I was in my 40s when I realized that the thing that gave me severe depression for over 25 years was capitalism. Even as a teenager I could not comprehend why anyone would go to school so they could get a job so they could hopefully pay the bank the rest of their lives so they can mow grass.
Yup and patriarchy. My father is low functioning and constantly has temper tantrums/outbursts, and it baffled me why the family was run by him. If he was a woman he wouldn’t be the head of anything.
Re capitalism, I never understood why people wanted to have a house and car. It also doesn’t make sense to have most of your assets sitting in real estate and not diversified.
Having a house isn’t suppose to be about owning an asset. It’s suppose to be having a place to live and not worring about owing someone money for it. Going from being a home owner with a mortgage to being a renter don’t really change your place in capitalism.
You still owe money for taxes and insurance, and of course you have to pay for the upkeep. It’s interesting that home ownership isn’t an asset since you’re not renting it out, but investing the same amount of money is considered an asset.
I disagree with ur last bit. With a mortgage u are working toward being part of the “ownership class”, where as a renter ur funding somebody else to be in that class this putting u “down a peg” in the sick game we have to play. Even if u spend 1 mil on a house that is worth 300k at the end of ur stint there, that’s better than paying similar monthly and getting back zero. Any return is better than no return, and some dickhead can’t sell ur home from under you.
People grew food for eachother before capitalism. A book that opened my eyes to the various systems that people organized themselves under before capitalism monopolized world is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
While she deals more specifically with society in the US she also covers things like how people didn’t really have or use money in society. Money was what rich people used, the rest of everyone traded and bartered work and goods for what they needed.
People where mostly growing food for themselves and their family, not for each other.
This changed when the first basic forms of capitalism where invented, things like markets, guilds, and skyrocketed with industrialization.
No other system that we tried ever worked as good and produced so much peace and prosperity like capitalism.
Is it perfect? Fuck no! Nothing that involves humans could ever be. But it is the best we have from a bunch of broken and fucked up systems.
Could you, though? Do you realize the level of knowledge, work, and risk that entailed?
Unless you’ve actually done it and survived without external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, emergency food, tools… what do you know about growing your own food?
I’m just saying there are more ways to form a society than exclusively through the complete control and exploitation of people and the environment like we’ve been doing for the last 100 years.
Just because capitalism is the only way you know to live , doesn’t mean it’s the only way to live.
Whenever we tried something else in the last 150 years it created a living hell for nearly everyone who was lucky enough to survive.
And what we had before that was not paradise either, far away from it.
The problem is not capitalism but unchecked, uncontrolled capitalism.
What are you trying to say? People only grow food because of a financial incentive? We know that isnt true because agriculture is older than any monetary economic system. Money simply acts as a means of smoothing out larger trade volumes, you don’t even need it for basic local trade.
Capitalism isn’t even the only market system, so that doesn’t really work either.
Capitalism is definitially a cancerous socioeconomic system. Prioritizing infinite growth in a finite system above all else inevitably causes systemic collapse on a long enough timeframe. Not to mention capitalism cannot hand the Matthew principle, aka power/money attracts power/money. Again, on a long enough timeframe inevitable leads to wealth disparities that collapse the system and society trying them.
The logic is plainly right there, staring us in the face that this cannot go on forever.
I was in my 40s when I realized that the thing that gave me severe depression for over 25 years was capitalism. Even as a teenager I could not comprehend why anyone would go to school so they could get a job so they could hopefully pay the bank the rest of their lives so they can mow grass.
Yup and patriarchy. My father is low functioning and constantly has temper tantrums/outbursts, and it baffled me why the family was run by him. If he was a woman he wouldn’t be the head of anything.
Re capitalism, I never understood why people wanted to have a house and car. It also doesn’t make sense to have most of your assets sitting in real estate and not diversified.
Having a house isn’t suppose to be about owning an asset. It’s suppose to be having a place to live and not worring about owing someone money for it. Going from being a home owner with a mortgage to being a renter don’t really change your place in capitalism.
You still owe money for taxes and insurance, and of course you have to pay for the upkeep. It’s interesting that home ownership isn’t an asset since you’re not renting it out, but investing the same amount of money is considered an asset.
I disagree with ur last bit. With a mortgage u are working toward being part of the “ownership class”, where as a renter ur funding somebody else to be in that class this putting u “down a peg” in the sick game we have to play. Even if u spend 1 mil on a house that is worth 300k at the end of ur stint there, that’s better than paying similar monthly and getting back zero. Any return is better than no return, and some dickhead can’t sell ur home from under you.
Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round. Of that we both are sure.
But you do understand that money makes other people grow your food, right?
People grew food for eachother before capitalism. A book that opened my eyes to the various systems that people organized themselves under before capitalism monopolized world is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Add: “The Way We Never Were” by Stephanie Coontz.
While she deals more specifically with society in the US she also covers things like how people didn’t really have or use money in society. Money was what rich people used, the rest of everyone traded and bartered work and goods for what they needed.
People where mostly growing food for themselves and their family, not for each other. This changed when the first basic forms of capitalism where invented, things like markets, guilds, and skyrocketed with industrialization.
No other system that we tried ever worked as good and produced so much peace and prosperity like capitalism. Is it perfect? Fuck no! Nothing that involves humans could ever be. But it is the best we have from a bunch of broken and fucked up systems.
Could you, though? Do you realize the level of knowledge, work, and risk that entailed?
Unless you’ve actually done it and survived without external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, emergency food, tools… what do you know about growing your own food?
You’re living in a fantasy world.
that’s rage bait.
I’m just saying there are more ways to form a society than exclusively through the complete control and exploitation of people and the environment like we’ve been doing for the last 100 years.
Just because capitalism is the only way you know to live , doesn’t mean it’s the only way to live.
Can you describe one that is better?
Whenever we tried something else in the last 150 years it created a living hell for nearly everyone who was lucky enough to survive. And what we had before that was not paradise either, far away from it.
The problem is not capitalism but unchecked, uncontrolled capitalism.
What are you trying to say? People only grow food because of a financial incentive? We know that isnt true because agriculture is older than any monetary economic system. Money simply acts as a means of smoothing out larger trade volumes, you don’t even need it for basic local trade.
Capitalism isn’t even the only market system, so that doesn’t really work either.
Capitalism is definitially a cancerous socioeconomic system. Prioritizing infinite growth in a finite system above all else inevitably causes systemic collapse on a long enough timeframe. Not to mention capitalism cannot hand the Matthew principle, aka power/money attracts power/money. Again, on a long enough timeframe inevitable leads to wealth disparities that collapse the system and society trying them.
The logic is plainly right there, staring us in the face that this cannot go on forever.