In middle school I learned about imports and exports and, as a suburban kid, I realized that I didn't know anyone who made physical products, and wondered, how can we have nice things without making things in return? Then i found out it was all exploitation and it always has been
As I started to get into politics I was continuously frustrated and baffled by politicians who would promise great great things and then never do any of them once in office, even if they had a majority in parliament and could basically do whatever they wanted. For a while I kinda just chalked it up to the classic "politicians are dishonest," but as I started to become a leftist I quickly realized that the reason nothing ever changes for the better is because all major parties have the same class interests.
The role of disabled people in society. If we all have to have jobs, what about people who can't have a job, and never will? How do they survive? As I grew up, the experience of some close family taught me the answers to these questions... and they are far worse than most people think. Knowing someone with a permanent disability is a recipe for instant radicalization.
But the chuds will always insist the people on government assistance are eating steak and lobster everyday. They are so confident in their wrongness.
a redditor told me that a poor person could just go to the library which would find them a place to live, unironically
What is the relationship between being at the library and having a home? Do they just mean free internet access to look around? Like people are just handing out housing if you ask politely?
their line was that all social services are handed out effortlessly at the library
someone tell them the world could really work that way but we'll need to implement communism
Well obviously no one's just handing out housing, if you want it you have to slay the librarian in single combat, then you become the new librarian and you can live at the library, problem solved.
Just do the ancap thing and assert that the librarian isn’t using the land productively and then the non-state will enforce the NAP and evict the librarian.
I mean if we're going by fantasy rules like "lol farming buffalo isn't productive, lets specicide them and grow cattle instead" just get the god-princess to allow you to live in the library while you complete research for your graduate degree.
Why the economy must always grow. It didn't make sense to me why growth was seen as necessary for a company to be successful, why wouldn't it be fine to stay at a constant output with constant profits? Or even just break even after everyone has been paid?
And why do we as a whole society depend on increasing output every year?
For example, why is it important that we make more and more cars every year, surely at some point everyone has a car, and we've reached the fabled equilibrium? My economics teacher didn't have any answers beyond "Well wouldn't you want your company to grow so you make more money?", and I didn't have the tools to dig into the real reasons, even though I could already see that capitalist growth has no endgame.
Learning some basic marxist analysis of the economy finally made it click, both why everyone is desperate for growth, and why this makes the economy eat itself.
Oh that one was a big one for me. Why did the trajectory of every company need to be a parabola? Couldn't it just plateau at some point?
This is probably the most simple, undeniable axiomatic truths around the sustainability of capitalism. You just can't grow forever on a bounded planet, and yet capitalism needs to always grow.
I find that you can get even the libbiest of libs to accept this contradiction. What they do with it is up to them of course, but it's one of those truths that is very powerful, because of how simple it is.
imagine if cars were made to be reliable, and had cheap, interchangeable parts, instead of pushing for everyone to get a new one every 4 years
A lot of conspiracy theorists are people who see the deep seated problems in the world and lack the education to explain it. There isn’t a secret cabal of Illuminati pulling the strings in world governments. It’s just capital exerting influence to bolster capital. They one entity that influences all the major players is immaterial. They have been conditioned all their life that capitalism is freedom and anything else is the beginning of the end, so when they start to see the cracks showing they have to conjure up some explanation as to what or who is sabotaging their perfect system.
I came here to say exactly this. Before fully comprehending imperialism, I found it really difficult to understand why poor countries existed. Even more difficult to explain was why poor countries stayed poor. Subliminal discrimination and racism can definitely play a part here, but even then it can't explain why those countries are still poor after almost a century of "help" from the west.
Also, explaining why the wars in the middle east happened is difficult without imperialism.
Century of help my ass. A hundred years of shitty reparitions isnt going to magically cure hundreds of years of systematic exploitation.
There's a reason I put help in quotations, and it's sarcasm. The "aid" (again, pls read sarcasm) western nations give to third world countries is exploitation.
When we went to war with Iraq, their economy was absolutely destroyed. The US then conveniently decided to help Iraq "rebuild." We then gave them billions in aid, on the condition that they sell off their state owned enterprises to american capitalists. (This is an extreme simplification, but you get the point. Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine does a good job of explaining the process of economic imperialisation through implementing Friedmanite economic policies during times of crisis).
Capitalist nations will NEVER provide aid just because a country needs it, they'll only offer it if there's something to gain.
The normalization of extreme price gouging on basic needs. The ruling owner class has very effectively convinced the average idiot that there is no ruling class and that you're getting a fair deal when you're paid 20% of what you produce while paying 300% to 10,000% the cost for housing, education, and healthcare. Just ignore the billions accumulating in the owner's coffers while you're being evicted from your home, completely unrelated.
Why the world sucks ass and is depressing as fuck and yet everyone doesn't commit suicide
Life and everything within life. I know that sounds like a broad answer but when I was a lib you notice the contradictions within capitalism without asking how or why. Like I noticed how you were forced to work, "pick a career" and after 40-50 years of grueling labor then you get to retire if you're lucky, or you notice commodity fetishism within consumerist culture and how these commodities are almost worshiped because of their supposed value and status symbol. You wonder to yourself how people could be racist or prejudiced but you blame the individual for a lack of education and think if people were educated, we could get together, talk out our issues and get along. You notice the slide towards nationalistic right-wing movements across the globe, you're a little worried but there's no structural economic and political framework to make sense of it.
I think some people including myself, notice this irrationality or this madness to some degree. What helped make sense of it all was Marxism and its explanatory power made it easier to realize the structural social and economic interests that either give rise to contradictions or reinforce them. A good clip that helps kind of sum up how I felt about everything before is this Michael Parenti clip . If you have six minutes, I urge you to watch it.
One thing that always bothered me was the question why some countries are poor and others rich. The only answer that capitalists give you is that those people are lazy or something along those lines. Imperialism isnt even mentioned as a possibility.
