Disclaimer I don't really have a largercpoint to make in this thread I just have been researching a lot about how shit the modern world is from a left perspective of course due to a bout of depression and I need to get this out of my system cuz it's weighing on my mind pretty hard.
So capitalism in general is the enemy but does anyone else find our current era of neoliberal globalization particularly nightmarish? In the past when capitalist decadence achieved too excessive a hold on the public it seemed more open and people could see the decimation of decency the system was waging on their lives. Now people can just hide away from it and completely drop out and those who can't are incapable of communicating with the walled off either literally, through physical barriers,security, or geographical distance such as the 3rd world being so far from the 1st and so on, or metaphorically due to the acceleration of ways to tune out the noise IE tech gadgets, consumerism, highly immersive virtual environments becoming more accessible, ever more potent drugs, more access to more food for less, the religion of big budget multi film Hollywood franchises, the infinite "fandoms" one can join gambling, pornography and binge watching media. This is an isolation that cuts across class too and I would say is actually now an even bigger problem among lower classes. In the past all of this stimulus could only be afforded by the bourgeoisie but it has been made cheap, affordable, and largely globalized while the treatment necessary to recover from this multitude of addictions is being further horded and stashed away and made only accessible to the rich.
Those who either can't afford or can't morally square becoming a true atom in a sea of anxious automatons are regulated by massive security and surveillance apparatuses. The attack on homelessness and tent cities is ramping up because of this. The goal is to shove everyone who won't conform to a culture of pure individualism and consumerism into a private prison so they can be used as free capital or to just kill them either directly or through forcing them to kill themselves by either literally taking their own lives or starving them. Anyone who is going to be even a passive or potential threat to the system must be neutralized. Even the leaders of Black Lives Matter, a mostly liberal and identity politics ridden organization that has been on the wane recently, are mysteriously turning up dead over and over.
There are also feedback loops in the system similar to feedback loops in climate change that it causes which seem just as self-perpetuating and deterministic. The recycling industry is a good segue into this. When you recycle plastics, they are stockpiled and then sold to the highest bidder, which used to be China most of the time. China then gets what they can use out of it and simply dumps the rest. Increasingly, more and more dirty plastics are thrown into the mix due to the frenzy for cheap materials and then China is so full of unusable material it simply stops accepting most recyclable imports and begins dumping tons of filth. In the interim the process continued but the plastics are sold to even poorer nations with even lower standards (due to the beauty of deregulation which I'll get to in a second) and even more environmentally unfriendly processing plants and so on. The "fast fashion" industry is very similar but almost worse because they have begun to set up bins in their stores and even give customers discounts if they recycle a certain amount of clothing. These companies then profit from selling these clothes to a middleman who then in turn takes those clothes and what stores like Salvation Army can't sell and ships them to African nations for a profit. These nations then get what they can out of largely unusable material, sell them for tiny profits, then throws them into landfills often where they are simply set ablaze and in the open with large plumes of toxic fumes billowing into the sky. (1/2)
(2/2) The slums of these 3rd world countries are built often adjacent to or even within these landfills. In Manila in the Philippines one quarter of the population lives in slums. There's a local food tradition among slum folks known as "Pagpag" which is to scavenge the landfill for uneaten scraps, particularly the remnants of fried chicken or hot dogs, from restaraunts, the majority of which are multinational fast food chains such as McDonald's or KFC whose existence and massive profits in places like Manila was driven by global capital and it's institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and it's muscle in NATO and the US Military industrial complex, coming into the country and forcing their markets to open for assimilation into the global system. The poverty created by this process leads to both the masses working for companies like McDonald's and is also a necessary byproduct of the construction and development of cities such as Manila which was sold to people in the Philippines as a way to escape the crushing poverty of the provinces which is now even worse than the cities due to the Phillipines discarding protections for farmers there. People have internalized this and a common refrain is for them to say "there's nothing we can do". This scenario is partially what led to the election of Duterte who, like Trump used the chaos and desperation created by his class to further enrich them and himself.
Basically in the 1st world global neoliberals have used deregulation and the cult of individualism to move jobs overseas while using the deindustrialization this created to either talk the children of these dying regions into flooding into hyper capitalist cities that are increasingly controlled by a smaller and smaller amount of the ultra wealthy and their corporations, or to gentrify the regions themselves with more Wal-Mart's and Starbucks and so on bringing them "revival" in the form of turning them into another college town or another place you stop to get a bite to eat at a fast casual restaraunt on the way to somewhere more exciting which they probably also profit from. Folks who don't like it are simply sedated into not giving a shit or sheepdogged into campaigns such as Trump or their local Republican ghoul. The remainder is then locked away in a private prison to be do slave labor or tortured to death through ever decadent living conditions. In the cities there are people who live and are treated the same, the children of the dying rape victims in the country who either struggle To make ends meet working shit gig economy jobs or in the increasingly infuriating and undignified service sector or who go into massive amounts of debt they will never repay to go to a big college that is basically a daycare center for a degree that,often even if it is STEM related these days, will never get them a career. Some of them numb themselves the same as their parents while somr become class conscious or politically active but are hearded by their more petite bourgeoise peers into lifeless identity politics infused liberalism, what Mark Fiaher refers to as the Vampire Castle of modern day academic and sterilized Leftist discourse produced mostly by the petite bourgeoisie to reproduce their own class and protect it's interest.
To further generate capital these neoliberals then constructed a multinational infrastructure to sanction and if needed militarily destroy anyone who attempted to defy the total globalization of capital, particularly in the 3rd world. The massive amounts of waste generated by the perpetual growth of hyper consumerism partially necessary to sustain this ever expanding dominance of global capitalist dictatorship was used as yet another opportunity for profit from almost no additional cost or labor creation, turning areas of the world into massive landfills and further destroying sectors of their local economies in the process. Then the full integration of finance capital led to record profits being generated almost literally out of thin air again with next to no increase in the necessity for labor. Finally a massive security and surveillance state capable of monitoring a majority of the people in the nation's making all the money from this system and preemptively disrupting any challenge to it no matter how insignificant arose and due to the same internalization mechanism that makes Filipinos say "I don't mind eating PagPag hell even famous celebrities eat it!" it's been mostly accepted as okay. In the background of all this has been a steady march toward the precipice regarding climate change.
Sorry this is so long and such a ramble but idk I just needed it out
Homelessness isn't really people who don't want to conform to individualism. Also its only an attack on homeless people in cities (which is a terrible place to be homeless unless you're a drug addict)
Cameron Wood
this is because when they say "no one cares about black people" they are right and the movement fizzled out
Justin Perez
The thing about the modern first world is that it is very harmful to most people in society.
But if you analyze what is going on, focus on self improvement and do not partake in self destructive behavior you can thrive quite easily
Jaxson Powell
but the worst aspect of all this crap is that focusing conscious attention on it will lead to insanity and depression (low mood and suicidal ideation) which reinforces the individualistic defence mechanisms (cultivating personality, apathy, selfishness), the world is so terrible that the acknowledgement of this reality will ruin your life. We are mentally chained to the celebration of bourgeois life, it is a self-serving system. We live in the apocalypse.
just knowing that you can't help anybody in any meaningful way, sometimes i give (a decent amount of) money to homeless people, but it is only a sentimental and egotistical gesture, there is no true charity behind it. Today's political powers seem to be under these same limitations of disconnection from a transcendent altruism.
Elijah Bell
why not? what do you consider help?
if you want to and it helps isn't that charity? If you don't think so you're still spooked by the christian self flagellation of thinking you are sinning no matter what you do.
politics is a sham You need to realize that politics will not solve all your problems
Thomas Martin
you do not help people by giving them what they want in the moment - to give a homeless person money, I'm probably just giving them the opportunity to get drunk or high, rather than allowing them to experience a greater autonomy of material self-reliance - this type of experience would require a greater moral principle than a superficial monetary transaction. It is like mentally ill people; you can give them drugs, or you can really try to understand them and try to make them feel valid in their humanity; there is a very large difference.
As someone with limited resources, I cannot help homeless people in a more meaningful type of way, which makes me feel inadequate, because I should be able to help people, we should all be able to support eachother, but like I said, there are too many constraints on the individual today which obligates selfishness.
Politics can never solve all our problems, no. But for fucks sake, it would be nice if our institutions gave any type of shit for it's subscribers.
no you help them by giving them what they need, they might need money who knows.
this is why I don't give hobos money.
then do that if you want to help them. Don't if you do not care for them. its quite simple.
why not?
then change
you can you're either unwilling because you don't want to go too far out of your away for strangers(which is understandable) or you don't care enough to brain storm ways you can do so.
what institutions?
Joseph Lee
as i have said, i can't do that, just because i do not have the resources to achieve this doesn't mean that I don't care for them. what do you think I'm talking about, genius?
you clearly never read what I said in my post or you are just seeing what you want to see. I expect you are underage since you are advocating for some sort of rationalistic selfishness rather than embracing a subjective humanity in regard to social problems.
James Young
Ignore the Peterson fag posting here btw. He's pedantic as fuck and has been shitting up every thread with contrarian circling around the whole "um actually the data shows life has gotten better just clean ur room" narrative because he's mad his dad lost a debate to a leftist and can't let it go
People always talk about feedback loops related to climate change but really there's a lot of different feedback loops generated in this moment of capitalism including social ones like what you mentioned. They then find ways to profit off of these feedback loops which accelerates them.
I honestly don't know if I agree with Mark Fisher that it's still possible to do revolution despite all of this. I don't find what he describes desirable and I hope this isn't the case but I'm a bit inclined to agree with Nick Land's conclusions about where capitalism will end up. Maybe not with literal AI Monarchs and so on but in the abstract he's probably right that eventually all of this is going to lead to a sort of singularity that is a synthesis between neoliberal capitalism and feudalism
You're just making excuses. What resources do you think you need.
you're being very vague.
Is this your response when I start asking questions about what you're saying? Why are you so hostile?
So in place of expanding upon what you said you resort to accusing people of being underage except I'm not.
what?
Owen Morris
there is no peterson fag here. But live has gotten better.
Jayden Young
I always wondered why the big capitalists don't band together and fix prices to guarantee themselves an extraction/rent stream. Since they have so much money they can either buy or undercut any upcoming competitor until it goes bankrupt.
Isaiah Jackson
The motivation would be to combat the falling rate of profit and to stop having to waste potential profit on competing with each other.
Robert Harris
Material. Self. Reliance. understand this idea before continuing. To experience an authentic freedom, you cannot be under the stresses of poverty. To give someone money is not necessarily allowing them to escape their circumstances, which is a process that is required to have true autonomy. Freedom is not simply a conscious action, or legal negation.
I cannot truly help homeless people because I cannot provide them an escape from their homelessness, how about that? I believe that society should give everybody freedom in this sense. Society; our social institutions and so on.
rather than egoism, which comes from a purely rational perspective, I feel like caring for other people's well-being despite it's irrationalities is a higher moral stance than the former - as it is understood, "man is an end in himself".
They've done stuff like this before and a lot of welfare capitalism comes more out of this strategy of capital accumulation than the whole liberal narrative of "shifting the establishment to the left" (which is why Stalin called social democracy the left wing of fascism and why the first neoliberals experiments often involved using fascist governments to impose the economic programs)
They're also doing it again right now it just is going slow. Look into the housing market shit in silicon valley and Detroit (I'll give you a link in another post I can't find it right now tho). Look at Disney's massive expansion the last few years.
The thing is this isn't as cut and dry as simply doing it. Netflix still wants to compete with Disney in terms of streaming before either giving up or selling out because in the short term the net profit will be worth it. Different landlords want pieces of land for different reasons and so on. We're not quite at the point where monopoly capital has grabbed every last piece of the pie despite being at a point where its control would make Lenin roll in his grave. But if it isn't impeded, and it likely won't be unless China surprises everyone and truly becomes a new USSR like people in the China general think it will, eventually the level of centralization you're talking about will happen and then we will be back to a handful of global elites simply trading wealth and control back and forth every few years and when automation ramps up the public will be so disposable that their will probably be a fusion of mass murder and genetic engineering to make them do whatever machines either can't or aren't good at.
Mason Morris
you can't give anyone this you can help people get it for themselves though.
you can help people get out of poverty or help them along the way. Why do you think you need to do everything for them to "help" Even if you are unable to completely lift someone out of poverty you can help them get closer to being out than they would without you. It isn't a zero sum game.
Society includes you as well.
morality is a spook
Parker Robinson
We'll be fine, remember that feudalism ended because in large part because Europe ran out of charcoal and was forced to find a different fuel source. The days of oil are numbered and the clear social and ecological need to switch to a patchwork of nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro is clearer every day, it's going to happen, much like global capitalism itself it's beyond our control.
I'm sorry but this is wishful thinking. Green capitalism is already emerging and will be fused either with social democracy or fascism (or a coalition of both spread across countries) to keep the middle class it creates placards long enough for technology to bail porky out of the ecological catastrophe's worst events. It's really a "kill two birds with one stone scenario" because you get to placate discontent among workers and middle class people in the first world while letting climate change kill off or make into refugees that will later be ethnically cleansed after their utility as a cheap source of labor dries up. When climate change really starts to hit the first world in a significant way and the green capitalism is shown to be a con it will be too late and the rich will already be retreating to their bunkers or into space. Automation won't be here for a while but it will arrive in time to help the rich escape dying or being in a perpetual civil war with the rest of the world
Wyatt Sanders
You forget probably the most important use of displaced first world Industrial labor. Military service. This labor is nessicary for the whole system to function. If only we can win the soldiers to our side. We can take over the system.
The whole system will eventually come crashing down as profitability becomes negative.
Because whenever they do this, one capitalist screws over the others for a larger piece of a smaller pie.
If they attempt to do this they will fail. This is because the military (which is mostly made up of prols) would likely step in. And if they don’t this will still likely cause riots and the toppling of the gov.
I see you're point but I think you're putting a little too much faith in the us military m8. The US Military while being largely proletarian or lower middle class is hardcore classcucked. Even soldiers who legit hate being a part of the system and get woke after going over seas a few times will still keep up appearances and they're in the minority anyway the vast amount of American troops legit believe neocon propaganda about the us being a force for good in the world. I'd say the only military in the world more ideologically cucked is the IDF
Source: I grew up right next to a military base during the Bush years and I have known tons of veterans or both past and current wars. Furthermore the ever accelerating militarization of the police and their even more ghoulish fascism is a sign that soon the USA is going to move the controlling of the domestic population more and more to them.
Hudson Nguyen
Things would be different if they were being ordered to literally exterminate their own friends and family.
That's what I'm saying regarding the militarization of the police. In the USA the majority of undesirables right now are either social rejects such ad the mentally ill or homeless or impoverished people of color and immigrants (this latter fact is often used by the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie colored folk to legitimize their retarded idpol which I'm not defending but the general structural racism is still there and more often then not aimed at poor colored and immigrant populations in urban areas in particular). These two groups are the people most often murdered by police or imprisoned (see how ICE's recent activities have been a huge boon to the private prison industry on par with what obamacare did for private insurance).
However, as time goes on and things accelerate, there will be more and more "undesirables" demonized exactly the same way the current ones are who will more and more be "normal" citizens who were turned into angry peasants by this system. I can't speak to other countries but the police in America began literally as a project for the wealthy in the big cities to centralize property security in times of panic and they have only grown in power since then. The police are basically an occupying military force now and unlike the military they are specifically trained to become desensitized to killing their own countrymen and considering anyone who doesn't submit to their authority without question as a threat.
One reason antifa are a bunch of faggots in the USA is that they spend so much time doxxing and/or confronting po dunk hicks or petite bourg failsons larping as Hitler youth when really they should be directly confronting the police.
Got a very sneaking suspicion this thread is a defeatism thread by a clown world retard
Angel Powell
Or at least lends itself to that rather than the ability to formulate a coherent analysis of the nightmarish hellscape of "neoliberal" or "post-fordist" capital or whatever you want to call it.
Easton Taylor
I'm the op and while I concede the attitude is a bit defeatist I'm not clown world gang. I want things to get better I just don't have the ability right now to do help it get there in any way and feel powerless and just needed to get things off my chest. I made these posts
Which despite the appreciation for lands conclusion about capitalism in the abstract from a sort of morbid curiosity I don't think betray any cryptofascism on my part. But since you're worried this is a Zig Forums thread all dressed up I'll direct you to this post I made in /leftytrash/ yesterday about my personal mental state lately. 8ch.net/leftypol/res/2263573.html#q2873041
I tried to keep it out of this thread as much as possible,because I wanted any conversation regarding this to be as materialist as possible but I don't want anyone to get the idea im a Zig Forums infiltrator I genuinely just don't know what to so anymore
Justin Butler
youtu.be/fDF-S68kx5o Ignore this guys liberal spooks about "muh true free market" and fixing the problem through antitrust laws,and pay attention to the content.
It's a pretty good example I think of how things will eventually go in most if not all industries. Rather than competing over services oligopolies will compete over who has more preferable monopolies until they reason that this doesn't make any sense and fuse into one large global monopoly. Basically there will be one King and then each nation will function as a collection of provinces ruled by various lords and labor will be reduced significantly to what absolutely cannot be done by machines with more and more of the population being picked off through attrition until automation becomes so singular 100-200 years from now that the monarch and lords simply focus on becoming immortal through various me and and competing among each other for that privelege.
The final singularity will be a small group of neofuedal aristocrats and lords uploading their consciousness to some indestructible cube that is launched into space where it automatically transcends space time when one universe or stat system or planet it is orbiting sends signals that it has the potential to destroy it.
Idk then maybe it will get bored with all of that and start this whole process over somewhere else for fun. Maybe that's how we got started.
If in the interim anything goes wrong they'll just take off on their private spaceships to let earth kill itself while they live among the stars. This bullshit will never end and capitalists will never face justice. It's just going to keep getting worse until everyone is dead and a group of dr. Manhattan esc trillionaires figure out how to become a formless machine that drifts among the stars for eternity
