HeavenlyPossumA thread of threads.
A survey of some examples of capitalist sabotage, through destruction of production, of various economic sectors:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The other day, I mentioned the deliberate destruction of food by supermarkets as an example of capitalism’s sabotage of production to create artificial scarcity and enforce profits. Some people rightfully asked about liability and risk stemming from eating expired food. So, to explain why I don’t think that’s a salient factor in their decision-making, I thought I’d do a quick survey of other sectors to see if they, too, sabotage production in this manner. https://apnews.com/article/portland-storms-oregon-4eebd2cd2f1b9f798667994bc871a647 1/5
A survey of some evidence that, contrary to neoclassical models, capitalists collude with each other to raise prices all the time.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In neoclassical doctrine, economic competition will inevitably lower prices, like gravity acting inexorably on mass. If some firms are selling at a particular price, the story goes, a competitor will attempt to sell at a lower price—such as by accepting lower margins or, ideally, innovating new processes and technologies to lower production costs—to capture market share and thus profits from competitors. Those original firms will then have to lower *their* prices or lose all their sales to the new, lower-price competitor. Everyone wins, thanks to those lower prices and new innovations. Well, everyone except for those capitalists, who must constantly lower prices in order to avoid being competed out of the market. 1/10
A discussion about the nature of wealth and poverty, and why the poor of today are not “richer” than ancient kings and historical titans of industry.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
This is an incredibly common and incredibly stupid take on wealth: that people today have so much more “stuff” than people in the past, so we—even the poorest among us—are richer than ancient kings and titans of industry. 1/9 https://twitter.com/cafreiman/status/1635430623958401024
A brief look at capitalism’s role in social crises:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
A lot of people buy alcohol, but a small number of people buy A LOT of alcohol. This is pretty common in a number of industries: sellers rely on a small number of hyper-consumers for the majority of their revenue. Alcoholism is good for alcohol industry profits. 1/7 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/22/problem-drinkers-alcohol-industry-most-sales-figures-reveal
An investigation into money, credit, and the social role of landlords:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
It is a common capitalist trope that landlords “provide” housing to people. They are, the story goes, doing everyone a service! And we all know the appropriate response: it’s actually the tenant who provides the landlord with housing, by paying capital costs (like the landlord’s mortgage, which was borrowed to pay the people who actually built the home) in their rent payments. Landlords don’t provide, they *hoard,* collecting tolls by restricting access to housing. Some of the cleverer ideologues might argue: the landlords play an important role by paying the capital costs up front. Without landlords to rent out housing incrementally, everyone would have to save up enough capital to buy outright, and most of us would be too poor to buy a house outright. So it’s worth asking: why do landlords have access to all that capital up front, and can spend it all at once, while others don’t and have to pay for it a bit at a time? 1/11
On the enclosure of our roads and car dependency as capitalist rent:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In 2010, Raquel Nelson attempted to cross a street in Marietta, Georgia, with her three children. Rather than walking a third of a mile away to the nearest crosswalk and then another third of a mile to her home, she attempted to directly cross. While she was doing so, Jerry Guy, who was driving a car while intoxicated, struck and killed Nelson’s four-years-old son A.J. Guy was convicted of hit-and-run and sentenced to six months in prison. Nelson—who was not driving a car—was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 36 months in prison. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/07/14/mother-convicted-of-vehicular-homicide-for-crossing-street-with-children/ 1/9
A thread on art as an enclosed commons.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
If you spend time with kids, one thing you’ll quickly notice is how incredibly creative they are. They churn out art at prolific rates, and seek out opportunities to create it as a form of play. I have two kids and have often struggled with figuring out storage solutions for their art, all of which is precious to me. I was a kid once too, and I have memories of making lots of art as a kid. But, at some point, I just sort of stopped. This isn’t true for everyone, of course; some people go on to become professional artists, while others keep it up as a hobby. I suspect, though, that most people reading this will share my experience: like most imaginative play, we leave the daily production of art behind in our childhoods. Isn’t that strange? 1/8
A quick look at the Irish rundale system for managing common property:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The dominant pattern of Irish community organization used to be something called the “rundale.” The rundale was a system for managing and dividing up village agricultural land according to need. The word derives from two Gaelic words—“roinn,” or division, and “daíl,” a meeting or assembly. The rundale, then, was “the meeting to divide up the land.” Each peasant village, or clachan, owned land in common. Some of it was used as common grazing land for cows and other livestock; some was used for gardens by individual households, and some was used as crop land to grow oats, rye, barley, and potatoes. Periodically—I presume each year—the clachan would meet in a daíl to redistribute crop land among households. 1/5
On the imposition of markets and the demolition of society:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves). 1/15
On labor and leisure as false distinctions, and the joy of just being alive.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
I have a cat that freaking loves to chase the laser pointer dot. Just bonkers for it. Up and down the stairs, around corners, leaping many times his height to try to catch it. In doing so, he mimics the act of hunting, on which cats naturally depend for their food. So when he plays at hunting with the laser pointer, does this imply he experiences that as work? Or do cats experience hunting as play? 1/11
An exploration of self-harm as a crime of the rich against the rest of us:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image · Content warning: Self-harm, capitalism
Freedom doesn’t mean much without the freedom to escape, to leave, to opt out entirely:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from a speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1859 in which he critically compared wage labor—especially life-long wage labor with no hope of ever graduating to independent production—to chattel slavery. As hard as it is to imagine today, there was once a robust public debate in the US in which words like “capital” and “labor” and “wage slavery” were explicitly used. Today, the slightest whiff of these would have you accused of communism and brayed off the public stage. Our discourse has gotten *more* restricted over time. 1/10
The simplicity and simplification of presidential speech is a good proxy for how much coercive control the state has over us:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Here’s a brief excerpt from one of Joe Biden’s state of the union addresses (bear with me I’m going somewhere with this): “Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies. But we’re better positioned than any country on Earth. We have more to do, but here at home, inflation is coming down. Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 a gallon since their peak. Food inflation is coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months while take home pay has gone up. Additionally, over the last two years, a record 10 million Americans applied to start a new small business. Every time somebody starts a small business, it’s an act of hope. And the Vice President will continue her work to ensure more small businesses can access capital…” Just…really boring boilerplate, right? A handful of data, some platitudes, very simple language. Blech. 1/8
On Thorstein Veblen and property as sabotage:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.” A Veblen good is something for which demand *increases* as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price. Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars. The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous. 1/8
On violence and inequality:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Regardless of Zach Snyder’s deeply fascist, deeply homoerotic, deeply ahistorical film 300, classical Spartan society was very shitty. Sparta was a highly militarized, nearly-totalitarian slave state. A tiny hereditary elite devoted itself almost entirely to the production and export of violence, living off the labor of a large servile population, the helots. Helots lived a bit like medieval serfs: they lived in their own villages, farmed their own fields, raised their own families. But each was owned by some member of the Spartan elite and owed a regular tribute of agricultural production to that owner, freeing the Spartan elites from manual labor and permitting them to focus on learning how to hurt people. 1/9
An exploration of some of the ways nonstate societies deter power-seeking and aggression:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
How, I’ve been asked, do people in nonstate societies prevent bad guys from taking over? It’s a bit of question begging: it presumes that the state (bad guys who have taken over) is required to prevent other bad guys from taking over. But let’s take a serious look at *some* of the scholarship on how and why nonstate societies aren’t quite as vulnerable to this as people seem to commonly assume. This is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive. 1/
Do people really like living under state rule?
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Someone said to me “I think most people believe states in general make their lives better, or at least can given the right leadership, and so like them.” I’m not even sure how you could confirm this. Maybe a poll? And even then, I’m not sure how you could trust the results, considering that most people alive are subject to state power, have never known an alternative, and have been taught since birth by the press, schools, and popular entertainment that there is no alternative to the status quo. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/12/paw-patrol-police-copaganda-children-peppa-pig/ 1/6
Archeologists should probably stop being “surprised” every time they find evidence for women hunters and leaders in the past.
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
This study is making the rounds: “Through the analysis of sexually dimorphic amelogenin peptides in tooth enamel, we establish that the most socially prominent person of the Iberian Copper Age (c. 3200–2200 BC) was not male, as previously thought, but female. The analysis of this woman, discovered in 2008 at Valencina, Spain, reveals that she was a leading social figure at a time where no male attained a remotely comparable social position.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36368-x 1/6
(moved)Galbinus Caeli 🌯@HeavenlyPossum real archeologists aren't. Biblical Archeologists and people who think Indiana Jones is a documentary might be.
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