Is capitalism causing adults to regress into childhood to escaping the soul-crushing monotony of their material...

Is capitalism causing adults to regress into childhood to escaping the soul-crushing monotony of their material conditions?

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Probably.

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your right, they turned to wife beating, prostitution, and alcoholism to hide the pain

Imagine being 20 years old and still getting hype for a fucking plastic gaming console

Please stop.

Blaming capitalism for everything including minor cultural trends you personally dislike is some really shitty, high school-tier grasp of materialism and makes you sound really stupid

What's that in common?

Oh yes, the Nintendo Switch, a favorite among Zig Forums.

The development of capitalism definitely did lead to the emergence of the idea of the hobby as a sort of voluntary private labor in which there is no alienation.

i've never even seen the nintendo switch being mentioned in any of the leftyvidya threads, quit talking out of your ass

proof?

"Escapism" is more than "enjoy hobbies" though.
Yeah I don't think that this is really specific to capitalism, it's probably something modern socialist societies would have to deal with as well. It might be even worse there actually since people might be more free to indulge. Dedicating your life to your hobbies sounds Utopian, but the ability to "escape" in it to such an extent is something new that came with technology, and you might lose too many people this way.
But in any case, in a capitalist society, escapism is definitively one way people have to try to cope with their conditions. It might still happen in socialism, but for somewhat different reasons.

It's certainly popular with liberal soyboys.

The Switch is pretty fun actually. Videogames are fun in general. I just think they unfortunately become a replacement for genuine intellectual endeavors.
To clarify, I'm a scientist skilled in theoretical mathematics. I often encounter people who extol the same sense of achievement making high scores on Super Smash Brothers that a colleague might in cracking a Sturm-Liouville problem formulation placed into a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Often they spend a similar amount of time and energy getting good at a video game that I do wrapping my mind around 5 research papers. In fact, given the option of treating socialist activism and packaging philosophical socialist arguments for proles as a video game or playing XBOX as a videogame in order to relax. I would choose the former, and crack open my Zizek books for my sort of socialist gaming guide.

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Except we're not liberals. Did you even read the FAQ? Oh that's right, nazifags can't read lol.

This meme is a spin off of OP's pic. It's hilarious.

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That fucking made me laff

What's so popular about this switch shit anyway? Last Nintendo stuff I had was a Wii for SSBB and that was a long time ago.

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butthurt /v/irgin detected

It's pretty good hardware tbh, and has had a score of great releases. Problem is it is Nintendo, and thus people fetishize it to the degree of near worship, and are willing to go on a fucking jihad for it. Mind you this is true of most cancerous fetishes (Star Wars, 40k).

Specifically, current economic trends - yes. The possibility of home ownership and decent living for the (gone) middle class faded after the last crash (exacerbated by decades of neoliberal policies), and most of the US didn't really have cultural conventions for adults living with their parents anymore - better conditions in the mid-20th century had led to moving out at 18 being normal. But this is also made a bit worse by overprotective parenting (itself actually partially a product of capitalism - moral panic is profitable) and a lack of real world experience. These material conditions are then marketed as (and mistaken for) a chosen identity - one thing in particular I've noticed is that the old 'child protagonist' trope seems to be seeing more shift towards older subjects.

How to Tame Your Dragon 2 off the top of my head - a friend took me to see that, and it's an archetypal "teenage boy trying to find himself" flick except the protagonist is 20. Of course this may be changing, now - I don't watch children's films on my own, so I'm unsure if we're still in the "our demographic is 20-something children who take CGI Disney films seriously" era or not.

But anyway, children are easy to sell shit to. Shitty social and economic conditions stunt development and rob people of their youthful endeavors. So, sell sell sell.

but that said, the bearded-guy-with-open-mouth thing is overblown. All YT partner types overreact - it gets more attention when you're excited or outraged about any fucking thing. It's just the cheapest form of theater.

There is good capitalism and there is bad capitalism.

Bad capitalism is the capitalism in which communists use against society to make capitalism look bad. It is no different than a leftist picking up a gun and using it against responsible gun owners, while blaming the gun for the deaths.

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I'd laugh if it wasn't for the fact that some people actually believe this…

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Capitalism does a good enough job making itself look bad, thank you. Needs no help from us.
Hot take tbh.

Is this a pasta?

capitalism is the same

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No. True shit. I work on FPGAs, computer architecture, control systems, semiconductors and advanced electromagnetics.

Science and socialism are my videogames.

Wtf how did this happen?

I'd say it is more about selling the experience of being a well adjusted, happy person.
You know… the spectacle of middle class success.

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This is the worst liberal meme. Something being enjoyable is basically a red flag at this point.

is this peak ideology?

pretty much, if you accept the Situationist analysis which concerns socialized post-war (WWII) capitalism

the people in this video are leftists

liberals*

...

Watch him say that Liberals are leftists.

It doesnt get any more boomer than this, folks.

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I would agree OP, but in more of a roundabout way - I think the primary cause is academia.

A few decades ago, having a second-level certificate was enough to get a decently-paying job. This is no longer viable.
It used to be a case where having a Bachelors Degree meant automatic employment where you were financially set for life. This is no longer the case.
Meanwhile, the poor people who had to drop out of school in their early teens and spent their lives working menial, low-paying jobs could still eventually save up enough to buy a home. This is now illegal.

Thus it is inevitable that as qualifications become more meaningless, you will spend more and more of your 20s/30s sitting around in classrooms while living with your parents. The dreaded alternative of working minimum wage keeps you in the system, as inflation makes this lifestyle look scarier as the decades progress.

The result of this is a perpetual adolescence, you dodge the major Rites of Passage and can continue to embody the values and mindset of a 15 year old at the age of 35. Renting, income tax, getting married and having children now carry a lower importance.
Of course, it is Capitalism which is at the root of this phenomenon.

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Daily reminder that this is what Zig Forumstards actually believe.

"Good capitalism" for Zig Forumstards is where the capitalist class is majority white, has conservative values and women shit out at least one kid a year. "Bad capitalism" is where everything is the same except "commie jews" run the system, and there are low-birth rates and pink-haired SJWs holding "refugees welcome" signs.

r'ing that meme where they unironically define the difference between their politics and cultural marxism as "capitalism as a tool vs. capitalism taken to its logical conclusions"

FTFY

Yes obviously lol, who wouldn't? Oh my god, society is the worst and living under Communism is a drag. Don't come to Canada until we get Trudeau out of the picture.

Any time this is pointed out, normalfags just claim it isn't real capitalism and blame it all on regulations.

This post is anti-capitalist yet at the same time brimming with capitalist morality.

I think capitalism destroys everything when it's corporate. I think a free market using cryptocurrency is the capitalist future and the rest of us won't use money. It's an ongoing debate for the anarchist community.

What, like a "half way there" change with regards to money elimination? You don't think porky will try to force his e-cash on everybody else? Phone scanning to pay already exists, it is likely to become the norm. And after that it's mandatory chipping.

The question is how do we literally spin off our own economy to compete with the capitalist one before all this happens.

Well you can't really force that upon anyone, cryptocurrency as we know is voluntary so all I'm saying is cryptocurrency and the free market is the future but since it's voluntary, those who don't wish to use it won't.

I'd like to know why

yes this is what happens when capitalism exploits the working class and makes them poor, they go out and buy luxury goods and use hobbies to fill up their free time…oh wait….

meanwhile in Venezuala people eat garbage.

We've been over this 1,000 times

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Fixed that typo for ya ;) uwu

B-but user, I like Snyder's more than Rold Gold. They taste slightly d-different!
Pl-please don't abolish gapitalism

Meanwhile in the USSR or PRC, the life expectancy doubled.

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That's exactly it. think about it, infantile idpoling based on race and gender is today more important than character and actions of a person. People don't care about one another they only care for themselves, emotions are shallow and meaningless, and money is the key to everything in modern society.

uhh I know, im so infuriated at this….where are the gulags and famines to keep us objectively BUSY?

Actually, agrarian peasants in the Feudal era had about half the year off and more leisure time over all than modern day workers do under capitalism.

They also had houses.

And trinkets and toys, as well. So, what's that?

Toys, more houses, and more free time to fuck around like retards with their dolls? Wow, feudalism sounds great!

I agree we should go back to monarchism and feudalism, but that is another topic.

>>>/p01/

Yes… It cost $1000/month to rent a low end apartment in my city. Buy a house is impossible because even the worst box goes for 1 million.

If this is 'capitalism' fuk it.

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Famines ended under the USSR after occurring for many centuries. The last one was in the 1940s.

Per-capita caloric consumption was comparable to the West.

Life expectancy doubled.

Those evil communists sure did a number on Russia.

Because it implies that life as a manchild is less meaningful than "Renting, income tax, getting married and having children". In other words, being a norp cog in the machine is held out as a meaningful existence. The rest of the post explores how contemporary capitalism itself however makes it impossible to even be a simple cog - a contradiction in capitalism.

It's a good post.

I have one.
It's fun, but I also realize videogames are escapism. I won't glorify it.

Is that guy in the middle badmouse?

No, I don't think he plays videogames.

Is whoever did this on the spectrum?

This. But unironically.

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Jej.

Not that user but I think there's a difference between being a manchild and being more productive with your energies (not necessarily being a cog) as well as fetishizing either of them, which capitalism thrives on because it's something that it can sell.

I don't disagree with you but I think what that user was trying to describe was the perspective of these people who have been indoctrinated into this mindset because it it still perceived as the set of social norms one must complete as a right of passage yet there is now a major dissonance between the material shift that capitalism has created and the ideological superstructure surrounding what it means to "be an adult" or what have you. After all, we accept that there is always a lag culturally when the underlying conditions of a society shift so dramatically to make the normal untenable and that's likely what we're experiencing right now. Of course, how and even /if/ culture will catch up to this reality is something left to be debated and analysed, but I'd also find it interesting to examine exactly how this would affect young people in addition to how society would accomodate them, and how it impacts the various social spheres of life; this is certainly a much more important phenomenon as it relates to sexual "politics" than the usual bullshit that gets shitposted on this board for example.

Begone newfag

There's a girl in one of the pictures, that means he's okay….unless she is his sister or something

This is what I was getting at, you worded it more pointedly.

Part of the reproduction of capital is the reproduction of the labourer, which has been left to the workers using their wages. When Marx talks about the reproduction of the labourer, he use of that term is very artful: the labourer reproduced his ability to labour by eating, clothing himself, but he also literally reproduces himself! There is poetry in Marx.

Now of course the capitalist to increase his rate of profit will try to push down the wage to the mere reproductive level, and in a time before reliable and safe contraceptives, this also implied sustaining his children, as a parent will go hungry himself before he starves his children, and so reduces his labouring power. Not to mention that when Marx wrote, children were very much also part of the labour force, reproducing their labour with their own wage.

I think capital has started to eat away at that. Reproduction of the labourer, the raising of children, it all happens through an increasing quantity of commodities - breakfast cereals, clothes, diapers, college degrees, and of course… toys. And in the case of raising a child to productive age, in takes longer. But as these demands of reproduction increase, as instilled by the capital-influence culture, so does the necessary wage to pay for it need to go up. And capitalists always try to squeeze at the wage, making it hover around the cost of reproduction.

We are clearly a time when capital has overshot in increasing the costs of reproduction, in the way people need degrees, and feel the urge to continue to consume toys. The effect this is having on culture is weird, to say the least.

I certainly think so, and I say this as someone who was into "nerd" culture going all the way back to the 90's.
People who weren't into think that "nerds" weren't self aware that their activity put made them low key pariahs or that they believed that their hobby and their obsessive following was productive somehow.
This is not true, one "nerd" blogger I used to follow in the early 2000's once said
"I have over a 1000 comics in my collection and I am a grown man, I feel a deep sense of shame about this and any of my reads who doesn't feel this way is dead to me."
That self awareness seems completely gone now among adults indulging in videogames and other "children's" hobbies.
The guys in the pictures and the men overall in these hobbies seem to hungrily consume this culture like actual children.
It's gotten to the point where I can't enjoy the culture anymore, that probably would have happened anyway as I became more class conscious, but regardless it's very weird to see this hobby filled with guys like this. I really think it is a shift, the hobby is no longer niche, it is firmly mainstream.

Famalam

Fuck it is Nazi poster I'm a dumb cunt please disregard.

Absolutely, the reproduction of labour is central to Capitalism and over the past 50-60 years we have seen massive shifts in the material conditions that highlight major contradictions. In the period previous to this we saw prevailing attitudes about the family also change as laws & reforms were passed forbidding children from engaging in labour, restrictions on women in the labour force etc which led to the ideological dissipation of the "Nuclear Family" model among other things which aimed to have the Husband & Father reproduce himself & his family off of predominantly a single wage. Wages are neccessarily always above the base level required for the labourer to reproduce themselves and their family so they generally cannot be below the subsistence level, but we've seen many technological breakthroughs that have affected the relations of production drastically in addition to the cultural reaction to such and have observed the ways in which this has been accomodated by the superstructural aspects of society. It's interesting that you bring up access to reliable & safe contraceptives because I think that would be one of the largest historical changes that we can glean information from to assist our understanding of the effects of the "Neoliberal" period as some call it.

As access to such things becomes available widely to the Proletariat we not only see an emergence of birth rates decline towards ~2 children per family as the minimum level required for labour to reproduce itself but we also see the rise of the women's liberation movements, which in turn produces a reconciliation in which women culturally are much more accepted in the labour force which fundamentally shifts the structure of the family as rates of participation increase.

If Birth Rates decline then there is a pressure exerted upon capital to increase wages which is partially resolved by the Proletarianization of women to increase the labour supply (a wholly positive & required step imo, I don't want my amateur analysis to be an argument for reaction), which exerts equal pressure in the opposite direction on wages increasing the level of exploitation for both women & men by being required for both of them to work longer hours in order to satisfy the requirements for the reproduction of their own lives & families, but it simultaneously opens up and huge new market of consumers at the same time as restricting the amount of time workers have to spend raising their children, which may well explain an aspect of your point about the increase in commodities required to raise children themselves.

This is a vast oversimplification of the relationship between these things but I just wanted to draw a few differing threads together to try and paint a picture of the way in which we can observe data to perhaps better understand our conditions now. Taking these tentative observations and then also looking at how the changes that have come about in the increased exploitation of labour especially in our "Neoliberal" period you could possibly arrive at more conclusions to help explain your concept of capital /overshooting/ and I actually think Cockshott's latest video about the Law of Wages ties into this further as a set of Tools to help our analysis. youtube.com/watch?v=85tYfXYmzJY

It's easy to identify the major technological changes and how they alter material conditions but as for the superstructural consequences of such and how they react, absorb and adapt to these things and to go further how they are then employed to maintain the base economic relations by capital I'm struggling a lot more to find ideas for, partially because we're currently in the middle of this historical period now and can look back on the past with more clarity due to other's work, but I think that even this is sympomatic of a more general fugue state of the youth in general being more alienated, atomized & lost. After all, we as filthy gommies aren't immune to such things.

In the case of the effect of contraceptives, women in the labour force, and so on, I think it's easy to see what is happening. Capital needs only the labour of the labourer, and he wants to pay him as little as possible for it. In the case where a family of two labourers does not have contraception, that will mean they will necessarily have children throughout their life. The effective minimal pay will need to accommodate that - pay them less, they revolt, or go seek employment elsewhere.

But now, we are already in a place where people are expected to defer having children until about late twenties: time to get a degree, and to rack up some experience. The freedom of the pill is afforded us, and capital expects us to use it. And because capital is a mechanical force without much foresight, it could easily press this expectation to where it pushes us below an actual long term reproduction of the workforce.

And if Japan is anything to go by, what it leads to is a soft societal euthanasia. The scary thing is that it never has come to a real crisis after the sudden stop of the economic growth in the 90's. Capital can seemingly plateau, and start to consume the actual population as it perpetuates itself.

Yes exactly we have a mountain of knowledge to draw upon when analysing the previous periods, the question becomes identifying the key aspects of our current period with that analysis in mind. I see this forced societal euthanasia providing a massive contradiction that will ultimately lead this neoliberal period to it's demise as capital cannibalizes it's lifeblood as you have laid out.

Because as birth rates decline below reproduction levels, due to this extended adolescence experienced by those in our generation and the ones proceeding us as a neccessitation of the lack of opportunities and standards of living to even meet the most basic needs, this same pressure we saw in the previous period on wages will arise again yet this time there is no real solution. Capital has forced this predicament upon modern society through policies and actions in an attempt to combat falling profit rates.

Previously this could have been displaced onto women by allowing them to enter the labour force en masse but there is no such room any more. We have seen a displacement onto third world labour and the dismantling of unneccessary industry in the first world where it is more profitable abroad but even this can only extend so far as these nations develop and have their own labour struggles which will have many of the same effects of rising wages as labour fights back against capital and their material conditions improve. Once again Capitals need for perpetual growth sowing the seeds for it's own demise in a limited world.

It's interesting you bring up Japan because a large way in which they have attempted to ameliorate these problems is by a massive increase in immigration into the country to expand the labour pool in the short term and increase birth rates in the long term but this will surely have diminishing returns if this Neoliberal period continues as living standards in Japan, whilst stagnating, are already high as a developed nation. We also see this trend somewhat in Western Capitalist nations, as we all know Immigration is used as a foil to third world labour and has the effect of attempting to increase the labour supply and suppress wages which causes another contradiction and split between workers (which really can only be resolved by solidarity & organization to combat the nativist reaction against such) but again you see the same problems of diminishing returns even in a situation not anywhere near as dire as Japan. Ultimately importing consumers & workers to offset the effects of this massive exploitation is untenable especially if you consider the relationship between the 1st and 3rd world labour forces in this dynamic.

I think what you described is what is producing incels. Not only is parenthood pushed off further into the future, but what constitutes a fit husband is dramatically raised leaving many out.

not to mention a side effect of deferring child birth- huge increases in mental retardation, autism and mental illness i.e. decreasing the quality of the labor pool and increasing the cost of children to society

tbf fair historically most women worked. the 20th century first world (middle class) women was an anomaly.

I'm the other guy and these are somewhat salient points imo but I think they'd need more fleshing out if we were to accept them as causal. For example, the side effect of deffering childbirth and the complications that arise from that increasing the burden on the state is nothing compared to the burden placed on the state by a more general increase in living standards & medical advances leaving a massive section of elderly living longer. It's no coincidence that this is a large part of Japan's predicament and that in the 1st world care & nursing work is among the largest growing sectors of the economy and is ruthlessly proletarianized with awful pay (I'd imagine in part to do with it's historical association with domestic labour and women's work, but as the extended family has been dismantled the contradictions come to bare)

Oh yeah absolutely it was an anomaly in many cases you could say that the expansion of the labour force in that time period was the /reproletarianization/ of women as it relates to 20th century western capitalist economies, but it's hard to deny that the participation of women in the labour force now globally is the highest it's ever been and that has an effect of immesirating the entire working class because of the dynamics of capital, but it also provides more opportunities for solidarity in order for women & men to fight united and engage in class struggle, which is ultimately that which is neccessary, to dissolve divisions among the proletariat to bear the full force of the workers against capital.

Without sounding too socdem friendly, there is some hope though. If we look at Sweden and France, it would appear that you can push birth rates up again to about replacement level by having cheap child care and generous maternity benefits and leave, even in this alienated society of ours. Of course, it goes without say education needs also be affordable so people don't have to work down a student loan before they can settle don with house-child-dog.

Likely we'll see a new wave of relocation to the last untapped developing labour pool before the limits of the system are really reached. Also incidentally the one place which still has a vigorously rising population. Scramble for Africa II: Electric Boogaloo.

Also, did not know Japan had a lot of immigration. I always read they were very immigrant-unfriendly.

They have traditionally been a pretty insular culture and seen as xenophobic but immigration has steadily been increasing and is being encouraged in an effort to combat the demographic problems they're having, not sure what sort of backlash there has been to this or raw numbers but they at least seem to be relatively selective in who they allow to immigrate much like western capitalist nations. I'm sure there is a large Brazilian contingent given the relationship between those 2 nations in the past and all the expats in Brazil.

pic very related, it's where this argumentation is from

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Could be the social alienation too and i dont just mean getting laid. Thats an element sure, but you can't go one God damn minute without someone being a caddy jackass to you, a zombie hobbling around in your way while you're walking or driving, most conversations with your typical fellow aka normies is dull and more cumbersome than worth it…

All the meanwhile who would want to have sex with half of beasts out there that call themselves women? And it's a systemic problem. It's not JUST terrible women, it's not JUST millennials glued to their iPhones, its not JUST moderators who basically make any interaction online besides upvoting commercial products like the Deadpool sequel impossible. It's everything. Everything fucking sucks. No medication in the world is gonna change your environment. For that matter you may as well just give everybody heroin and they can basically just sleep all day and waste away rather than have to consciously face their own void.

Oh wait… There's an opiod epidemic HMMMMM that's convenient

This is why revolution isn't possible in the first world. Yes Jason is a Ugandan Knuckles ☭TANKIE☭ who has a romantic view of the brown man. But its not without good reason. You can still talk to the brown man like a fucking human being. The brown man isn't trying to ban you or harass you for trivial bullshit. The brown man in one way or another…respects your rights as he does his own.

Incels wrongly believe it's just them, or that the factors of why they are so depressed are tied to a linear social hierarchy of appearance, finances, and "game". But it's more than that. Their entire environment is so royally ass backward that even if they were good looking and charismatic they would still be depressed. Any sane person would be

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Oh, thanks comrade, would you recommend this for elucidating the concepts me & other posters have discussed here and is the English Translation adequate assuming Badiou originally wrote this in French and didn't translate himself?

Bilingue user here, yes to both - it is very thorough and only requires a small knowledge of theoretical postulates by Badiou. Also the translation is great

I can't actually tell if you're Jim or not

Thank you for the recommendation, I'm not particularly familiar with Badiou's work but I'm sure if I find gaps in my comprehension I can look to his other efforts. I'll grab it online now.