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“Oh, you’re expecting capitalism to collapse into anarchy? Better BUY lots of food and antibiotics to stockpile for the collapse!”
Grinch smirk
Certified Mark Fisher moment.
I haven’t played it, but is this disco elesium?
yep
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.
Not to mention the expenses that cities waste on the consequences of cars, like crashes and infrastructure maintenance.
It’s because they’re convinced, through their own experience, there isn’t enough money to go around so we have to make more instead of use what we have wisely.
Aka send a plumber to the billionaires
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.
If it breaks even it can sustain itself in a market economy (anything where revenue >= costs can). If it operates at a loss, then someone other than the user is having to pay for it, and that’s usually where you lose them (because generally the answer is that you’re expecting them to pay for it in part, usually through taxes).
This is also why they get so grumpy about things like welfare (especially the ones who are working class and barely getting by) - they actively dislike the idea that they should have to pay for their own food/shelter/etc and also help pay for your food/shelter/etc when things are tight and they’re destroying their work/life balance just to get by and life would be meaningfully easier for them if they weren’t paying as much in taxes (and they grossly overestimate how much tax money goes to SNAP/TANF/etc).
Oh I know that, and the last point is what I try to drive home. That things like transit and food benefits are a fraction of a percentage of their taxes. I did amtrak for someone and realized it was less than 2 dollars a year that the person paid for amtrak, but them talking about it sounded like it was sending them right to the poor house. The military, on the other hand…
Well, we’re leaving capitalism behind and switching back to feudalism. So I guess no more capitalism.
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.
I guess I tend to think that police, and power structures in general, are organic and will pop into existence spontaneously.
(I actually think power structures are going to be important to maintain a socialist society too, just not ones that serve the few at the cost of the many.)
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
meta-capitalist game show idea:
you could do this in about any format. video, podcast, maybe even sets of still images.
The core concept is a bunch of ad reads for your sponsors. the sponsors are the contestants.
you use really good production values, but you get progressively edgier and more hostile to them as the season goes on. the prize is a free ad campaign for the last one to drop out/denounce you.
edit: alternatively, you create a weird contract, and use some sort of auction structure, where they each bid to the others to be the one who can drop out that episode. highest bidder wins and gets off the show, they all (along with some cut for the house, of course) split the money.
I…actually would enjoy that for a month. But I feel like whoever did it would eventually get lazy and comfortable from their riches, and so the advertisers would know what they’re getting into. Alternatively, the person making would NOT get lazy, and would go for really really controversial topics, like holocaust-denial, or promoting child-rape. So either way, viewers would leave. I don’t see a good middle-ground where it actually works.
okay, I edited in an alternate structure that might fix this. tell me you wouldn’t watch that, with stressed brand managers panicking over what they’ve gotten each other into?
like holocaust denial, or child-rape
yeah but nobody advertises to any sort of lefty, so those aren’t controversial among basically every company’s target market. I might be more likely to go for “glock: protecting trans kids since [year they were founded]” if I were trying to cause a problem for them.
but you don’t start off with that. you start off each season with stuff that’s on the edge side of what a company would actual buy from an ad agency. then you get more and more. until it’s paramilitaries marching blindfolded factory workers out into the jungle, then shooting them in the head, with full gore and horror and maybe one begging for their life. then a coca cola logo. coca cola: an american tradition.
What? These companies advertise to lefty-folks all the time!? They very much represent several different target-markets. Left-wing folks tend to have that middle-class to low-upper-class money. MAGAts are mostly in the lower-middle to low-class grouping, with a sprinkling of rich folks. Yeah, you can sell them some stuff, but how’s that My Pillow guy doing? lol.
As far as your Coke ad goes…okay, that’s the kind of dark where even educated folks would be confused. I’ve had this idea for a Fanta commercial where’s it’s just a bunch of Nazis marching lockstep to the “don’t you want to Fanta Fanta” song. I feel like it highlights history appropriately, and also hits Coke in the face. But overall, I feel like folks would still get bored of it…even if they got the jokes (which a lot of folks wouldn’t). No viewers, no bargaining-power with advertisers.
IBM: the machinery of government (and the various things they’ve enabled over the years) and just a really warm fuzzy folksy time lapse montage (mid-late season)
exxonmobil: burning tomorrow, today. slogan after a couple minutes of horrible disaster (natural and otherwise) footage and a park ranger drinking to forget, with a translucent exxon logo on screen. then you flash up the slogan at the end. (mid-late season)
it’s true, the coke idea could use some work, but these are all pretty rough.
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.
- Would the industrial revolution not have happened without capitalism?
- Would the world be a better place if it hadn’t happened? Would we be as technologically advanced as we are now? Would the internet be a thing already? Would all the science breakthroughs that happened at a greatly increased rate after trains across Europe improved (enabling better collaboration) have happened?
Yes, climate change is a huge problem, and yes, it probably wouldn’t be a thing if we still were limited to 18th century technology & lifestyle. But I doubt the world would be better this way.
The world would absolutely be better if we hadn’t been ravaging the atmosphere and ecosystems for 300 years. Do you think cars, factories, the internet make the world a better place? For who? The people who own these things benefit while the rest of us clamour for space and calories. Fuck capitalism.
Technology advanced before capitalism for the few hundred thousand years or so that humans were around. Ingenuity and provenance - standing on the shoulders of giants, drives innovation, not free market competition. Capitalism or not, we would still have science. And without capitalism, I believe we would spend a fair bit more of our time on it, instead of chasing green bits of paper.Trains and yes, later also the internet, greatly increased the rate of scientific breakthrough due to much better communication and collaboration, so yes, I think they make the world a better place.
The rate at which technology improved skyrocketed after the industrial revolution. We certainly wouldn’t be as far as we are now.
Scientific breakthroughs include (but aren’t limited to) better healthcare, granting us the highest life expectancy humanity had ever had (79.4 m / 84.2 f in my country (2023), in 1800 it was 30 to 35 years).
The internet also plays a huge part in ensuring easy communication between citizens of different countries, preventing them from building unjustified hate on each other (that only works on groups of people you don’t know).
The EU, the most successful peacekeeping project Europe had ever had, was born from a trade alliance for coal and steel (which ensured reliance on the other country between Germany and France, making it stupid for one to attack the other). That also wouldn’t be a thing with the industrial revolution.
I could list so many more things but my time is limited
The industrial revolution happened because of technological advances, not the other way around. The economic model changed because of basic human greed. Scientific breakthroughs happen with or without financial incentive because of basic human curiosity.
Yes, I agree technological advances and not capitalism are the reason for the industrial revolution, it also would have happened without capitalism.
But just like technological advances led to the industrial revolution, the industrial revolution led to more technological advances. Science is growing exponentially, and we’d for sure be worse off if we restricted scientific growth to a point that didn’t lead to the industrial revolution, preventing the innovations that resulted from it from happening.
But that has nothing to do with capital. My point is that we would be making these advances regardless of GDP or the value of the NYSE or whatever. Capitalism does not drive innovation is what I’m saying to you.
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The Industrial Revolution could not have happened without Capitalism, IMO, as the increase in the factory model grew the M-C-M’ circuit and competition.
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No. Capitalism is a stage in history, and will be phased out like the iron and bronze ages, feudalism, etc.
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Control of media and governments is a feature of capitalism/corporatism
Bazaar folks can only sell when you’re physically there. The form of propaganda this post is referring to is more insidious.
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.
It’s also how driven the profits are. All the choices on the way, are they directed for maximum profit or for good. And many things that are made didn’t need to be made, and wouldn’t if people didn’t care to buy them. The effort instead could have gone into good things.
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.
We can clearly observe the shift from genuine productivity to increasingly financialized Capital, which is an inherently unsustainable model.
You say that likes it’s a bug, not a feature.
I say it like it’s a symptom of the unsustainability of it all.
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I mean without capitalism they wouldn’t have the concept of selling, so probably not.
I love how you take the definition of relationship to labour, and make it about market places that have existed long before capitalism has.
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.
I also like “My death comes by a thousand cuts, and I paid for the knife” - Dopamine by The Arcadian Wild
I think capitalism falls neatly into the concept of Moloch.
A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?
I love SSC.
“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
Drag doesn’t believe in money. What’s capital gonna do about that?
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.
Punk Rock itself is not a product of capitalism.
Album and ticket sales are.
