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#capitalism
zetrystan · 2 days
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My smooth brain does NOT appreciate the complexity of America's capitalism!!!1!
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mbrainspaz · 5 hours
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The thing about our american capitalist system as it stands is that there is a giant fucking Murder Axe swinging back and forth over all of us, and you don't ever see it unless you're unfortunate enough to fall into the axe pit. Sure, sometimes heads went missing but that was just the world you lived in. Then one day you got a chronic illness and lost your job and your housing and suddenly THERE'S THE AXE COMING TO KILL YOU. You dodge for all you're worth. Again and again. And you don't know how you were ever blind to it. Even if you survive long enough to crawl back out of the pit you can never unsee the Murder Axe. You arrive back in normal society only to realize everyone around you worships the Axe.
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politijohn · 3 days
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jadagul · 1 day
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Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.
Except.
I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."
And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".
These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.
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genderqueerdykes · 13 hours
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it's ass-backwards that under capitalism people like cashiers, who genuinely can slack off at work at times due to long periods of literally nothing happening at their jobs and literally nothing of importance to do get fired for taking even a moment to look at their phone, but landlords and people in government jobs that are literally the only person between someone living and dying can slack off because they've "earned" it. they've "worked so hard" that they can totally ignore their responsibilities with little to no repercussions, but the person working at the shoe store can't sit down and daydream when there's zero customers and everything down to sweeping the floor for the 20th time that day has been done over and over again.
it should be that the more vital your job is to someone else's survival and well being, the less you get to slack off. it should never be excused for someone who is literally responsible for someone else's food, housing, or safety to do literally nothing for the majority of their work day. do i think that everyone should be worked to the bone? hell no, but if you're going to willingly enter a job where you are the only thing between someone and survival, you shouldn't get to just ignore your responsibilities. find another job if the responsibility of making sure other people are safe just isn't for you.
how can you say you've "earned" the right to fuck around and do nothing at work if you don't do your job to begin with? you've earned jack shit. not that anyone should have to "earn" the right to rest, but you can't get on your high horse about "earning" something if you don't work in the first place. you don't get to look down on minimum wage workers for doing the same thing you do every day with zero repercussions.
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theconcealedweapon · 2 days
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Step 1: Rich people increase prices in order to increase their own profits.
Step 2: The working class want higher wages so they can afford the price increases.
Step 3: Bootlickers blame the working class for the inflation, even if the higher wages never happen.
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Xavier Olivé is the last person renting a flat in a building in the Eixample [neighbourhood of Barcelona, Catalonia], after a Dutch company has bought the whole building. He denounces that the owners have expelled all the neighbours who always lived here and now all the other flats are touristic or luxury apartments.
Despite being saddened by the situation and fearing they might expel him as well, he is decided to resist because he doesn't want to leave.
By Barcelona TV. English subtitles added by me.
Sadly, this is a common story in Barcelona and other cities and towns affected by touristic massification.
We urgently need laws that regulate housing so that locals aren't massively expelled to make room for tourists or second homes for rich foreigners, and to stop vulture funds from buying up huge amounts of property to raise the prices. But right now, as a tourist, the most important thing you can do to stop kicking people out of their homes is easy: NEVER, NEVER STAY AT AN AIRBNB, AN UNCONTROLLED TOURISTIC APARTMENT, OR SIMILAR. Always stay at certified hotels (or, of course, with friends and family if you have them there).
If you rent an apartment that is being marketed to tourists where there's a housing crisis for locals, or an Airbnb anywhere, you're effectively destroying the local community.
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longlivepalestina · 11 hours
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@linahadid on insta
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“The division of labor is a broad concept and both in the workplace and across societies, and there are numerous social and cultural distinctions that shape its formation, including the organization of productive and social reproductive labor through gendered and racial hierarchies. However, at this point, Marx is focused on divisions between firms and economic sectors and more broadly with territorial divisions of labor. As with cooperation, he suggests (cursorily) that a social division of labor of some form exists in all types of societies, and in relation to territory, this includes exchange relations that arise between different communities with different assets, resources, and products. He asserts that “the foundation of every division of labor which has obtained a certain degree of development and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the separation of town from country.” While territorial divisions of labor exist in precapitalist societies, the division of labor in the manufacturing system provides a “fresh stimulus” to the “territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to specific districts of a country” and “exploits all natural peculiarities.” This extends yet more broadly to the “colonial system and world market.”
While they reinforce each other, Marx makes an important distinction between the division of labor in the enterprise and in society, which he suggests, differ not only in degree but kind. One key difference is that with the social division of labor, the means of production are not strictly concentrated, but rather distributed among independent producers, and the connections between them are formed through the purchase and sale of commodities. The way the social division of labor is organized is also quite different. Marx points out that its organization is not based on conscious control but rather “the play of chance and caprice,” which “results in a motley pattern of distribution of the producers and their means of production among the various branches of social labour.” While the division of labor in production is extensively planned, regulated, and supervised—and is thus enforced a priori by capital—the division of labor in society, Marx writes, is enforced a posteriori, via market-price fluctuation and competition.
As a result, capitalism is characterized by “anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour.” While capitalists eagerly plan the organization of production in the factory, they continually resist attempts to control and plan the social division of labor. This resistance, as Marx presciently observes, is enforced by bourgeois ideology which “celebrates the division of labour in the workshop” but “denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially.”
There is a deep contradiction, in Marx’s view, between socialized production and private appropriation, leading him to suggest that under socialism, society-wide planning would eliminate capitalist “anarchy of production,” ensuring a more rational allocation of economic resources and productive capacities, while eliminating economic crises. This is expressed succinctly in Marx’s reflections in the Civil War in France, where he writes: “If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the Capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, ‘possible’ Communism?”
In the chapter on divisions of labor, Marx points not only to the irrationality of market coordination, but also to the despotism and coercion this market system produces in the workplace. “Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and command of capital, but creates an additional hierarchical structure among the workers themselves.”The result is an “impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power,” such that “the possibility of an intelligent direction in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others.” Workers’ own capacities to administer production are thwarted.”
Planning and the Ecosocialist Mode of Cooperation, Nicholas Graham
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marxman1 · 21 hours
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would proceed with its plans to assault Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where over 1.5 million refugees are sheltering.
“No international pressure will stop Israel,” Netanyahu said during a meeting of Israel’s cabinet, adding, “If we stop the war now before achieving all of its goals, the meaning is that Israel had lost the war, and we will not allow this.
“We will operate in Rafah,” Netanyahu said. “This will take several weeks, and it will happen.”
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US policies of containment during the Cold War were not exclusively designed to contain the expansion of the Soviet threat. Instead, the East-West security tensions of the Cold War were largely subsidiary to the dynamics of North-South relations in which US policy was shaped predominantly by the logic of capital expansion and the need for the maintenance of “open” political economies in the South. As Layne explains, “Washington’s ambitions were not driven by the Cold War but transcended it. The Cold War was superimposed on an existing hegemonic grand strategy that the United States would have pursued—or attempted to pursue—even if there had been no rivalry with the Soviet Union.” It is not that US-Soviet tensions did not play a role in US interventions in the global South. They of course did. But rather that this picture is incomplete, and that salient dynamics in US imperialism and corresponding Open Door grand strategy provided the primary basis for Cold War interventions into the global South.
Andrew Thomson, Outsourced Empire: How Militias, Mercenaries, and Contractors Support US Statecraft
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politijohn · 20 hours
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troythecatfish · 2 days
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memingursa · 13 hours
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dude
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theconcealedweapon · 3 days
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If working for you is "not a real job", then you don't get to call yourself a job creator.
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aerowolf · 1 day
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Random Hobie Headcanon B4 Bed
He is all for theft from corporations and chains, especially large ones which are unsustainable and mistreat their employees, but refuses to do so from local small businesses. He supports the people who are trying to do their best and make a difference because this capitalist economy is inescapable and it's correct to support the people who have actual soul and love and care in what they do for others.
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