Are folks really pressuring independent artists, authors, etc., not to promote their work here?
Do you also picket your local independent cafe and mom and pop stores? What happens if you succeed in shutting them down? That’s right, you end up with a McDonald’s in their place.
Please learn to separate capitalists from folks trying to survive under capitalism. Independent people trying to pay their rent isn’t advertising, it’s existing. What Coca-Cola does is advertising.
#fediverse ❤️ #indie
I agree with the message, but not with the ideology.
Capitalism is not the problem. *Corporativism* is. *Globalization* is.
Market forces are good. Profit-seeking as a way to collectively determine the best allocation of resources is good. Exchange of capital for labor and services is good.
What is bad is to have *corporations* with so much money/power and a faceless "executive board of directors" who deal with a production system that affects people on the other side of the world.
There are many small business owners who are doing a lot more than just "surviving under Capitalism". And this is something that independent artists and authors should *aspire* to, instead of being pushed to feel guilty about it.
The idea of "indie artists" is only possible because we live in a world that can produce so much wealth that we can actually afford to have people not working on something else. Only "Capitalism" could bring this. No other means of production managed that.
To wrap up: the idea that people are only selling things online to "survive" seems to me like an expression of victim-culture.
if people want to sell things online, great! A society where people can simply say "I've done this, and it can be yours in exchange of X" seems to me a lot healthier than one where people can only support themselves if they are deemed worth of pity and show *strict* compliance to some vague notion of "community values".
The initial use of the term “capitalism” in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 (“What I call ‘capitalism’ that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others”) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 (“Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor”).[20]: 237 Karl Marx frequently referred to the “capital” and to the “capitalist mode of production” in Das Kapital (1867).[26][27] Marx did however not use the form capitalism, but instead used capital, capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear frequently.[27][28] Due to the word being coined by socialist critics of capitalism, economist and historian Robert Hessen stated that the term “capitalism” itself is a term of disparagement and a misnomer for economic individualism.[29] Bernard Harcourt agrees with the statement that the term is a misnomer, adding that it misleadingly suggests that there is such as a thing as “capital” that inherently functions in certain ways and is governed by stable economic laws of its own.[30]
> regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor
> capital does not belong to those who labor
the term is primarily about who owns what and who calls the shots, not merely whether or not whoever it is that’s calling the shots should respond to feedback from market forces
> capital does not belong to those who labor
That definition is a bit outdated, don't you think? Liberal professionals very much have access and get to keep capital. Small business owners still work on their business and still get to keep capital. Even workers of large Corporations (e.g, the car industry in the XX Century, tech in the XXI) still get to keep a sizable portion of the capital accumulated by the Corporation.
Aral Balkan
Raphael Lullis
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