The question “Where did we go wrong?” being asked on 4chan in /b/ is funny to me.
Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.
Corporatism=literally capitalism
Capitalism
Pitchshifter warned us.
Man I used to have the dopest pitchshifter wife beater when I was 18
Nope education is the downfall. Teach critical thinking well and you won’t have such a malleable idiotic population that buys into either of those.
Almost none of my well educated professional-managerial class peers have developed class consciousness. They seem to be even more class clueless than blue & pink collar workers.
Don’t vote Conservative
so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why. It’s reassuring to see people starting to wake up but frustrating to see them groggy, incoherent, and still half-asleep. 95 times out of a hundred they’ll blame “corporatism” or welfare queens or race mixing or overpopulation or some shit and it’s just exhausting
Not a fan of capitalism myself, but I’d take western (somewhat) liberal capitalism over the authoritarian alternatives (kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy in Russia or fake-communist dictatorship in China) that are being pushed here on Lemmy.
I have yet to find a good, reasonable solution. Capitalism is the least bad that I have seen.
Where did we go wrong?
The bad guys won the Cold War.
The bad guys replaced land with happiness in the declaration of Independence.
The bad guys passed all of the enclosure acts of the middle ages.
Not even happiness, just the pursuit of.
whose land tho
The continents full of people they genocided
I suspect the failure of viable alternatives to capitalism in the 90s resulted in the runaway scenario we see today. That doesn’t make the Soviet union good though.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
Damn, really feels like we’ve been seized by the throat
That doesn’t make the Soviet union good though.
even if it was “bad” (it wasn’t just to be clear) the mere threat of its existence allowed labour unions in the West to win more concession from their bosses.
China does not have the same effect because China does not export the revolution.
100% agree. I had a much higher opinion of the soviet union before i heard how little it took to be placed in a gulag. It sounded like a toxic environment for voicing concerns at the very least. Although my sources could be biased I suppose.
Generally competition is good for the “consumer” or citizen in this case
Generally competition is good
no
Wait why not?
I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.
I’m not the other poster, but there’s at least 3 reasons.
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Competition doesn’t just happen for consumer goods, it happens for every single commodity traded on the market. Labor is a commodity. Because of the immense supply of labor, and the capitalist class’ deliberate decision to maintain an unemployed section of the population which deflates wages by adding more desperate people willing to work for less. Generally, you can think of a market as a battle between 2 armies who also have internal battles. If the attacking army is better at organizing itself and doesn’t get mired in the internal conflict, while the defending army is divided and has constant mutinies, the attacking army is bound to have a better chance in the battle. The capitalist class is smaller and has a much easier time coordinating, most workers don’t have large enough unions to contend with that.
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Competition only goes on for so long, and eventually the whole point of a competition is that someone wins. If you have several companies competing to set the price of a commodity in a market, odds are one of them has enough capital to starve out the other ones. That happens in the real world all the time. What’s worse, the more times you capture parts of the market, the easier it is to capture more. That’s one of the fundamental tendencies in capitalism, the centralization of capital under fewer and fewer hands. Of course, once this process has run its course the result is monopoly, but even if the companies step short of monopolizing the market entirely to avoid anti trust regulations they are still likely to draw agreements between themselves to keep prices at a certain level to maintain profits. Recall the armies analogy above.
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Even if nobody won in a competition and there was some permanent state of lowering the price of goods, while this is “good” for consumers, it’s still bad for the workers producing the goods, which most consumers are. Capitalists have no problem investing more fixed costs in the process of production if it leads to larger profits in the short term, but the issue comes down to the way profit is made in the first place. In a capitalist system, a cycle of production takes place when a capitalist exchanges money for commodities, pays a wage to workers who improve the commodities through their labor, then sells the commodities for more money than they spent during the cycle. The difference in the selling price and the fixed cost (capital) plus the variable cost (wages) is profit. Since the fixed cost is paid for at the same rate everywhere, i.e. no one should be buying the same commodities for significantly different prices at least locally, the only place where the difference could come from is the wages being smaller than the value added to the commodities through labor. Therefore, profit comes as a result of using labor that the capitalist bought at a discount. That discount we call exploitation. Now consider what happens if more capital is invested: the fixed costs grow in relation to the variable costs, but profit only grows if more labor is exploited. That means that the only way to keep commodities cheaper and cheaper still, while generating more profit relative to investment, is to ramp up exploitation. Practically we see this in reality in the way the production of some goods take place once competition runs its course; factories close down and capital moves abroad to where there are fewer regulations, sweatshops replace the factories and production can keep taking place because exploitation was increased.
Thanks for the detailed comments. Is this the kind of thing you talk about at hexbear? I’d call myself a skeptic but I love the topic
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There were no good guys in the cold war.
I wish I could just completely block anything from hexbear, no matter where I go you guys are pushing your toxic agenda.
The people that ended malnutrition among their people and brought us into space are toxic?
Lmao life expectancy rising goes brr. Women gaining independence goes brr. Advancements in the sciences goes brr. Life quality improvements goes brr. Going from a rural peasant state ruled by a monarchy to a modern country within few decades, while the same process took centuries for the capitalist states goes brr.
You hate seeing hexbear users, so you took the considered and well-thought tactic of directly replying to one to whine about them. That’ll stop you from seeing more of them, for sure!
Yes, just like glorifying oppressive states on an online forum will bring about communism!
You should read the Jakarta Method.
it won’t, that’s true, but it would be cool if it did
You must be confused, Hexbear is a forum for shitposting not bringing about communism. Real world organizing is for bringing about communism. Hope this clears that up!
Did you know that at it’s peak the USSR gulag system had more than a million citizens imprisoned, which worked for scraps, receiving little to no pay?
Oh wait actually that’s the US current day, my bad.Also posting isn’t praxis. I hope you don’t think you’re actually doing anything on this website. Organizing is for the real world!
Nyaaaahahahaha, we have an agenda folks! We’ve made it!
Look, i’ll take whatever wouldn’t have ended up in this
We consume pseudo-food, watch pseudo movies and participate in pseudo sports, heck even pseudo politics. Why pseudo? Because everything is made as cheap as possible and to distract us from the suffering that capitalism brings us so that we won’t rise up.
Examples:
- Our vegetables are genetically modified so that they grow bigger but they can’t reproduce anymore and the seeds are copyrighted.
- The movies that are watching are catered to the mainstream and don’t even really get a message across. Marvel movies try to tell us that rich people with power will save the world
- Football games are there to distract people “give them bread and games and they will never revolt”
- The people at power, through massive propaganda, seperate our people into left and right. These two parties will then fight eachother instead of realizing who is really opressing us
I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we’ve built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can’t be it…
The constant revamping of the production process, the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, and the everlasting uncertainty and agitation of society distinguish the bourgeois era from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. All new-formed relationships become outdated before they can solidify. All that is fixed melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and thier relations with each other.
-Some guy, in some manifesto, in 1848
The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you’re over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You’re a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.
They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn’t erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you’ll tilt. They can’t make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you’re discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it’s never about recognizing your actual situation.
They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there’s as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don’t sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you’re unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.
This isn’t new and owning productive assets isn’t as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.
A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you’re free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you’re happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.
Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you’ve noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.
You can’t imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You’re better to go with the devil you know.
You’re not unhappy because you’re possessed with bad spirits. You’re not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You’re unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.
Welcome to being poor … I mean poor poor … not the kind of poor where you can’t afford a Lamborghini … the kind of poor where you no longer have any luxuries like being able to go to the movies.
Where life is a constant hassle and struggle to survive. And where you constantly have to fight to stay above water. A kind of life where someone is constantly either trying to screw you, is screwing you or has screwed you. A kind of life where you no longer trust the people you see, the people you meet, or the people you live with. A kind of life where you know from the time you are born that everything and everyone will be hard.
I grew up like that and it became a normal part of life.
I learned to make a bit of money and survive and I’ve done good but not great … good enough to travel the world. It gave me the insight that the majority of the world is poor … I thought that before but after traveling, I realized just how true that really is.
The world we’re complaining about now is the world that most of the world already knows.
Welcome to being poor and hopeless.
Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.
Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.
