In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
Capitalism. The longer Capitalism exists, the more it has to find new ways to stop/slow its own built-in death clock. If it doesn’t, it dies, due to problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall and rising disparity. Enshittification, so to speak.
With each economic disaster, the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie can claim large swaths of cheaper Capital at a discount, compounding the issue into a form of neo-feudalism that will eventually collapse under its own weight.
God forbid a post-scarcity world where the only currency is our reputation, honor, and credibility.
Make it so number one.
Hehehehe it started there but took an Orville hard left
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices, and instead embracing neoliberal economics. I don’t accept that all ownership is theft. Trade in goods and services benefits both parties. I am so sick of people using this shorthand word “capitalism” to describe what’s going on here. We’ve had capitalism for millennia, and it’s brought us longer, healthier and happier lives, and reduced warfare. It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem, not the system of ownership of capital.
At the core, the issue is still deeply rooted within capitalism but governments should absolutely be doing their fucking jobs and curb the worst aspects of it a little until we’re ready for something better.
Fair point, I accept that. A bit like how democracy is the worst form of government apart from those other ones we tried.
Even then, there are still countless forms of democracy and democratic government. Democracy itself is a cool concept, the actual systems utilizing Democracy vary wildly, from the Soviet form, to the Chinese form, to the American form, to the European forms, to the forms practiced in more Anarchist societies like the EZLN and revolutionary Catalonia, and more.
There’s direct Democracy, council Democracy, republican Democracy, proportional Democracy, parliamentary democracy, and far, far more.
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It’s come and gone throughout the millennia, like certain pieces of knowledge. Eratosthenes very accurately calculated the circumference of the world in Ptolemaic Egypt and later on people thought the Earth was flat (and some morons still do). As for capitalism, look at prehistoric societies using shells as currency. What is that currency for?
Capitalism isn’t “when people use money”. It has an actual definition.
Liberal Democracies are of, by, and for the bourgeoisie. Because Capitalists have immense influence, the state will bend to their will.
Trade is good. Capitalism is not. Capitalism is not trade, its a Mode of Production by which there are individual Capitalists and non-owner workers. We have not had Capitalism for millenia, but a few hundred years.
Capitalism did not bring us healthier, longer, and happier lives, nor reduce warfare. Development did. Capitalism drives profit, that’s it, anything else is tangential to that end.
I think you would do yourself a lot of good by reading theory.
I agree with your last point - and I may be a bit bourgeois (not to mention ignorant) myself. I’d appreciate recommendations if you wouldn’t mind.
That’s a ton of reflection and openness, so I just want to commend you for that. Fantastic to hear and see.
Initially, I want to give a general basis for what can be considered bourgeois. The Bourgeoisie are those Capitalists who do not need to perform labor to survive, and earn their money via ownership alone. One can be a business owner actively and a member of the bourgeoisie if they can simply hire someone to manage in their place, but a member of the petite bourgeoisie cannot hire a manager to take their place and still make enough money to survive.
As for general reading recommendations? You have a lot of paths you can go. I don’t personally recommend going full ML or full Anarchist right off the bat, usually it takes a lot of reflection to pick a tendency. I myself don’t even have a tendency I identify with, as I believe the process towards progress is unique for each country and state.
If you want a real quick intro: Principles of Communism, by Engels, is an extremely quick read. Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein is another fantastic paper. The Communist Manifesto is good, but it’s extremely fiery and usually is better after you’re familiar with Marxism.
If you want to get a quick intro that breaks more into the theory side (as in, you’ll be more well-read than the vast majority of online leftists with little effort), read both Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labor and Capital by Marx. They are condensed and simplified versions of what Marx greatly elaborates on in Capital, his seminal masterwork.
For Anarchism, An Anarchist FAQ is a good starting point. Note that Anarchists usually align with Marxists on analysis, but not on strategy.
There’s also topics like Syndicalism, Market Socialism, the idea of Reform vs Revolution (Rosa Luxembourg has a good paper on that), and more, but those are fantastic bang for buck reads.
If you still want more, you can always read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and The Conquest of Bread, the former for Marxism and the latter for Anarchism.
Hope this helps! There are tons of YouTube videos as well that simplify Marxism as much as possible.
Capitalism is not millennia old. Capitalism (as commonly defined) only stared to take root after the black death (1350ish) flipped feudalism on its head. Suddenly the free and unfree peasant class had some control of their own destiny and could sell their skills to whomever they wanted at whatever price they could get. Serfs could declare themselves free. Land was often up for grabs.
You may enjoy this read:
Thanks for this :)
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices
It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem
Hmm, I’m trying to remember what economic system both these countries have… Let’s call it “Bappitalism”. And if the economic model is so powerful that it influences the governmental one (lobbyists, military spending, etc), then yes, that is a problem.
Read the other comments please.
That’s not how forums or discussions in general work. For reference, read other comments on the internet, please.
Alas, the alternative to capitalism has never been socialism, but feudalism.
You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
But then we wouldn’t have the triple breasted whores of Eroticon Six!
Ahhh, Excentrica Gallumbits. I remember her fondly.
I’ve seen the argument made that there was no mental illness (non phyiso-neurological, I suppose?) And therefore civilization is worse per se.
I mean… animals, disease, murder, rape, starvation, hydration… but still not living in the same ongoing trauma anxiety state of today
There’s no objective “answer” to this, just sharing an idea I’ve seen
Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.
I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.
On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.
Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.
Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.
The rise in interest rates meant easy money dried up for corporations. They all had to “monitize” at the same time. That’s why enshitification happened everywhere at the same time. Things are easing. Enshitification will slow down.
In the UK, 14 years of Conservative government has really made the rot grow.
Y’all have been going hard at Americanism for a minute now. I remember the beginning of the new world media thinking, “oh shit, there as obese and decrepit as us”
Capitalism is the answer. We’re in the part of capitalism where regular people are almost completely out of money. Bezos is building company towns preparing for a huge influx of new desperate Amazon employees.
Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.
We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren’t enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.
This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.
The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.
I agree with this, and I’d like to add that the wealth gap focusing on funneling money to the top is obviously not helping the quality of products, responsible production , or fair compensation for most of the world.
Yeah, but I’m trying to explain why it is happening. You’ve hit market saturation in so many companies when the only way to fuel growth now is to reduce costs.
Cumulative generational focus on acquiring and consolidating capital explains the why comprehensively, at least in the states.
Monopolies, market saturation, minimizing cost at all costs, poor labor compensation are all symptoms of a system focused primarily on acquiring and consolidating capital.
Are you American? Because I seem to recall between five and ten years ago a particular event that changed the way we ran a lot of the government.
People underestimate the depths of the fuckedupedness of practical every day functioning regulating govt shit as a result of it
The powers that be realised that a non-stop feed of bad news for you to Doom scroll makes people apathetic and apethic people don’t protest, or revolt, or even vote against you. They go through life scrolling on their phone and just accept whatever life gives them.
It’s not even a concious conspiracy, it’s just the result of “the attention economy”.
You’re finally realizing the end game of capitalism. The 1% trying to hoard everything and milk 99% of the population. I call them piggies because they’re gluttonous with money.
Edit: you’re
Thing is most people on earth would do the same if given the opportunity to become ultra wealthy.
The issue is the system allows people to become ultra wealthy
No, most people would not.
Most people would share, or hit a point and think “OK, that’s enough for anything I really want personally… I’m gonna try and help out now…”
Nobody in their right mind should want a world where they are privately wealthy, but publically impoverished.
Because then, you have no security.
Someone will always be gunning for you.
You can stave it off by layering brute force, and laws, but there is no such thing as 100% secure. Eventually something will make it through, and wreak havoc. And because all you now care about, over everything, is whatever paltry “wealth” you’ve managed to secure, the catastrophe is magnified orders of magnitude. You have no real friends or community to turn to, nobody who would support you if you didn’t have the most, and the rules didn’t make you “king” because of it.It’s a sickness.
We live in the materialistic era of wanting more. Given minimal effort, the overwhelming majority of people would not stop until they have tens or hundreds of millions of net worth.
No matter what you say you’re just wrong
The issue with the system is that we are locked within it. You can’t escape capitalism. It has superseded law. We are just tumbling around in the algorithm.
Nah, only about 5% of the population have antisocial personality disorders. That’s a lot of people, but not “most.”
But is it possible that extreme wealth breeds antisocial disorders? Think about it–how does a normal person justify having more money than they could ever spend? You have to separate yourself from the average person, or otherwise think you somehow deserve it (while others suffer).
Extreme wealth is poison, both for the wealthy and for the exploited.
Yeah, I agree. Our economic system and some of our culture encourages and rewards antisocial behavior.
I think of it like the Stanford Prison Experiment. As a human, we are meant to play roles in a hierarchical structure.
So if I put you in a role, certain parts of your personality are going to come out subconsciously. You become the right person to fit the role.
Pretty much like you said- if you are given wild amounts of money you start to justify it and become someone else.
If Jeff bezoz offered you his position in Amazon along with his entire net worth, do you think you (or 19/20 people) would disband that privileged position down to a point where no one would think you’re ultra rich poison?
No, most would give away some but continue to live a overly luxurious lifestyle. My point is proven because it’s the same reason why people enter the lottery, for extreme wealth
Eh, I’m not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I’d probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don’t really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don’t plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I’d probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that’s my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.
Edit: I should say, I don’t think most people care so little about luxury and money as I do. My problem is not so much about people having wealth (though wealth is a limited resources, so that does mean others will not have it), but my problem is what people do to get such wealth. It usually involves deceiving your network of associates and exploiting your employees. I do not think most people would be ok with forcing their employees to shit in bags.
I think it is the natural result of capitalism, that’s what happens when you let it run. The system makes it inevitable.
Yeah, this is why capitalism should be treated like a dangerous dog and kept on a short leash. It can kind of work out for a while when a government restrains it, ensures that legislation exists and is enforced to protect workers, the environment, and consumers. Strong unions are a good sign. This never seems to last though, because the governments get bought eventually.
Who came up with the “end game”? O.o
How much money were you paid to lobby for dumbasses like rich people?
How many victim points did you earn through your envious display of keyboard warriorism?
I have enough people watching me to make you go crazy.
The scale and proportions of this are all fucked, the rich take substantially more from the state than the non-rich. Is this a sarcastic meme or is this like shaming ‘welfare queens’?
“The scale and proportions of this are all fucked, the rich take substantially more from the state than the non-rich.” - Yes, absolutely! The parasitical rich benefit most of all! All the more reason to abolish the host - abolish the state! When the poor have more opportunity to enter the market, due to the abolishion of the state and it crony class, then the free market can raise the tide for all leaving the need for charity far less. There will be no constructed dependent class. There will be a rising again of mutual societies, unities etc that benefited the poor before gov coopted those services.
I agree we should abolish the state but you imply markets to help the poor, do you envision a capitalist structure without a state? What would stop the current hoarders of wealth from continuing their dominance and creating an even more unequal corporate feudal state?
nice meme, bold of you to assume however that all rich people don’t take all the money from the state they can get their hands on
It’s is on the graph. But it neglects the soft benefits of government that disproportionately help the rich: like the expensive police state that keeps them from the guillotine.
Ah but if you ask this guy that’s because of big gubmint meddling in an imaginary, utopian free and fair market
If you ask me there is no utopia - but there is the attempt to minimize away coercion & manipulation. It is completely Utopian to think you can create an all powerful political class and not expect exploitation by psychopaths and sociopaths.
ALL rich people? That would be quite the assumption! Many rich are parasites that use regulatory capture, artificial cartels, lobbying, bribery, threats etc because the state exists. Other rich have attained great value by giving the world much value. Don’t let envy eat you away!
Do you think they would be unable to form their cartels if the state was abolished? Pray tell, what’s to stop them from doing so?
The question should be who will enable their cartel without the state law enforcing it? What is to stop them get a large share of the market - cartel status? Well, their competition providing better goods and services!
But what is there to stop them from simply hiring a private militia to kill their competition? The NAP?
NAP, aka respect for private property rights. If a society does not respect the NAP then it is a society based foremost on the threat of violence. What is government - the threat of violence - the threat of force. So, if a society allowed private militia to kill competitors you would end up with a gang ruling over others - you know - like government. So, yes you need a society with respect for private property rights/NAP. Would all people be peaceful? Heck no! Does this mean there will also not be private institutions that uphold the law - uphold respect for private property rights? Of course! People will still need security, decision making and justice! A peaceful society with respect for the NAP would NOT allow a private militia to violate others rights! Business (in the absence of government favouritism) survives on good products, services and reputation. Sending a militia against you opponents does not do well for your reputation! So ultimately you have a choice - government, which is an involuntary institution with a monopoly on force and rule making that serves the elite to the detriment of others OR A free society with respect for private property rights that is more decentralised and snuffs out any trouble makers.
Greed
like… seriously this.
Normal function of capitalism. It has superseded law. Just “accumulate”.
Greed, wanting stuff, precipitates giving value in return for value. Regardless of motives everybody benefits. This is a free market.
Throw in an institution that can manipulate & distort free market forces - government - then you get parasites that use the violence of that institution for non reciprocated greed. This creates distortions in wealth and power in favour of the scrupulous.
Doesn’t that assume that resources were at one point distributed fairly? If you have all the value, you can devalue everyone else.
I mean, I think it has to do with different kind of value, some have capital, some have services, they would not work without eachother
Automation could replace all services, and only property owners would remain.
- No. Why would it assume that?
- How so? The only way I see to have all the value & devalue others is to be an absolute dictator that has enslaved everyone. This of course is not possible in a free market as it is all about private property rights/self ownership.
- Because if they weren’t distributed equally, some people would unfairly have more capital than others, which means a fair trade where people exchange the precise value of an item leaves some people with inherent setbacks.
- If I don’t own property, then I am forced into wage-slavery, which means I don’t have time to myself to innovate or property to innovate. Even if I manage to buy some property, I can innovate some, but larger players with more capital and resources can out-compete me. The more money you have, the longer you can take to turn a profit, and drive others out of business.
I do not think you understand fairness or value. Life is not fair. You cannot expect it to be. To try to make it fair requires the initiation of force against another. The happenstance of an unfair life is different to the deliberate application of force to create what one thinks should be fair. Precise value??? All value is subjective! Setbacks? Every exchange that occurs happens due to the exchange making both parties life better - otherwise the exchange would not occur. You are viewing the world as a glass half empty rather than half full! Wage-slavery? There is not such thing! You own property - always! You own your body! Other peoples ability to generate wealth is something you have no right to interfere with just as much as they have no right to interfere with your body. You may not like the terms of contract but that is simply because you have no better option and you need to upskill. Innovate? If you are working you are gaining skills. Are you showing your worth or just doing the acceptable minimum to justify your employment? If the game is unfair - it is because the system (govenment) applies the law unfairly - not because others create value.
The question is not “Is life fair?”, but rather “Should we pursue fairness?”
No. We should pursue liberty (the absence of coercion), peace, prosperity and happiness. We should defend self-ownership/private property.
Well said
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*Pitchfork, and I’d rather have nuclear weapons if that’s what we’re up against.
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Don’t forget that global climate change has really kicked into gear the last few years. Just 10 years ago, summer in Arizona was terrible, but you wouldn’t get third degree burns from falling on the ground. The polar vortex is getting all screwed up, causing severe cold in winter on one half of the northern hemisphere while the other half experiences very very mild winter weather. global weather phenomena are getting more and more severe, and still the people who actually can effect change on large scale are loathe to do so because it would hurt their bottom line. Hell in a hand basket would be an apt descriptor for where we’re going and how we’re getting there.
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Thank you for this excellent writeup.
A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).
Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.
However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.
Religion, tribe mentality, greed.
Paraphrasing TE Lawrence
So long as people fight against eachother, so long will they be a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.
Succinct
