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u/npvuvuzela 16d ago
Wait but this only happens under communism???!? This picture has to be from Cuba or Venezuela, right??
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u/NightVale_Comm_Radio 19d ago
See??? In communist countries like Vuvuzela and France they need to have fake shelves, not like capitalist AMERICA 🇱🇷🇱🇷
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u/eannasheridan 19d ago
Imagine if this was taken in China. There’d be absolute outrage. But when it’s in the US it’s joked about and we shuffle on to consume some more appealing US propaganda.
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u/thetaformes 19d ago
It's pretty amazing how much americans care about social ills when there's a socialist flag flying over them. I wish we could get even 5% of that outrage channeled into local problems where it can actually be constructive. Someone should invent a generator that harvests our impotent China rage and converts it into electricity so it actually does something.
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 19d ago
It's worse, the shelves are full but you cannot afford to buy anything. Every night perfectly edible and usable goods are tossed away like rotisserie chickens at supermarkets. Fashion brands shred their clothes because god forbid their brand is 'diluted' by having some homeless person scavenge from their dumpsters. You have islands of affluence surrounded by a deep sea of misery that goes to support the islanders. The Ultra Rich flaunt their ill gotten gains and have convinced many that they too may one day share in prosperity if only they give more of their blood and sweat into the system.
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u/emisneko 19d ago
yep. price rationing is still rationing
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 19d ago
It's cold calculus they conduct. How high can the price of insulin be to extract the most value from people before they die, while not being so raised so high so quickly as to cause public outrage. How much can we raise the price of food? Capitalism doesn't encourage competition, it encourage collaboration between these big companies so they may fix the prices across the board for everyone everywhere.
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u/Hydraxxon 19d ago
I worked as part of a sustainability initiative, we would take the food that stores were throwing away, sort it, and then allow anyone to take what they needed from our storefront. From my experience, I can tell you it is so much worse than rotisserie chickens. Everything imaginable gets thrown out. Our issue was not getting enough food donations, but picking up/ storing the donations and distributing it all before it went bad.
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 19d ago
I believe you. I heard Amazon destroys by the ton many solid non food goods too. Nothing like wasting rare earth finite resources for the fleeting will of the free market. It's cheaper for them since it cost money to bring that stuff to people who are in need. Currency is arbitrary. The true costs are paid much further down the line in the overall sustainability of life on earth.
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u/RedTerror88 19d ago
I heard Amazon destroys by the ton many solid non food goods too.
That's correct, they destroy an average of 130,000 items per week in the UK alone.
There was recently a bit of drama about it, but as you'd expect, nothing happened.
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 19d ago
Sickening but not surprising. The volume though makes me cringe when we scale that up to their entire operation. Sucks there's no boycotting since there's no option in many places. Or you simply choose another devil like Walmart.
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u/wakeful_sleep 19d ago
LOL they show this thing about north korea when in reality it's in USA itself....
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u/thomasisnotmyname 19d ago
This looks like a mock-up for product staging in a store that is about to open.
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u/photogenickiwi 19d ago
Yeah I keep seeing comments saying this is what the US is really like but honestly I never saw shelves even near that empty even during the height of the panic during the pandemic
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u/mc_burger_only_chees 19d ago
Incoming chuds: “GROCERY STORES IN VUVUZUELA GOMMUNISM CHINA CUBA NORTH KOREA BE LIKE”
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
Looks like the grocery store from The Interview. Which, mind you is based in North Korea.
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u/Skybombardier 19d ago
It was also a movie. You know, moving pictures made by a group of individuals trying to present their ideology in the most profitable way possible?
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
Yes obviously, but I’m saying if America is worse in real life than North Korea is portrayed in a movie, made by comedians, I think we have an issue.
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u/Skybombardier 19d ago
I misinterpreted, but I see your point now. Sorry I downvoted you before
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
I think a few people misinterpreted it lol
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u/Skybombardier 19d ago
You know, going from lurking in a lib sub to critically thinking in an anti-imperialist one can give people like me whiplash. Perhaps I need to unwind with a movie. Anyone seen Red Dawn?
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u/bash_fash 19d ago
*based on America's propaganda on the DPRK
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
I’m sure North Korea is a great place to live.
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u/bash_fash 19d ago
ok American
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
Lol check your last post. Sounds great when you’re getting shot at after you’ve “had enough” and “attempted to escape” while being shot at. Sounds wonderful.
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u/High_Speed_Idiot 19d ago
Go check out Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, it's on youtube and really isn't very long.
Bottom line is so little actual info comes out of the DPRK and so much of the defector testimony we hear is either an exaggeration or straight up lie because the ROK literally pays defectors to say outrageous stuff, so whatever you think you know about the DPRK most likely is made up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39170614
https://www.newsweek.com/why-south-korea-offering-more-money-north-korean-defectors-564330
No one is saying the DPRK is a great place to live, but anyone who calls themselves anti-imperialist should recognize that the DPRK is the way it is only because of the absolutely mind melting amount of genocidal imperialist aggression it's had to deal with literally for its entire existence. The fact they're (still) a sovereign nation that has accomplished what they have given the material reality they have been forced to deal with is pretty fuckin impressive.
Literally my dude, Bolton straight up said the US should pursue a "Libyan Model" in regards to the DPRK. No matter how fucked the DPRK might be because of borderline genocidal sanctions and other imperialist shit, they are literally fighting to not become a failed slave state controlled by US private interests
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u/bash_fash 19d ago
we're literally in a thread parented by your comment of how the image in the OP looks like North Korea as depicted by American media, and you're still failing to separate actual life in the DPRK from how America depicts it
why are you even in an anti-imperialist sub?
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u/WomTilson34 19d ago
How am I failing to separate it when I’m literally telling you to check your own last post about a man escaping North Korea?
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u/LouisSal 19d ago
That looks like they are about to go to digital screens for their products
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u/ninjette847 19d ago
Why would they do that for peanut butter and chips? I've only seen that for refrigerated or frozen stuff. The shelves don't have doors.
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u/LouisSal 19d ago
It’s hard inference from the picture. My initial thoughts are they will be moving to digital screens and that’s a glimpse of what it will look like.
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u/RussianSkunk Marxist 19d ago
If this picture was taken anywhere else, it’d be spread around on mainstream media as evidence of widespread dystopian trickery.
“Grocery stores in China don’t have any food, they just hang up pictures of food to make the rest of the world think they aren’t starving.”
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u/Rooster1981 19d ago
Is there a food shortage in the US?
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u/steeveperry 19d ago
There are a lot of artificial shortages because of the way businesses reacted to the pandemic. Take the airline industry. When people stopped flying, airlines made maneuvers to unburden themselves of salaries that they were not able to exploit during a global pandemic. When the world is shut down, the airline industry doesn't have much business to conduct.
Knowing damn well that the pandemic was the sole force impacting their business, and that people would want to travel after the pandemic just as much as they did before it (you can argue people would want to travel even more when they could, after being stuck in place for so long), the airlines fired/furloughed/generally pissed off their employees. Now that the demand is coming back--they knew it would--they're crying worker shortage.
All of these shortages were avoidable. Instead of buying back stocks, they could've paid their employees to stay home until this blew over, and have them back--happy to be back, even--and they could've jumped back into stride. But instead, they sold out their workers and then complained when they didn't come back.
This happened across several industries, where employees or infrastructure were made unexploitable by the pandemic and nothing else.
America is a fucking disgrace.
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u/karmavorous 19d ago
Oh, trust me, before long a rightwinger will make a meme
FOOD STORES UNDER SOCIALISM [this pic]
FOOD STORES UNDER CAPITALISM [picture of stocked shelves from a grocery in Sweden]
And rightwingers will share it all over social media without a hint of irony.
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u/kremlinhelpdesk 19d ago edited 19d ago
To be fair, Sweden is way more capitalist than the US could ever hope to become, so not entirely wrong I guess.
edit: Downvotes are not arguments, people. Numbers below are what applies to the 1%, so experiences may vary.
Corporate tax rate: US federal 21%, plus state taxes which vary, so lowest possible is 21%. Sweden, 20.6%.
Estate tax: US 40%. Sweden, 0%.
Capital gains tax: US 20%. Sweden 30%, unless you're a minor stakeholder, in that case 1.5-ish% on the total sum invested which is less than inflation, so less than 0%.
Billionaires per capita: US 1.853, Sweden 2.987
Wealth inequality (as measured by wealth GINI, higher means more inequality): US 0.852, Sweden 0.867.
Counterexamples maybe? The things that are usually praised as socialism-ish in Sweden are all financed by payroll taxes, paid by the working class, and even then the profits (yes, profits, from the privately owned providers of the services) go directly to from the tax coffers to private venture capitalists.
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u/Jamarcus316 18d ago
Isn't there a better welfare state/more worker rights in the Nordic countries than in the US and the rest of Europe?
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u/kremlinhelpdesk 18d ago
There is, but none of that is socialism, it all works to keep capitalism functioning smoothly, and as proven by the above statistics, it's pretty effective. And, again, the vast majority of that is paid for by workers rather than the rich, so you could say we have a parallel society of sorts, where the rich get to keep their fortunes over time (lack of estate tax, lack of wealth tax, lack of effective taxes on most capital gains), while the working class is aggressively taxed to provide all of the stability that capitalism needs to function this well. It decreases the gap between the working poor and the middle class, while increasing the distance from both of those to the bourgeois. This keeps income inequality low, but that doesn't matter because there's no way to actually get rich from working here, because of (among other things) massive payroll taxes.
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u/IWillStealYourToes Libertarian Socialist 19d ago
How is Sweden more capitalist than the US?
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u/kremlinhelpdesk 19d ago
See edit.
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u/IWillStealYourToes Libertarian Socialist 19d ago
Cool, thanks for substantiating your point!
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u/kremlinhelpdesk 19d ago
Not as cool as our well stocked grocery stores, almost makes up for the out of control neoliberalism and general lack of class consciousness.
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u/pigchampion 19d ago
So not so different from Norway. Neo-liberalism marketed as Social- democratic. I think the norwegian elite would like the country to be more like Sweden, more «international»
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u/kremlinhelpdesk 19d ago
Did you also do that thing where you shifted taxes from corporate taxes to income taxes, and then shifted the tax debate narrative to only be about income taxes? We did that in 1990, worked wonders for rapidly climbing the wealth gini ladder (currently bronze medalists) while getting people to complain about high taxes. Perfectly executed, no one seems to have even noticed, because most people don't know any billionaires.
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u/pigchampion 17d ago
Haha yes, and thats all we talk about when it comes to taxes. And now we have had Høyre (the right wing business party) in government for some years, so the tax debate is just dead
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u/SoFisticate 19d ago
Lol like that will stop propagandists from misappropriating this image a million times.
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