I live in one of a thousand identical cookie cutter american towns, the kind 20 minutes away from the nearest thing that could be called a highway, just backroads and little towns at the crossroads. no monopoly capitalism in sight really, just everyone on their grind with their shitty small businesses. tow yards and head shops, corrupt cops and section 8 landlords, drug dealing and drug doing.

the farmers and business owners have nice houses on big plots of private land farther out. I've driven around out there, it's very beautiful with lots of trees and grass. but the towns themselves are not. all the local chamber of commerce assholes are too miserly to reinvest any capital, so you see them driving their motor trikes and waxed convertibles around these sad, weathered buildings with crumbling brickwork and overgrown sidewalks. they hose down the grimy windows once in a while and scowl at the sterile corporate chain places that look nice I guess because they don't blow all of their gross margin on lake boats and granite countertops.

my therapist's office is in a converted church. they use the old sanctuary as a yoga studio. most weeks I go to another office too, in an ordinary single-family house that someone partitioned up into office space. a receptionist sits at a desk in the foyer, and the living room and dining room etc all have desks in them. I walk through the kitchen to get to my appointment. the florist is in the back of someone's house, the county magistrate leases a couple of rooms in the back of a gas station, etc. it's whatever I guess.

I live in a kind of closet that's billed as one "bedroom" out of a two bedroom apartment. our building is falling apart- the hallway is full of garbage, we've got mice, the ceiling is slumping in, and the front door doesn't lock properly. but if you go to our slumlord's landscaping business to drop off a rent check it's actually one of the few really nice looking businesses I've seen here. usually I only see that kind of bright new construction out of healthcare and police. I guess the secret to running a profitable business in this area is to vacuum up the medicaid benefits and rent assistance checks and "fund the police" bidenbucks flowing out from the cities where actual economic activity still happens.

this whole area is on life support. there's nothing really here to attract big capital and anything that gets big enough mostly goes elsewhere, leaving the remaining petty tyrants to pick up pennies. and since small business owners suck at doing the work of capitalism, everything stagnates and slowly goes to shit. capital dissipates into small consumption, nobody really builds anything, bright kids go off to college and don't come back. it's crabs in a bucket for everyone who's left

I've been driving to a regional city every week lately and every time I come back here it's like a weight settles on my shoulders throughout the drive. city bustle and sidewalks and fire hydrants and corner stores and big highway interchanges gradually give way to back roads lined with boarded up houses, yards full of junk, and sagging porches. one poverty to another but the difference is that one is suffocated by just a surly, reactionary opposition to everything alive that I love about the city. you can feel it in the air when driving around here. even the idea of building/maintaining a sidewalk seems baffling to people who can't imagine paying for someone else to have a nice place to walk.

Carnegie may fleece his workers — he has 20,000 of them — of only 50 cents a day and yet net, from sunrise to sunset, $10,000 profits; the banker with plenty of money to lend can thrive with a trifling shaving of each individual note; but the apple woman on the street corner must make a 100 and 500 percent profit to exist. For the same reason, the middle class, the employer of few hands, is the worst, the bitterest, the most inveterate, the most relentless exploiter of the wage slave. - Daniel de Leon

the petty bourgeoisie here snarls at big urban capital like a dog who thinks that a human is trying to steal its kibble. they're terrified of being proletarianized, so they cling with a death grip to their shitty little fiefdoms and urge everyone to "buy local" and put up hundreds of american flags and trump 2024 signs and grumble about the socialist elites sending all of the money to china. that's not going to do anything for them. they've been losing this war for hundreds of years, and it's joever for real now that neoliberals are at the helm and manufacturing is gone and the only "comparative advantage" left in this country is in knowledge work that flocks to the cities and leaves decline at the opposite pole.

but this is a decadent empire so even the failures stay comfortable, and so they still believe in the system, and so they still try to work it, and so they keep losing. it's pathetic. reactionaries plop down and have a tantrum about how it's all so unfair that their idyllic self-sufficient stardew valley life is slipping from their grasp because wages are too high and nobody wants to work anymore and interest rates are too high and trans people are mocking god, or whatever.

I don't understand how anyone can feel anything towards these sawdust tyrants other than pity or more likely disgust. so it's been wild to live around a few rarely-employed pauper-proletarians always going on with their friends about how they're basically temporarily-embarrassed business owners who are going to finally get ahead. put some money together, set up a business, buy some box trucks, hire a few guys! satori it's time for you to get on your shit, all you have to do is follow kim kardashian's advice and you'll be the boss and be the one yelling at your employees and you can buy one of those nice houses and not worry so much.

it feels like I'm in a twilight zone episode where there's some kind of wacky premise involved. I hope my experience isn't representative, that not every dead end town is full of people stupid enough or cruel enough to become true believers when business tiktok serves them up hustler ideology on a trashcan lid. it's so corny istg. wanting to be the boss is like a somehow even-lamer version of someone reading the fountainhead after having a bad experience at the dmv and deciding that collectivism is the root of all evil. I don't know how anyone can drive every day around this bleak place full of and still dream of having a scrap of it for themselves. have some dignity for christ's sake