Every supermarket that throws unsold but edible food into a dumpster at the end of the day and pours bleach onto it to prevent the hungry from eating it is reminding us, over and over, that capitalism is not “trade” or “commerce” but rather *sabotage.*
Capitalism isn’t about producing and selling things; it’s about setting up toll booths.
@BendingUnit @HeavenlyPossum Definitely. Industry has existed literally since at least the stone age... Flint has been mined since the paleolithic era.
@HeavenlyPossum when I worked grocery retail we had to separate all foods that could not be donated to the food bank by meat vs non meat. I tried to donate as much as I could but they would not allow us to donate meat if it went past the date, same with if it was a weekend because they didn't do pickups on weekends, and they figured deli stuff and bananas and avocados or whatever would not survive the weekend in the dairy cooler before being picked up Mondays.
It went down to the level of pulling apart deli sandwiches, and all the meat went into this big nasty trash can of old meat they called a "bone barrel" and I was the person made to do that a lot of the time when I worked in the meat department. All non-meats were poured together into a dumpster that during the summer was a foul brew of maggots and rotting food. It was a fuckin crime against me and my senses just like it was a crime against humanity to destroy edible food.
@Galletasalada @HeavenlyPossum Yeah when I worked at a grocery store we also donated a bunch of food every night but a lot of the time the pushback was from other employees that didn’t want to fuck with it so they could just get home. And like honestly I’m not tryin to blame them either, that job was rough and closing the store meant it was already late as fuck anyway.
There are a million ways management could have streamlined the process and they just didn’t.
Trade? Exchange? Sharing? Gifting? Feasting? Feeding our children? Lots of options.
Yes—many stores use bleach and other harsh chemicals to taint unsold food and make it inedible.
Sometimes the state simply deploys cops on behalf of the stores to help maintain artificial scarcity and protect profits.
https://apnews.com/article/portland-storms-oregon-4eebd2cd2f1b9f798667994bc871a647
@HeavenlyPossum
I don’t quite agree. I think your real problem is the lack of regulation. You have a weak government when it comes to this sort of thing. You (as a country) need to vote in better people. You also need to sort your media out as it gets bad people elected and does not present the bleach pouring as a national scandal. It is effectively, accepted behaviour. It’s de facto ok due to a non-objection from the people. (In case it’s not clear, bleach pour is despicable behaviour and it should be named and shamed).
I totally agree capitalism isn’t something to be held up as the Wunder Pferd but without it we wouldn’t have these phones we use.
The state is not some neutral institution; it’s the coercive and bureaucratic arm of the capital class.
We don’t have phones because of capitalism; we have phones because of the intellectual and physical labor of workers.
@HeavenlyPossum
That is what I am saying too. The state is not some neutral institution. It is the exact opposite.
Also capitalism is the exchange of intellectual and physical labor of workers.
It’s not the capitalist elite, it’s the powerful elite. Money is just one neutral leaver, along with the law, the police, the army, etc. How these ideas are used cannot be neutral. Capitalism is politically neutral as it’s just a logical process but people wielding money are not.
A rock is neutral. The object can be. The choices around it cannot be neutral.
I don’t blame capitalism for the hiking of insulin. The blame the person who did it and the law makers that allowed it. I will not let them have a pass by blaming the leaver they pulled. Get out and vote everyone!
Anyway, that’s my take and we might just have to disagree on this one.
Capitalism is the opposite of politically neutral
"I think your real problem is the lack of regulation"
"That is what I am saying too. The state is not some neutral institution. It is the exact opposite."
Can you clarify how you reconcile these two statements?
The powerful elite are powerful because they serve Capital. Capital is politically neutral because it is served by all sides, that doesn't make it benevolent or even justified. In fact Capital, the true god of this world, is a toxic, cancerous concept that is dragging humanity into oblivion, bringing the biosphere along with it.
As you asked, I think your premise is wrong. The powerful don’t serve capital. Capital serves the powerful. It also serves you but much lesser. The government could redistribute wealth. To do this it would use law, as enforced by the courts who are in turn enforced by the police. It doesn’t. The problem is the government acting for the powerful (unneutral).
If you blame the tool, you excuse the person.
The problem isn’t capital or you wouldn’t be demanding a fair wage, you’d be demanding communism. If you are advocating for communism then this isn’t the right medium for me explain why that is a really bad idea.
I am an anarchist communist, yes.
The state does not use the law to create fair wages because the state is the bureaucratic and coercive arm of the capital class.
To the extent that the state intervenes with capital, it’s in an effort to maintain overall stability in the capitalist system, not to make things “fair” for anyone.
Capitalism is always and everywhere a creature of the state; it has never existed and could never exist without constant, massive, pervasive state violence.
@HeavenlyPossum @taatm @RD4Anarchy
As usual, Possum, you cut right to the heart of the matter: The state is the coercive arm of the capital class and it intervenes to preserve systemic stability. I wonder if Taatm's point is consistent with this if read right and so whether the argument is more semantic than substantial?
Taatm says capital serves the powerful and that government serves the powerful, also that government is a tool. When you say "capital" do you mean more than a big pile of money? There are a lot of synecdochic uses of the word and what you mean specifically isn't clear to me. If the word is used in the larger sense then the question of whether capital serves the powerful or vice-versa is empty since the two words mean the same thing. If capital means nothing more than a pile of money then it's true that the powerful don't serve capital and it's true that capital serves the powerful, but it doesn't seem worth arguing over maybe?
My premise is that human beings can work things out together without being forcefully coerced by a small privileged class of owners/rulers.
I believe that every premise #capitalism is based on is false, perhaps even *intentional* lies. These premises include empirical claims that have been disproven.
Capitalism is a tool designed only to do despicable things. We could eliminate capitalists but if we don't overthrow the idea of Capital itself we would soon find ourselves enslaved again.
There is no such thing as a "fair wage" because the whole system of capitalism and private property is deeply and inherently unfair, morally unjustified and based on horrendous acts of violence, cruelty and genocide.
What is the right medium to explain your idea of why communism is bad? Why can't you explain here why you are opposed to a stateless, classless society?
@HeavenlyPossum @taatm
It's true that we have phones because of labor, but it's at least plausible that without capitalism we wouldn't have phones. This is equivalent to the claim that phones imply capitalism. The argument I'm working on goes like this:
1. The existence of phones requires an extremely complex supply chain, not just for the component parts but for the labor to bring them into being and distribute them. Also network infrastructure is required, along with supply chains of materials and labor to at least maintain the network. All of this is "the phone production process" or PPP.
2. If social changes introduce friction of any kind into a link of one of these chain it makes the phone production process more costly overall whether in terms of materials, labor, or both.
3. If the PPP gets sufficiently costly we won't have nearly as many phones as we have now or maybe none (after the current ones stop working, etc) or the network will break, or something. In other words, a sufficient amount of friction could stop the PPP.
4. If capitalism is abolished the social changes will be vast, unprecedented, and not reliably predictable. We can't now imagine the ways in which people will live without capitalism.
5. Various links in the PPP chains require extremely unpleasant labor, e.g. being forced to mine poisonous dirt at gunpoint and all kinds of stuff like that.
6. Without the coercion necessary to keep people working at jobs that ruin their lives probably fewer people will be interested in doing them.
7. It only takes one or two supply chain breaks to stop the whole PPP. They're all necessary.
8. It's plausible that phones --> capitalism, but not certain. The question will be how much dangerous gross work will people be willing to do if they're not coerced. I don't think it's possible to answer this question on this side of the revolution.
Capitalism isn’t “supply chains,” though capitalism has produced some ludicrously complex and brittle supply chains.
If producing phones is valuable enough to people, we’ll produce them without coercion. Just because we produce them now in horrific, environmentally destructive ways involving immense human suffering doesn’t mean that’s the *only* way to produce them. Perhaps, absent capitalism, we’d produce phones without planned obsolescence built into them.
This I completely agree with. Capital isn't supply chains, but capital can function with incredibly unstable supply chains because they're propped up by violence. I'm absolutely not basing anything on putative good qualities of capitalism, including the widely touted lies about efficiency. So capital's supply chains may or may not seem worthwhile to maintain once the guns are down, like you say. All I'm saying is that it's an open question as to what will seem worthwhile for free people to spend their labor on. We can't know if we'll have phones or not because we're not free to choose. If they choose not to make phones then it's true that phones imply capital, otherwise not.
@AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @taatm
It's interesting to think about how much different the design of phones might be in a post-capitalist world. Our behaviors, the way we use phones and the what phones are designed to do are all so deeply conditioned by #capitalism
We managed without mobile phones for quite a long time. Hell, I didn't acquire a smart phone myself until just last year. They certainly have some benefits, but mostly I think they serve needs that have been manufactured by capitalism and what it has done to us.
@AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @taatm
After posting this I thought about how it's nice to be able to look at weather info on my smart phone, then the Simon & Garfunkel lyrics came to my mind:
"I get the news I need on the weather report
Oh, I can gather all the news I need on the weather report"
Right. This is exactly my point. If phones --> coerced poison dirt digging then we shouldn't have phones. I also think that there's no way now to tell whether or not phones --> poison dirt, so that I prefer to bracket the question. We might have phones after capitalism but maybe it's not possible in any way that our future comrades will find acceptable.
I’m sure there is liability! People are harmed by firms all the time. Two things can be true at once—that there is risk and that these firms exploit that risk to sabotage production and sustain artificial scarcity. (We might ask whether any regulations that compel these firms to dispose of unsold food were written by these very firms).
I picked the food example because it’s particularly atrocious, but we could also talk about the clothing firms that deliberately burn warehouses full of unsold clothes to maintain “exclusivity.”
@mav @HeavenlyPossum I think it only happened once or twice ages ago, which is why everybody's off their beam about it. Kind of like news outlets always saying "alleged" when the story is "guy kicks puppies on live television and then admits to it, accompanied with instant replay." One or two folks successfully sued for defamation of character and slander under such circumstances so nobody wants to be next.
Or, come to think of it, "if you don't belong in this system disconnect now" login messages. Back in the 80's a couple of systems crackers successfully beat the rap because nothing explicitly told them they couldn't break in, and now every last auditor checks for that message first thing.
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