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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
Kid named Guy Debord:
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.
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.
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.
The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.
Well it can’t commodify me! Oh wait.
Sorry, I got myself worked up.
do you sell your labor on the job market?
Grr
I haven’t played it, but is this disco elesium?
yep
This is why I became comfort not owning things
Jokes on you, capitalism made you not want things!
If only I could sell this idea of not owning things.
(Enter overpriced minimalist products)
Or subscriptions
You realise capitolism isnt the boogey man right, if you see problems with it then your problem lies with the consumer, nothing is sold until its bought.
Let me ask you, what mode of commerce should we all ascribe to?
Blaming victims existing within a system for the problems with the system is deflection, not a solution. The answer is socialism, ie gradually working towards a fully publicly owned and planned economy after a period of revolution.
Moreover, Capitalism isn’t just “markets.”
Do you understand the difference between capitalism and commerce? Using money for trade isn’t what makes capitalism what it is. Capitalism is, from wikipedia, “An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market” Capitalism means that I can own something I have nothing to do with and you have to pay me for the privilege of using it. When that thing is housing or food or medicine then I own you unless you want to die.
Capitalism means taking from the worker and giving to the ‘owner’. The problem is that work is real and ownership is a made up concept.
The more you learn about it the more you’ll understand how evil it is, I promise.
I think your whole first paragraph is just posturing, maybe i did speak incorrectly, i dont care.
In your economic system, if I make a machine that makes something, and sell it to a guy, what happens to that machine if what it makes is important or valuable?
Your question doesn’t make sense. Try rewriting it a little clearer.
Hello, different person here. It’s understandable that you’re confused by this tbh, but there are real proposals.
Broadly, there are two basic suggestions:
- All businesses would be nationalised. You would develop the machine as part of your job, or sell the rights to the government.
- There are still independent businesses like now, but they’re controlled by the people that work and use them. As a Kingdom is to a Democracy, an Owned Company is to a Participatory Company (Communists call them cooperatives, Corporatists call them corporations). The former country/company is controlled by the people that own it, whereas the latter is controlled by the people that are affected by its decisions (at least in theory). In real life people don’t really buy manufacturing machines, they do it through a company. So your sale would be the same, it’d just be to a different kind of company.
It’s not one or the other and they’re often combined.
It isn’t fair for a king to control an army and do what he likes with it, that’s dangerous. The army has to be controlled by the people of the nation. But, if you and your friends want to privately own guns, that’s fine. So long as you aren’t organising into a militia, it does little harm.
Critics say, likewise: if your machine is small, who cares. But if it’s sufficiently powerful, if it could concentrate wealth and power in your hands, create mass unemployment (maybe even allow you to wield military): that’s harm. A machine like that should be controlled by the people.
Hey, comrade, good comment! I want to offer that in my experience, Principles of Communism is clearer and more concise than the Manifesto, for someone entirely unaware. I also have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list I keep for easy sharing.
ok commie
Yeah idk I removed those because it’s not a very good introductory text imo.
How are you making your machine? Does it literally create something from nothing? Why would what it creates have any value if it can be infinitely easily produced, even if important? If it obeys the laws of physics, why would you be able to compete with large, mass scale industry as a single person?
Your question largely doesn’t make any sense.
Read this article, dude:
Create a problem then sell the solution. Simple as
Sell the revolution.
How much would people pay for communism, how much for other forms of government?
When capitalism has commodified everything, then all ingrediences for a revolution can be bought.
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.
Capitalism made a treatment for the cancer.
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.
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.
“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?
