Because even the people who are the most negatively affected by wealth centralization will defend the billionaires that provide them with stuff they like, we’ll never escape that system until people realize that there are no good billionaires and that they all exist at the expense of the majority of the population.
Mainly because the wealthy are the ones who co tell the flow of (dis)information and have been making full on attacks against the quality of education we as citizens receive.
When you don’t know any better, and you’re being told the sky is green and the grass is blue long enough, you start to believe it. Them in comes some know-it-all telling you you’re wrong and your belief system has been lying to you, and yeah you’re going to get mad at the know-it-all and cling tighter to your belief system.
Big Scary Man Bad.
It’s not the billionaires doing the providing, it’s just that the economic engine is locked behind a paywall and so instead of laborers getting the value and credit it’s the owning class.
The laborers should be the owning class. This is the core idea of socialism. I don’t get why “small government” types are so big on “own me harder daddy” when it comes to the economy. We spend most of our waking hours in dictatorships.
I don’t get why “small government” types are so big on “own me harder daddy” when it comes to the economy.
Lots of these people are Petite Bourgeoisie, ie small business owners and the like. Their class interests align with larger Bourgeoisie, but the growth of larger Bourgeoisie pushes the Petite Bourgeoisie into proletarianization.
This is where fascism comes in, actually. The Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie unite against the Proletariat and Lumpenproletariat, along Nationalist lines, as a response to this proletarianization.
The Alt-Right Playbook does a good job of explaining it in this video, but basically what it comes down to is they believe in a rigid pyramidal structure, with everyone in their ‘proper place’. They also believe that, if we don’t have that rigid structure, our society will crumble.
That’s also why they’re against UBIs, DEI, and other things that ‘promote people beyond their means’.
They are literally parasites.
But they took the risk. The risk of spending loaned money at minuscule interest rates and offsetting any real losses by petitioning the state for handouts. They took the risk of making guaranteed profits on political donations leading to regulatory capture.
The capitalism that people imagine (which I still wholeheartedly reject) isn’t even the capitalism that’s real in practice.
Even putting aside the inherent inequality of risk having a significant coefficient applied to it that diminishes when you come from generational wealth and a family with the right connections.
The myth of capitalist meritocracy is the most blatantly false myth that’s ever been peddled but it works on so many people. It’s mind boggling.
Ironically things like UBI might level the playing field a bit in terms of entrepreneurship becoming more accessible, but for some reason capitalism advocates don’t actually want more people to be able to participate in capitalism.
Ironically things like UBI might level the playing field a bit in terms of entrepreneurship becoming more accessible, but for some reason capitalism advocates don’t actually want more people to be able to participate in capitalism.
Because the moment someone is given something like UBI to help lift them up and provide an equitable playing field for everyone, you get some asshole focusing on how they don’t “deserve” it. As if the only thing you can possibly to in order to “deserve” to live is have a job where you are paid the bare minimum your company thinks they can get away with paying you so a few folks at the top get filthy rich and a few in the middle get rich enough not to think to much about the folks at the bottom.
Yep, and tell me how peopke born into richesses “deserve” it…
It’s also the slippery slope towards the idea that some people are worth less and some more, as the rich worthless people with inflated egos needs to have something to project their useless souls onto, wanting to believe they are worth more “because they are inherently better”. And we all know where that leads to.
So they are not just useless, but also dangerous.
your system is working as intended, every true democracy knows that lettings your politians get bought by corporation is a stupid idea, working exactky as written
The older I get the more I agree with this.
Like, we won. We did it. We have enough food, we can build enough homes, we can build enough clean energy to fulfill our requirements if we’re halfway smart about it. What the fuck are we doing?
What the fuck are we doing?
Making the shareholders rich.
This is what kills me about modern day living. What the fuck are we doing? Innovations (AI) dont fucking help people anymore. All we’re doing is chasing profits and letting everything else rot. I feel like I’m living in some FromSoft game before the player comes in to clear out all the ancients holding onto the decay.
That might just be because conservatives and liberals, have always been those ancients holding back society.
In 1776 the conservatives were Loyalists, the progressives were Patriots.
In 1789 the conservatives were Right Wing, the progressives were Left Wing.
In 1860 the conservatives were Confederates, the progressives were The Union.
In 1940 the conservatives were The Axis, the progressives were The Allies.
Innovations still help people loads, that’s a crazy pessimistic generalization.
Yes of course the trashy tech bro nonsense isn’t helping you, but what about RNA vaccines during covid? What about all of the medical work and innovation going into cancer treatment? What about all of the work and innovation going into reducing carbon emissions so we don’t ruin our planet? I could go on for a long time.
Real innovation in mainstream tech may be mostly stagnant and lame, but there will always be useful and helpful innovation.
Of course, there still are helpful innovations. I guess I should say it’s obvious 85% of corporations are just profit chasing and rent seeking at this point. There is no global drive forward anymore. Everything is about squeezing the most profit out of whatever. Our infrastructure alone is proof of that.
We’ve made farming a capitalist system. It only functions if there’s scarcity. A farmer can’t feed their family or farm their fields without paying bribes to machine companies.
And politicians vilify “subsidies” to farmers. Our society should be “funding” food production as a basic human right. It would take about 1% of the US military budget to completely socialize food production and feed everyone. It’s disgusting.
I don’t think capitalism is inherently evil. Just the people in control of the wealth.
The Nature of Capitalism https://youtu.be/WseyrYuD8ao
Once anyone understands this , nothing else politically matters. There is no left or right. There is no tankie or liberal.
There is only rich… and poor.
There is no left or right
There is only rich and poor
So you’re left?
Feel like you didn’t understand the message
I’m not rich 🤑
Even worse, we have been producing, and throwing away, so much food that the US by itself could feed the entire world a couple times over. We don’t need to spend more money to fix food production and healthcare, we need to spend less.
Yeah. This is wild. I bet it’s very similar to solar or wind power production. The places where it’s cheap to produce, doesn’t have a lot of need. The places where it’s needed, it’s difficult to get.
There’s probably a lot of logistical problems that need solving… but that’s easy stuff. Humans can catch fish in the north sea, send it to Malaysia to be cut and frozen and boxed, to be sold to a person in England within a few days…
Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We’ve de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
That’s before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
Idk if we’ve won. I get the feeling that we’re all living on borrowed time, and we’ve actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting.
Only USA does. The only country that did similar things was USSR. It was. Now USA the only is.
Even EU has better standards of living AND not use slave labour of prisoners.
Our semiconductor industry is failing.
Assuming you are from USA, your semiconductor industry is just fine.
The only country that did similar things was USSR.
Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.
I would think that’s North Korea, but that’s kinda a given.
The only country that did similar things was USSR.
The USSR by all accounts decreasingly relied on prison labor after WW2 and Stalinism ended. By the 60s, forced labor was anecdotic, and the conditions of people in the gulag system (which shifted from forced labor during Stalinism to mostly reeducation afterwards) were better than those in normal prisons to the point of prison being a punishment to rebellious gulag workers.
It’s the problem of “political deactivation” it’s in part a cultural issue, in part a byproduct of capitalism.
9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by “the little people”… These are the ingredients for “political deactivation”.
People want to stay an alert and informed member of society, but that doesn’t necessarily result in activism or change. In fact sometimes it makes people less likely to try to change things.
9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by “the little people”… These are the ingredients for “political deactivation”.
Welcome to 1916 Russia, when all non-Imperialists(not only Bolsheviks) were saying, that 6-day work week prevents prevents people from becoming citizens. Next step would be mandatory education.
What made us successful as a species, required us to be ruthless by design.
I feel like it was more learning to work together that’s made us so successful compared to other animals. Not having to spend our lives solely dedicated to hunting/growing food for ourselves and our families has allowed people to specialize in other fields. The advancement of science wouldn’t have been possible without people collaborating and working together, though conflict has also played a role as well. Ruthlessness only works for a small number of individuals who exploit the good will of others, but the whole thing falls apart if everybody was always ruthless.
That’s patently false. Before agriculture, societies were just tribes of at most a hundred individuals, with not much in the way of hierarchy due to the lack of division of labor, essentially a very primitive form of anarcho-communism. Humans are extremely empathetic and there’s plenty of evidence that prehistoric humans took care of people with disabilities or with serious injuries despite them possibly (not necessarily) being a liability for the tribe in terms of food-to-labor ratio.
Tribes that fought each other for hunting grounds
The taking care of your own when it’s a handful of people doesn’t scale up to millions
Tribes that fought each other for hunting grounds
So you agree that by human nature humans can do both good and bad things, and that society is the one that imposes which ones we do?
The taking care of your own when it’s a handful of people doesn’t scale up to millions
It kinda does, look at Cuba. Peaceful as it gets, extremely high number of doctors per capita to the point of exporting doctors in times of crisis in other countries, fastest country to vaccinate its population against COVID, guaranteed housing for everyone, really low crime rates and no mafias or drug cartels… You can accuse Cuba of many things, but it proves you can take care of millions of people
look at Cuba. Peaceful as it gets
I take it that you’ve never been there
A comment as smart as your username. Why take actual data when you can take personal experience, amirite?
Edit: my comment was written before links were provided through an edit to the previous comment
Oh you got me sir, well played being the one of us to cite sources
Somebody read and agreed with Might is Right…
What made us successful as a species is our societies and those came as a direct rejection of ‘ruthlessness’. Society is built on cooperation.
Sure, we’re still bloodthirsty monsters. But that will be our downfall.
Nonsense.
What the fuck are we doing?
A mortgage (not rent!) for a 3 bedroom house is $1,400. Live somewhere cheaper, you don’t need to live in/near a city.
If you do, that’s fine, just recognize that is something you are choosing to pay for.
Damn dude. Why didn’t I think about that? All I have to do is work 80 hours a week at the gas station, send my kids to substandard schools, not buy decent food, not have access to public transit, not have access to decent medical care, not have any cultural options, be white since rural areas are not kind to people of color, drive 40+ minutes to anything worth driving to, not have municipal water or sewage or possibly trash pickup, etc.
Why do I keep wanting to live in places with services and good quality of life in a capitalist country where I make 3x the median wage and still can’t buy a house? Silly me.
In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’ve lived in rural areas previously, and I’d rather rent for the rest of my life than ever do that again.
I don’t really understand how you don’t understand that buying a house requires cash on hand.
Closing costs can be rolled into the mortgage and PMI drastically reduces how much is required for a downpayment.
Rents are also much cheaper in these areas too, which makes it much easier to save up for a PMI lowered downpayment.
You have no idea what people’s economic situation is like, do you?
This mofo saying that living in a city (56% of humans, 4.4bn people, live in cities) should be a luxury.
US Democrats are the equivalent to our countries conservatives, and US Republicans are basically our rightwing/neo-nazi party pedant. It is noteworthy here that this Republican-equivalent rightwing party here is under active surveillance by the national security agencies for being a threat to our democracy.
And people still wonder why the US f-ups their people up and down.
I keep trying to tell people this but they don’t want to hear it.
Because it’s not the rich robbing you, it’s the blacks, queers, loudmouth women, and Satan robbing you.
Vote Republican.
/s
Because it’s actually a corporate oligarchy
Capitalism in decay.
I think the most damning thing is that the US is regressing where others are progressing.
DeSantis Signs Anti-Worker Bill Against Heat Regulation in Florida
As a European, I wish you were right. Europe hasn’t recovered from the austerity policy imposed in the post-2008 crisis. I’m Spanish so I can tell you about my country. Job termination payment was halved and hasn’t recovered, firing people became easier and cheaper, stricter laws against protesting were created (“ley mordaza” or gag law) which enabled more police violence and increasingly violent mall-cops, and we’re right now suffering the rise of the far right in Europe with Meloni winning in Italy, Marine LePen close to doing so in France, and rising AFD in Germany (many other countries as well).
We’re all fucked, buddy.
Work is punishment for original sin.
You mean breaking away from the UK?
No, we meant throwing away good tea.
Propaganda is one hell of a drug
I do not think that the US is a democracy. The electoral college is not in any way democratic.
It is an indirect democracy, rather than a direct one. Its less democratic, but not completely undemocratic.
That being said, I do think the system is broken in another fundamental way.
Its less democratic, but not completely undemocratic.
It’s completely undemocratic. Public opinion has no influence on policy whatsoever. Most Americans are in favour of Medicare for all, of legal abortions, of rising taxes on corporations and the most rich people, and much much more. But study after study shows that public opinion has no influence on policy, as in, they’re not even correlated.
I feel like that’s less of a problem with the way a representative democracy works, but rather with corruption and thus capitalism
Yeah, I wasn’t referring to the concept of representative democracy itself, I was referring to the particular case of the US (though I’d extrapolate it to most liberal democracies in western countries)
It is an indirect democracy, rather than a direct one.
Ahem. Indirect democracy AKA representative democracy AKA republic is political system, where laws are voted by representatives who are elected by citizens. USA is indirect indirectracy. Or idiocracy. Like Putin’s Russia, but with bells and whistles.
Direct democracy is rare beast. In it laws are directly voted by citizens on referendums.
FPTP?
Gerrymandering, vote caging, mass disenfranchisement, consolidated power in appointed positions…
A very curious was to run a republic.
Can’t have a view that matters when you are hungry, stressed, are left with like 1 hour a day to yourself, and with constant other random threats to your existence you get to manage.
The system is working as designed, ppl forget how much work such a system needs to sustain itself actually.
The system is working as designed, ppl forget how much work such a system needs to sustain itself actually.
The problem is that Capitalism, and by extension Imperialism, is unsustainable and constantly decaying.
Yes.
And one of the constant maintenance being performed to sustain it is convincing us how sustainable and overall the best thing ever possible it is - how at the same time it has by default only one single goal, a goal of which by default the only end-game of a properly working system is a single complete concentration of power, yet it is widely “believed” how much that is in everyones best interest.
The Nature of Capitalism https://youtu.be/WseyrYuD8ao
*60 hours a week
Laughs in European
Right. I work 37.5 hours a week in a job I love and I hate working. I can’t imagine doing almost double.
My partner used to do 60 hour weeks. She was working outdoors, in the desert (41°c on average), and only worked 4 days a week. The work culture in this country sucks…
I know its just a meme and I think you’re right to point it out but I feel bad for laughing.
In the UK, as one example, its default unlawful to work more than 45 hours a week. You have to choose to sign this away. Refusal to agree can’t be used as a reason to fire you or choose not to hire you, unless its like the police or army or something.
The UK is worse in different places and has this too. So, its not about being superior or any of that BS. But the US is full on, mask-off, you are cattle and the mega rich are your ranchers. You can’t even just simply move to a different country to escape paying for gargantuan corporate benefits. They own you and they don’t care if you know it.
In the UK, as one example, its default unlawful to work more than 45 hours a week.
It’s 5 hours more than in Russia. Please fix.
There’s functionally no enforcement of what was formerly the EU working time directive being voluntary to opt out of. If a company wants you to sign (and in some fields, they will, even if they’ve got no reason to) they can always pretend to have found some other reason not to hire you.
I worked 12h shifts for 7 days a week, as a european. Hoping to gather enough money to buy a house…guess what, my 40h job barely covers the cost of living nowadays and i’m not fit to work more hours. Plus i ended up running short with every passing year, when i needed a 200€ wage increase to afford a mortgage by the time i got that i needed another €150 wage increase.
A single family home used to be 150k, now those go for 500k and my wage ended up in the exact same spot where i started at the age of 21. (Before that it was a youth wage and surprise surprise i could rent a bigger house back then than i currently am on my adult wage)
Somedays i just want to stop showing up for work and stop paying rent, weaponize myself and keep the house by force.
Fuck this shitshow we are in.
What does your union think of that?
The fact that my wage has no value or that i want to go nuts?
It’s not the standard view because, in America, consumption is inherently tied to your identity.
You are seen as more attractive if you have trendy clothing compared to “outdated” clothing. You are seen as more financially successful if you overpay for “luxury” handbags. You are seen as having “made it” based on how much stuff you have.
Corporations know they can exploit this. They play up the value of purchases to your identity in advertising, then use that to distract you from the fact that your labor is being allocated solely to fuel this seemingly endless (solely monetary) growth, while they continue to siphon off more and more of your wages because, well, they “deserve” it for being the founder of the company, or being the shareholders that are “invested in its success.”
The only solution to this problem is degrowth. If we show corporations we don’t care about all this excess junk that nobody really needs, the available labor pool remains the same while demand craters. If everyone is working x hours a week, but demand drops to only necessities and minor luxuries, without the products advertised as “needs” holding any demand, suddenly, each individual has to work only, say, half of x hours a week to accomplish the same requirements to sustain society and individual wellbeing.
That, and we need to give the means of production back to the workers too, of course.
Except people are getting squeezed on housing and the basic necessities now, people are having to work long hours just to live. I can’t even imagine how my young adult life would play out if I were experiencing it now, paying ridiculous rents and making the shitty wages. Sharing an apartment and affording anything else was hard enough back then, I can’t even imagine how people are making it out there nowadays. I got lucky and got into a home when prices were semi-decent, it’d be a severe strain on finances if I had to pay current rates.
Yeah, housing’s a huge issue right now. It’s almost entirely the fault of the artificial scarcity produced by landlords, and their influence on what kind of housing gets built.
I’m not sure if this was meant to be your point by the way, but I do want to clarify that my original post was not meant to make it seem like the only reason people are struggling with work and finances is because they buy goods they don’t actually need. That’s certainly part of the equation for some people, but definitely not entirely.
In my opinion, we can see the same effects I mentioned before happening to our necessities as well, but on the corporate decision making side of things, rather than the consumer decision making side. For instance, food is more expensive because companies throw out any produce that looks “weird,” even if it’s perfectly edible. Housing is more expensive because developers prioritize the highest paying customer class over the average working person when deciding the quality, pricing, and size of housing to build. I hope you get the idea.
The only real solution to these issues is unions and co-ops, anti-monopoly action, the elimination of landlording as a practice, and a higher minimum wage. Basically all of this has to be advocated for at a federal level, unfortunately, since we can’t exactly implement these as independent, personal practices.
Because mEriTocRacY, those wealth
thieveshoardersaggregators worked sooooooooooo hard for their money, they totally deserve every penny. If only people would work as hard as them, they wouldn’t be hungry or cold!I have no idea how this isn’t the standard view. Technology is often used as a carrot on a stick.
Ah yes, propaganda superspreader, my favorite account to follow on twitter.
![The US is Politically to the Right of [Other] Democracies](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/21301eb3-0348-4db4-9f02-82fd35987e02.jpeg){kind=link}