this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Microblog Memes

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I guess I tend to think that police, and power structures in general, are organic and will pop into existence spontaneously.

(I actually think power structures are going to be important to maintain a socialist society too, just not ones that serve the few at the cost of the many.)

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I haven't played it, but is this disco elesium?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Sure, sort of. Commodity production, ie the production of goods purely in order to sell and make a profit, likely won't last forever, especially as the rate of profit trends towards 0.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

It's also how driven the profits are. All the choices on the way, are they directed for maximum profit or for good. And many things that are made didn't need to be made, and wouldn't if people didn't care to buy them. The effort instead could have gone into good things.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Kid named Guy Debord:

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

If it breaks even it can sustain itself in a market economy (anything where revenue >= costs can). If it operates at a loss, then someone other than the user is having to pay for it, and that's usually where you lose them (because generally the answer is that you're expecting them to pay for it in part, usually through taxes).

This is also why they get so grumpy about things like welfare (especially the ones who are working class and barely getting by) - they actively dislike the idea that they should have to pay for their own food/shelter/etc and also help pay for your food/shelter/etc when things are tight and they're destroying their work/life balance just to get by and life would be meaningfully easier for them if they weren't paying as much in taxes (and they grossly overestimate how much tax money goes to SNAP/TANF/etc).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Oh I know that, and the last point is what I try to drive home. That things like transit and food benefits are a fraction of a percentage of their taxes. I did amtrak for someone and realized it was less than 2 dollars a year that the person paid for amtrak, but them talking about it sounded like it was sending them right to the poor house. The military, on the other hand...

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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 on quite a while listing things public transport provides that indirectly works in favor of capitalism.

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I also like "My death comes by a thousand cuts, and I paid for the knife" - Dopamine by The Arcadian Wild

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

"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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Well it can't commodify me! Oh wait.

Sorry, I got myself worked up.

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