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.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    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.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
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      2 years ago

      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.