>>2686908used to be able go to the corner store and get 2 packs of peanuts for $1, or 69 cents each. Now those same peanuts are $2.29 each, or you can get two for $4.
This price increase has happened over the last 6 years or so. How do I know? I used to get those peanuts everyday before work.
Wages have only actually gone down though. Sure, some places have raised the wages, but the hours worked shift. These capitalists will do anything to avoid giving the working class a dime. So the standard dropped from 6 hour days for a part time to a 3 hour shift. Want to survive? Get a second job, maybe a third. Oh look at that, we have created new jobs! This was Bidenomics in action. Now, a year into Trump, we are seeing a net negative of job creation when combined with the mass layoffs. I wouldn't hesitate to say that over a million workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2026. Rate of profit continues to fall. We've got Klarna for paying rent now though.
Living with roommates has been the norm before I became an adult. Now, working and being homeless is rapidly becoming the norm. The question remains, how long can that, in-combination with rising prices, continue? The soft power of the hegemony, the social contract of the empire, has all but evaporated.
In the 1970s to 80s? It was "get any job, buy a home, you're good" more or less. Work hard, maybe start a business, maybe just retire early. These people still control our society deeply.
Then in the 90s it shifted. Get a white collar job, and you can have a decent life. Might not be as grand as your parents, but still decent. It's the end of history after-all, this is the best possible system. Look at a movie like Office Space. Hard to relate to the setting now, in the post-COVID era. This vision of history ending, the neoliberal victory. That did not hold.
In the post-2008 era, the narrative shifted again. Work hard, take extra hours, go into massive amounts of debt, pick the right "career friendly" degree (probably STEM), keep your head down, get a side hustle and you can have an okay life. You'll never own a home but you can rent somewhere nice. I remember being a kid watching OWS. Hearing about Obama's change. What changed? The descent into hyper exploitation only accelerated. The gigification of the proletariat was the change. The birth of the Uber oriented, techbro capitalism. Thinking about how being a Taxi driver used to be a stable career that people would work their entire lives before Uber. I have never called a taxi cab.
Now, in the mid 2020s, the narrative shifts again. There is no decent life promised. White collar jobs are being rapidly cut down, and solid paths like comp sci, or engineering see massive unemployment. The hegemony has shifted to anti-intellectualism. Both those who study STEM and those who study Liberal Arts are without options. Companies race to lay off as many people as possible. What contract is there? Join ICE, kidnap a brown person, and you won't end up in the camps with them? Keep your head down, so you can pay off your cashapp afterpay that you spent getting a new outfit from a reseller? Become a reseller? Maybe grift online to right wingers? Did you even get an education, if you went to school during COVID, probably not really.
So now the idea of a job is more or less something that's a societal expectation with minimal benefits. More and more people are simply dropping out. 50% or more of the homeless have jobs. That's a 2018 stat, our understanding of unemployment is incredibly skewed by the use of regime backed statistics, which cull for people "not actively looking for work, or people who haven't worked in over 6 months" (paraphrasing). Which means that large amounts of people simply aren't counted as unemployed. There was a Politico article that pointed to potentially 25% of working class Americans being unemployed, or so underemployed they are living in poverty. Like me, working two 3 hour shifts a week at McDonald's. That's not including homeless people, and the definition of homelessness is again skewed by the regime's definition. Couch surfing? Not homeless. Stay at one place for more than a week? Not homeless. The homeless stats are also based on what can be reported by shelters and other organizations that work with them. A whole lot of people simply don't exist in these statistics. The top 10% of the earners in the US, read people making 250k or more, make up over 50% of economic spending. The average person is simply not part of the economy or the culture that drives it.
Is it any wonder that you read emails in these files between the uber rich, talking about how they can literally get rid of all of the poor people? If you're making 30k or less? You're contributing a sliver of the economy, but yet you drive the entire machine. The machine still needs people to be exploited, labor still creates, the capitalist still exploits. The shattering of the social contract, the hegemonic soft power of the capitalist, only serves to accelerate its defeat. What can they promise us at this stage in the game? Seriously. What is on offer? Gambling apps? What's the over/under of revolution? What's the Kalshi odds on socialism winning?
Think about it. There's absolutely a timeline wherein the capitalists do some social democracy FDR type shit. In that timeline, I might not be running the most trafficked politics site on neocities.org, I might not be a revolutionary. They are their own gravediggers, after all. The capitalist class had their chance to do that with Bernie or even Yang. Get some social programs, some basic UBI. People keep consuming, people continue to allow the system to exist as it is. Sure you'll never own a n y t h i n g, not a book or a movie let alone a car, let alone a home. But you can get the subscription service, call the Waymo or Uber, rent the shared home. Whatever. This was that last gasp of millennial optimism we saw with the rat-fucking of Bernie in 2016 and 2020. But you've now got a generation of adults were half of them have never even seen the promise of what could have been.
If you're 23 right now, you have known nothing but intense struggle in a collapsing world. If you're approaching 30, you've only seen the failures of change and every promise society has ever made to you be broken. If you're just turning 18? What is there for you? hyper exploitation? scamming? or maybe the internet could be finessed. maybe you could be an NPC streamer on Tiktok, but no matter what part of this generation you are, you're hyper alienated. From yourself, from society, from the past, and from a future that has been stolen from you.
Is it a shock that we see such high levels of reactionary though emerging? The descent into fascism? It's a reaction to something, the death spiral of the material conditions in late-stage capitalism. Terminal stage capitalism. 73% of the Earth's wildlife has died in the last 50 years. That's the age of a lot of our parents. That's less time that my mother has been alive.
So then, is it any wonder that the numbers of the DSA have swelled? Some say over 150% growth in the last two years. 100,000 members. How many more people are members of mutual aid groups? Or various other collectives? Fanon said that every generation had to find its purpose. Well it seems that our purpose is either to surrender to total reactionary nihilism, the type that normalizes the actions of those listed in the Epstein files, or to organize revolution. I believe that we will carry out the latter, the signs are already there. The gears of history already in motion.
If the capitalist can offer no future, then we can take no quarter. We have seen their crimes against humanity, those done in private on billionaire owned islands, and those done in public in the name of imperialist plunder. We have seen decades of neoliberal "marketplace of ideas" debate against the fascist, against the imperialist, against those whom have made an enemy out of life itself. We have met them at the ballot box, but this government only represents the corporations. We have met them on the soapbox, in the streamer debates, and they have doubled down on their positions, taking pride in their hypocrisy. We must meet them with the only box left. We must make for revolution, and steal our future back.