Nobody said it would be easy or fair, only that it would be necessary for an audience that is predisposed to oppose you to be charitable and hear what you are saying.

The problem with this is the capitalists have a way of revoking rights when the working class has its back turned, and the privilege of making unlimited propaganda to make sure those backs stay turned and either complacent or focused on other things. The only way to prevent this is for the wealthy to answer to the people rather than the other way around, which means the working class must control the means of production. This is the capitalists’ lever of control as a class.

By making sure that society cannot produce anything without them, they get to control our material conditions, who lives or dies, what gets produced and how it gets produced, with no real regard for the people’s needs besides what coincidentally creates more capital for them. And they can direct this all in the particular way which convinces us that this is the natural order of things and we should actually be thanking them for the breadcrumbs they leave us when all is said and done.

Realistically, you cannot have one without the other. Anything else is leaving the door open to the capitalists to pull things back in their direction using their vast accumulation of wealth, which under capitalism directly translates to influence and power.

Except for the left side, the bars are proportionate to price in dollars. The percent increase that amounts to is marked above the bars, and that number should match up to the visual difference between the 2014 price and the 2024 price, compared to the 2014 price alone.

The 3 yellow bars on the left are nonsense and seem to have been drawn like that just to fit that picture of the girl in.

They borked their graph to make room for the picture of the girl for some reason

McDonald’s profit margin–as a percentage of cost–remained steady

It’s cute you think a publicly traded company would allow for that, especially for a leader in a market as fully saturated as fast-food. When you’ve reached every person, there’s not much left to do but increase profit margins by cutting costs and raising prices.

If that line stops going up, executives can be voted out by the shareholders and lose their generous pay packages and bonuses! Last year’s billions in profit just isn’t good enough when there’s quarterly earnings reports to be made and shareholder wealth to be maximized!

Well of course they had to make room for the picture of a child eating McDonald’s. How else would people know what they’re looking at, and who would they feel bad for?

I’ve been called a tankie just for referencing communist theory.

I agree, I believe that people fundamentally tend towards peace in the absence of any other forces, and this is something that makes no sense to me aside from the ideas being planted and nurtured in our society to keep us divided and lashing out at each other instead of looking up and rising against those who oppress us.

I once heard someone say if the west cost was discovered first, no one would live on the east coast.

Well, not exactly. The natives would’ve still been there, and somehow I don’t believe the early americans would have allowed for that.

Line must go up