Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.
Capitalism
Corporatism=literally capitalism
Major media bodies are owned by corporations or the state, and the state is also owned by corporations, so they functionally control all of it. QED Socialism or barbarism.
Nope education is the downfall. Teach critical thinking well and you won’t have such a malleable idiotic population that buys into either of those.
That’s maybe a part, but not the whole story.
Your (and your parents’, and your peers’) real and perceived economic circumstances and opportunities have a lot to do with what you’ll value and prioritize as an adult - how invested and loyal you’ll be in society. Every poor person we generate due to greedy decisions has a very high likelihood of being a destructive force back to us.
Now consider how many poor people were generated by black slavery, segregation, and explicit racism in America, and how, in a society, we all just swim around in the same trauma soup, deflecting pain towards one another.
Imo greed is an lack of education. As education is ideally schooling +life experience. Part of that critical thinking section needs to be taught by experience and society in the us at least didn’t give anyone enough time to see the world before deciding what to do, how to live and what kind of person you want to be.
as an adult
That’s an interesting way to frame things.
Now consider how many poor people were generated by black slavery, segregation, and explicit racism in America, and how, in a society, we all just swim around in the same trauma soup, deflecting pain towards one another.
That’s a nice thought 😳
Education was destroyed by the same people who forced corporate news down our throats.
Correct, but one had to go before the other.
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Almost none of my well educated professional-managerial class peers have developed class consciousness. They seem to be even more class clueless than blue & pink collar workers.
It’s literally just capitalism, Marx called this alienation under capital
Pitchshifter warned us.
The 90s industrial/nu metal band?
Industrial then switched genres to Industrial Punk, but yeah.
Neat. Just was not at all expecting to see Pitchshifter in this discussion. (sorry I called them nu metal, felt strange to me too)
Yeah, I guess they did warn us. I didn’t really grasp the lyrics when I was younger. Even RATM was lost on me until I hit my 30s…
I’m safe in the knowledge that we’ll all be saved.
? By who?
This is the coldest take on Lemmy. Not that it’s wrong, though.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we’ve built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can’t be it…
The constant revamping of the production process, the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, and the everlasting uncertainty and agitation of society distinguish the bourgeois era from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. All new-formed relationships become outdated before they can solidify. All that is fixed melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and thier relations with each other.
-Some guy, in some manifesto, in 1848
The question “Where did we go wrong?” being asked on 4chan in /b/ is funny to me.
Cue John Travolta looking around gif
This was my feeling as well. Hey Anon, go look in the fuckin’ mirror if you want to know where we went wrong.
Damn straight, homie stumbled upon alienation and commodity fetishism all at once
Capitalism is tearing me apart Lenin!
Don’t vote Conservative
Next year will mark my 16th year voting for democrats, all they do is kick the can and move the line. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with saying don’t vote conservative, I do think it’s a bit like saying “CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS” when a tornado is coming. We’re screwed regardless of who we vote for, the only thing that changes is the rate at which we’re screwed; that is why Anon is sick of life.
Democrats are also conservatives. If you allow the oligarchs and aristocrats to choose who represents you then they will always choose candidates who rule in their interest. You can’t change this system by playing within the ruleset you’re given. Democratic power can only ever be wielded by unions of workers and communes of citizens. Those organizations combine and concentrate the power of regular people and can effectively wield this against the ruling class.
It’s not even a matter of “Democrat vs Republican” - do you know what they all have in common? They’re all part of the same ruling class you mentioned, and they’re all also helping the corporate owners of America push their agendas.
Like… it’s pretty damn blatant who the GOP are rooting for when you consider what rich asshats like Elongated Muskrat want, and then look at some of the policies they passed and go “oh shit.”
The FPTP voting system means everyone is held hostage voting for the party they hate the least. If you vote for a third party you just make it more likely the party you hate most will win because the vote is split.
Obviously things still wouldn’t be perfect with a proportional voting system but I think it would take some power away from capitalist oligarchs because we will be able to vote for a party we like without just making the fascists more likely to win. The issue is the only two parties you can realistically vote for are highly incentivised to not change the voting system because they will lose a lot of the power they have.
Or how about everyone who wants to vote 3rd party, votes 3rd party?
I know it’s a little different because my country has proportional voting system, but the first two elections the party I vote for was below the limit to be in a parliament. I still voted for them as did others and now it’s one of the stronger parties.
If everyone who doesn’t like both the parties starts voting 3rd party, you have a chance.
I made the mistake of voting 3rd party in 2016. Massive fucking mistake.
That’s the good 'ol spoiler effect in action lol
Think about it on the constituency level, say you have a constituency with 100,000 people. One year, 60k people vote for party A and 40k for party B so party A wins. But during during the years before the next election people become disenfranchised with party A so they start voting for party C who they like more. In the following election, party A gets 30k votes, party B gets 40k votes again and party C gets 30k votes. Because FPTP is a “winner takes all” system, party B is now takes that constituency which is the the party A and C voters dislike most, even though party B got less votes than those other two. This is called the spoiler effect. When this is happening all over a country, sure maybe some constituencies will flip but for each that does like 30 will have the vote split leading to a probable landslide victory for party B.
Sure in your country, your vote was also “wasted” if your party of choice never entered parliament I suppose (although if you get to choose multiple parties in order of preference where it defaults to your second if the first doesn’t get enough votes then it isn’t wasted) but the ecosystem will be much more favourable to new parties growing because the way the voting system works makes it actually possible for them to do so. So the vote isn’t wasted like it is in FPTP.
CGP Grey has some great videos about FPTP on his channel if you’re interested in a better explanation that I can provide.
The spoiler effect was very evident when Ross Perot ran during the 1992 presidential election which put Clinton in office.
Well, at least you’ve got a heads-up and some choice on how fast you get screwed.
We just got a guy we didnt choose who just suddenly and royally f🇷🇺ks everyone over every few years or so
The Dems can’t do anything without a majority. Give them a true majority where Sinema and Man Chin can’t hold things up. Then stand the fuck back.
Dont vote Neo-Liberal.
America is the world.
Can say the same for progressives! They progressed us so far, we ended up going backwards!
Ohh that would almost be clever if it weren’t conservatives dragging the world through their unga bunga bullshit.
We started with hating the gays, then we accepted gays, now we hate straights. See, backwards. “Conservitves”, have been progressing in their own direction, which is not actually conservative but a branch of liberalism that focuses on things like anti abortion and more government control over that as well as border control and anti lgbt. One side of liberalism wants more government control over social things, the other wants government control over economic and state things. By things I mean…whatever those retards are bickering about ATM I’m not sure, thats just my own conclusion.
No one cares about straight people enough to hate us. Spare me your fox news talking points about why we’re actually the most persecuted group in the universe. It’s old hat bullshit.
now we hate straights.
who the fuck is we? why do you hate the straights? explain how this is progressive’s fault that you ‘hate the straights’
now we hate the straights
No idea who hates straight people, but that line alone is telling me you need to touch grass.
by things I mean… whatever those retards are bickering about ATM I’m not sure
No, no, I’m fairly certain you do. Please elaborate on what things you’re talking about in this context.
Some people think of politics as a circle instead of a spectrum, if that’s what you mean.
From what I can tell gay people are getting a lot of hate sent their way lately. Didn’t someone just get shot and killed for having a pride flag.
Yes, an old granny who ran an art gallery.
Progressive to me means fair wages, medicare for all, tackling climate change, defending civil rights, protecting against authoritarianism, tackling the wage gap, making government work for all people, etc.
Conservative means insurrection, praising authoritarianism, banning books, attacking public education, idolizing the ultra wealthy, culture wars, gerrymandering, preventing fair elections, etc.
I know what I prefer.
Can you? Examples, please.
so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why. It’s reassuring to see people starting to wake up but frustrating to see them groggy, incoherent, and still half-asleep. 95 times out of a hundred they’ll blame “corporatism” or welfare queens or race mixing or overpopulation or some shit and it’s just exhausting
so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why
It’s because of crony capitalism! Because there’s a magical different one that would go better, trust me!
And when they say “corporatism”, rather than the capitalist aspects of corporations draining the life from society, they’ll instead be referring to whenever a company does something they consider “woke”.
Not a fan of capitalism myself, but I’d take western (somewhat) liberal capitalism over the authoritarian alternatives (kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy in Russia or fake-communist dictatorship in China) that are being pushed here on Lemmy.
China is the only country that is on track to hit the goals stated in the Paris Agreement.
China has invested trillions in combating climate change.
75% of people alleviated from poverty are chinese citizens.
China has a higher life expectancy than the US.
China has a higher median wage than several european countries.
The US has the largest prisoner population in the world.
Slavery is legal in the US as a punishment for a crime.
The leaders of the riots in Ferguson were all murdered. Several political leaders have disappeared or died mysteriously over the years in the US.
The US “used to have” a project by the name of COINTELPRO which focused on suppressing political dissidents.Why exactly would you take the western system over China?
What makes China authoritarian, yet the country with the largest prisoner population in the world and a proven record of suppressing and murdering political dissidents not authoritarian?I don’t like how you make it seem like the US is the average western country.
It is one of the worst in terms of everything except money and military.
If you compare China with an actual average western country, like France or Spain. Then China looks a lot less hospitable. With its giant face tracking infrastructure, the anti-privacy devices and apps, the genocides of Uyghurs and castrations of Muslims.
I like how China is improving massively, but it still is closer to the US than it is to Finland in terms of population happiness and freedom.
The US is the hegemon of the West, they call the shots. It’s reasonable to talk about US in place of the west.
the genocides of Uyghurs and castrations of Muslims.
posting
love how you euros pretend to give a shit about muslims
As a European, we’re definitely leagues ahead of the US, but we also have giant face tracking infrastructure, anti privacy devices and apps, and we just recently did massive invasions resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent civilians in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And at least hundreds of thousands of those deaths are actually provable and well-documented.
I don’t think anyone is pushing modern capitalist Russia, although kleprocratic, imperialist oligarchy describes the US and western liberal democracy at large as much as it does the Russian Federation.
China though has a better democracy than the US. Calling it a dictatorship is pure western brainworms.
Edit: Why do you think the US is not a kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy? And why do you think liberal democracy is more democratic than full process democracy in China?
| China though has a better democracy than the US.
Anyone in the US can try to be elected, in China the government chooses who can be elected. Equal representation is a cornerstone of democracy.
The whole point of government is to be authoritarian. That authority is what separates tax collectors from muggers. That authority is what allows for public good such as welfare programs and public bad such as a militarized police force that brutally defends the capitalist class and their capital. Under “liberal” capitalism, that authority is concentrated in the hands of the dictators that own the means of production.
fake-communist dictatorship in China
Do you know anything about how their system actually works or are you just repeating something you’ve seen in reddit comments over and over again?
my elites are better than your elites
lol.
Yes😎
I mean, probably.
“become more rich by exploting poor people buy politicians make more money repeat” you can do this in china ,usa and any other countries
We don’t get tortured and re-educated though! Gotta count your blessings!
based patriot 👍🏽
We’re fucking our planet and all its species regardless, and arguing about the amount of lube being used.
I have yet to find a good, reasonable solution. Capitalism is the least bad that I have seen.
You haven’t seen New Economic Policy. It’s still capitalism, but don’t eat people as much.
Um, it was created by Lenin.
Yes. Doesn’t change fact that it is still capitalism.
Everything under neoliberalism is assessed primarily in terms of money. It thrives on selfishness. Doing things to improve climate and reduce carbon emissions doesn’t have immediate profits and is therefore ignored. The wealth inequality results in the more wealthy thinking they deserve the wealth and seeing the poor as inferior thus destroying social cohesion.
Liberalism does not seem to seek any kind of cohesion, rather it focuses on maximising each individual’s desires regardless of the resulting sum of these individual fulfillments.
Eat the rich
The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you’re over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You’re a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.
They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn’t erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you’ll tilt. They can’t make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you’re discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it’s never about recognizing your actual situation.
They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there’s as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don’t sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you’re unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.
This isn’t new and owning productive assets isn’t as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.
A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you’re free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you’re happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.
Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you’ve noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.
You can’t imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You’re better to go with the devil you know.
You’re not unhappy because you’re possessed with bad spirits. You’re not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You’re unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.
This is heaven
This is hell
This is living
This is tale to tell
This is drivewheel
This is cog
This is master
This is snarling dog
Would you want a change from the current modus oprandi? If so how would you suggest it one or many achieve it?
Create a better world through revolutionary solcialism
If I could change one big thing, I’d make it such that each worker is aware of how much they personally have put into the economy via their labor and wage. Someone who works for someone else never really knows the true value of their work, just the wage that’s paid to them. If we all knew the true value of our labor we’d riot.
When I was a fitness trainer for Big Corporate Gym, I was paid a quarter what each session cost for the client. I’ve come to understand that even this is an unusually high proportion.
I believe we must repalace leadership, i.e. politicians, CEOS managerial and administrative positions with A.I. or just automate the decicion making at those levels, since they are actively going against humanities interests and just pursue their own, like instead of figthing climate change by yeeting oil businesess into hell, they instead keep receiving blood money from oil companies so that they actively push back on reneubable energy sources, and use that money to build themselves another fucking swimmimg pool.
The A.I. should be able to not be corruptible and shouls exploit resources in a renewable manner and distribute them in a just manner according to both phisical and human needs. Its the only way which we stoo exploiting each other, we must automate the means of productionand take it back from those lizard people (not actually reptilians but might as well be since their so detached from the human experience) Why A.I.?
Because humans get horribly corrupted with power, and end up taking all from themselves, and if not they are either forced out by the system or forced to adapt to the system, and if we make a revolution and replace them its all just gonna happen again, we cannot rule ourselves without resorthing to violence, represion or enslavement.
This is why i believe we must repalace leadership, i.e. politicians, CEOS managerial and administrative positions with A.I. or just automate the decicion making at those levels, since they are actively going against humanities interests and just pursue their own, like instead of figthing climate change by yeeting oil businesess into hell, they instead keep receiving blood money from oil companies so that they actively push back on reneubable energy sources, and use that money to build themselves another fucking swimmimg pool.
The A.I. should be able to not be corruptible and shouls exploit resources in a renewable manner and distribute them in a just manner according to both phisical and human needs. Its the only way which we stoo exploiting each other, we must automate the means of productionand take it back from those lizard people (not actually reptilians but might as well be since their so detached from the human experience)
Why A.I.? Because humans get horribly corrupted with power, and end up taking all from themselves, and if not they are either forced out by the system or forced to adapt to the system, and if we make a revolution and replace them its all just gonna happen again, we cannot rule ourselves without resorthing to violence, represion or enslavement.
Somewhere around 20 years ago/b/ was one of the first aggressively “us vs them” communities I was ever exposed to, and it only got worse from there.
You’re crazy, /b/ wasn’t around 20 years ago… I mean, it only recently started in the early ‘00s!
…oh no
Where did we go wrong?
The bad guys won the Cold War.
There were no good guys in the cold war.
I wish I could just completely block anything from hexbear, no matter where I go you guys are pushing your toxic agenda.
You hate seeing hexbear users, so you took the considered and well-thought tactic of directly replying to one to whine about them. That’ll stop you from seeing more of them, for sure!
Yes, just like glorifying oppressive states on an online forum will bring about communism!
You must be confused, Hexbear is a forum for shitposting not bringing about communism. Real world organizing is for bringing about communism. Hope this clears that up!
Did you know that at it’s peak the USSR gulag system had more than a million citizens imprisoned, which worked for scraps, receiving little to no pay?
Oh wait actually that’s the US current day, my bad.Also posting isn’t praxis. I hope you don’t think you’re actually doing anything on this website. Organizing is for the real world!
You should read the Jakarta Method.
it won’t, that’s true, but it would be cool if it did
Lmao life expectancy rising goes brr. Women gaining independence goes brr. Advancements in the sciences goes brr. Life quality improvements goes brr. Going from a rural peasant state ruled by a monarchy to a modern country within few decades, while the same process took centuries for the capitalist states goes brr.
The people that ended malnutrition among their people and brought us into space are toxic?
Look, i’ll take whatever wouldn’t have ended up in this
Nyaaaahahahaha, we have an agenda folks! We’ve made it!
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The bad guys replaced land with happiness in the declaration of Independence.
The bad guys passed all of the enclosure acts of the middle ages.
Not even happiness, just the pursuit of.
whose land tho
The continents full of people they genocided
? I’m not saying that they had a right to the land, in fact they just took the land for themselves. Everyone still has a right to have a home.
I suspect the failure of viable alternatives to capitalism in the 90s resulted in the runaway scenario we see today. That doesn’t make the Soviet union good though.
spoiler
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
Damn, really feels like we’ve been seized by the throat
That doesn’t make the Soviet union good though.
even if it was “bad” (it wasn’t just to be clear) the mere threat of its existence allowed labour unions in the West to win more concession from their bosses.
China does not have the same effect because China does not export the revolution.
100% agree. I had a much higher opinion of the soviet union before i heard how little it took to be placed in a gulag. It sounded like a toxic environment for voicing concerns at the very least. Although my sources could be biased I suppose.
Generally competition is good for the “consumer” or citizen in this case
Generally competition is good
no
Wait why not?
Sure I’ll bite, competition is incredibly hard to attain so hard in fact that it doesn’t exist in the real world.
For one I’ll say that when we talk about competition should have the following elements:
No competitor has a large market share (A large marketshare would help them influence prices which they can use to drive out other competitors taking their market share) Almost no barrier to enter and exit the competition Consumers have perfect information
Now ignoring that ‘competitors’ will activly try to destroy perfect competitions to go for higher profits why do even consumers not want competition? Economies of Scale
In order to have perfect competition you need an ‘excess’ of competitors. So think 100 furniture factories when 10 could do that work, every factory needs to figure out their own logistics, sale and management, this means that the state of competition is less efficient than a state that is closer to a monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly with several larger companies, even if those companies suck.
This is also of course ignoring natural monopolies aka utilities.
Thank you I’ve gotten so many quality responses to this question and alot to think about.
I’m not the other poster, but there’s at least 3 reasons.
-
Competition doesn’t just happen for consumer goods, it happens for every single commodity traded on the market. Labor is a commodity. Because of the immense supply of labor, and the capitalist class’ deliberate decision to maintain an unemployed section of the population which deflates wages by adding more desperate people willing to work for less. Generally, you can think of a market as a battle between 2 armies who also have internal battles. If the attacking army is better at organizing itself and doesn’t get mired in the internal conflict, while the defending army is divided and has constant mutinies, the attacking army is bound to have a better chance in the battle. The capitalist class is smaller and has a much easier time coordinating, most workers don’t have large enough unions to contend with that.
-
Competition only goes on for so long, and eventually the whole point of a competition is that someone wins. If you have several companies competing to set the price of a commodity in a market, odds are one of them has enough capital to starve out the other ones. That happens in the real world all the time. What’s worse, the more times you capture parts of the market, the easier it is to capture more. That’s one of the fundamental tendencies in capitalism, the centralization of capital under fewer and fewer hands. Of course, once this process has run its course the result is monopoly, but even if the companies step short of monopolizing the market entirely to avoid anti trust regulations they are still likely to draw agreements between themselves to keep prices at a certain level to maintain profits. Recall the armies analogy above.
-
Even if nobody won in a competition and there was some permanent state of lowering the price of goods, while this is “good” for consumers, it’s still bad for the workers producing the goods, which most consumers are. Capitalists have no problem investing more fixed costs in the process of production if it leads to larger profits in the short term, but the issue comes down to the way profit is made in the first place. In a capitalist system, a cycle of production takes place when a capitalist exchanges money for commodities, pays a wage to workers who improve the commodities through their labor, then sells the commodities for more money than they spent during the cycle. The difference in the selling price and the fixed cost (capital) plus the variable cost (wages) is profit. Since the fixed cost is paid for at the same rate everywhere, i.e. no one should be buying the same commodities for significantly different prices at least locally, the only place where the difference could come from is the wages being smaller than the value added to the commodities through labor. Therefore, profit comes as a result of using labor that the capitalist bought at a discount. That discount we call exploitation. Now consider what happens if more capital is invested: the fixed costs grow in relation to the variable costs, but profit only grows if more labor is exploited. That means that the only way to keep commodities cheaper and cheaper still, while generating more profit relative to investment, is to ramp up exploitation. Practically we see this in reality in the way the production of some goods take place once competition runs its course; factories close down and capital moves abroad to where there are fewer regulations, sweatshops replace the factories and production can keep taking place because exploitation was increased.
Thanks for the detailed comments. Is this the kind of thing you talk about at hexbear? I’d call myself a skeptic but I love the topic
-
here is more:
Because it is unprofitable. Sooner or later competitors will realize cooperation is more profitable overall. That is why unions are strong and big companies are not really competing
and:
-This hits at one of the core flaws of libertarianism. They tend to hold as a core axiom that competitive markets and free markets are one in the same, i.e. that the “natural state” of the markets are highly competitive, and if there is a lack of competition, it must be an “unnatural state”, i.e. there is some sort of top-down interference, government policies, which restrict competition.
-Libertarians thus see cronyism as happening from the top-down, where governments interfere with the markets, create monopolies, and all for the purpose of enriching themselves. Hence, they conclude the problem is government, that you have to get rid of government and then the problems will be solved.
-This is the direct opposite view of Marxists. Marxists instead argue that markets inherently lead to a gradual increase in monopolization over time, what Marx referred to as the “laws of the concentration and centralization of capitals”, and that market economies have a natural tendency to move more and more away from competition over time.
-More than this, Marxists also see political power as not ultimately originating from the superstructure of society (the politics), but instead from the base of society (the economics). Any government policy requires enforcement, but any enforcement inherently presupposes an economic system which can produce tools of enforcement and allocate them appropriately to the enforcers. Politics is inherently derivative of economics. -The reason the political system favors the wealthy is not because of some laws implemented by some evil cabal that if they were just abolished, then capitalism would “work”. No, the reason the political system favors the wealthy is because the wealthy are the ones who control society’s wealth, and so of course the political system will favor them.
-No law you write on a piece of paper will make a billionaire like Jeff Bezos have equal political influence as a minimum wage worker barely making ends meet. Production is the most fundamental basis of human society and those who control production control society’s wealth and will inevitably have more influence. Even if you write laws saying bribery is illegal then they can just bribe those who enforce it.
-Hence, Marxists do not see cronyism as a result of top-down processes implemented by a corrupt superstructure, by some evil cabal within the government that corrupted “true capitalism” and turned it into cronyism. -Rather, Marxists see cronyism as originating from a bottom-up process, that stems from the economic base in and of itself. Markets inevitably lead over time to greater and greater monopolization, creating a larger and larger gap between the working masses and the capitalists, and even if there is a “rising tide” and workers’ wages rise as well, the profits of capital increase disproportionality faster, and capital continues to centralize rapidly, leading to an increasing social chasm between the rich and the poor.
-This is why libertarianism/conservatism has never worked in history and will never work. They can’t get rid of “big government” because the economic base, capitalism, inherently creates an enormous social divide, enormous polarization in the economy. This enormous wealth inequality naturally translates to power inequality, which then allows the capitalists to capture the state for their interests.
-Once the capitalists capture the state, there is no reason for them not to implement “big government” but for their own benefit, i.e. corporate bailouts and subsidies and such. Libertarian policies, hence, in practice, always lead to “big government”. Never in human history have they actually achieved their goals, because their goals are fundamentally impossible and self-contradictory.
-Another separate point is that these people also have a tendency to water down what “capitalism” means. Capitalism is about capital, that’s why it’s called capitalism. This refers to a specific kind of society dominated by capital, i.e. production for profit. Libertarians like water down “capitalism” to refer specifically just to trade or markets, but capitalism is not tradeism or marketism. It’s capitalism. Pre-capitalist economies have had trade and markets and so have socialist economies.
Thanks for providing such detailed responses. I think my biggest problem with marxist ideologies is that I don’t know an example of them working outside of theory. It seems to me like greed is a natural part of human nature and capitalism generally feeds into that nature as terrible as that is. Its not sustainable in the long term, but that also tends to be when revolutions happen to redistribute the wealth
I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.
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Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.
Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.
It’s hard to make an effort when all your energy goes into survival. Wasn’t the point of “civilization” to not have to worry about all of that?
Yes it should, but modernity also made us less reliant on the group and I think it made use more introvert and more social risk averse. This is something that can be worked on with reasonable cost.
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It’s called alienation under capital
Like we can afford burrows.
Your local gardening association should have shovels.
Human experience has been almost entirely privatized. If you’re poor, you’re denied most of it.
What do you mean by that? Go find a sport/hobby. Clubs aren’t expensive at all.
Human experience isn’t just hanging out with other people. It includes going to other places, experiencing what the world has to offer. You can’t do much of that, if any, when you’re living paycheck to paycheck like most people.
In social countries, they give you money for hobbies if you have low salaries.
Holy shit. One more little reason to hope the civil war comes quickly so I can flee as a refugee to a semi-civilized country.
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Are non-profit associations rare in your place? They are very present around me, all my hobbies are covered.
Where do I go? I have no idea what to do
Try to find an association near your place, sports, arts, gardening, nature exploration, table top games, whatever you like.
As a default, a spouse and kids will rope you into decades of regular social interaction.
I think this varies from place to place. In some places, I’ve definitely felt like going out and interacting with physical people was too dangerous, since the culture was along the lines of “everyone for themselves” and “don’t trust anyone”. That being said, I’ve also lived in places where the people around me were extremely friendly, so for many people that opportunity still does exist.
For the people who feel like going out and interacting with strangers is dangerous, I think it might help to go to specific places where the kinds of people you want to meet would also go to (and the kinds of people you want to avoid wouldn’t go to), although that can be hard to find.
Where did we go wrong? We stopped killing fascists. Appeasement never works when one party has no interest in concession.
I have said this many times: internet memes only helped with radicalizing people, but offered none of the tools needed to help them see where they might overcome the problems.
Therefore you end up with a whole bunch of radicalized people who are increasingly depressed and pessimistic about the world because they literally don’t have the tools to analyze the current state of affairs, let alone come up with solutions.
Only reading theory can solve that. Read your Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao. That’s the only way forward.
theory without praxis just gets you the disco elysium quote
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect
Kras MazovKarl Marx fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory.Praxis is practice guided by theory. It requires that you at least grasp some theory before putting them into actions.
i’m aware, at no point does my comment indicate otherwise
Not entirely true. See a CEO and his family, no one saw anything.
Protest in the homes of boardmembers.
Only bootlickers care what the elites protectors think instead of action.
Getting yourself imprisoned or killed while functionally achieving nothing that actually changes the system does absolutely nothing except remove yourself from the next 30+ years of value you could be providing to organising.
We call it fedposting because it’s the kind of shit feds say because it benefits them by removing radicals from society.
Thus:
Join an org and put the work in. When the appropriate requirements are met they will act, but they will never be met without people putting in the effort. Individual action sounds tempting and exciting, but it’s not going to change anything. It is adventurism.
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that’s pretty adventurist, that’s how you end up like Alexander Ulyanov, you should aim to end up like his brother