We’re just going to do this model of capitalism for the rest of humanity’s existence
Especially when, at this rate, there's a hard limit of like 80 years because of the climate trends we are seeing
Excuse me, but how many flavours of Doritos and Mountain Dew did a supermarket in the Soviet Union have, hmmm???
Shout-out to that book The End of History that proposes liberal capitalism as the end of human development and encourages the idea of things staying this specific way forever. It seems insanely unimaginative to me that people actually believe this, let alone LIKE it. What happened to always looking to the future and the next great thing? Why would you want stasis forever?
And they'll keep thinking that as long as they can pay their rent and eat food. Being kept in the brink of starvation, but not starving now gives people a lot of stake in upholding the status quo.
This is why it's important for people to know about market socialism even if you're not a market socialist.
Wow, look at all these people in poverty instead of extreme poverty. Capitalism truly lifts all.
capitalism lifts people out of poverty. all those people still in poverty just aren't believing in capitalism hard enough
Even then that's just because of China. Absolute poverty's gone up if you exclude China.
Honestly, what I despise the most about chuds is their disingenuity, the ones that aren’t recruited teenagers that is. Why can’t they just be honest and say that they hate those non-white peasants and want to exploit them in broad daylight? Why do they equate self defense, no matter the scale, with the initial attack? They are slimier than they paint their stereotypical jews.
This. This is what makes me angrier than anything. Honestly an open white nationalist who was honest about his intentions would annoy me less than the average conservative or even moderate.
Was it projection all along?
EVERYTHING they say is projection, no exceptions
Just flip it on them when they criticize China
"just because a few unemployed Uyghurs with no job prospects say it, doesn't mean it's true"
Why would anyone want the freedom to move down the economic ladder?
So you could climb back up, it's like when dragon ball characters wear those weighted vests.
Because if you believe that fundamentally some people deserve to be on top and consequently others deserve to be at the bottom in society, a system that permits motion both ways is a good thing. It lets you (obviously you belong at the top) move upward quicker because all the lazy undeserving people move downwards at the same time.
Capitalism is the freedom to own a business. That's it, that's the whole thing.
If they own the business itself and can use that position of ownership to control how their employees work they're still capitalists. Capital doesn't have to be a physical thing, you just need some legal structure that the state recognizes and will enforce with violence for you. (Like, workers can't just declare this is a co-op now and set their own rules, eventually the police show up. The slip of paper that says the police are on the owner's side is capital.)
Oh sure.
Every rung of capitalist is under constant threat of being casually tossed aside by a bigger capitalist, until you get to the top of the hierarchy and they need to grow their empire as fast as possible lest someone else do it faster and put them back into that situation. It's a pretty shitty system even for them. (Though of course, they're under threat of becoming smaller capitalists or being reduced to working class, not the threat of death from exposure like the working class is.)
Hot tak: the general improvement in things like health, poverty etc. has happened regardless of or despite capitalism. You could agrue that capitalism in fact slows all these down, but people conflate the cooccurance of these things as causality.
Even hotter take: The World Bank's poverty line is a laughably low measurement ($1.90/day) and using a more reasonable figure reveals that poverty has remained proportionally the same for decades. This means that with all the end-of-history, neoliberalism-has-won celebrations of the past few decades, the raw number of people in poverty has increased.
But it's not all bad, there has been one place where poverty has been aggressively reduced and the quality of its citizens' lives have improved, let me just check my notes here...oh my mistake it's Communist China. Welp sorry capitalism.
Even the UN acknowledges that this whole "the crusade against poverty is going amazingly" talking point is bullshit.
The improvement in living standards (including health) is due to the use of fossil fuels.
The ability to harness fossil fuels was due to a bunch of rich well-off people mentally masturbating in Britain for 300 years.
Britain had so many rich well-off people because the Black Death killed 50% of all Europeans, freeing up resources and reducing the power of the king and elites.
The increase in living standards, as well as everything Europeans invented in the last 500 years, is directly due to Bubonically-enforced socialism. Other regions lagged behind because they were mostly unaffected by Plague, and thus remained in hypercompetitive societies since nobody died.
The system that eliminated extreme poverty was China's and Cuba's... America's people are backsliding, on reserves people live under hideous conditions, or in Puerto Rico. African people never got out of poverty no matter how many times the neolibs keep saying capitalism has eliminated extreme poverty.
Word. Three raindrops fall on the island and I lose power. I lose water. Without internet during a pandemic, I can't work or go to college. Everyone here is just trying their best. PR is a nightmare under the American Flag.
It was possible for my parents to scramble their way up a crumbling cliff to achieve a slightly better economic position, therefore everything is fine
I am very intelligent
I'm very familiar with that variety of optimism they are expressing, the rush of hope that comes when it seems like you're finally getting ahead. Unfortunately the most likely outcome is that the florist business will fail. It's already a very tight market and most of the big players are ready to buy or outright crush their competition. It's depressing to see because I already know that when things don't work out, they're going to blame themselves for it.
"huh, works on my machine, you must just be doing it wrong"
If we didn't have capitalism your parents could have been an upholsterer and florist right away and it wouldn't have been a struggle. Still gonna need chairs and flowers in our communist utopia. Insurance salesmen and brand awareness managers however... will also be given useful jobs and looked after.
White hero worship/myopia. White cultures always worship completely incorrect secondary factors instead of true causes. And they always attribute the secondary effect as the primary cause.
For instance, white cultures are more likely to view the end of US slavery as mostly due to Abraham Lincoln, rather than to economic factors (industrialization) and the unstoppable demography of US Blacks (10% of the population). You could go back in time and kill Abraham Lincoln, and a bunch of abolitionists, and history still would have turned out relatively the same. (and yes, I know slavery never ended, prisons, etc)
Same for capitalism. Capitalism doesn't do anything, it's just an effect of resource distribution and cultural predisposition. Capitalism doesn't lift anyone out of poverty. Resources lift people out of poverty. Countries with a wealth of resources TEND to be more capitalist, because capitalism can't survive in a resource constrained nation. As usual, western culture gets cause and effect completely backward, and is proud of how absolutely incorrect they are.
What does this have to do with white cultures in particular? Wouldn’t it be more about a ruling class legitimizing itself by telling history to paint itself in a good light?
I only ever see this type of Hero worship in white cultures, arguably in Middle Eastern ones too. You don't really see it much in Asian/African ones.
This sort of pervasive capitalist propaganda is why the left can't afford to abandon electoral politics. We don't have a prayer of organizing any real non-electoral movement as long as this propaganda is in place, and one of the best ways to challenge that propaganda is to dispute it on the 24/7 reality TV show where most people turn when they think of politics. Electoral politics is the biggest platform available, and if we're on it we can use it to challenge inane shit like "capitalism lifts people out of poverty."
Slavery is ok because you can theoretically buy your freedom and then buy a plantation all of your own!
If we're speaking seriously though, capitalism would be dysgenics. Since it allows hypothetically "deficient" people to survive and proliferate for centuries if they simply got lucky with money.
I would have to disagree. Since defectiveness and deficiency aren’t objectively and universally measurable, it’s down to subjective opinion what counts as a deficiency or not. In Capitalism, being poor and lower class IS seen as a personal defect. If someone rises out of poverty to become a capitalist, people consider it a natural outcome of that person’s inherent superiority over other poor people who simply can’t do the same due to deficiencies within themselves as people. It’s seen as shedding their filth or even sins in way. It’s becoming “clean”. The inverse is also true with those born into wealth whom fall into poverty. That’s why this poster says, “look in the mirror if you’re failing to rise from your circumstances.” They think this system is justifiable on the basis that naturally superior people will always be rewarded while the inferior will fall into destitution as a result of their flaws and nothing else. It’s eugenics in every sense of the word, imo. It’s not like eugenics in the context it’s usually brought up in is more rational just because it’s based on “genetic superiority”. Which also doesn’t exist in any objective or universal measure.
I would have to disagree. Since defectiveness and deficiency aren’t objectively and universally measurable, it’s down to subjective opinion what counts as a deficiency or not.
yeah I agree. I'm just saying that IF you believed in that stuff, it would be dysgenics.
