Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just “capitalism” or its consequences.
Trump
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”
Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
Destroying our only habitable planet.
How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don’t have me go through a service to figure it out
Religions.
Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it’s really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can’t even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they’re literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don’t want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn’t making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It’s not a great world we’ve made for ourselves.
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Some oppressors (indirectly, but essentially) started drawing lines one day and agreed that they would each get to farm the humans in their own territory.
Control goes back further than just territories to tribes. The tribe identity is only later tied to specific locations. Tribes formed because pooling resources burdens and learning was more efficient than doing it all yourself. From there, the tribes expanded and joined together and eventually settled into one location. So I disagree that oppressors just decided one day.
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This was the case before countries existed. The territories used to be limited to how far the human cattle could walk, be productive and walk back home in day.
Freedom is only possible where the possibility of encountering other humans is negligible.
Whenever humans aglomerate, non productive humans require handouts to live. If they do not receive then they die. If they don’t want to die, they will steal. If the other humans resist, there will be a struggle and whoever wins becomes the state.
I think keeping population below 1 per square kilometer and spread out is the best solution to the state predation problem.
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That’s probably the most polite disagreement I’ve ever had, I think I’ll save this comment !
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1 per square kilometer is physically impossible unless you plan on finding a way to kill 7.9 billion people.
Earth has 146 million square kilometers of land.
It’s a neat idea but I think “the largest genocide in the history of humanity” kinda outweighs your solution.
About 64 million square km is habitable. Everyone stop having babies until we reach this number. That’s how we can have a stateless borderless utopia.
You won’t see it in your lifetime. About 150,000 people die a day assuming no natural disasters or disease. 7.9 billion / 150,000 = 52,666 days. About 144 years for your dream.
I’m fine to plant the idea of a borderless countryless stateless world without war even if I never sit in its shade
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A government could be good. In theory:
- one year terms for elected individuals in public offices
- no second term
- getting elected is a random draw (akin to jury duty) based on the individuals’ capabilities
- authority limited in scope within city states
I’m sure there’s other ideas regarding this.
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The American Healthcare system
Tipping.
Support for communism. People somehow manage to wildly exaggerate both the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism, even though we have plenty of contemporary and historical examples to refer to.
Communism is as much of a fairy tale as the Free Market.
For exactly the same reasons.
Almost like we better pick something … in the middle, like heavily regulated capitalism and social democracy.
Full genocide now or no genocide? Those both seem pretty extreme, let’s pick from the middle and genocide some people. I am an enlightened centrist.
There’s a logical fallacy going on here that I don’t know the name for, but basically: who says there needs to be any genocide? Why is genocide a constant present in all aspects of that spectrum?
The logical fallacy was committed by you when you equivocated with zero support, Communism and “The Free Market.” The free market has never existed except as a thought experiment so that market economists can try to model what effects supply and demand would have on a frictionless market. It’s equivalent to physics classes where you ignore air-resistance and friction. No one claims physics is a fairy-tale and it would be absurd to claim that market economics and physics are both fairy-tales for “exactly the same reason.”
Communism on the other hand is a well-defined and studied economic system, and aspects of that economic system exist in every country on earth.
Capitalism.
Tell us what makes it absurd. And please stick to demonstrable facts for proof of cause and effect.
Thank you
The basic unit of production, where capital meets labour to produce goods and services, is the capitalist firm. And every profit-maximising firm is owned by a private capital.
Capitalists extract profits from firms. They can spend only a fraction of their profits on luxury consumption. Because if the rich spent all their profit on luxuries their capital will rapidly diminish and expire, compared to competing capitals who invest their profit in further profitable activities. Profit income must be reinvested in order to make more profit. This is the prime directive for anyone who possesses a capital sum of money.
Owners of capital — that is capitalists — can’t put all their eggs in one basket. That’s too risky because firms can go under, or assets that store value might depreciate. So capitalists spread their risk by owning a portfolio of investments with different risk profiles.
A typical portfolio will consist of cash held in different sovereign currencies, government, municipal and corporate bonds, shares in different companies, from risky start-ups to blue chips, and all kinds of income-producing assets, such as land and housing. Basically anything that might yield a higher than average return.
Each individual capital must aim to maximise the return over its portfolio. If it fails it will diminish in size relative to other capitals, and eventually cease being a capital at all.
And it’s right here that we again find the causal structure of a feedback control system. An individual capital — when we consider it as a social practice mediated by a privately owned large sum of money — also has its own goal state, sensory inputs, decision making, and ability to act upon the world in which it is embedded.
Let’s take each of these in turn. (i) The goal of an individual capital is to maximise the average return from every dollar (or pound) invested. (ii) The “sensory inputs” are the different profit-rates earned across the portfolio. (iii) The capitalist, or the financial experts they employ, compare the different profit-rates, and (iv) the feedback loop is closed by actions that withdraw capital from poorly performing investments, and inject capital into high performing investments.
This control loop manifests as an insatiable and ceaseless search for high returns.
Capital doesn’t care how its money is actually used in production. It entirely abstracts from all concrete activities. The only thing it can sense, compare and use is abstract value.
So the commanding heights of the global economy consists of an enormous ensemble of individual capitals, each manically scrambling for profit, reacting to the signals of differential returns received from its tendrils that extend to every productive activity under its rule, continually injecting and withdrawing capital to and from different industrial sectors and geographical regions. The entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities. In the space of months, entire industrial sectors may be raised up, relocated, or thrown down.
Capitalists are possessed, mere machine components of capital.
What about the individual people who participate in this social practice? Surely their individual consciousness, their ideas, and their behaviour matter, and make a difference?
To a certain extent they do of course. But individuals come and go, but capitals live much longer than any individual human. The people controlled by the capital — that is the workers that supply labour to firms, and capitalists that exploit them and extract profits — are mere replaceable components in the control loop, mechanically performing prescribed functional roles.
For example, Marx writes in Capital, that:
“to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.”
We often say that a capitalist possesses capital. But it is more accurate to say that capital possesses them. Capitalists are the human face of an inhuman intelligence with its own logic and its own goals.
“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality” (Communist Manifesto).
Bigger capitals enjoy the advantage of larger portfolios, which spreads risk. In consequence, capital tends to concentrate in a few hands. So we find a large number of small capitals, and a very small number of astronomically large capitals, which earn profits that dwarf the GDP of many nation states. The scale and power of some capitals is truly titanic.
And these titans are so much in control, that they are out of control. Again, a quote from the Communist Manifesto:
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Every day millions of workers, around the globe, have no choice but to sacrifice their time, and their vitality, to produce new profit for the autonomous controllers. No matter how hard, long or efficiently we work, the imperative to work remains.
Why? Because every labour-saving technical innovation takes the form of profit, which is then captured by individual capitals, and immediately re-injected into the material world to animate new activities for further profit. This is why, despite huge advances in automation, the working day remains as long as ever.
Take another example: the logic of capital demands maximum profit extraction from firms, and that means minimising wages. Those possessed by capital live an exalted existence. But the world’s dispossessed must feed, clothe and maintain a home with an average income of about 7 pounds a day.
Another example: it’s better to be exploited than not exploited. We are subject to the whims of the business cycle and periodic crises of accumulation. Recessions regularly throw large numbers of people out of work, through no fault of their own. Suddenly bills can’t be paid. Families are thrown onto the street, as happened in the US during the 2008 mortgage crisis, and is happening again now.
Why? Because individual capitals are almost blind. They see only differential returns across their portfolios. And returns may be good even if unemployment is high, or human misery spills onto the streets. Capital does not care.
Another example: capital deals in abstract value, and things that are not owned, which aren’t bought and sold, therefore have no value to it at all. So the material wealth of nature — the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere — is relentlessly plundered without any regard for the consequences.
Capital destroys us, and the environment. The endless production and profit-making cannot stop, because each individual capital must compete to survive. Marx summarised the prime directive of capital as:
“Accumulate, accumulate! … reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value … into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”.
So all the autonomous control loops have the single-minded goal of extracting profit from the world’s activities. If an activity fails to satisfy this goal, then the controller withdraws its capital, and the activity stops.
So at the apex of the economy we have a competing collection of identical controllers — with an atavistic, low level of demonic intelligence — which inject and withdraw a social substance that appears to possess the magical power of animation, of bringing things alive, of creation; but also appears to possess the power of annihilation, of suffocation, of bringing things to an end, of destruction.
We are definitely not in control. And something else definitely is in control.
So what are we really talking about now?
We’re saying that a new kind of supra-individual control system emerged, quite spontaneously, from our own social intercourse, and then — in a very real sense — has taken on a life of its own, turned around, and started controlling us.
Capital in a scientific, not a metaphorical sense, is a control system. And it is capital, as a control system, that ultimately creates and maintains the abstraction we call exchange-value. Capital is the abstractor.
more here: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
That is an interesting read. Thank you for the effort, it is honestly appreciated.
I feel compelled to point the author is hardly unbiased.
I know it is a difficult request. I just don’t have it in me to accept anything at face value because someone says so.
That being said, you took time to present discourse far beyond what most people do. Again, thank you for that
I feel compelled to point the author is hardly unbiased.
No author is unbiased. If you think they’re unbiased it’s just their biases are the same as yours or those of the status quo (whatever you might consider that to be).
I just don’t have it in me to accept anything at face value because someone says so.
Thankfully, you don’t have to! You have a brain in your head, so you can read the arguments being made, think about them, and critically evaluate them. You can try to come up with counter-arguments, or failing that, look around for counter-arguments other people have made and critically evaluate those too.
The commenter above gave you sources for the quotes, so you can find copies of them and read the complete argument being made in those works.
Your comment is textbook sealioning.
It’s convenient how some people have invented a word that allows them to avoid having to back up any claims they make…
“The Earth is flat.”
“What evidence do you have for that?”
“Sealioning!”And your comment is classic avoidance and redirection.
Allowing to block public traffic just so you can perform you hobby.
Looking at you cycling races like the Tour de France.
Ceding public spaces like roads to cars in the first place.
