Posts by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #AdF03cspfjg6zWXeEa by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-26T23:34:55Z
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@neonsnake @gerrymcgovern @RD4Anarchy @gnutelephony @AlexanderKingsbury @whatzaname > “Capitalists love competition and the risk of failure; those breed excellence.”Capitalists hate competition and the risk of failure because these are costly and injurious. This is why capitalists go to such incredible lengths to block competition. They form cartels; they communicate surreptitiously with each other to set prices; they lobby the state to subsidize them and create barriers to market entry; etc etc etc.> “Capitalism doesn't preclude voluntary exchange; indeed, that's the ONLY form of exchange allowed under capitalism.”Ideologically, sure. Practically, no.> “You can ONLY have free markets with private property.”Again, no. You have it precisely backwards: all extant private property originated in violent (state) expropriation and, once in place, precludes voluntary agreement by non-owners who must gain permission from property owners to be alive, as you agreed with our island thought experiment.
(DIR) Post #AdF03mpIhinLpSxy7M by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-27T15:36:00Z
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@gnutelephony @gerrymcgovern @AlexanderKingsbury @neonsnake @whatzaname @ciggysmokebringer @RD4Anarchy @Radical_EgoCom A key reason why capitalism and cronyism are two expressions of the same phenomenon is that the state and the capitalist are two expressions of the same phenomenon.Taxes and rents, ownership and sovereignty—we’re talking about differences in scale, not kind.
(DIR) Post #AdF03p5KJ6nopkTnNI by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-27T16:40:15Z
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@neonsnake @Radical_EgoCom @whatzaname @punissuer @gerrymcgovern @gnutelephony @AlexanderKingsbury @ciggysmokebringer @RD4Anarchy Rent is no voluntary than any tax, and is equally taken by force and spent even on things you may hate, and there’s not much you can do about it.
(DIR) Post #AdNrGRbeIGAMkRPtlQ by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-31T21:24:22Z
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Made a trip back to the US for the first time in a couple of years. A few things that stand out:- there are so many fucking ads everywhere- infrastructure is crumbling everywhere I look- cops cops cops cops cops. I saw more cops within a few hours of getting back to the states than I’ve seen in a few years of living abroad. Americans generally have no idea how hyper-policed they are.
(DIR) Post #AdPEpbjZ7h0UOiode4 by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-01T15:28:37Z
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@RD4Anarchy @gerrymcgovern @AlexanderKingsbury @neonsnake @whatzaname @stevenroose If capitalism were just “individuals have the right to own their own property and labor and that they have the right to exchange what they own freely and voluntarily with others”then we could say that humans have enjoyed capitalism since the birth of our species. In which case, capitalist ideologues can’t claim capitalism brought us unparalleled abundance only in the last few centuries.
(DIR) Post #AdPjKEBrhkWoyrZNh2 by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-01T16:17:00Z
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Family put on the rose parade this morning and the commentators sang the praises of the B2 bomber that flew overhead (“it can drop conventional and nuclear munitions anywhere in the world!”) and then a marine band (“synchronized displays like this really help build national unity!”).If I scripted shit like for a parody it would feel too on the nose.
(DIR) Post #AdPkx69zav31K6nC2y by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-28T14:12:52Z
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@AlexanderKingsbury Of course capitalists are incentivized to prioritize profit—or, more specifically, to maximize differential profits. That is, by the workings of the market itself, capitalists must try to beat the average rate of return in their market or potentially lose all their capital (and become the worst thing imaginable, a wage laborer subject to the whims of capital owners).Capitalists who beat the rate of return can reinvest that additional income in capturing more market share faster than their competitors—sometimes by expanding production, but more often by acquiring other firms, investing in regulatory capture by bribing the state, dumping to undersell competitors, raising prices faster than competitors, etc.The greater the market share, the faster capitalists can accrue differential profits. The more differential profits, the faster capitalists can expand market share. Capitalists who don’t behave this way will soon find themselves competed out of business and replaced by capitalists who *will* behave this way.
(DIR) Post #AdPkxeBx48ois1yEoy by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-28T18:15:41Z
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@OliverUv @AlexanderKingsbury A key insight by economist Thorstein Veblen is that we can draw a distinction between what we might call “industry” and what we might call “business.” The goal of industry is to satisfy wants as efficiently and thoroughly as possible. The goal of business is to maximize (differential) profits. These two functions of our economy are fundamentally at odds with each other. Goods and services that are plentiful or ubiquitous are hard to sell for profit. So business—ie, capital—“sabotages” industry by artificially restricting it in ways that all business to collect rents. Hence things like copyright—a classic example of artificial scarcity imposed on what would be a nonrivalrous good so that owners can collect profits.
(DIR) Post #AdPx4JTtfG1G7BJEno by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-28T20:33:37Z
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@AlexanderKingsbury @magitweeter @RD4Anarchy @neonsnake @FrenchPanda People tend to group the things we actually possess and use under a rubric we might call “personal property.” It’s a fairly universal category (though there are exceptions), usually governed by custom.Things that we own but that other people possess and use is usually (rentier) private property. This is fairly rare historically, and always governed by coercive states and law.
(DIR) Post #AdPx4KDGwYJcNuXTWq by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-28T21:02:15Z
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@neonsnake @RD4Anarchy @FrenchPanda @AlexanderKingsbury @magitweeter “Owning a company” is a particularly interesting example because it’s shorthand for “owning the labor of other people working cooperatively towards some common goal.” In the absence of coercion, a person proposing to start a cooperative endeavor would be just one of many equal partners contributing to the start and operation of that endeavor—ideas, resources, labor, all of which are critical and without which the endeavor can’t succeed. People might choose lots of different kinds of arrangement, but “equal partnership” seems to me the most likely.
(DIR) Post #AdPx4NllikgxPlhZDM by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-29T01:19:26Z
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@neonsnake @magitweeter @RD4Anarchy @AlexanderKingsbury @FrenchPanda Theoretically, there’s no reason why one person couldn’t come to own the entire earth through purely voluntary transactions of property originating in purely just appropriation through initial homesteading.That global owner could then demand the world slave for him, or else be evicted into the ocean. This would somehow be freedom, according to a propertarian ideologue.
(DIR) Post #AdPyiBRp3HDUjkulRw by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-01T15:33:42Z
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@neonsnake @stevenroose @AlexanderKingsbury @RD4Anarchy @gerrymcgovern @whatzaname “Capitalism is not a legal framework” friend wait until you find out what happens if workers try to keep the product of their own labor
(DIR) Post #AdVVQ9wKBkC37oziLY by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-04T15:56:17Z
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@srijit Sure!Since we had neoliberalism slapped down on us, starting in the 1970s, we’ve seen a declining rate of technological advancement, and especially in those areas that might have promised liberation from drudgery. David Graeber famously asked “what happened to the flying cars we were promised?” A lot of effort has been poured into technologies of monitoring, control, and financialization, but very little into the gee-wiz stuff we were promised for decades as our due.We got very good at special effects; we can very readily conjure the *illusion* of a more advanced future. We just don’t actually deliver on it.
(DIR) Post #AdWTM4kVXVfH7OLtA0 by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2023-12-30T13:43:39Z
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@AlexanderKingsbury @breadandcircuses @peteriskrisjanis @mcv @hugh The problem of inequality is threefold:- inequality produced demonstrable harms to people regardless of the material context;- inequality of ownership can generate unfreedoms for people with less or no ownership; and - inequality of ownership is itself a symptom of deeper systems of unfreedom.We don’t have to assume that our only two options are inequality or impoverished equality; that’s question begging.
(DIR) Post #AdWTMVCPCPQf9RbXFo by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-05T03:13:23Z
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@peteriskrisjanis @breadandcircuses @Winter @AlexanderKingsbury @hugh @mcv We definitely have capitalism (3 days ago):“Of course capitalism creates abundance; look at, say, the US versus Venezuela. We literally have people who can afford plenty of food and yet choose to eat exclusively out of dumpsters. We make so much high-quality food that the waste is a problem.”We don’t have capitalism, we have cronyism (1 hour ago):“It’s been centuries…but during nearly all that time, we’ve had cronyism…mechanisms that a free market would see swept aside.”This is Schrödinger’s capitalism, simultaneously the system we have which is responsible for all our wealth but also the system we’ve never had because of all the bad people who won’t let us have capitalism but do create all our problems.
(DIR) Post #AdaTTgF7JYJk3v8Rdo by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-05T21:39:24Z
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“The low expected turnout in the upcoming elections reflects a popular rejection of the…political system, which is suffering from a legitimacy crisis and the absence of real opposition forces to vie with the parties in power…”We have no problem identifying low voter turnout as a consequence of political illegitimacy. People decline to vote because they recognize that voting will not produce meaningful change, because it’s not worth it and because they don’t want to participate in a corrupt system……as long as we’re talking about countries other than the US. When US voters withhold their participation, they’re almost certainly going to hear about how they personally want fascism to win. Haven’t you heard that this is The Most Important Election in Our Lifetime? All systemic analysis goes out the window and all we can talk about is personal failure.https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/iraqi-political-systems-legitimacy-problem-low-expected-turnout-provincial
(DIR) Post #AdaTTlDsnZIjVXb1ua by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-07T00:50:31Z
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@gentrifiedrose @Radical_EgoCom @libramoon “The power is held by the people” is question begging. If there is a state apart from the rest of society, then the state, not the people, holds power.
(DIR) Post #AdaTTmaxhFM9lPOyWW by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-07T00:58:47Z
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@gentrifiedrose @libramoon @Radical_EgoCom If there is some segment of society called “the state” that holds power over the everyone else who isn’t part of the state, then we can’t say that “the people hold power.”When we define a republic as a system in which “the state” and “the people” hold power, we’re begging the question that this is even possible. We’ve baked a paradox into the very definition of the word.
(DIR) Post #AdaTTnu8pQIBpBNo3c by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-07T01:25:46Z
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@gentrifiedrose @Radical_EgoCom @libramoon Sure, a state is a conglomeration of *some* people. It almost certainly does not include *you.*
(DIR) Post #AdaTTp6ENxYbWy2yXY by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
2024-01-07T01:33:03Z
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@gentrifiedrose @libramoon @Radical_EgoCom You are not part of the state if your only involvement is casting a periodic and mathematically insignificant ballot for one of two candidates chosen from among our wealthy elites, neither of whom will pursue your interests or preferences.