaires themselves.
Unions lobbying the current US government isn’t going to happen. Nothing short of a general strike will make them listen.
I suggest they unionize, demand seats on the board for their unions, and crush excessive C-level compensation. Moving on just moves the exploitation to a new kind of job.
Crypto is one of the only businesses where use of the Enron name could conceivably improve their reputation.
You’d think that, but a depressingly large percent of middle managers identify more with the bosses than with the people doing real work. They believe that if they toe the line and work hard at enabling the sociopaths, they might eventually get the promised invisible handjob.
Interestingly, I’ve known more senior managers than middle managers who are radical. I’m one, and I’ve known many others. I think that those who really understand how the system works end up advancing, but they’re also the ones with no illusions about how the sausage is made.
Capitalism has made me moderately rich (and I started from near-destitution), but that doesn’t mean I am unaware of its many toxic side effects. You have to live within the system that exists. People who don’t know how to do anything make shitty revolutionaries and incompetent reformers.