We have so many houses going unused. We have food and resources for everybody, but we’ve set up a system that arbitrarily concentrates most of it on a few people! Young children, with no understanding why society is this way, are suffering and dying because they live in a world that collectively agrees to let this happen unnecessarily
Fuck, I’m stoned but you know I’m right
Edit: and the sad thought hits me: the first step is realizing the system doesn’t have to be this way, the second step is realizing it isn’t going to change, at least not any time soon
Every year capitalists kill 10 million people by withholding food, medicine, and clean water. All because it isn’t profitable to them personally.
Just FYI this is a tankie account.
This. This is the reality and the root cause of a lot of the issues regarding homelessness, starvation and preventable illness in the world.
Aggressive capitalists value money more than anyone’s, and everyone’s life.
They will let you die to bump their profits a fraction of a percent.
To put in the words of someone I truly hate, someone I deeply despise, someone who used to be part of my friends discord group but is thankfully gone now:
“You can’t have winners without there being losers”.
This. This is how such people see the world, and in their eyes, perfectly justify inequality.
Probably throw in a bit of “just world” delusion in the mix, to make things worse.
There is a reason, well, at least two reasons. First is greed the second is the greedy ones also enjoy the cruelty.
If not the cruelty they are often convinced (or have convinced themselves) that poverty is deserved, like their opulence is.
Just today there was a post on how most Americans believe poverty is the result of individual choices.
The less organized and fragmented the populous, the easier it is for the rich to take advantage of us.
Reality is rather complicated
I can tell you right now why nothing happens. Because those of us who have housing and a solid life are terrified it will be taken away if others are given what they worked for (I realize this to be false, however it’s a very common sentiment among 30-40 year olds who own homes or property of any kind).
So, they keep voting for farther and farther right politicians because the left wants to “take your guns, land, and make you live under communism!” This is a non-exaggerated thought process of how a lot of people think.
Fuck that i only have a house so i don’t have to pay someone else’s mortgage.
I bought it the wrong time. I had a house and paid for 15 years lost $200,000 in the sale.
I would have actually done quite well to rent instead.
That sucks real hard.
You’re right, but it’s worse. That sentiment isn’t just why our cohort votes right - it’s why our cohort is unwilling to change the status quo. It’s scary, when you have a kid and rent and a partner and aging parents and just a fuckton on your plate, and even if your morals are all in the right place you have to choose between even protesting, potentially being jailed or worse, or just biding time to vote. And that’s ignoring even any actual radical expression. Revolution is a young man’s game.
The world is how it is until it doesn’t matter. Suffering is only temporary. Enjoy the time that you have. Can’t take anything with you.
Then explain the tombs of Egyptian Pharoahs?
They thought you could take it with you. But they were wrong
You can’t take anything with you, because the British will rob your tomb and take your stuff back to Britain.
That too
Take anything with you where? Dead is dead, and there’s nothing after.
My point, exactly. No point in hoarding.
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich,”
As an example of how stupid our global civilization is … Africa has more than enough wealth and natural resources to produce all the food and water it needs to feed its own people without any outside influence or control. Unfortunately, first world countries have such a stranglehold on African nations and governments that they are forever beholden to foreign aid and manipulation that they will never be able to pay off their debts … which means African will forever pay first world countries and never be capable of standing on their own.
Also, I’ve been sober from alcohol and drugs for close to 30 years now … and I’m perfectly aware of all this and think about this stuff all the time. We don’t need mind altering drugs to understand how stupid, greedy and corrupt our world is, has always been and will always be until we destroy ourselves and free this planet of our own stupidity.
Also, I’ve been sober from alcohol and drugs for close to 30 years now … and I’m perfectly aware of all this and think about this stuff all the time. We don’t need mind altering drugs to understand how stupid, greedy and corrupt our world is, has always been and will always be until we destroy ourselves and free this planet of our own stupidity.
You have to remember that most people, especially Americans, are brainwashed from birth to believe that the current order of the affairs is the best and only way to operate a society, and that anything else is, ahem, communism, which is the worst possible thing there is. For many, psychedelics has been the most impactful way for an individual to actually think outside the box on a visceral level since their conditioning since birth has been one of “this is the only way to think, so hop on board lest you be cast out of society.” It’s the entire reason why these substances are illegal, can’t have people thinking for themselves out of lockstep with the prescribed mentality.
youd think that but ik plenty of ppl that do psychs and still are republican/trump supporters, if anything they doubled down harder, it can go both ways
A quick look at the Wikipedia article The world’s billionaires will reveal that billionaires have an estimated aggregate net worth of 16 trillion. That’s more than 2,000 dollars for every single human being on this planet. Maybe not as individuals, but as a collective, they literally have the possibility of ending world hunger. And that’s only the richest three thousand or so.
If the world taxed them all only half their wealth (keeping them billionaires) and took the results and invested it in a trust, it could be generating 80 billion a year from only a 1% return. That’s enough to solve world hunger every year twice.
The world doesn’t have a resource problem. It has a billionaire problem.
I recommend a good read: Poverty, by America - Matthew Desmond – Princeton (2023)
~~We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another. – Leo Tolstoy
The passage of Proposition 13 inspired a nationwide revolt that led to Reagan’s 1981 cutting spree. It was a white-led revolt. Only 2 groups opposed Proposition 13: public sector employees and African Americans. Massive tax cuts fundamentally reshaped the agendas of the nation’s 2 major political parties and resulted in the rise of private fortunes alongside public poverty. This was a response to white people being ordered to share public goods with Black people. ~~
How to fix?
In the USA:
We just have to stop spending so much on the rich. Support policies that disrupt poverty, not accommodate it. In 2020, the gap separately everyone in America below the poverty line and the poverty line itself amounted to $177 billion. That’s less that 1% of our GDP.
I’m calling for the rich to pay their taxes. Rebalance our social net. Return to a time when America made bigger investments in the general welfare.
“We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.” - theologian Walter Bruggemann
Make sure all women have access to the best contraception and healthcare, and more pregnancies become intentional and safer. Provide new mothers with paid parental leave and free childcare. A country as wealthy as ours could put our money where our mouth is and support life. But from the poor, we just seem to take and take.~~
Let’s choose businesses that are doing right by their workers and the planet.
Doing the right thing is often highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly. That’s the price for our restored humanity.
Prosperity without poverty carries a different feeling. We’d be more free. A nation invested in ending poverty is a nation that is truly committed to freedom.
The worst part is: the wealthiest few of them could each, individually, if they wanted to, end world hunger permanently with their current wealth. Estimates I’ve read range $40b per year or something like $250-300b just once to set up sustainable long-term solutions globally.
Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos could end hunger globally and permanently. Any one of them, individually, could do it. If the richest 10 billionaires all pitched in a portion, they’d all recoup everything they spent within a couple years at worst. If the richest 100 did, many of them wouldn’t even notice the expenditure.
But it would only take 1 of them.
Not my line- but you can have billionaires or you can have democracy.
It’s because guaranteeing positive rights requires cooperation or coercion. And it turns out we’re not great at cooperation.
It turns out capitalism actively disincentives cooperation. Cooperation is how humanity became the dominant life form. We’re fucking great at it when we don’t have a bunch of leeches siphoning off our surplus value and using that wealth to turn us against each other.
At a small scale, sure. When you reach the size of a country, not so much.
Maybe. We’ve also never had a classless country, so we don’t know for certain how very large groups of humans interact when we are free from the exploitation, division, and oppression that is inherent to class structures.
Why have we never had a classless country?
Because countries didn’t exist when humanity’s mode of production was primitive communism, and then since the agricultural revolution the means of production has always been held by individuals, which necessarily creates at least two classes, those who have, and those who have not.
There have been a few attempts by the people to seize the means of production, but they have always existed within the context of a global class system that prevents any attempt at a truly classless society. (IE, a strong centralized state is necessary to survive reactionary attempts to take back control, but a strong state creates a class system of those who have control vs those who don’t.)
Most Marxists actually acknowledge that after a socialist revolution you will still have class contradictions that society will have to work through, like the potential abuses a strong state can inflict. We generally agree though, that the key first step to creating a classless society is getting the means of production out of the hands of private individuals.
Seems to me if it was our natural tendency to treat everyone in the world the same way we’d treat our family, then it would have prevailed in some capacity, somewhere, after all this time.
Instead, it seems like we’re good at participating in that kind of communism you mentioned within smaller groups, and those groups can cooperate with other groups in increasingly less familial ways as this network of groups grow larger and larger.
I don’t see any evidence that our natural tendency is towards communism.
Right, and my point is that it’s not surprising that you don’t see that evidence (assuming you live in the US or elsewhere in the imperial core), given the effects that class dynamics have on social behavior. By its very nature capitalism alienates people and turns them into individualist consumers. If you travel to more communally-minded places, it’s clear that human nature is very much place- and context- dependent.
It also requires empathy over group belonging
Yes. Though capitalism/fascism is the reason, it’s not good.
Faschitalism
Where did the h come from
because it’s shit
He gets it
Actually, it’s because of capitalism. It’s not a good reason but it is the reason. Everybody knows that we throw away food every single day that could literally feed the whole planet twice over. Everyone knows that we can manage to put everyone under a roof. The billionares sure as hell know this but they want to keep the status quo because they know as long as nobody actually does anything about it, they’ll always be the 1% with everything—and so the rat race continues.
Reagan pretty much shut down progressivism in the eighties and its only in the new millenium we have seen it come back to a level it could be implemented again. We would be in much better shape if we did not have reaganomics that looked better than it was due to the energy crises no longer being a thing.
Poverty is a necessary component of capitalism. It’s not arbitrary, it’s calculated.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Yes but I’m saying there’s no good reason why we use capitalism instead of something better
The reason is that it’s extremely difficult to reach a consensus as to what that “better” thing is.
Because the people in power benefit from the status quo, and they’ll sooner blow up the planet than live in a world where they’re not on top.
Not a good reason
I mean, glad you think that, but there’s this stupid thing call reality that is pretty lame yet it is what it is.
I know what you’re saying, I’m just raising the class question. There are “good” reasons for the rich to use capitalism, after all.
Pointing out that the rich are acting according to their own material interests is a powerful way to show the (sadly) uneducated masses that they should do the same!
b…but…but that would be SOCIALISM!
Everyone else already mentioned this… Methinks the fundamental issue is wealth distribution, so yes it is capitalism. I would say it is a “good” reason as it is a major target for sociology research and politicians, and there are active efforts in some countries to reduce inequality so…
I think I was radicated by this back in second year of college… Professor mentioned something like “The US Midwest has enough production capacity to feed the entire world” when a lot of the crops went to beef production, sweeteners, or just waste
This has been an issue for a while and I think Cory Doctorow mentioned it in one of his blog posts? About the Luddites; they were not anti-technology, but saw how the productivity increases would only benefit the rich and wealthy. I suspect the current AI issue is the same, “robots replacing your job” will be a lot more positive if the replaced worker still makes the same amount via basic income/stipend by the government instead of the money being concentrated into OpenAI or Meta or somewhere
… I’ve wanted to talk about these for a while
For those reasons I believe ai will be a net negative for all humanity in a capitalist system. It serves to further enrich billionaires and create a police state for the rest of us.
Now if it wasn’t this way, you could use ai as a tool to potentially do good (im still not a fan of it) but we know this will never happen. So id advise anyone to boycott any ai shit that keeps getting shoved into our faces. I will deny it until I have to go live in a shack in the woods to do so.
