If the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are worthless, then why not kill them all and be done with it? You want to be a leftist, then you need to taste the bitter pain of being exterminated once your usefulness has dried up. Death is possibly your best option this point…otherwise you might find annihilation at your doorstep.(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
High Speed Rail
Evan Watson
Justin Garcia
???
Robert Fisher
This is a good point -
Before the advent of feudalism and landlordry, pretty much everyone had housing because there was no middleman extract rent from owning land which others lived on. Rentseeking suppresses workers' power as well as productive economic activity by making necessities ridiculously expensive and thereby controlling access to resources and control of the workers over how those resources are used.
Jason Myers
Ignore the schizo.
Honestly I feel that because capitalism is so far developed in a real physical sense (as in occupation of land) that it is more and more becoming rent based. That's why we live in such stagnant times. To stay true to socialism and materialism would mean re-orienting our analysis to have more focus on this. Late capitalism is characterized by rent and stagnation.
Hell yeah, I'm pleasantly surprised how that group hasn't become too liberal even as it grew in size. You can even find some good defenses of 20th century socialism even if "muh stalinism" democratic "socialists" outnumber them.
Anthony Gonzalez
American cities are generally so sprawling that to move around with any efficiency you have to use a car in one way or another. Cities with successful rail systems are dense and designed with efficient foot travel in mind. Places like Japan, Korea and China are successful at high speed rail because pretty much all of their metro zones have very developed rail/subway systems and last mile transportation. Whereas in most American cities, pedestrians are an afterthought and the entirety of transportation infrastructure is geared towards motor vehicle travel (most California sidewalks are only four feet wide, last mile transportation is completely absent). The only places where you might be able to get your business done without a car is if you live smack dab in the heart of a metropolitan zone. Anywhere else and the nearest store or bus stop to your house is a mile away.
What would be by far the most used rail routes in that plan would be the Inland Empire -> Los Angeles and Inland Empire -> San Diego routes. Which would go something like this.
You'd have to rent out a parking spot for your car at the train station. And you'd have to call up a cab every time you wanted to go anywhere in the destination city. This would be way too expensive.
This at first seems reasonable but due to the complete lack of last mile transportation this method would probably have you spending over an hour per day just walking to and from bus stops. The new surge of rental scooters is one method of trying to solve this last mile problem albeit rather unsuccessfully.
This is in comparison to the current method of
This is much simpler and less of a hassle than the previous methods and offers much more flexibility, is cheaper than the rent-a-cab option and faster than the bus option.
Now the advent of self driving cars might very well change all of this. If there is a constantly running shuttle fleet of self driving cars that will cheaply take you straight from your location to the train station, and from the train station to your destination then we might just see enough political push to revamp the rail system. But until self driving tech has made traveling the last mile simple and cheap enough, people will continue choose the convenience of driving cars over rail.
Blake Williams
This. Proudhon was right.
Nathaniel Myers
user you might not like hearing this but american cities will be completely rebuilt to be transit, pedestrian and bike friendly just like they've been rebuilt to be car friendly halfway the 20th century. The tram networks of the 1930s which have been torn down will be small play compared to the future that socialism holds.
Ryder Harris
Don't get the wrong idea. I think high speed rail systems have amazing potential and I don't have anything against public transportation. I just think that, due to the realities of the sprawling layout of American cities, even with a rebuilding you would first need something that is both extremely flexible and efficient for intracity transportation. Completely revamping the transportation grid and somehow sandwiching in a Japan style rail system would require a massive amount of resources, far more than any other previously implemented system. If something like self driving buses could nearly reach efficiencies of trains then I think it would be much more viable and less resource intensive to do something like narrowing the roads and mainly repurposing them as "tracks" for the bus/shuttle fleets (basically making them automated single car carriages that don't require metal tracks). Which would give space to widen the pedestrian avenues and add actual dedicated bike lanes. I think this would largely solve the transportation problems in cities and actually enable people to survive without owning a car. And with the solving of the intracity transportation problem, the high speed rails would be able to function as intended as the main form of intercity transportation. But the self driving tech needs to get there first.
I really do look forward to the day when I don't need to slog through traffic everyday for work, and can buy a $50 ticket to take a 2-3 hour bullet train from San Diego to Lake Tahoe for a weekend trip.
Tyler Barnes
Roads are way more costly to maintain over long distances. It's one of the reasons why America is falling apart. It literally cannot afford to keep it's many roads, highways, and bridges in proper order.
Samuel Hall
It's also a lie. It's more like
It's a huge fucking hassle where at any moment you can get fucking murdered by some drunk asshole or someone on their phone. It is simultainiously the most stressful and most boring part of anyone's day. Compare that to public transport where you don't really have to do anything. You just walk in, sit down, and someone ELSE drives you.