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“But capitalism is so efficient at growing!”
Yeah, but now capitalism has grown out of control:
meta-capitalist game show idea:
you could do this in about any format. video, podcast, maybe even sets of still images.
The core concept is a bunch of ad reads for your sponsors. the sponsors are the contestants.
you use really good production values, but you get progressively edgier and more hostile to them as the season goes on. the prize is a free ad campaign for the last one to drop out/denounce you.
This ties into the notion of interpassivity. This is when a piece of media perform an action for you (think interactivity, but exactly the opposite). An example is the laugh track on sitcoms. Another is the series or film performing your environmental or anti-capital activism for you. Frequently the bad guy is some big polluting corp, or some evil rich guy who wants to bulldoze the community center to put his Luxury Resort there. You watch the movie, feel all rebellious and sympathetic with the main characters, and go home feeling like you’ve done something, when in fact all you’ve done is feed Disney some more money. See also movies like triangle of sadness and the glass onion or whatever.
Mark Fischer’s capitalist realism explores this and similar ideas in a much more comprehensive and eloquent manner than I ever could. Give it a read, it’s quite short!
minimalism is so funny to me.
Like you’re buying shit so you can not buy things? Yeah ok buddy.
That is one side of it that people fall into. But another side is sometimes buying something additional will simplify your life then it makes sense. Not everyone is one pair clothing and everything fits in a bag. Something as simple as you and your SO deciding on the same shampoo to only have one bottle in the bathroom. This allows you to buy in bulk the ONE shampoo you need. Also one less item to keep track of, need shampoo? which kind?
Same with food storage containers. Might be best to throw away all the different kinds you have and buy ones where all the tops are the same. Yeah, I bought something additional it now takes “minimal” effort to find something to store food it. It’s more of an overall mindset to most people. It’s the constant asking yourself “Do I need this in my life?” as you start to figure out all your shit starts to own you. Organization (a lot of money spent here) is key to this as if you can’t find something in your home…do you really have it? Minimalists want streamlined processes or “OCD with purpose” as I like to call it. lol
That is fake minimalism. Minimalism in practice is donating stuff you don’t need and not buying stuff unless you truly need it and will use it.
I’ve been really interested in learning how to grow vegetables in my back garden. Somehow I just have this feeling that learning how to care about plants to make food (and not just because it flowers and looks pretty) will open my eyes to thinking about nature and the environment
At the moment, climate collapse is a conceptual issue to me in that “sure the days get warmer every year but it’s actually quite nice for me right now”, but I’m not as in tune with my environment to really notice how it’s impacting us.
Growing veg also feels like it has a higher pay off than just the cost price of a single unit of veg. There’s probably some nutritional benefit to it, knowledge etc that does beyond the price of buying an onion from the shop. I think getting in touch with this principle is the key to getting out of the ruthless capitalism structure
Basically, if we all just stopped buying shit and learnt how to fix and make shit ourselves our experiences of the things we attach ourselves to would be so much more authentic
You don’t have to buy doc martens because you feel like a rebel.
Punk Rock itself is not a product of capitalism.
Album and ticket sales are.“Oh, you’re expecting capitalism to collapse into anarchy? Better BUY lots of food and antibiotics to stockpile for the collapse!”
Grinch smirk
don’t buy into the illusion that capitalism is so self-organizing and organic. it requires the direct protection and supervision of a nationwide military and a police force -multiple police forces actually - to protect capital.
Kid named Guy Debord:
Well, things would exist whether you’re in a capitalist economic system or not. People would make music and label their genre. People would write books and want to sell them. The real difference is who gets the profits.
Sure, sort of. Commodity production, ie the production of goods purely in order to sell and make a profit, likely won’t last forever, especially as the rate of profit trends towards 0.
I mean without capitalism they wouldn’t have the concept of selling, so probably not.
It’s also how driven the profits are. All the choices on the way, are they directed for maximum profit or for good. And many things that are made didn’t need to be made, and wouldn’t if people didn’t care to buy them. The effort instead could have gone into good things.
Well it can’t commodify me! Oh wait.
Sorry, I got myself worked up.
do you sell your labor on the job market?
Grr
The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.
Imagine watching that episode then going to a desk/office/cubicle job 5 days a week without going insane. Must take a shit ton of cognitive dissonance and shamelessness to voluntarily work for capitalists.
Certified Mark Fisher moment.
I haven’t played it, but is this disco elesium?
yep
Create a problem then sell the solution. Simple as
Sell the revolution.
How much would people pay for communism, how much for other forms of government?
This is why talking about things like government services just wash over conservatives. I was talking about transit and a common reply I get is “it’s not even profitable!”. It’s intrinsically linked that if it doesn’t make money, it’s valueless… it doesn’t matter if people use it, or if people need it, if it breaks even, or even if it’s designed to run at a slight loss because it’s value is more important than profit. People have lost the ability to understand that profit is not always the goal.
if it breaks even, or even if it’s designed to run at a slight loss because it’s value is more important than profit.
If it breaks even it can sustain itself in a market economy (anything where revenue >= costs can). If it operates at a loss, then someone other than the user is having to pay for it, and that’s usually where you lose them (because generally the answer is that you’re expecting them to pay for it in part, usually through taxes).
This is also why they get so grumpy about things like welfare (especially the ones who are working class and barely getting by) - they actively dislike the idea that they should have to pay for their own food/shelter/etc and also help pay for your food/shelter/etc when things are tight and they’re destroying their work/life balance just to get by and life would be meaningfully easier for them if they weren’t paying as much in taxes (and they grossly overestimate how much tax money goes to SNAP/TANF/etc).
Oh I know that, and the last point is what I try to drive home. That things like transit and food benefits are a fraction of a percentage of their taxes. I did amtrak for someone and realized it was less than 2 dollars a year that the person paid for amtrak, but them talking about it sounded like it was sending them right to the poor house. The military, on the other hand…
It’s because they’re convinced, through their own experience, there isn’t enough money to go around so we have to make more instead of use what we have wisely.
Aka send a plumber to the billionaires
The view that public transport is not profitable because it does not directly turn a profit also completely misses the bigger picture. Imagine in a city where public transport operates at a loss, but provides transportation to and from work for loads of people. Without public transport, they’d have to switch to something like cars, causing congestion, causing delays, causing loss of profit for the city as a whole. Not to mention less time spend with your family or your hobbies, causing unhappiness, decreasing people’s desire to work to the best of their abilities etc etc. I could probably go on quite a while listing things public transport provides that indirectly works in favor of capitalism.
Not to mention the expenses that cities waste on the consequences of cars, like crashes and infrastructure maintenance.
