Merely thrown off a cliff as babies? Luxury.
It's ok to be angry about capitalism
- Thread starter XsjadoBlaydette
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Pecked to death and my body dropped from a height and displayed on my own shed roof as a warning to others.
There's a really cheap and easy way to get rid of them but I'm not going to say it unless you're good with seagulls randomly exploding.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go feed paracetemol to feral cats.
I feel like, especially in the US but also generally, people don't seem to recognize that what they actually want isn't capitalism.
When people say things like "I like capitalism but I think it should be regulated so it can't be abused by greedy people" what they're actually saying is "I don't like capitalism, and we need a counterveiling force that works against capitalism in order to correct its intrinsic problems".
During the cold war, there was a very concerted effort to ideologically link capitalism with democracy, like they naturally go together and work harmoniously, but on a very basic and obvious level they don't. They are opposed to each other. Capitalism requires that the vast majority of people are not free, that they do not have any real control over their lives and that they are forced to participate in hierarchically organized institutions in which they have no power. The basic features of democracy: equality, self-governance and personal autonomy are completely alien to capitalism, because who is going to invest in a company that works in the interests of its employees rather than the interests of its shareholders?
The fact that, in a democracy, you could hypothetically vote for a government that would protect your interests is not "real capitalism" working as designed, it's a problem for capitalism, because the more powerless and vulnerable you are the more you can be exploited to make money. That's why a huge ammount of work goes into making sure you don't vote against the interests of capitalism, and into making sure the political system is aligned with the interests of capitalism. It's not an accident, it's not the abuse of capitalism, it's an intentional, deliberate feature of what enables capitalism to continue perpetuating itself despite the flaws that would otherwise cause it to fall apart.
They are literally working on making underage labor easier.
Free people willingly participate in hierarchically organized institutions. Free people voluntary seek employment. They voluntarily join churches. They voluntarily participate in top-down led charitable organizations. Sports get organized by hierarchies. Hobbies in general often have hierarchies. Families have hierarchies. Every social institution not explicitly designed to avoid hierarchies falls into hierarchies, because free people decide to organize themselves that way. Everyone prefers to be led at least some of the time. Then someone becomes the leader. Boom, hierarchy. The idea that being employed means you're not free is insane nonsense.
The word "capitalism" itself was invented by socialists trying to deride the idea of privately owned property generating wealth. But that's just the natural consequence of private ownership, it's not some systemic effort to enslave the masses.
Is a decision truly voluntary if the only alternative on offer is destitution, hunger or homelessness?
Some do. Historically speaking, most are threatened into it with damnation, social exclusion or outright suspicion.
Most do, though not all-- and the ones that are most rigidly hierarchical tend to be the ones most susceptible to abuse and misery.
Of course, Terminal Blue didn't say employment means you're not free. They said employment in a hierarchically-organised institution in which they have no power means you're not free. Most socialists do not envisage a world without work or employment; most envisage a world in which work is more communally organised, and from which the production is more equitably shared.
Right-wingers, primarily in America, have just successfully conflated this (relatively modest) goal with inane notions of completely abolishing all work.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
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As if hierachical institutions weren't "explicitely designed" to "avoid falling out of hierarchies". And insanely violently bloodily so.
But again, it's the good old rationalized Divine Order, hierarchical and patriarchal by definition. Copy-pasted ad infinitum. It's how spirituality is structured (the "Lord", ffs, as the big bearded know-it-all patriarchal figure), how family is structured (the know-it-all Head Of The Family that wives and children must diligently obey if not serve), how nature is structured (the lion reigning over the "animal kingdom" because of course), how politics is structured (the divine right of feudal order, or the god-anointed dictator which boots the local church will always lick, or the trump neo-jesus, or whatever figure of manly authority sets the univocal rules, morals and models to enforce) and of course how the workplace is structured (praise and obey the benevolent boss without whom you'd be nothing). The conservative christian imagination may be pretty narrow, but this makes for some tight cohesion, not much room for confusion there. Top down discipline, and radical exclusion of counter models as ungodly and unnatural.
Such a simple tiny little world, so easy to process and intuitive to justify.
More like "normalizing fascism by effecting the second Red Scare", but sure. The correlation between openly supporting German Nazism before US entry into WWII, and pushing the Washington consensus, was shockingly high.
I don't think anyone questions the concept that forms of hierarchy exist in society.
I think you are however missing the point of the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism made. Even in a representative democracy, although people are bound by the decisions of the state, they have (at minimum theoretical) power over who is giving them orders, and can boot them out if they don't like them. But when was the last time you saw employees sack their CEO? The ability to determine one's leader - and thus the hierarchy - is a pretty fundamental form of freedom. Just check with your forebears who rebelled against their king for precisely that reason.
This is one of those facts that sounds like it might mean something profound, but is in reality a massive nothingburger that's not worth the calories it took to type it.
Free people wouldn't need to be compelled to do so under threat of material deprivation, would they. That's not how freedom works.
Yikes.
Except when they don't.
Leadership does not imply a hierarchy.
And for that matter, hierarchy does not imply coercion, except when it actually does.
Nope.
Private ownership existed for literally thousands of years before capitalism, but cool story I guess.
Voluntarily choosing to acknowledge another's experience, knowledge skill and allowing them to lead is not the same as a hierarchy. People pay me to coach them in the gym. They pay me for my knowledge and guidance. I am leading them. But they're paying me, they're the boss. How does that fit into a hierarchy?
I'd sure like to know where precisely I can opt out of having data and metadata about my financial past and present collected and sold by financial institutions which I have no formal association, and indexed into a score predicting the amount of capital that can be extracted from me, accessible by any third party willing to pay for it and entirely without my express or informed consent. Especially when that score determines my access to employment, housing, health care, transportation, and utilities -- y'know, any potential pathway for upward social mobility either individually or generationally.
And that data/metadata can be (and is) negligently mishandled, leading to mistaken identity, identity theft, and fraud that negatively impacts that score absent my knowledge or willing participation, entirely without recourse or substantive consequence for the parties responsible for that harm.
Because nothing, and I mean nothing, says "freedom" like credit scores.
The Prosperity Hoax
The myth of global poverty eradication has been used to justify levels of wealth concentration that defy meritocratic rationalization.
thebaffler.com
Look, it's very easy to lower the numbers of people in poverty... just keep changing the criteria until it covers less people. Way easier than actually doing something helpful for 'people formerly living in Poverty'The Prosperity Hoax
The myth of global poverty eradication has been used to justify levels of wealth concentration that defy meritocratic rationalization.thebaffler.com
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Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,558
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
It's meaningless if those people continue existing, living, and can be seen in real life, outside of statistical charts.
Let me introduce the swiss method consisting in keeping the price of public transportations and any outside activity beyond their reach, forbidding begging in the streets, and maintaining a culture and social pressure shaming the poorer people out of sight and away of (as punishing and humiliating as possible) social services. It's not simply about making them invisible in the stats, it's also about keeping them locked inside their home (or off the streets if they don't have one). At least until their corpse's smell becomes too annoying for the neighbours.