The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.
Create a problem then sell the solution. Simple as
Infinite growth in a finite system is the definition of cancer. And like a cancer it will keep poisoning us, and must be cut out and eradicated.
Not the greatest dude, but had a sick quote that sums up this post:
“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” - Vladimir Lenin
“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.”
– Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
If a system needs constant growth to survive it will eventually collapse.
Finally YOLO makes sense. Yes, capitalism indeed only lives once. It will have its lifetime, and then it will collapse and be done with. It will not come back, it will not be reborn.
I’ve always believed that capitalism is the default state of human exchange and the opposite of capitalism which I define tersely as empathy at scale takes effort.
Capitalism ≠ commerce
Oh i know so many people who are into vanity. Everything goes as long as there’s no point in it.
This is why talking about things like government services just wash over conservatives. I was talking about transit and a common reply I get is “it’s not even profitable!”. It’s intrinsically linked that if it doesn’t make money, it’s valueless… it doesn’t matter if people use it, or if people need it, if it breaks even, or even if it’s designed to run at a slight loss because it’s value is more important than profit. People have lost the ability to understand that profit is not always the goal.
The view that public transport is not profitable because it does not directly turn a profit also completely misses the bigger picture. Imagine in a city where public transport operates at a loss, but provides transportation to and from work for loads of people. Without public transport, they’d have to switch to something like cars, causing congestion, causing delays, causing loss of profit for the city as a whole. Not to mention less time spend with your family or your hobbies, causing unhappiness, decreasing people’s desire to work to the best of their abilities etc etc. I could probably go in quite a while listing things public transport provides that indirectly works in favor of capitalism.
“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would ‘critique’ capital end up ‘reinforcing’ it instead…”
very true detective
When you commodify all the people’s wants and needs, you commodify the people.
What are we to them capitalists but (wage) slaves?
See how in the US we wait to potty train until 3,4,5 years old, while most other countries potty train earlier. Gotta sell those pull-ups!
What? No we don’t.
commodity production
someone read adorno
