THAT'S THE POST.
Every human instinctly knows that a very small minority living in unlimited luxury while half the world lives in squalor is an unforgivable evil that can't be forgiven.
Theory is cool and good, and you should study it as much as you're able to, but at the end of the day, you don't need to read any theory at all to understand why this is wrong. You just need the basic human empathy we're all born with.
A significant amount of people enjoy being one the priviliged few and have no sympathy for those screwed over. They still KNOW it's morally wrong, they just enjoy it. Most people don't think like that though, and have just been conditiond since childhood into believing contrived justifications of why it has to be this way or why change is dangerous if not outright impossible. In my experience, they all know the current capitalist system is unacceptable if you press them enough, even if they'd never use those words or think about it in those terms. It's just that none of us know what to do about it.
The entire point of both modern political and economic theory is to justify something we all intuitively understand isn't okay, which is probably part of why modern society is so fucked.
I used to work at a resort for rich people. Like Old Money RICH people. Instead of renting a wedding venue, they’d gift the venue a historically-accurate remodeling project for all of their flooring and replace their chandelier with a period piece from their collection. And then they’d get gifted a reservation. Shit like that. We’d cater for these giant parties that were just in some rich fuck’s house. Like I’d wake up, eat a grilled cheese sandwich with Kraft singles and then go serve dinner at The Kraft House, which was the summer home owned by the grandson of the dude who invented pre sliced cheese or some shit like that.
I’m going to say pretty definitively that many of these people consider their domination of the world to be a moral good. Like if they had a relative who was not participating in the cycles of wealth accumulation like everyone else, we’d pick up bits of gossip and these people were morally outraged that people were not doing their part and living up to their potential.
I lived my whole life feeling like nothing made sense and that everyone was living by these arbitrary rules that they couldn’t explain and made their lives worse. Working that job, for the first time, I saw who the rules were made for and everything clicked. It was like seeing a species in the wild that I’d only seen in captivity. By far the most radicalizing job I’ve ever worked.
you don’t need to read any theory at all to understand why this is wrong
understanding why it's wrong doesn't seem to be the point of reading theory to me, I think it's more trying to shed light on the second part you get to here:
It’s just that none of us know what to do about it.
True. Definitely don't want to discourage people from reading theory. It also helps people understand why the world is the way it is, which is a really good way to combat capitalist propaganda.
There's explanatory theory like Capital, and there's instructional theory like State and Rev. Both are necessary, the first to combat capitalist propaganda and the second to combat capitalism itself.
A lot of people aren't going to intrinsically view captialism as wrong if they're on its good side. They'll automatically conjure its defense into existence by sheer refusal to view themselves as bad peoole because of their status. That's where you get all the stories of self made millionaires or the risk of being a business owner, or any number of bigotries or raw hatred of the homeless.
My cousin is a small business dipshit in a small town. Complete reactionary and goes to a cultish evangelical church that teaches prosperity gospel. He's never going to view his business as exploitation no matter how it's explained unless he's humiliated onto the other side of it...and probably re-educated with theory.
Sorry about your cousing. People will latch onto the wildest shit to justify their own privileges.
you read theory to keep caring when you burn through your supplies of compassion. to know what you're fighting for, more than just treats-for-the-weak-too. more than just switching out the titles in the hierarchy and putting yourself at the top.
and also to have ideas for other ways things could be, ways winning might be possible, or undermine itself. but that's not more important than the other thing.
Graeber in some of his books talks about how early civilizations had cultutal apparatuses and norms that resisted the creation of capitalism. I've always thought that was a neat idea, that humanity has always kind of had an idea about atomization and its eventual end point and installed stuff to stave it off as long as possible. Stuff like cultural norms against selfishness or tightly knit community or religious values. Kind of chicken or the egg though, like what material conditions encouraged what cultutal norms and connections between people. Capitalism is the result of a long series of contradictions that detaches humanity from one another, it makes all human connections abstract.
It didn't work in the long run though, because capitalism makes everything abstract. It will eat everything thrown at it, including trying to be a good person. Gotta consciously resist it by destroying its control over labor first and foremost.
The very old idea of "liches" comes from the even older phenomenon of narcissistic rich assholes that want to cheat death and live forever at everyone else's expense. Even the idea of phylacteries is a very symbolic way of making a treasured object into a substitute for humanity.
My dumbass family proves you wrong. My cousin is a removed and argued to my face that capitalism is good because muh freedumbs for the cons00mers, and he regularly "likes" capitalist goons like Kevin O'Leary posts on linkedin. Meanwhile the adults in my family are classist and racist doucebags who are literal slumlords and own own land (ranches), and they constantly point to cuba and venezuela as to why muh shocialism doesn't work and capitalism good!!1! Thank god I put a 1000+ mile buffer zone between me and them.
:sadness: Sucks that your family is like that. Glad you were able to get away.
While I obviously can't say anything about your family specifically, stuff like that always sound like desperate grasping to explain why bad things are actually good. It's propaganda you learn to justify your own place in the capitalist order and why you shouldn't try to change things for the better. Beliefs they have because they're convenient, not because they're actually convincing.
Human beings, outside of some kind of tremendous propaganda machine, will definitely naturally arrive at the conclusion that it's bad for everyone to compete against each other, and it's clearly superior to work collectively. Sadly there is a tremendous propaganda machine, and at least a little bit of theory is needed to deprogram yourself.
While this is true to an extent, its also a lot easier to convince someone of this being the best of all structures, or that this is inherent to civilization and society, due to inertia.
Pointing out the problem is a good start but theory is needed to cement why its not only just wrong, but also artificial, unnecessary and demonstrably worse than the alternative.
right but we live in a world of all against all, in which people will randomly do bad things for no reason, because people are sources of infinite entropy or something, and so if someone we choose doesn't do the bad things, ALL the bad things, before anyone else can do them, or organized to do them bigger than anyone else can, then just random people might do bad things!
plus, we wouldn't have Iphones or computers or cheese or space flight without capitalism. do you hate Iphones and cheese and computers and space? huh? do you hate civilization?
