These days I see it as a shorthand, a metaphor for dismantling the system of resource hoarding so that we can more equitably distribute it - let the world consume what the elite have hoarded.
It’s also sort of a joke that reduces them to use value.
I’m all in on wealth redistribution. But it’s not a simple as, “spread it all around”. We’d still be broke, just with bigger bank account numbers and a loaf of bread would be astronomical.
Old friend of mine was appalled when he found out that the US burns worn out currency. (Mike wasn’t that bright.) Said the government should hand that back out.
Allright Mike, can we agree that the government could give all of us a million dollars, like, today?
Of course they could!
Agreed. You know I charge $20 to mow a lawn? (this was early 90’s) What if I suddenly had a million dollars? Hell I want with $20?! Nah. Now I want $20,000 to mow your yard.
Mike honestly didn’t get it. To him, a cheeseburger would always cost $.85 and $15 would get you an 1/8th bag, no matter what.
Reality is, we could skim some hella money off these fuckers. And I don’t just mean billionaires, and I don’t just mean the 1%. We could hit the .01% and the .001% for serious social good. But we can’t take it all and splat it around.
Dad used to say, “If making money was easy, everybody would do it.” And then it wouldn’t be money anymore. (I’m sad I had to follow up with that last sentence, but some people here aren’t going to get it.)
While I’m ranting (sorry OP, you gave me a jumping off point), Robert Heinlein had a great collection of essays, in addition to his science fiction. Him and his wife Virginia decided to travel the world. But they didn’t want the northern hemisphere tourist crap, they went all in on the southern bits.
One way he gauged local economies was, “How long does a laborer have to work to earn a loaf of bread?” Think on that. Very eye opening. His take on the Soviet Union was wild as well!
One of my favorite stories in those essays was when they went to Ecuador (70s? 80s?). He would always ask the cab driver to take them to the poorest part of town, really gauge how the economy was working. They end up in a nice little neighborhood. Tiny, tiny houses, but very neat and clean, flower boxes in all the windows, nice streets, all that.
Heinlein got a little bent. “I asked you to take us to the poorest part of town!” Cabbie, “Oh no senior, these are the poorest people! They are on government assistance and are very ashamed.”
Imagine that.
/drunk_rant
Notice I didn’t say money, I said resources. And I’m thinking in global terms.
I’m not saying, say, American government take cash of American billionaires and give it to different Americans.
I’m saying, who controls water, who controls oil, who controls farmland. Who pressures nations with threats if they try to be food self sufficient. Who steals. Who orders and finances killings. There is enough here on terra for everyone, but it’s being misused and hoarded.
Tax incentives to convert privately owned companies into worker owned cooperatives,
Income tax set at brackets of the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of income, with the rates nominally calculated based on the shares of wealth controlled by each percentile, and with additional rate hikes for every time a persons income passes a multiple of the median income of those below the 20th percentile of incomes,
Anyone in the 99th percentile of incomes are banned from public office for ten years starting when they stop earning in that bracket, I call this one the “You’re doing fine, now shut up.”, rule,
Minimum wage calculated state by state as the minimum amount for the quarterly median rent of that state to not exceed 35% of that wage,
Wage based on the week, a nominal rate for up to 32 hours of work, with work between 32 and 48 hours of work receiving an additional sum of the nominal rate times 2.5, with any work between 48 and 64 hours being compensated at that sum times an additional 2.5, and any work beyond 64 hours just being completely illegal altogether, as in the manager goes to jail immediately and the shop is turned into a worker owned co-op by force if it happens too many times. Overtime should be what you do because it’s an emergency, not because you’re too fucking cheap to hire the actually necessary labor,
Price hikes of all kinds are limited to a max of the federal interest rate in terms of percent increase,
Serious increases in non-habitation taxes for properties safe to be used as housing,
Businesses cannot use physical office space without having a minimum percentage of essential labor roles staffing that office, essential meaning “this job cannot possibly in any way be done without us being on site.”
Service industry workers are protected by law and verbally harassing them is a felony,
Elections are funded entirely publicly, in fact if you accept a private donation of any sort you’re ejected from the election, as in even if you win the ballot is instead treated as if the second place runner up won,
Hunt down any and every person responsible for the current advertising eco-system and sentence the lot of them to be publicly hanged for a number of counts of criminal harassment equal to the number of televized and online advertisements aired from the date of birth of the oldest among them,
Post office and library banking and post office and library polling places,
One congressman for every 50k residents of a state, and 27 senators to every state, more elected offices means more people in government, which necessarily means less rich folks as a share of government,
Abolish the office of president, hand the powers of government to the House of Representatives and the powers of State to the Senate, and give them both the ability to veto the other by a margin equal to how much a given act by either house passed by, with a Veto Overturn either being a 2/3rds vote, or a 5% increase on the veto margin, whichever is higher, basically this is just neutering the house most commonly filled with the political elites of the nation, ergo some of the richest of the nation, while still having that ability to block legislation from the house if its something ludicrous that pretty clearly violates a large cross section of the states’ interests, also the senate has to pass those margins with qualified majorities, meaning it doesn’t count unless the senators voting to veto something represent over half the country’s population, no cornfield courts in this country,
You’ve got some serious takes there, but why so soft on landleeches?
If you do not live at a residential address you don’t get to own it. Zero corporate ownership of residential properties, the individual person or family who owns your apartment building has to actually provide labor involved in the running of the building (maintenance or leasing) but cannot take a monthly pay greater than 2.5x the lowest-cost unit in the building.
Aerosmith or edgelording. Depending on context.
It means the social contract has been broken beyond repair. Wealth hording, inequality, the power balance, lobbying, mega-corporations, data harvesting to profit from us even further, working until death for pennies while other profit from our labour. We are slaves to a system that has the illusion of comfort and freedom, when in reality, a small subset of the population control it all and are actively clamping down on what little freedom and comfort we actually had.
The 2008 financial collapse lifted the curtain to most, and it became glaringly obvious just how transparent and artificial the entire concept of economy actually is.
Control and/or ownership of the means of production should be more distributed among or more accountable to the people who use those means.
Destroy them not in retribution, but to nourish ourselves.
It’s a meme designed to express dissatisfaction with income equality and the desire to fix it. What isn’t clear to me is what qualifies as “rich”. Because a US based entry-level fast food worker is at the 50th percentile of richest people in the world by income, after accounting for cost of living and other regional inequality.
It’s also pretty clear from studies that everyone in the top 30% of the richest in the world will need to give up a lot of our privileges if we’re going to address climate change, and I don’t think people realise how rich they actually are. https://wid.world/income-comparator/ uses some of the latest research to help you find out, it’s definitely worth a look.
Whole lot of blaming the victims going on in this one. No one is picturing a fast food worker when they say eat the rich and you know it.
How is it victim blaming to try to define the scope? Most of the demographic who visit lemmy wouldn’t consider fast food workers to be rich, and I certainly don’t, but by income they are literally at the halfway point globally. To the billions of people who are below even the 25th percentile, they may well consider a US fast food worker rich. The extreme poverty that exists in this world is a very well hidden atrocity, but the perspectives of those people still matter to me and still should be taken into account.
The sad reality is that most of the people reading your comment and mine are naturally going to be privileged enough to have literacy education, internet access, and the spare time to browse the internet.
Too many leftists think locally and not globally; underprivileged individuals in other countries half a world away are easy for them to disqualify as an “out of context problem”, when we should all be in this together: global intersectionality.
To an extent, it’s completely understandable. To have a significant proportion of the richest people in the world struggle to pay all their bills or afford medical care is a really hard concept to reconcile. And if you’re someone who has never been exposed to a sizable group of people who don’t have a reliable source of clean water or the most basic of staple foods, it’s very easy to not realise how privileged you might be - even if you’re really genuinely struggling compared to everyone around you.
To me it highlights that the problem is much deeper than wealth inequality, even though that’s a huge symptom. But that’s another topic altogether.
Thanks for understanding where I was coming from though!
Hell yes.
There have been several studies showing that the wealth of a nation has less impact on the general welfare of that nation’s citizens than wealth inequality does. By that metric, saying “Fast food people are objectively rich if you compare them to the world” has to be either ignorant, or purposefully misleading.
And how much can we supply in resources to the bottom 50% by taking even from just the top 1000 richest people?
Maybe enough to make a huge difference. To be clear, I have zero problem with the concept of wealth redistribution to better achieve some kind of equitable outcome (that ideally isn’t at the cost of the environment, which is the big reason that the top global richest will need to give up a lot of travel ).
I just think a lot of the people who are keen for “eat the rich”, especially in its more violent forms, may not realise they’re on the menu themselves when the issue is looked at from a global all-of-humanity perspective. And, I encourage people to really think about who and what is included or excluded in the definitions of “rich”, what level of variation is acceptable to them, and what a sustainable living situation even looks like for the world’s population if we had total equality. They’re all very hard questions that I don’t have an answer to either.
Its from the French revolution you silly person
If the question OP asked was about the origin of the phrase, your reply would be a great starting point as a top level comment.
Its not a meme, its a historical quotes. Unless your saying you see it as a meme, which to me a meme is silly and easily thrown away
I’m using the original definition of the word meme: “a unit of cultural information spread by imitation”. Meme as a word doesn’t imply that it’s a comedic image macro on the internet, but I appreciate that the more modern slang usage might have made that confusing for you.
In 50 years if “meme” evolves in the general dialect to have these connotations you pointed out I’ll feel better about it
evolves
It started from what @fiat_lux defined.
It’s ironic that you want people to recognise the roots of “eat the rich” but you’re unwilling to recognise the roots and wider meaning of “meme”.
Its more to do with the connotation of calling something a meme.
Maybe I am out of the loop but the description for a meme that was previously given has never occupied my mind whilst seeing a meme.
Eat the rich with the laymen’s understanding of a meme does not fit the perceived definition.
Where as eat the rich and its evolution still has the same connotation as it had when first spoken, most likely due to it be a quite with historical meaning.
I am wrong with the given definition but I still see there being understandable confusion and a need for meme to evolve for it to used without confusion.
Yeah if you’re interested in origins of a phrase’s meaning, I think you’ better look into what a “meme” actually originally is before criticizing its useage here.
It means uniting as a people to force them to answer for their crimes against humanity, using the assumption that their mortal life is the only opportunity for punishment.
I assumed it was just a meme… People don’t actually want to eat them, do they?
Feels like they’d be very fatty.
Let’s ask the Dutch.
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Traditional recipes for ruling class stem from an era when great body mass was a sign of wealth and all that fat really lent itself well to a roast, either in an oven or on a spit, to really render out all the fruits of that stolen labor (no pun intended, but cherries, plums, or my personal favorite, oranges, work great here to add a splash of color, flavor and complexity), or sliced thinly and fried with veggies that blister well, like peppers and onions.
The modern billionaire is quite lean, demonstrating that they can afford better quality food and have the time to cater to their own health and body, a luxury they’d never afford the people who make them their money. For this, a wet cook is better. Think like a brisket. Ideal for long, slow cooker meats, with acidic and sweet vegetables. Or braised with wine and flavored with umami bombs such as anchovy, like ossobuco.
We have fed them all for a thousand years, but one day they will feed us, so it’s best to be ready!
We really need a method for getting the plastics out of them.
Want to? Nah. But by god, I’ll do my part.
The term is marbled
I believe it originated from a saying like (paraphrased) ”if we are so poor that we starve then all that is left to eat are the rich"
I imagine it’d be tender since they haven’t worked a day in their life
Redistribute wealth.
Or more specifically, reverse the redistribution of wealth to the rich.
Do you want to hear how to dismantle the cancerous class of humans or just like looking for recipes?
Tangential story time. I play a lot fo video games, mmo’s being the norm. A few years ago one came out that I was hooked on not just as a game but also a social platform. I met many people on there and knew them better than I know some of my friends.
One of them set a goal for herself. She wanted a billion in game currency, and it was possible. She spent several months and enough real world money to end up in some fairly deep debt, but I only heard that from others who were closer.
Being outside of her unguarded group, she randomly asked me what I would do of I had a billion currency in the game. I thought about it for a few minutes and responded “I’d probably quit the game”. Confused, she asked me why.
It’s a pretty simple concept, if I had accumulated that level of wealth in game, that meant one of two things had occured: either I had nothing left to spend the currency on, or the inflation had gotten so bad that only the wealthiest players could participate.
That mindset doesn’t work with the rich. They can do and get whatever they want with their wealth, but they’re more focused on getting a big number more than actually just enjoying it freely and openly.
Eating the rich is decimating the concept of a high score financially. Fostering altruism and attempting to make the world a better place for all. The absolute wealth some people in this world have could do so much good if it weren’t being hoarded.
Taxing the rich is a hard fight with so many loopholes and outs that it will take forever. Changing the mindset is basically impossible as well, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try every available means.
I played Borderlands with my brother online once. He was ahead of me but we wanted to have fun together so we tried to play together.
I was on a mission to get the best gun for my current level. He was kind enough to just drop a gun that was as good or better for my level than what I was seeking. I no longer had to do that quest.
In fact, he dropped all the best guns he had through all the levels. I no longer had to do any extra quests.
I quit the game. It was suddenly boring. It was the need for the next new thing that had been making it exciting, and now that was gone.
I think about that sometimes for rich people. Why does it never get boring?
Great analogy
Vive la révolution
The decision making in the economy is too centralized. Not only does that reward corrupting the system and is arguably immoral, the wisdom of the crowd only works when there is a crowd making those decisions. eg. coops, smaller businesses + more competition/lower barriers to entry
Normal people: it’s a metaphor for cannibalizing their wealth and assets to feed and house the poor they’ve explored.
Me: I will literally eat a rich human if it means I won’t starve.
We are not the same.
You’re right. I’m a cook. To me, it means feed the whole neighborhood.
