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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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The thing that gets me is how often this sort of thing is happening all around us without us noticing. Every online purchase is bound to be doing this in some form or another. Every plane ticket, every uber ride. All designed to figure out the exact cost we're willing to pay for the service.
I'm so tired of capitalism...
I realized the other day about how much I’ve internalized the violence of capitalism. I was driving down the road and there was a man with a sign that said he was hungry and needed help and my first reflexive feeling was annoyance.
That’s insane, that’s monstrous, that made me stop.
Here is a human being, standing there just holding a sign and I’m annoyed, even angry at them. The system is set up so that there will be people that can’t be exploited by capital and that’s their lot, to stand on the side of the road begging for scraps.
You see it so frequently in capitalism that your choices are to be sad for them, be angry at them, or ignore them entirely.
Maybe I wasn’t annoyed or angry at that man, but at myself for hardening my heart to his plight, and at the system we are stuck in that put him there.
Same thoughts over here, friend. The thing keeping me sane is that I started volunteering. Look for the helpers, an all that (Mr Rogers). Shit is fucked and food scarcity is a thing for a lot of people in our immediate vicinity. I found a weekly breakfast through a local political org, but find something that speaks to you. Mutual aid groups, or do a shoe drive with your parish, or hell - one lady just collects bags of clothes donations from offerup and shows up when we're serving bfast with a folding table and people can grab what they need.
I carry a lot of rage at "the system" and helping my neighbors goes a very long way in keeping it focused where it might make some change for the better.
Don't use those companies. Walk to a fucking store. Pay cash. Nothing is keeping us from showing capitalists what we want and what we will spend our money on.
Cancel your Prime, your Walmart sub, your Target rewards account. Find a non-chain store for things.
Show others around you how it's not that hard to cut unnecessary shit out of your life.
Start today, keep it small.
We love to complain as a species, don't we? Take that energy and change your habits and let others know. That's how you end up reading stories like "Companies respond to changing consumer preferences for more durable goods and more privacy."
I don't mean to target you, I am just as guilty of these things. Instead, this is a call to myself and others to complain less and change more.
if by do more u mean organize a revolution then yeah do more, but if u mean vote with ur wallet just a friendly reminder that the corps have an unimaginably bigger wallet than anyone else and ur individualistic attempt to change the world thru this means will be completely drowned out in literal billions of dollars of propaganda.
If you feel that way, I guess their propaganda dollars are working against you, at the least.
Stop thinking you're so outgunned.
if u think u can beat them in their system that they made and control by playing by their rules u are delusional. u can not fight capitalism by consuming.
I'm not trying to beat capitalism. I like regulated, competitive capitalism.
Why support an unsustainable system?
Because I think with proper regulation capitalism has ushered in the greatest improvements in quality of life compared to the other economic systems we have tried.
When you don't assume infinite growth and you instead optimize for maintaining a distribution of capital, I think it can be a good motivating system. We just need our baseline focused by human rights, not the money.
Money is what we decide it is, not the other way around. The people who are in charge right now want you to think money is in control.
Why do you believe that Capitalism has done that? I think reading Wage Labor and Capital might help you.
I believe it because countries with more capitalist tendencies tend to have higher standards of living than other countries.
That's an easy mistake to make. Judging countries by where they get their wealth, ie exploitation of the Global South, combined with judging by trajectory, will explain why this is a mistake.
Capitalism allowed the global north and "west" to outpace those other countries and exploit them in the first place. It wasn't moral, but capitalism is what positioned them in the first place.
Yes, via violent domestic and hyper-violent international exploitation.
Read the linked text.
Like I said, it wasn't moral. It is still a result of capitalism. Think we've probably finished here because you're not my teacher and you don't assign me reading.
It was not, it was a result of industrialization, followed by Imperialism.
Suit yourself though.
Colonial imperialism began with industrialization in your explanation? Capitalist countries were colonizing the world well before the industrial revolution.
Colonialism is not the same as what I am referring to as Imperialism. I specifically mean the point at which Capitalism reaches outward and exports Capital to less developed countries to super-exploit for super-profits.
🤷♂️
its hard for individual action to fix a societal problem though.
you and me both