• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Slavery called, and wants to remind you that it was a legal, formal, and accepted part of capitalism for a loooooooong time. Blaming it all on Reagan is ignoring massive swaths of US history.

    The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 was also called “The Bombing of Black Wall Street” because it was the most concentrated area of black wealth in the US. Capitalism and Democracy decided the best way to deal with that was to bomb the living shit out of all of them, because the majority white citizentry couldn’t deal with the idea of successful black citizens.

    Beyond that, this also ignores the entirety of the labor movement that won you things like a 40-hour work-week and labor laws preventing children from being employed.

    People literally fought and died, shed their blood, to get you better working conditions, when the business owners were hiring the fucking Pinkertons and calling in the National Guard to fucking murder workers for standing up for their rights.

    And everything was regulated and limited until Reagan came around? Give me the biggest of motherfucking breaks. Upton Sinclair would love to have a word with you.

    Read a fucking book about US history before Reagan (The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a great one, it’s actually about the importance of unions, but most people’s main take away is that the food industry was wholly unregulated at the time). Capitalism has always been evil, has always been willing to turn a blind eye to horrible abuse as long as it makes money, and in general is unable to be constrained. The fact that we’re re-living the labor disputes of the early 20th century during the previous gilded age is proof of that. We already fought these battles and won, but now we have to fight them again, against the same class of rich twats as before.

    • girlfreddy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s fair.

      I should have added that regulations were implemented post-WW2. My bad on forgetting to add that in prior to posting.