Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Like asking 'how can you be a marxist if you don't love every single person?'
There are companies I like and companies I don't like. Capitalism is all about having the choice to pick what I buy and what I use. Shitty companies are free to fail. That's actually a really important part of capitalism.
uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don't know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.
what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you're wrong.
me: looks at cereal aisle at the local grocery store
No...I think i've got plenty of choices, thanks. In which areas do you feel like your freedom to chose is badly impinged-upon?
Do you want a list of tech companies that have been allowed to fail? It's a very long list.
I'm typing this on NixOS on a Framework laptop. Very happy with both. Both were products of (*gasp*) capitalism!
I'm sitting in a 20-year-old La-Z-Boy chair. Not the most beautiful, but it sure is comfortable, and it's in good condition for it's age.
Sipping on a nice red wine. Don't remember the company--it was a random pick, one of thousands of choices. Anyway, it's great, I'm enjoying it. Snacking on some corn nuts from Trader Joes.
That's just a few companies whose products I appreciate, and am interacting with right this instant.
Google annoys me sometimes. I'm kinda de-googling, and it's harder than it ought to be. Still: totally doable. Microsoft was a huge PITA back in the 90s and 00s, but these days they don't affect me at all. It didn't fail, but it changed in major ways, and more to the point it became irrelevant in important ways.
Overall, when I compare the system I'm living in with the alternatives that we've tried in the past...well, it's very much a no-brainer.
"The Illusion Of Choice"
if you don't want to acknowledge the vast swaths of the human population for which options are strictly limited by capitalism seeking profits, i genuinely don't know what to tell you.
food deserts, where the most impoverished people in the country are forced to eat processed foods because the nearest produce isle is miles away. the complete market domination of amazon. local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise. planned obsolescence. the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you're referring to are produced by like two corporations, alongside the vast majority of the products you see in grocery stores period. the fact that all the grocery stores are large corporate chains. the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves. nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children. millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans. the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.
i would encourage you to apply your brain to the situation. i understand, you find yourself in a comfortable position, where the luxuries of modern capitalism have availed themselves to you. not everybody is so lucky. capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering. everything you buy, everything you've mentioned, has been made possible by widespread ecological destruction, rampant pollution, and exploitation, all of which have a cost in human lives.
the history of capitalism is also not so rosy. the East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India, and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people. the slave trade being directly powered by capitalist interests. banana republics like in Guatemala, where the US government helped the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, actively coup an elected leader and install a military dictator in his place to protect their monopoly over fruit farms. many South and Central american governments still suffer from the consequences of US backed dictators, as a direct result of the US government putting the profits of fruit companies over the lives of millions.
even if this is the best system we've ever devised, uh... its really not that fucking great for a vast quantity of human beings. the status quo causes immense amounts of human suffering, and will cause even more as we spiral into climate catastrophe.
Whew, okay.
...Are a thing. They're around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This...just isn't a huge deal. It's a public policy tweak away from being solved.
Amazon has a shitload of competitors in every sector. AliExpress, Best Buy, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, etc etc etc. But Amazon is solid as hell, so people stick with them. If they slip, people have endless options.
Don't care. I mean, I feel for the owners, but...you know that like 90% of everybody in the Western world worked in agriculture? Including all my great-grandparents. But then they got outcompeted by more successful farmers (including corporate operations in some cases) and ended up shutting down and selling their place. None of my grandparents worked in agriculture.
Was that a tragedy, for me or for them? Do I wish I still owned a dozen acres of land in the middle of the Canadian prairies, on which I could grow just enough to sustain myself? Lol, the fuck do you think?
Small businesses are lost to progress. This is great.
I've been buying more repairable devices. Thus the Framework laptop. And the government is putting pressure on companies to allow repairs, which is good. In the end, though, this is our fault, because we're a bunch of short-sighted assholes who are distracted by shiny things. We don't have to be.
Why on earth would I care? Again, beyond those two companies, there are a thousand up-and-comers, so if the big guys slip there will be alternatives. In the meantime? They do a really fucking good job. If the government operated like Post, I'd enjoy going to the DMV.
...In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it's authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.
Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.
Yeah, that sucks, we should do something about that.
But the 'wealth' bar falls every day. People in Africa are able to access AIDS medication so successfully that I read recently it's on the path to eradication. And there just isn't a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it's kinda fucking irrelevant, isn't it?
No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it. Suffering is normal from any sane reading of history. But we've driven the share of people in serious poverty, on the verge of famine and starvation, from 80+% a century ago to well under 20% today. There's a lot of causes for that, but capitalism is high on the list.
East India Company was a monopoly grant by the crown of England. They had an army. They weren't capitalist, they were colonialist. I know you can't tell a difference between Amazon shipping you a shirt you bought from them voluntarily because you wanted a shirt, and the East India Company using their military to extract taxes from the natives using fear and violence, but to me it's a pretty significant difference.
Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently. Look up the the most fatal events in human history, and a whole lot of them are famines in China or India--most of them long before Westerners ever turned up. Saying "capitalism sucks, because there were famines that overlapped with the rise of capitalism!" is like saying "This house sucks, because while we were in the process of building it, before we had a proper roof, we got rained on! We should tear the house down again!"
Fuck this is exhausting.
It's true that capitalism isn't perfect, and even more to the point, it doesn't exist in a perfect world: people trade for goods on open markets, and at the same time there are enslaved people in Africa. People pool their resources to fund enterprises that offer goods & services for sale, and even as they do so, the American government works to achieve policy objectives which I don't personally agree with. Giving people the freedom to buy, sell, work, and invest as they please has fantastically increased the wellbeing of those people & countries who participated, but it hasn't solved literally every problem in the world (especially in places that have very specifically not participated).
So you want to rise up and shut down the markets and ban enterprise. In it's place you have nothing. You have no working system to replace it. Nobody has proposed anything that could take it's place in anything but the vaguest, most loose terms possible. "What if everything was like...better, man?" Fucking useless. Anyway, even if you did have a goal, you have no politically viable means to reach it. Historically, the best anybody has come up with was, "hey, how about we just kill a bunch of people who are better off than we are, then sit around and talk about how much better things could be?" Then somebody with charisma gathers enough followers to seize power, and things get really fucked up.
Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you're just whining. And I haven't seen anything even beginning to approach a half-baked vision. I am profoundly unimpressed. At the same time I think you (and others like you) suffer from a profound lack of perspective on where we are and how impressive it is that we got here.
you can't be serious about this, right? have you done any research on this at all? vast quantities of people live in food deserts in a ton of places. 23 million people. and its suspected that that figure is under-reporting.
you make a bunch of comments about being essentially fine with monopolies, which i'm going to just ignore, because if you can't understand why entrusting so much of the things we consume to a couple megacorps is really dangerous i don't know what to tell you. historically that doesn't tend to lead to people having a great time, and all evidence suggests that the people working for those corporations are suffering pretty bad right now. we actually have quite a few protections in place to theoretically break up monopolies, specifically because they're known to cause lots of suffering for people.
i genuinely can't believe this one lol. you are actually going to pretend that market forces aren't the explicit driving factor of slavery in these regions. their work is directly linked into global supply chains, you bought the slave labor phone with dollars, how is that possibly something that can be solved with a market economy? the market economy is already there, and it has driven human beings into bondage. whatever. if a country is the target of rampant resource exploitation that directly enriches corporations existing under capitalism, its not non-capitalist. and even if it were true that countries that are "anarchic" or "authoritarian" weren't capitalist by their participation in the global system of capital, the way the government got that way is not some accident of history. the exploitation started with colonial expansion, and it never stopped. rich countries pillaged these places, enriching themselves even further, and then you go and blame them for being unstable enough to continue pillaging.
is the US noncapitalist? nestle is doing this in impoverished regions of the states too. sometimes not legally, but mostly while protected by the US government.
now i know you really haven't explored these ideas at all lol. that's just marx. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. he actually did propose such a government, and laid out a pretty detailed roadmap to get there. the failures of that system are well described, but nah man, there are a ton of proposed models of government based specifically about getting people what they need. that you seem not to have heard of them doesn't really make your defense of capitalism seem well considered. wouldn't it be nice if the government gave everybody what they needed? why shouldn't that be our goal?
fuck that noise. the specific suffering caused by capitalism are not natural consequences of our lives as humans. there are identifiable harms caused by structures that extract resources from places without any to spare. the "developing world" is often in the state they're in because capitalist governments took all their shit and kept all the profits.
this one's just ignorant. the frequency of crop failures in india increased drastically under British control, and there is fairly solid research to support the assertion that the extraction of wealth and food from the region by the East India Company directly led to the famines there. that is not to mention that the resource extraction capitalism has driven worldwide has made crop failures a lot more likely, and increasingly so, as we continue to ramp up our fossil fuel usage, despite knowing about the very real dangers of climate change for fucking decades.
nah. i don't need those things. i can criticize the many many flaws inherent to the current economic system without having a perfect alternative available for you. not that i don't have any alternatives. again, there are so many fucking books on this stuff its insane. i know you seem to think that capitalism is not responsible for the many things capitalism is directly responsible for, but capitalists of yore fought tooth and nail to keep slaves, to work people impossible hours under unsafe conditions, to deprive people of food, water, and shelter, and they are continuing to do so to this day. the only way that's gonna change is if we make it change. the only way we've improved things through the past is by directly opposing the ability for single dudes to own all the land and all the stuff and all the tools to make the stuff, and the same is true today. but you go ahead, have fun licking that boot.