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You don't have to change a single thing about this picture. It's as relevant today as the day it was drawn.
(lemmygrad.ml)
the title: At the American Diner
the subtext: In this restaurant, they serve only one person...
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for non-nerds
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It’s often a sign of uncuriousness: not interested in their own power, only of appealing to those who rule them.
Those who, after hearing a critique, ask whether something other than the criticized object would actually work, leave the analysis of what causes the “evils due to the system” uncontested, as if they agreed with the analysis. If they did agree, however, they could no longer foster any reasonable doubts about whether something other than the criticized evil were feasible. The specified causes are after all not natural necessities but based on social relations of power, which in no way have to be as they are. It’s the other way around. Those who doubt the feasibility of an alternative are not convinced that they have been presented with the real causes in the explanation of the social causes of the circumstances whose harmfulness they concede. On the contrary, they are convinced that there must be an entirely different reason than the prevailing relations of power, some not yet understood necessity that lends stability to the criticized circumstances. They thus deny the soundness of our arguments. One cannot avoid arguing about that.
Those who, after hearing a critique, demand the “positive” side likewise pretend that the critique is fine but that the practical consequences remain in the dark. That’s not honest. Every particular critique shows what alternative it is driving at. Those who, for example, ascribe contemporary evils, which we after all are not the only ones to criticize, to free competition in which the big fish always swallow the small fish — those people are pleading for fairness in competition, control of monopolies, antitrust legislation, and healthy medium-sized firms. Those who lay the blame for these abuses on modern man‘s growth mania, on its unspecific “always wanting more” — those people are pleading for salvation in doing without and reveal themselves as global ecological reformers. And when we explain that the poverty and insecure existence of wageworkers is a necessary consequence of their role as the cost factor ‘labor’ and that this role is a consequence of the one and only purpose for which production in capitalism takes place — namely turning money into more money — then everyone can hear perfectly well the call for action in it: the people who, in their entire existence, are made instruments of the growth of capital must get rid of this obstacle standing in the way of their own benefit. They must break the power of those who have the interest in profits, and win the freedom to organize their work so that it finally is about their needs and a good life for them. Everyone who takes note of our explanations understands that much of an alternative. Whether these explanations deserve approval depends on whether or not the causes of the well-known evils have been correctly determined. But those who, apart from any controversy about particular causes, turn up with the question of whether we actually had an alternative just don’t want the practical consequences they’ve sounded out, and clothe their displeasure in polite doubt as to whether the intended goal is in fact realistic.
