Due to bugs in our political systems, more money means more power; the labor exploitation market failure is one of the primary ways the evil corporations gain money exponentially, so that’s something I want us to fix. If money wasn’t power to this degree, I wouldn’t’ve had as strong of a hangup on this.
Exploiting other externalities like enviroment and network—i.e. plundering the Earth—is an even more primary way for them to gain money and thus as all y’all know, fighting those things is an even hangup of mine! That’s like my main focus! (If by “fighting” you mean blogging and never leaving bed…)
People have sometimes wondered why I’m so hung up on labor rights, i.e. supporting workers vs owners, instead of joining them in misogyny, homophobia, or xenophobia, i.e. why is fighting the owner class so important to me when I could be joining them in fighting women, gays, or immigrants?
And when they realize that I am a bi woman from an immigrant family, they’re like “oh that explains it all, self-interest strikes again”.
Except not really because I’ve done more owning than working in my day so that’s not it.
“Huh? Why did you phrase it as ‘joining the racists’?!” peeps from my beloved intersectional left might say when they read this. “Wouldn’t instead be ‘join the fight against misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, and as an ally also fight cissexism, islamophobia, racism and antisemitism’?” And they even have a name for overly focusing on the workers-vs-owners fight: “class reductionism”.
Class reductionism is something I’ve thankfully not been accused of since I already am fighting all those fights all day every day. Fights no one should have to fight. Fixing climate change is so urgent, and to the extent that addressing money in politics is a stepping stone towards a solution, that becomes urgent too. Getting dragged into all these fights about what being a human even means is a distraction. My answer isn’t to give up on those fights (that wouldn’t make sense since we’re fighting for our lives) but to try to zoom out and figure out what’s driving the haters to attack, and what did I find? Corporate greed and corruption as per ushe.
And I don’t think the following reflects my current readership but before I made my web site more explicitly political, I was actually getting emails saying things like “I love your blog, FOSS is great, but why aren’t you more racist or transphobic like me?”
After the fourth email like that, I was like “OK, I need to get way clearer about how I think that kind of stuff sucks”, so now, while I’ve promised to not make it the bread-and-butter of the blog, I have hopefully made it clear enough. As scary as that was for a chickenshit like me (I had pretty much unplugged my modem entirely back when Gamergate was raging), I’ve been glad I did. These days I’ve been getting more letters from people who’ve had their minds changed. Which is great, no need to preach to an echo chamber of already-converted.