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- cross-posted to:
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“Small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin”.
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Kings never went away, they just changed to a different form and name to remain accepted in society, as the ones with the crowns ended up in the gallows.
Already has more than a hundred people would ever need, yet takes every opportunity to oppress the have-nots in order to make their ego number go up?
I’d make a punch line about billionaires, but it’s way, way more than just them.
This isn’t good historical analysis. The feudal class society, with its aristocracy, church and peasants, was highly rigid in terms of class mobility. Peasants stayed peasants and aristocrats stayed aristocrats. The current dominant class, the capitalist owners, exert their power not by god-given rights over the population, but by legal control of the means of production. The current exploited class, the workers, aren’t tied to a lord anymore and pay tributes in kind on exchange for land and protection, but instead are “free” to work where they want for a payment in cash, and unable for the most part to have ownership of the means of production they themselves work.
Kings have disappeared, classes in society haven’t
Up until the last part I thought your point was going to be “but now we have class mobility”. Yeah, we don’t 😫 freedom is an illusion for the most part, but a convenient one
Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn’t imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn’t freedom. It’s just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly
Nah, I meant that workers really don’t have freedom, but we are led to believe that we do have it, because it’s convenient for the rich
I’m fully aware, I never said workers are free under capitalism
socialize the costs, privatize the rewards
SCOTUS just ruled that US presidents have the divine right of kings.
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…
From this day forward, every day that Biden doesn’t have the Republican judges killed is a betrayal of democracy.
That is as dumb as the typical right-wing ideas. Impeach, and abuse executive orders would be less stupid.
He can’t because it was tossed to the lower court to be put on ice until the election decides how they should rule.
The King-Maker ruling will be a blight if it is not fixed fast!
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 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 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.
My favourite author. LeGuin, that is.
I read the comic and was like “didn’t Le Guin say something similar” than I read the subtitle and apparently, I was right
The comic’s author should have add the proper quote.
Her father was an Anthropologist, where as she seems to be more of a Sociologist.
This comic would slap harder if not for the Supreme Court under christofascist influence from the belief in the divine right of kings having today ruled that Presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts.
That whole divine king thing isn’t nearly as dead as the last panel would like to portray it.
SCOTUS got you covered, fam. The new King-Maker ruling by the regressives should get us back there in no time flat!
I don’t really fit in that well here at times because I don’t consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance. Capitalism is a market system that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both. If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities, then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn’t require abolishing private property nor would that end corruption.
Who wants to abolish private property? You don’t need capitalism to have private property.
I want to abolish private property, as in “private ownership of the means of production”. I don’t want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.
Some users on here use Capitalism as an opposite term to Communism.
removed by mod
Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked?
Most of Europe has phenomenal education and happiness rates with low crime rates despite the massive impoverished refugee camps they’ve taken in out of goodwill. If competent legislative reform and regulation doesn’t work then businesses wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to stop it. Better question: When has that other option ever worked?
It doesn’t “use” competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition.
And the absolute authority of the state to seize any and all assets, allocate all resources wherever they see fit, works actively against competition to a much higher degree, among the many other reasons not to do that. For an example look at Chinese housing infrastructure: everybody was built a home, massive complexes paid for by the public built by lowest bidders and people with connections rather than by developers and contractors. The problem is the homes weren’t built in the places those people live and work, so there is a massive homelessness problem in China and many housing units have sat vacant since they were built. And the amount of blood sacrificed to build this ineffective system under Mao was astronomical.
And that’s a controversial take. I could have brought up the USSR.
The Supremos: on second thought, let’s have a King after all.
Read Marx, everyone.
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.
I read an interesting take on some site and it said that we are leaving Capitalism for Feudalism where the kings are now big Companies.
Kind of. American Proletarians have a unique position of enjoying the benefits of a super-exploited class of domestic immigrants paid lower wages via threat of deportation, and Imperialistic hegemony, but are also enslaved by vast amounts of debt. This is very different from standard Capitalism, but not quite feudalism. It depresses the revolutionary potential of the American Proletariat for as long as Imperialism is the status quo.
I believe the theory goes something along the lines of feudalism being centered about renting (ie land) and with manafacture that shifted to a product-based economy. With time, renting has regained dominance and is reaching a whole new level now that most capital is tied up in the cloud (AWS, azure etc.)
Confused British noises
The quote is correct, but as I recall the divine right didn’t end because the people cried out for freedom. Royalty was replaced by governments of the nobility or military, neither of which are necessarily better for the people.
And how did such replacement happen? It wasn’t out of nowhere but after a lot of turmoil, uprisings, and guillotines. The point being, there’s people outcries, prostest, and so on. I’m not endorsing violence, but we can’t just ignore that there was a process in-between. That’s the whole point of the quote, is up to grassroots movement to try and find a way to open a crack and then make it grow…
I don’t see how anyone can look at 99.9% of history and not endorse violence.
I might be endorsing violence this time. You can’t always make nice with a bully. We’ve given them plenty of chances to stop kicking over our sandcastles
