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.
@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 @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.
HeavenlyPossum
The Animal and the Machine
Adrian Riskin 
RD
NomiChirps