The insurmountable momentum of the systems we have in place will lead us to ruin.
Not even this, it's increase profits next quarter.
Corporate behavior would be ridiculously different if they weren't so short term.
Corporate behaviour would be different if they were treated like the citizen they claim to be.
The prison would be filled to the brim, and we could release people that were imprisoned for smoking pot or something to make place for people destroying the planet.
This is pretty ignorant actually. Companies pay millions to have CEOs that are invested in long term strategy. How you ask? With stock bonuses that will perform better if the company does well.
Many do, but many seem to not. I didn't mean to generalize them all, but I see way too many decisions that boost the next quarters or few quarters at the expense of long term health, and these decisions get rewarded with stock price bumps. Then the decision makers eject when its time to pay the price.
I own or used to own some of these stocks, and it annoys me when they do. I want to hold these companies, not pump and dump them.
As a hypothetical investor, why would I invest my money in a company that promises profit in 10 years, when I could invest in profits for the next quarter, then take back my investment + profit, and invest somewhere else with profit next quarter?
Tesla is a a great counter-example. Before Musks true colors came out, Tesla stock went on a wild ride long before the company made a profit, and is frequently priced way above anything justifiable by current income or profit. It’s all based on hope for a long term plan to change the world and eventually make huge profits, rather than short term goals.
As a hypothetical investor, if you stayed away from companies like Tesla, you would miss some stocks with the highest returns
A stock-price bubble is the opposite of a good example in my opinion. Dumb techbros hyping a company to the point where it has a higher capitalization than literal Volkswagen group, because the stock price kept inflating. What percentage of the stock owners of Tesla 4 years ago are the same as nowadays? I'd bet it's low
Are you actually this stupid or are you trolling? I just cannot imagine that someone could actually be this ignorant.
Depends on the corporation. Silicon Valley, for example, is often all about the next quarter. Older companies that have been around longer have a longer view and tend to be more focused on long-term results.
The system we have right now isn't accurately described by "capitalism", and reusing the same word that describes the industrialization process is really tone-deaf.
How is this not capitalism? It may not be free market capitalism since an increasingly small bunch of rich people at the top have way too much power over everything, but that's just what happens when the game of Monopoly nears its inevitable end.
For any reasonable measure, capitalism died at the 20th century. The thing around right now is a completely different organization than what existed from the 17th to the 19th one.
Just for a start, making a lot of stuff won't make you rich. If you just get capital, invest in some random production, and go to market, you'll almost certainly fail.
But also, the state hands capital down everywhere; freedom of initiative is severely restricted everywhere; most of what we call "capital" isn't past produced value. The last one hints at calling the current system "rentism".
"Rentism" is just the end state of that same game of Monopoly. Some own everything and everyone else just goes around spending what little they have on rent. The game didn't change name just because some people already won and it wasn't us. We sell our labour to the capitalists to buy the necessities of life from them, while they enjoy the surplus value generated by our labour. That's straight up the marxist definitions of working class and capitalist.
Just for a start, making a lot of stuff won’t make you rich. If you just get capital, invest in some random production, and go to market, you’ll almost certainly fail.
I fail to see how this isn't a feature of capitalism. Just "making a lot of stuff" never worked even in the haydays of capitalism. You need a valid business case and customers etc..
But also, the state hands capital down everywhere
That's the money you get every time you pass the starting square. It exists solely to keep the system functioning without the need for dramatic reform. If the tenants have no money to pay with, the landlords don't get their profits.
freedom of initiative is severely restricted everywhere
That's because the capitalists (people who own the means of production) have no intention to share their positions of power with the plebeians. Doing so would be against their rational self-interest. The state is a tool among many they use to perpetuate the status quo. Lobbyists and campaign funding are the most direct examples of this, but it goes a lot deeper than that.
most of what we call “capital” isn’t past produced value
Anything that can be traded for money counts as capital when even money itself can be used to manipulate the markets to generate even more money. Yeah it may well be some NFT or other such scam, but scamming is just a profitable business among others. To stick with the allegory about tenants and landlords: Owning a house is a profitable endeavour that generates passive income. The money generator box has some person inside who may at times complain about a kitchen appliance not working, but most of the time the thing just keeps generating capital for you despite the annoying whining noise coming from within. You may then invest this capital, for example in purchasing additional money generator boxes.
You're wrong in your analysis. The system hasn't qualitatively changed. It's still a system with an owning class and a working class. The difference is that capital now, as you say, mostly revalorizes in the financial sector instead of in the industrial sector. But capitalism is called capitalism, not industrialism.
Lenin already talked about this in his 1916 treatise "Imperialism: the highest form of capitalism". He describes the process of concentration of capital that took place over the 19th and especially the beginnings of the 20th century, the consolidation of trusts and cartels, and the financialization of the economy. You're describing nothing new, he calls this phase of capitalism "imperialism". But it is a phase of capitalism, the social relations haven't been changed, workers still have to sell their labor force as a commodity, goods and services are exchanged in the free market, and the owners of capital, be it financial or industrial, rake the surplus value from the workers.
It’s still a system with an owning class and a working class.
Hum... So, capitalism is what? 5000 years old?
I specifically made a mention to free markets, and to workers selling their labor as a commodity, in my comment.
People like to imagine "capitalism" as some machine entity that we can disassemble.
It's people.
People who either inherited or earned too much money through various means, nefarious or otherwise. They in turn have enough money to buy other people's decisions who are in a place to make these laws but also want more money themselves so they in turn can do the same.
The only way to change capitalism is a full system reset, and to enable restrictions on net worth. Every single position from president all the way down to the smallest assistant needs a full re-roll, no exceptions.
Don't forget:
The problem is not that they choose to do this, it's that they're allowed to do it.
It's not that CEOs just happened to be evil. It's a material conditions problem. Anyone who becomes a CEO has tremendous pressure to become evil. You could even argue that the steps you would have to take to become a CEO are morally problematic. So the pressure to become evil starts early. As soon as you enter the job market.
Yes, but the difference is with politics things are more transparent and we have a choice. We can vote. With CEOs, we don't get a choice and no one really knows what goes on up there.
Which is why we normally argue for democracy. If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.
If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.
I mean this is only really true so long as everyone is allowed to vote, which is inevitably never the case. We always have certain subsects of the population which aren't really given access to democracy. It's very easy to, even in a "total democracy", still have a ton of xenophobia and imperialism, because obviously, people who aren't citizens can't vote. That's a very large top-down example, right, but this creation of subsects happens at every level. Famous more american examples are gerrymandering and the electoral college.
More than allowed! The system (society at large, capitalism, etc...) forces them to think this way!
Ed Zitron's podcast, Better Offline, has been discussing the rot economy for multiple episodes. The idea of "number go up" being the only metric that matters makes a lot of sense for how we got here.
"If the customers are buying and the money multiplying and the PR people lying and the lawyers are denying, who cares if some things are dying!"
Or, y'know... Vote Democrat and have a chance to save your children from climate Armageddon.
I feel like "Vote Democrat" is 0.5 step forwards while "Vote GOP" is 50 steps backwards. Really wish we had ranked choice voting and a handful of viable other viable parties like other democracies around the world!
Sure...we are not at all at fault. Our demand for disposable tech junk and cheap Chinese trinkets is the corporations fault. Tech corporations made cryptocurrency and set up crypto farms?
I'll give you oil corps all day long, but most of the rest is on us. We did it. We fucked ourselves. We demanded that the planet burn while we meme about climate change on Twitter, as it single handedly eats enough power to run a town.
Let the downvotes commence. Lie to yourselves all you want, but that doesn't makes us less guilty.
A lot of this can be attributed to corporations and the (b/m)illionaire class forcing us all into a position where we too have to try and find a way forward, and a way to get wealthy. Those needs lead to things like people working multiple gig jobs like Uber Eats; trying to monetize crypto or basically any hobby we can think of; distracting ourselves with junk because we can’t come to terms with the fact that our lives are all lacking because the ruling class is constantly draining us dry.
There is always a link back to the ruling class with these things.
Why are minority neighborhoods fucked? Because the ruling class doesn’t see them as profitable; because the landlord class sees their land as a commodity and drives them out, or takes over and continues to gentrify.
Why can’t anyone afford rent? Because the landlord class drives prices up simply because they can. What do people in desperate times like this do? They seek out what they consider “easy money” such as crypto, selling hobbies, etc. Drop-shipping junk on Etsy and even buying it for themselves.
We live in a country that forces downward pressure on everyone that isn’t swimming in money.
“But what about people in tech that get paid well?” — they are still trying to seek their own shortest way out due to constant burnout because of layoffs and “line go up” pressure. Yet again, the ruling class is at the root of the problem.
For your last part in tech jobs being paid well. You might wanna mention how the tech companies worked with each other to keep salaries down by not hiring other companies ex-employees.
I would post a reference but I can't find the news article I read, this was sometime in the 90s and 00s. I'm sure there is some fuckery still going on. Google has really gone downhill since I can't even find it.....I used to be revered at my old job for my "Google Fu" and now I feel lost...
I’m in tech myself and am curious to check that out. It’s really become a rough and chaotic field. I was laid off myself for 3 months and have had to deal with all kinds of wild fuckery.
I don't disagree with that at all. What I dislike is when people try to fully "pass the buck" and play the victim when they are also part of the problem. Ultimately we agree at the core level. As I said, the problem are not corporations, the problem is the core concept of capitalism that puts us in a rat race and in desperate need for something, anything, to make us feel better about a miserable existence, as well as the oppression of a ruling class who's only interests are their own.
I understand your point. But I also feel that it needs to be taken in the wider context that our consumerist lifestyles were manufactured by those same corporations in order to sell more stuff. A good article about this. The individual can always try to consume as little as possible, but to truly break this vicious cycle at the societal scale, drastic measures would have to be taken in order to limit advertising (which is quite literally just propaganda to convince the masses to consume more) and other forces perpetuating the current situation. People can live without consumer capitalism, most corporations cannot. That's why they're hell bent on keeping the populace thirsty for their products through whatever means necessary.
The companies selling you junk are using psychology to make you buy their products. They have boiled down what makes you consume more, and what doesn't to a science.
You are bombarded 24/7 with ads and pressured to buy shit you don't need all the time so that the profits keep growing. This is 100% the corporations' fault
This is why nowadays, you see the same budget for marketing as the development of a product or service.
Remove the ads everywhere, and you will see consumption decrease.
Our demand for disposable tech junk and cheap Chinese trinkets is the corporations fault.
Yes, it is. With wages being paid by corporations so low and absolute necessities such as food, shelter, and medicine so expensive, most of us can't afford anything better.
Tech corporations made cryptocurrency and set up crypto farms?
They literally did, yes.
most of the rest is on us. We did it. We fucked ourselves
It's not every day you see delusions of grandeur, victim blaming and a mea culpa in the same sentence. Probably because that's ridiculous.
We demanded that the planet burn
[Citation needed]
we meme about climate change on Twitter, as it single handedly eats enough power to run a town.
Nope. No real person uses "enough power to run a town" to meme. That's corporations and billionaires you're thinking of.
Lie to yourselves all you want
Nah, no need. We have you for that.
Magical thinking peaks somewhere around blaming natural disasters on the profit motive.
Magical thinking peaks somewhere around blaming natural disasters on the profit motive.
Does it? We’ve pumped so much carbon and methane and other worse substances into the atmosphere (or into the earth, in the case of fracking) in pursuit of that profit and that’s directly affecting the severity and frequency of some of those natural disasters. Obviously natural disasters exist anyway, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t demonstrably making the situation worse.
Was the soviet union also pursuing profit? If we stopped having profit seeking, would that mean less carbon and other pollution?
If so, how do you figure? Do you not think economic activity would have happened if we’d been doing all our stuff from the goodness of our altruistic hearts?
Like, what kind of economic system doesn’t pollute?
The soviets were constantly trying to grow their economy to stay competitive with the US and to demonstrate affluence. They switched out the old capitalist factory owners for the new class of government bureaucrats and party elite, who then carried on running the system for themselves. The state owned the means of production. They pretended that everyone owned the state, but we know this wasn't the case. The soviet union was a state capitalist system.
If we stopped seeking profit, our economies would stop growing and subsequently our emissions would as well. Our system is built to rely on infinite growth. No bank gives out a loan without expecting that money to grow with interest. Infinite growth is incompatible with the material reality of a finite planet. What we would need to do now, would involve purposeful economic degrowth. I have no hope that this will ever happen since it would require a lot of people to consume less and we are used to a lot of bread and circuses. Whatever you define as "economic activity" is secondary to the survival of the species.
I’m literally the only person opposed to the dominant narrative here and you’re telling me to think critically?
Yep. Does an economic system that rewards infinite growth make sense on a planet with finite resources?