The question that makes fundies hostile

[Raven]

I don't know that we want to credit Drippy with being more than a barely sentient life form. OK, I will grant you that the working poor have it rough, that's where my wife and I both came from. It isn't easy. We both have friends from our youth who didn't make it. My father was a semi-skilled factory worker, and that was not a good thing to be at that time. The company left to go to Tennessee to take advantage of those Orwellianly-named “right to work” laws, he had the rug pulled out from him. He got lucky and found a job elsewhere, but that only lasted a few years before that happened again. Both companies have since left the US, again in search of cheap labor. He got lucky and was able to somehow wrangle himself a job with the transit authority and hang on to what little he had.

If you wanted to you could call that situation “wage-slavery”. I certainly would not argue. He was stuck. Most people are. Some are stuck in a more economically viable place than others. But unless you're blessed in the inheritance department, you are going to have to do something to earn your daily bread. In my own case, I went to college and still ended up with a blue collar job. I spent 30 years as a licensed exterminator. The company was only hiring people with a college education. We had to take classes every year to keep our licenses current. There is a lot more to it than most people think. I liked a lot about the job, but there was certainly a lot not to like about it. It allowed me to raise 4 kids to adulthood, in decent circumstances. It allowed me to get my family out of Brooklyn, which meant a great deal to me. But I was stuck, I was just stuck in a better place than my dad was.

But everybody in the 99% is stuck. So why should I complain? I got to retire after 30 years while I am still young enough to enjoy it. Yes, you do have people who are stuck in really crappy jobs at Walmart, etc. But at least they get to choose who is going to exploit them. We all get exploited. No worker gets paid the full value of their labor, therefore we are all being ripped off. Capitalism is a very predatory economic system. Would you rather do things the way the ancient Israelites did? Maybe we should go back to the Ante-bellum South? Didn't think so.

Damn near all of us are going to be stuck no matter what we do. Marxism seems like such a great idea on paper, but it has never worked well in actual practice. Soviet workers were in an even worse place than my dad was. Drippy was just engaging in some semantical obfucating because he needed to do so in order to appear to be less stupid than he actually did.