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“Small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin”.
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Sure, but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
If you don’t open or shift the overton window, no change is possible.
socialize the costs, privatize the rewards
the bottom picture would look pretty cool in a shaun video
SCOTUS just ruled that US presidents have the divine right of kings.
From this day forward, every day that Biden doesn’t have the Republican judges killed is a betrayal of democracy.
He can’t because it was tossed to the lower court to be put on ice until the election decides how they should rule.
That is as dumb as the typical right-wing ideas. Impeach, and abuse executive orders would be less stupid.
The King-Maker ruling will be a blight if it is not fixed fast!
Hot take (not entirely serious):
Now that Presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts that are crimes, Biden should enact Project 2025 EARLY give himself unitary executive power, and refuse to leave office.
This would either destroy the country, save the country, or force SCOTUS to reconsider their ruling.
Of course he could just deem the imbalance on SCOTUS a threat to national security, and write an official law saying that all major parties must be equally repressented by the judges on there (a one out, one in law).
That would also work, and run less risk of tearing the country apart.
That isn’t how p2025 works, but in theory…he could do something a lot like it. While it is better than the other guy, it would be a deeply fucked precedent…
In contrast to a monarchy, where people cannot choose their leader, in capitalism people can choose from which company they buy, or even create their own.
As another person already pointed out, these are obviously two different categories.
The question then is, why do people choose the way they do, both when buying and when running a company? To me it seems, they don’t because of some external pressure (like monarchy requires).
The point can be summed up as a question: Why don’t people run (more) non-capitalist services and productions, and why don’t they prefer them when looking to satisfy their demand?
These non-capitalist things exist, it’s certainly possible. But as far as I know, they are all very niche. Like a communal kitchen, some solidary agriculture or housing project. Heck, entire villages of this kind exist.
So the alternative is there, but it requires actual commitment and work. I don’t see how capitalism could be abolished in an armed uprising (in contrast to monarchy). But it can be replaced by alternative projects. Partially. Why are they so small and few?
The question then is, why do people choose the way they do, both when buying and when running a company? To me it seems, they don’t because of some external pressure (like monarchy requires).
The ideas that people have are shaped by their Material Conditions, and people generally act in their best interests. People will buy what is available in the market, and Capitalists work to accumulate more and more money in an M-C-M’ circuit.
The point can be summed up as a question: Why don’t people run (more) non-capitalist services and productions, and why don’t they prefer them when looking to satisfy their demand?
These are 2 questions.
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People generally don’t run Socialist services as frequently because in the framework of Capitalism, it is excessively difficult to gain the Capital necessary to start one, and furthermore the people with access to Capital continue to act in their own interests and accumulate more profit off of ownership.
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People do not care where their commodities come from, largely, as they work for their income and thus their access is limited by the money they have.
These non-capitalist things exist, it’s certainly possible. But as far as I know, they are all very niche. Like a communal kitchen, some solidary agriculture or housing project. Heck, entire villages of this kind exist.
This is known as Mutual Aid, which is a big cornerstone of Anarchism. The issue is that Anarchism generally relies on individuals making the right decisions due to their horizontal structures and has issues with scaling horizontally. These structures tend to have great success locally, such as Food Not Bombs feeding people, but without strong organization scaling becomes difficult and action becomes unfocused.
So the alternative is there, but it requires actual commitment and work. I don’t see how capitalism could be abolished in an armed uprising (in contrast to monarchy). But it can be replaced by alternative projects. Partially. Why are they so small and few?
Why don’t you think Capitalism could be abolished via revolution? It’s been done before.
Secondly, it is not simply capable of being replaced entirely via parallel systems because that depends on individuals outcompeting the immense resources of the Bourgeoisie. It’s certainly possible at a local level, but at a state level takes enourmous power and unity.
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♫ monopoly duopoly oligopoly cartel ♫
♪ anti-trust, pork barrel, propaganda lobbying ♪
♫ economies of scale, information asymmetry, regulatory capture and personal responsibility ♫
♪ unions, pinkertons, labor theory of value and the CIA ♪
♫ rent seeking, georgism, tax incentive, scarcity ♫
♪ free trade, minimum wage, petrodollar and the MIC ♪
♫ we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning ♫
provided as is, no warranty in regard to serving any particular rhyme or meter, express or implied, consult a licensed physician before attempting to sing along
This is my personal opinion without any real evidence than my experience and knowledge of what I read somewhere:
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People are stupid and lazy mostly. The education is going down for most industrial countries. Changing habits is stressful and avoided if possible.
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Manipulation works. Media and advertisements successfully change people behaviour without them noticing. If you put enough money into a campaign people think they are responsible for your co2 emissions.
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As long as you don’t drive people too fast and too deep into an existential crisis they will tolerate a lot!
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The system is rigged. People who are honest and social are pushed down. While greedy and lying people are being pushed on top.
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Why are people stupid and lazy? Is this a new thing? Why are conditions worsening?
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Correct.
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Correct.
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Kinda vibes-based but strikes the target. It’s less that lying is encouraged, but that profit drives the system and money greases its wheels. Follow the dollar.
To first:
Take your average Joe and think how dumb he is. Then remember that half of the people are even dumber.
People have always been lazy. Children are not that lazy but usually the school system kills most encouragement kids had.
Just check how much money the government has invested into education over the past 50 years. For Germany at least they have cut the money on education for years instead of investing into the children.
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Not to be downer, but there are people literally thinking Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ.
Oh, it is worse than that. There are accelerationist Christians that are certain he is the antichrist. They believe bringing him to power will bring about the end of days, the rapture(that will save them), and the 1000 years of peace promised after revelations. Religion is vile.
Oh my fucking god. We are fucked.
If anything, I’m more concerned with folks like Jamie Dimon and Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy. People who have trillions of dollars of capital at their command exert immense influence over my quality of life. Arguably much more so than any king or high priest or even any American president.
We talk about Divine Right of Kings like its a thing that came and went, but consider how a guy like Elon Musk has accrued phenomenal amounts of wealth and authority. Consider how people see him. And how he sees himself. Its chilling to consider how much power some of these people wield and how blind we all are to their intentions.
I think you can be concerned by both. All these examples are of people that can exert and incredible amount of power through their respective means.
I read intense concern about the results of the next election, without seeing anything approaching the comparative concern for a private monopoly of real estate, a mass privatization of our postal and shipping system, or the horrifying prospect of a computerized administrative state run out of Microsoft’s digital basement.
If you want to talk about the Divine Right of Kings, it should be noted how much of that authority was accrued through mystifying the mechanisms of authority. The modern capitalist state reinvents mysticism through contracts, borders, and advanced technologies, while working towards the same fundamental ends.
Kings and Priests would have plotzed at the power afforded by a credit card company or mortgage lender or OS vendor over one of its clients. And yet these are powers we hand over to modern capitalist institutions without a second thought.
I appreciate the perspective but nothing here says we can’t be coscerbed by both positions (or all sides) of power.
I don’t want kings or monopolies, or either by any other name. No need to split hairs on it.
I would also argue that “we hand powers over to modern capitalist institutions without a second thought” is a pretty loaded sentence. Who’s doing that? Me? You? It’s not like someone asked us. Sounds pretty dismissive to assume people are acting outside of their better interest.
I don’t want kings or monopolies
Its not really a matter of what you want. These are systemic issues, not personal choices.
I would also argue that “we hand powers over to modern capitalist institutions without a second thought” is a pretty loaded sentence.
Its a consequence of growing up in a world that functions in a particular way. Adopting the tools of a society means putting out substantially less effort for survival than trying to cut across them. Ask any homeless vagrant how easy it is not to have a bank account or to get by without a job in a commercial business or state institution.
It’s not like someone asked us.
You work within the system because you fear the consequences of transgression. Nobody has to spell out why you can’t squat in an empty apartment room or wander through a grocery store grazing out of the produce section. You pay your credit card balance and your car note because you know what happens if you miss too many payments, not because some repo man or loan shark has to spell it out for you.
Sounds pretty dismissive to assume people are acting outside of their better interest.
When you’re under the gun, its in your best interest for the other guy not to pull the trigger.
I see you’re picking and choosing what to try and call out here, but you dont have any clear call to action. You’re just being obtuse. If I’m wrong, by all means, spell it out, but otherwise it’s not particularly helpful.
you dont have any clear call to action
There isn’t a clear path forward. It’s a complex problem that is made deliberately intractable by the people who benefit from the current system.
And there are people who thought their kings were divine.
The whole point of capitalism (unintentionally?) is to make everything so efficient that there no longer is a reason to have profit.
The point of capitalism is that the aristocracy hated the idea of having to work for their money, like the rest of us. So, they came up with a system so brilliant that the rest of the population had to be starved, dispossessed of their land, branded, imprisoned whipped and sent to workhouses until centuries of generational trauma knocked the fight out of them.
It was never about utopian efficiency, although it is touted to be the benefit now. The problem is, people don’t realise that the “inefficiency” they look to do away with is all the people below the top having more than just enough to live on. We have nations of workers who have been convinced that they should run their countries as if they were shareholders of it.
And they call socialists utopians.
the point of capitalism is to make it so that there’s no longer a reason to have profit.
That’s gotta be the stupidest take I’ve seen in the whole 28 days I’ve been in Lemmy, congratulations. The whole point of capitalism is the revalorization of capital, i.e., a capitalist owner having $1mn, and investing it into a company or finance or housing to turn it into more than $1mn. In what universe is the objective of capitalism to eliminate profit??? It’s the polar opposite…
People are greedy and given tools that make it easier and easier to start more and more types of business, profit margins will continue to get thinner and thinner as competition increases to keep portfolios growing.
Standards of living will continue to rise(average over time as it always has) as the amount of human labor hours needed to maintain the standard continues to drop. Fully automated food production is not that far away. When that happens there will be a large incentive for more and more business startups as food producers with very low cost and very low profit margin. Competition will keep prices extremely low to the point that individuals may be able to produce their own food as the process gets cheaper and more efficient.
profit margins will continue to get thinner and thinner as competition increases
Competition doesn’t increase under capitalism, it decreases as a consequence of economy of scale, consolidation of markets, corruption and many other reasons. Tell me how competition fosters when Amazon, Google, Walmart, Apple, Uber and the rest of big firms control all their respective markets.
Your second paragraph is a senseless utopian dream not based on reality, I won’t even bother arguing against it.
The Supremos: on second thought, let’s have a King after all.
My favourite author. LeGuin, that is.
There are still plenty of kings in the world.
If old man Charles starts talking shit about divine right they’ll put him in a home and replace him with another inbred fuck in like a month
There are also kings in the Middle East, and all over Asia and Africa.
I’m sorry to be a wet rag but the comic is simply innacurate.
And are their powers inescapable?
I do think that every cultures political system is structured the way that it is for a reason. Based off the history and experiences of the peoples of that country.
We agree that the current situation won’t change itself, and change to this system from inside of it would likely be stifled and repressed.
I agree that we need to keep trying to find a better way, because there are many people are will certainly keep trying to make things worse for us.
The first step is a better way to communicate between ourselves about what we want, why we want it, and how to enact our intentions.
With the advent and use of the internet we now have the possibility for a new way to organize our collective wants.
This system, which I call a consensus engine, would let us as a species make long term goals and work towards their fruition. Without some way to communicate that is less sustainable to misinformation I don’t see any way we can get out of this into something better.
Now everyone can understand why Twitter is being dismantled
#Metoo ruffled some feathers
You’ve described liberal democracy. The combination of individual freedom plus democracy is supposed to provide a framework for curating precisely the kind of political agency you describe.
They’ve described the opposite. A collective, grassroots, democratic institution in which people can freely discuss their thoughts and political opinions and direct the policy of their country in that way, is less reminiscent of top-down political parties with representatives voted every 4 years as in liberal democracy, and more reminiscent of worker democracy or direct democracy as anarchists or communists defend.
They described democracy as implemented through parliaments.
You are describing the US implementation’s flaws.
Read Marx, everyone.
You can always move to North Korea and enjoy communism!
You can always move to Senegal and enjoy capitalism!
Divine right of kings lasted for a long long long time, and caused the deaths of untold millions
Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.
That is the question best asked I suppose.
“Listen, the Crusades seemed bad, sure. And the Mongolian hordes did kill a lot of people. And maybe the globe spanning feudal industrialization of Victorian Era England leading headlong into a pair of World Wars decimated whole continents. But hear me out. Maybe coulda been worse?”
If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative to human-sacrificing Bronze Age god-kings, I’m going to call you out as being a little bit unrealistic. Government isn’t just an idea, it’s a technology, and it relies on other technologies (communication, record-keeping, organization) to function.
The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other. Where things started getting difficult is when agriculture paved the way for population explosions.
If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative
Claiming that paradise is preferable to purgatory is not the same thing as knowing the road out of hell.
The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other.
One of the most effective methods for instituting an enduring state of capitalist exploitation is alienating you from your neighbors.
Unfortunately there is no double blind studied alternative to capitalism that demonstrates without a doubt that it’s statistically significantly better than capitalism as a system so I’m sorry to tell you that your children deserve to die because you’re too poor, hope that helps
Unfortunately there is no double blind studied alternative to capitalism
I’ll never understand why people believe clinical trials for pharmaceutical efficiency are the baseline for all forms of scientific inquiry and sociological research.
How on earth do we study astronomy, paleontology, or seismology without double-blind trials?
We just have to let the capitalist experiment play out. When this world is destroyed whatever humans remain if any will start the next trial. Trust me, capitalism still has a fighting chance.
What point are you trying to make? That it would have been better if the divine right of kings ended sooner? I’m sure Ursula K. Le Guin would agree.
Or are you trying to say we shouldn’t be complacent in working to end capitalism? Because I’m sure Ursula K. Le Guin would agree as well.
The point of even saying this is to rally people who might feel there’s no point in trying, because the current system seems unstoppable.
to me it read like “that’s a nice thought and I’m sure one day we’ll move beyond it, but i doubt I’ll live to see that”
The only thing stopping people from ending the system is lacking the knowledge that they should end it, and lacking the knowledge that they can collectively end it. Pushing for hope towards the end of the system is positive
Just pondering the difference between something that is practically inescapable in a finite human lifespan vs something that is surely escapable given a removal of that metric. Merely the first thought I had when enjoying the art, no point to be made of it… More mumblings of a idle fool/thinker?
An important thought. What we tell ourselves needs to be true, or at least be believable, in order for us to take action. I tell myself that whether we reach such and such a goal in my lifetime, I want to have contributed to moving whatever tiny amount closer to the goal. It would be disappointing to me to not have tried to contribute something.
I like the Le Guin quote because it touches on that mental block to action, “Is trying to make change pointless?” On the one hand it is pointless, because we all die. On the other hand, it’s possible to contribute to a multigenerational project.
I’m sure one day we’ll achieve some sort of utopia if we aren’t killed off by climate change or some other catastrophe, but my bones will have eroded to dust by then.
