Microblog Memes

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would 'critique' capital end up 'reinforcing' it instead..."

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.

don't buy into the illusion that capitalism is so self-organizing and organic. it requires the direct protection and supervision of a nationwide military and a police force -multiple police forces actually - to protect capital.

"Oh, you're expecting capitalism to collapse into anarchy? Better BUY lots of food and antibiotics to stockpile for the collapse!"

Grinch smirk

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.

Well, things would exist whether you're in a capitalist economic system or not. People would make music and label their genre. People would write books and want to sell them. The real difference is who gets the profits.

This ties into the notion of interpassivity. This is when a piece of media perform an action for you (think interactivity, but exactly the opposite). An example is the laugh track on sitcoms. Another is the series or film performing your environmental or anti-capital activism for you. Frequently the bad guy is some big polluting corp, or some evil rich guy who wants to bulldoze the community center to put his Luxury Resort there. You watch the movie, feel all rebellious and sympathetic with the main characters, and go home feeling like you've done something, when in fact all you've done is feed Disney some more money. See also movies like triangle of sadness and the glass onion or whatever.

Mark Fischer's capitalist realism explores this and similar ideas in a much more comprehensive and eloquent manner than I ever could. Give it a read, it's quite short!

When you commodify all the people’s wants and needs, you commodify the people.

The Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.

Well, we're leaving capitalism behind and switching back to feudalism. So I guess no more capitalism.

How do you fight against it?

"But capitalism is so efficient at growing!"

Yeah, but now capitalism has grown out of control:

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.

I’ve been really interested in learning how to grow vegetables in my back garden. Somehow I just have this feeling that learning how to care about plants to make food (and not just because it flowers and looks pretty) will open my eyes to thinking about nature and the environment

At the moment, climate collapse is a conceptual issue to me in that “sure the days get warmer every year but it’s actually quite nice for me right now”, but I’m not as in tune with my environment to really notice how it’s impacting us.

Growing veg also feels like it has a higher pay off than just the cost price of a single unit of veg. There’s probably some nutritional benefit to it, knowledge etc that does beyond the price of buying an onion from the shop. I think getting in touch with this principle is the key to getting out of the ruthless capitalism structure

Basically, if we all just stopped buying shit and learnt how to fix and make shit ourselves our experiences of the things we attach ourselves to would be so much more authentic

You don’t have to buy doc martens because you feel like a rebel.

How much of this is capitalism, and how much of it is just trade?

Bazaars go back 5000 years, about 5000 years before capitalism. If you've ever been to a bazaar or a street market in a developing country, you know they'll try to sell you anything and everything.

Punk Rock itself is not a product of capitalism.
Album and ticket sales are.

Kid named Guy Debord:

I think capitalism falls neatly into the concept of Moloch.

Well it can't commodify me! Oh wait.

Sorry, I got myself worked up.