★ Amy Star ★capitalists: "without a profit motive, nobody would do anything. society would collapse."
my friends & acquaintances: "I implemented a SPARC emulator in pure CSS"
BeldarakIt's really crazy (and infuriating) when they say this.
Capitalism is not that old. How do they think villages and communities were built and managed before capitalism?
Also, they will often default to the "who will clean the sewers in a socialist world?".
Man, I'd be happy to clean the sewers, on my own terms and schedule if it could prevent me from waking up every single day at dawn to do fuck all in front of a computer for 8 hours :|
Also, huh... Who's deciding that cleaning sewers or healing people should be such low pay jobs? Oh right, it's capitalists.
yunchtimewhile inventing hedge fund derivative calculations must obviously pay the most! they are parasites.
K~@Beldarak @AmyZenunim Yeah. It's pretty messed up that in a capitalist system, the people who physically do the work tend to get the lowest pay while the people who own stuff (i.e. have 'capital') get the highest pay - often without actually doing anything at all.
Bob Thomson@Beldarak @AmyZenunim I often think this too, capitalism in the current form is only 2-3 generations old, yet collectively we act as if it's this built-in thing that we can never replace with any other way. It's gas lighting on a grand scale from those doing just fine on the status quo.
@bobthomson70 @Beldarak i've read their theories and it basically boils down to "capitalism is a primordial truth of biology, even lobsters in the permian era practiced their own forms of capitalism". completely unhinged revisionism that flies in the face of how we know preindustrial societies functioned based on pure historical accounts.
potentially hazardous object@AmyZenunim @bobthomson70 @Beldarak wasn't the lobsters thing from, like, them putting a bunch of lobters in a tank that's more crowded than their natural habitat and letting them sort themselves out?
Carson Hill@AmyZenunim @bobthomson70 @Beldarak
Another Crabs Treasure comes to mind... 🦀
ratfactorTotally. If you put somebody like me in charge of cleaning a sewer and gave me free reign and autonomy, I'm pretty sure I'd be reading books about sewers and the history of sewers and would make changes until it did NOT suck to clean anymore...for myself and whoever came after. Anything can be an interesting problem if you're enabled to solve it.
Yeah, it's easier to improve society when you don't have someone at the top syphoning all ressources
Octorine@Beldarak @AmyZenunim Before capitalism, we had serfs. Are you actually saying everyone should just go back to being serfs?
Ofc not, I clearly stated I was in favour of socialism.
Feodalism wasn't the only system before capitalism. You took the worst exemple, why?
But anyway, I'm not saying we should go BACK, just that other systems are possible and that we should move FORWARD, away from capitalism.
To be fair, I also read about better capitalist systems, so those are options too, but capitalists will just close their ears any time someone says we should improve society somehow.
@Beldarak @AmyZenunim I picked feudalism because that's where capitalism came from, so if you want to talk about life before capitalism, it seems like the natural place to start.
That's one of the issue capitalism has I think. It comes from an exploitative system and evolved through crisisn revolutions and industrial changes to become another exploitative system.
But like I said, my point was just to say capitalism wasn't always there and can be replaced. I don't think it should be replaced with older systems though but rather a new one.
That new system would put the people and the planet at the center.
Using the technological progress we made and put it at work towards those goals.
But for that we need to get rid of the sociapathic oligarchs that are currently running the show.
Progress and production should serve humanity, not a few child rapists at the top.
Lea@Beldarak @octorine @AmyZenunim
>"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin in “Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books"
>"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin in "The Dispossessed"
Woozle Hypertwin@octorine @Beldarak @AmyZenunim
Feudalsm was a system that existed before capitalism; it was hardly the only one.
I think your observation of the connection kinda underscores the OP's point: capitalism was invented as a way of doing feudalism while making it seem more palatable.
Maybe we should try adopting a system that emerged from something better than that, hey.
knowuhCapitalism is just the latest form of feudalism, something with a long European history.