Every site analog has `ads`, `ads`, `ads` at the top. Then, when you waste a few minutes watching a banal video, full of unoriginal cliches, and bored to distraction, you're asked to buy merch. It's hard to tell the difference here between parody, idiocy, and the commercialism that I assume is the target of the parody.
As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I find that people who complain about capitalism have not typically experienced another form of economic system.
Most recently, my Uber driver was a 20-something year old from Brazil who thought capitalism was evil and seriously wanted to bring back communism. She went on a long rant about capitalism, how we need a revolution and how communism was going to make things better.
- "Have you lived in Communism?"
- "No, but I read about it"
The grass is always greener, especially if you read books that tell you how it's so much greener on the other side.
Much of the region is socialist. Much of the region is deeply corrupt. Citizens protest endlessly against their governments for said corruption. Citizens think the solution to their problems is more government control over their economies...by the same corrupt government that they're protesting.
I think the real problem is that people in the region deeply think that their own well being is somebody else's problem to solve. Taking control over your own life is anathema.
You make a fair point, who in their right mind would want to live in a centralised command economy claiming to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat on some mythical road to an imagined communism.
Have there been any actual communist states?
For that matter, is the US a "capitalist state" or just something flawed in the vicinity of an ideal.
People can rightly complain of Citizens United and extreme wealth disparity without wanting some farcical wealth leveling via a Bolshevist revolution and a bunch of tossers rabbiting on about Marxism | Leninism while imprisoning millions.
I hail from a formerly communist country and one time during his youth in the 70s my dad hosted a few Americans for a short while. He asked them at one point if they're not worried that communism could get a foothold in the US, to which one of the Americans replied:
"Nah, if it happens we'll just start selling hammer and sickle t-shirts."
Looking how it's currently normalized that every activist of any kind has a book to sell I'm beginning to think that at some point they really started selling those Ts.
Hi! Capitalism is not simply the exchange of goods (merchandise, in my case) and money. Capitalists accumulate excess capital (hence the name “capitalism”) through the exploitation of the environment and workfore (RE surplus Labour value). I do not have a workforce, and I use Teemill because they are—at least purportedly—sustainable. I am self-employed because I do not like to be on capitalists’ payrolls. That means I have to think of other ways to make money. The notion of making money any way but having a job (working for a capitalist) being bad is an internalisation of capitalist dogma.
IMO a capitalist that merely hoards wealth is a bad capitalist. They will eventually be surpassed by someone better.
Good capitalists reinvest in better technology, processes and the labor force that executes their mission. That’s how you stay competitive.
Regardless of whether an economy is capitalist, socialist, communist, whatever, there will be wealth hoarders and exploiters. This is not intrinsic to any economic system, but rather human nature.
