I know I bump heads with some types of people here because of my unorthodox views that some might go as far as to call heterodox, but even if you’re the most by-the-book follower of Marx and Lenin, I hope you can hear me out here:
I’m definitely not alone in thinking that the Situationists were on to something, respect for them seems wide across the entire spectrum of leftism. It’s just a shame that the idea of detournment was more or less constrained to the realm of literal conventonal forms of art. What WSB has been doing with Gamestop can fit quite easily into being understood as a detournment of Hedge Funds, Speculation, and the Stock Market in general. This “Prank” has seemingly shaken more common everyday people of the legitimacy of the stock market and perhaps their faith in capitalism itself. Compare the effectivenes of that with something like Occupy Wallstreet.
People hate being told what to think. Even if its absolutely true, they’ll be resistant to it. On the other hand, if people think that they came to a belief with profound implications all on their own, they will champion that belief with unshakable passion, particularly if they think they are unique in having “figured it out”. See Qanon and their cult-like thinking that has hardly any basis in reality. In 2021 its not enough just to tell people that capitalism riddled with contradictions and iherently unstable. You need to pull back the sheet and let people make that realization with their own eyes.
I’ve been thinking of other forms of action this could take, and honestly I haven’t been able to come up with much, but I’d hope that other people who are more creative than me might have better ideas. One idea is to create a social network, something like facebok or twitter or the like, but have the users get a percentage cut of the returns whenever their personal data in particular is used as part of a sale. This would even be gamified, to encourage users to add more personal information to get more cash. This is probably the only way to get people to sign up to a new service en masse due to the current monopolization of the market. It’d also lay bare the fundamentals of the industry as the other big players attempt to react with their products. My only other idea is kind of stupid and I think has been tried before without much success. But the basic idea would be to start a consulting firm that presents itself as getting a leg up on the competitor without quite using the term “corporate sabotage”, but the interesting bit is that it would be accomplished by attempting to unionize that competitor’s workplace. So instead of the board deciding to hire a union busting firm for their business, they would hire a union-organizing firm to essentially salt their competitors or otherwise agitate for a union drive.
edit: Reposting in this sub since we're trying to keep WSB stuff from clogging up main. GIven a bit more time to think about my idea, I think it can be summed up like this: Capitalism as a system is very prone to positive-feedback loops, actions which by their nature cause themselves to be amplified, like feedback on a microphone, rapidly gaining in strength and drowning out most other things (Posittive in this context means reinforcing itself, as opposed to negative feedback loops which are a form of self-regulation). It just so happens that most of these are alerady set up to benefit the rich. I think it would be fruitful to discuss the eaiest way to fudge the system into forming a positive feedback loop that supports workers.
The purpose of it isn't necessarily to get people to abstain for participating in them. The same way that brining attention to US war crimes carried out with taxpayer money isn't neccesarily done with the immediate goal of having people refrain from paying their taxes to prevent such wars from having funding, or having all US soldiers decide to immediately go AWOL to halt imperialism. That's just not a reasonably realistic goal to have. The way I see it, the immediate goals of these kinds of actions would be to force Capital to respond to it with a way that overtly and undeniably contradicts the narrative they have spun about themselves, narratives that many still buy into. That's what I mean by "shake faith in". And this can have more material consequences in addition to growing sympathy for anticapitalist ideas. Like during a union drive, whether or not the employees see the inevitable union busting operations the management will carry out as genuine, or whether they dismiss it as the obvious farce it is, literally can be the difference between a successful campaign or a failure.
I guesss what I'm saying is that you're not necessarily trying to convince other people of the contradictions of capitalism, because if you're successful, they will observe the contradictions themselves with their own two eyes, and come to that conclusion on all their own. That experience is much stronger than reading any literature or theory or listening to any speech.
I know what you're saying, yes, but I'm not trying to argue about realistic goals right now. What I'm trying to get at is that everyone can be painfully aware how contradictory capitalism is and still not only participate in it, but actively further capitalism. And I'm not saying just some people being aware of it, I'm saying that literally everybody, as in 100% of the people in the world, can be aware of internal contradictions and still run with it. Essentially, capitalism itself absorbing its own contradictions, existing as a sort of zombie version of itself, only being kept alive because people act as if it was alive.
I guess what I'm trying to argue is that it's not enough that people know that capitalism is deeply contradictory, people need to start behaving as if capitalism is deeply contradictory, and thus it makes no sense to participate in it*. Through this logic, doing short squeezes is a bit counter-productive, especially if you aren't very surprised about market insiders actively denouncing it (of course they would denounce it!), discord banning WSB (of course they would ban WSB!), or RH halting trades of the shorted options, because this is understood as the logical reaction of exploiting a rigged market. It's part of what comes with the territory of outsmarting the big guy. The important takeaway is that capitalism will preserve this fantasy of another opportunity to outsmart the system presenting itself, but only if the current system is preserved with its own contradictions, because the alternative has no means nor comes with a justification for exploitation. Maybe at some point all avenues of exploiting a flawed system will be obviously (obvious for everyone) exhausted, leaving no choice but to abandon capitalism, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Also I'm not really doing moral judgements or whatever, essentially I'm trying to explain how capitalism preserves itself despite glaring contradictions. It just does! Like Apple stuff, it just werks.
*I am well aware of distancing ourselves individually from your own context is essentially impossible, but perhaps if everyone decides to divorce themselves of such a context...