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Well the problem with fascism is you eventually run out of other peoples children so…
The problem with Capitalism is eventually the imperial core runs out of third world labour and resources to pillage
This is double funny right now as uh… Private Equity more or less just… pulled most of their ‘investments’ out of about half of US AI datacenter build outs.
Just literally directly because they ran out of other people’s money.
They’ve all been seeing like double the desired outflows, capital flight, that they can handle, and they’ve just literally been rewriting their own rules on the fly, all while acting like everything is fine.
… this is gonna make 07/08 look like the fucking prologue, the goddamned tutorial level.
Where is the capital flying to?
A lot of it will get moved into physical assets like property. There’s also been a huge investment boom in HK because people are realizing Chinese economy is more stable now. Similar situation with Singapore since Asia is expected to be doing better than the west thanks to China being the stabilizing force there.
that’s also likely a good defense against stagflation, which the USD (and probably the EUR) are likely to see soon
The pay of CEOs in fortune 500 companies is somewhere between 0,01 and 0,05% of all expanses. Management as a whole is 10-25%, management pay is 1-5%.
Now do stockholders and stock options
Dividends make up somewhere between 20 and 50% of company net income, which is usually 10-20% of total expanses, so most companies spend 2-10% on dividends (which aren’t classified as expenses).
Management is also work. You can’t just throw labor into goods, you need to coordinate it
Yup
I mean a slaver does work, it’s just that job shouldn’t exist in the first place.
’ + money is a social construct ’
our whole society is inherently a social construct
if the boss doesn’t take your money someone else will
Never mind that money ultimately belongs to the state anyway, and is only worth anything because if you don’t pay the state then it will do Bad Things™ to you.
Not only is it impossible to “run out” of a currency that you control, it’s also not “other people’s”. So the only correct term in the whole phrase is “money”.
I appreciate the critique, but no, money is not
only worth anything because if you don’t pay the state then it will do Bad Things™ to you.
That’s “modern” (from 1905) monetary theory (MMT), which ignores that money is a commodity and can and did historically exist before states.
Modern states are clearly crucial to the reproduction of money and the system in which it circulates. But their power over money is quite limited — and as Schumpeter said (and Marx would have said), the limits are clearest in determining the value of money. The mint can print any numbers on its bills and coins, but it cannot decide what those numbers refer to. That is determined by countless price-setting decisions by mainly private firms, reacting strategically to the structure of costs and demand they face, in competition with other firms.
Marx argued that money in capitalism has three main functions: as a measure of value; as a means of exchange; and “money as money” which includes debt payments. Marx’s theorisation of money as a measure of value derives from his labour theory of value; and this is the main difference between Marx and the Chartalists/MMT supporters, who have no theory of value whatsoever.
Money only has value if there is value in production to back it. Government spending cannot create that value — indeed some government spending can destroy value (consider the case of armaments, for example). Productive value is what gives money credibility. A productive private sector generates the domestic product and income that gives government liabilities credibility in the first place. When that credibility is not there, then trust in the state’s currency can disappear fast, as we have seen in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Argentina.
MMT essentially boils down to good old keynesianism in the end. It’s still a thousand times better than neoliberalism of course, but merely reformist, not equipped to handle capitalism’s crisis and not willing to transcend it.
Money can exist without states - but likewise, most states existed without money, at least internally. Graebers Debt is all about this.
I feel like the actual “Average Capitalism Enjoyer” is someone making or reading memes online… On their phones.
The enjoyment of Capitalism is made ambient by simply owning stuff Capitalism has produced. However here we have to say some things: Not all the systems or technology that enabled this were done for Capitalism in today’s model, and most weren’t.
Society was a lot more creative and progressing much faster, and with more freedom before today’s system of survival Capitalism, with it’s prevelant race to the bottom morality which produces very little of value.
Another iPhone, space ship, data center, or 5 cent T-shirt with custom slogan… These are the articles of modern Capitalism. They contain very little to most people. No one wishes to live and die for these “rewards”, thus very few of us are enjoying this.
The memes are broken.
today’s system of survival Capitalism
it’s not “today’s system”, this is not a different kind of capitalism we are living through; it’s simply the logical continuation of capitalism.
Capitalism means profiting from owning. This systematically means, as the meme says, “line goes up”. The line must go up, otherwise owning stops being profitable, and capitalism stops. We’re just at a point where the avenues to keep growth going are becoming harder and costlier to reach, and each time those avenues are explored, they make the next ones costlier. So we’re all getting squeezed, both as workers (mass layoffs, multiple jobs etc), and as consumers (enshittification, product quality deterioration, price increases).
This is unavoidable; European countries that are currently more livable than the US will inevitably face this as well, they just took the scenic route
Why is there this idea that personal property such as phones are specific to capitalism? Why does making or reading memes have anything to do with enjoying capitalism? Other social orders also allow for making memes and using phones.
Although I do agree most people don’t benefit from capitalism, only the top 1% do so yeah the meme doesn’t really make sense in that respect.
