"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would 'critique' capital end up 'reinforcing' it instead..."
very true detective
This is why talking about things like government services just wash over conservatives. I was talking about transit and a common reply I get is "it's not even profitable!". It's intrinsically linked that if it doesn't make money, it's valueless.. it doesn't matter if people use it, or if people need it, if it breaks even, or even if it's designed to run at a slight loss because it's value is more important than profit. People have lost the ability to understand that profit is not always the goal.
The view that public transport is not profitable because it does not directly turn a profit also completely misses the bigger picture. Imagine in a city where public transport operates at a loss, but provides transportation to and from work for loads of people. Without public transport, they'd have to switch to something like cars, causing congestion, causing delays, causing loss of profit for the city as a whole. Not to mention less time spend with your family or your hobbies, causing unhappiness, decreasing people's desire to work to the best of their abilities etc etc. I could probably go on quite a while listing things public transport provides that indirectly works in favor of capitalism.
I haven't played it, but is this disco elesium?
yep
Certified Mark Fisher moment.
"Oh, you're expecting capitalism to collapse into anarchy? Better BUY lots of food and antibiotics to stockpile for the collapse!"
Grinch smirk
don't buy into the illusion that capitalism is so self-organizing and organic. it requires the direct protection and supervision of a nationwide military and a police force -multiple police forces actually - to protect capital.
"A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it."
-- Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
If a system needs constant growth to survive it will eventually collapse.
Not the greatest dude, but had a sick quote that sums up this post:
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" - Vladimir Lenin
To piggyback off your comment, a thread from Existential Comics:
I highly recommend reading this thread. If you want an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list, I made one you can check out here.
See how in the US we wait to potty train until 3,4,5 years old, while most other countries potty train earlier. Gotta sell those pull-ups!
What? No we don't.
Well, things would exist whether you're in a capitalist economic system or not. People would make music and label their genre. People would write books and want to sell them. The real difference is who gets the profits.
Sure, sort of. Commodity production, ie the production of goods purely in order to sell and make a profit, likely won't last forever, especially as the rate of profit trends towards 0.
When you commodify all the people’s wants and needs, you commodify the people.
If we are being technical, people were already commodified with the origin of Capitalism. Capitalism requires Labor-Power to be bought and sold as a commodity on the open market, that's where surplus value extraction comes from.
The Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.
Well, we're leaving capitalism behind and switching back to feudalism. So I guess no more capitalism.
This ties into the notion of interpassivity. This is when a piece of media perform an action for you (think interactivity, but exactly the opposite). An example is the laugh track on sitcoms. Another is the series or film performing your environmental or anti-capital activism for you. Frequently the bad guy is some big polluting corp, or some evil rich guy who wants to bulldoze the community center to put his Luxury Resort there. You watch the movie, feel all rebellious and sympathetic with the main characters, and go home feeling like you've done something, when in fact all you've done is feed Disney some more money. See also movies like triangle of sadness and the glass onion or whatever.
Mark Fischer's capitalist realism explores this and similar ideas in a much more comprehensive and eloquent manner than I ever could. Give it a read, it's quite short!
Thanks, I've been trying to remember this term and where I saw this concept for like 2 weeks!
Also, a related concept is recuperation:
The process by which ideas and actions deemed ‘radical’ or oppositional become commodified or absorbed into mainstream society and culture.
Think of the sterile critique of capitalism from the Fallout series (produced by Amazon).
"But capitalism is so efficient at growing!"
Yeah, but now capitalism has grown out of control:
Capitalism is the most efficient way to push wealth and power to the top
Infinite growth in a finite system is the definition of cancer. And like a cancer it will keep poisoning us, and must be cut out and eradicated.
I’ve been really interested in learning how to grow vegetables in my back garden. Somehow I just have this feeling that learning how to care about plants to make food (and not just because it flowers and looks pretty) will open my eyes to thinking about nature and the environment
At the moment, climate collapse is a conceptual issue to me in that “sure the days get warmer every year but it’s actually quite nice for me right now”, but I’m not as in tune with my environment to really notice how it’s impacting us.
Growing veg also feels like it has a higher pay off than just the cost price of a single unit of veg. There’s probably some nutritional benefit to it, knowledge etc that does beyond the price of buying an onion from the shop. I think getting in touch with this principle is the key to getting out of the ruthless capitalism structure
Basically, if we all just stopped buying shit and learnt how to fix and make shit ourselves our experiences of the things we attach ourselves to would be so much more authentic
You don’t have to buy doc martens because you feel like a rebel.
How much of this is capitalism, and how much of it is just trade?
Bazaars go back 5000 years, about 5000 years before capitalism. If you've ever been to a bazaar or a street market in a developing country, you know they'll try to sell you anything and everything.
Climate Change really picked up with the Industrial Revolution, alongside Capitalism. The M-C-M' circuit of continuous money growth and rapid expansion of industry was the driving factor, not people simple trading. The obsession with commodifying things previously produced for use, rather than exchange, has had wide-reaching impact.
Punk Rock itself is not a product of capitalism.
Album and ticket sales are.
Kid named Guy Debord:
minimalism is so funny to me.
Like you're buying shit so you can not buy things? Yeah ok buddy.
That is fake minimalism. Minimalism in practice is donating stuff you don't need and not buying stuff unless you truly need it and will use it.
That is one side of it that people fall into. But another side is sometimes buying something additional will simplify your life then it makes sense. Not everyone is one pair clothing and everything fits in a bag. Something as simple as you and your SO deciding on the same shampoo to only have one bottle in the bathroom. This allows you to buy in bulk the ONE shampoo you need. Also one less item to keep track of, need shampoo? which kind?
Same with food storage containers. Might be best to throw away all the different kinds you have and buy ones where all the tops are the same. Yeah, I bought something additional it now takes "minimal" effort to find something to store food it. It's more of an overall mindset to most people. It's the constant asking yourself "Do I need this in my life?" as you start to figure out all your shit starts to own you. Organization (a lot of money spent here) is key to this as if you can't find something in your home......do you really have it? Minimalists want streamlined processes or "OCD with purpose" as I like to call it. lol
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
