cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/35986695
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Why do I need to put guard rails on things? People can just choose to not fall off. All people are perfectly rational/knowledgeable and other physical pressures do not exist, so people must want to fall off of cliffs!
There actually is no way to change this. We can't do anything about it because we're just too stupid. People create systems of violence, and there's just nothing that can be done to help that because there is no way to change that. No sir, no way at all. It's pointless to even try.
We are all sinners filled with sin so anything that we do is bad. There is no hope. Your grandmother is a virus actually.
Yeah I know what you mean man. I gave a bunch of children some knives and the one with the biggest knife coerced the others into hurting a bunch of people. They still would have found a way to do that without knives! Don't you know that rocks exist?? Them having knives is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the outcome!
A bunch of people thinking they outsmarted the meme by asking "who made capitalism".
A better question is "when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?" Because the bunker-state ethnonationalist, the trumpists, the Peter Thiels and the Mark Andreesens, the Dark Enlightenment and Network State and Tech Zionism neofascists, they know exactly what they mean.
The earth is big enough to support modest human life. It's not big enough to support billionaires' delusions of singularity. So they imagine to purge the parts of humanity that are not their particular version of white.
Don't fall for their fascist propaganda.
I'm sure the rhetoric stems from propaganda, I won't disagree there. But I don't think that trying to logic the analogy itself is the way to outline the problem with it.
Calling humans a 'virus' may not mean an extermination is the intention of the person regurgitating it. You can control a virus instead of just exterminating it, for example. It's just a term people are familiar with that they associate with abusing resources and multiplying beyond a sustainable level, thus creating a toxic environment around them.
Ah, so just exterminate the correct people. Got it.
Nobody has to die if we just make billionnaires millionnaires again.
I disagree, there are some psychotic people in power and they don't care one iota about anyone but themselves and maybe a small handful of like minded people. To me they should be wiped from the earth.
You are correct that the planet can support a certain number (whatever that number is), but not with these people in power.
Now will we be able to truly figure which ones are the correct ones, probably not but we need to keep looking and root them out, expose them to the world and then let nature take its role once they are all hanging from the highest most visible place for all to see what happens when you are the virus that is continuously trying to destroy the world.
Good that you clarified that :D
Who do you think made capitalism? Space aliens?
Lizard people, obviously
If I'm not mistaken, Marx describes capital as "dead labour". So, to answer your question: who made capitalism? Vampires, zombies, liches. The undead.
Marx certainly didn't see capitalism as merely metaphorical. Marx recognized that capitalism existed in material reality, that it was a system constructed and operated by real, flesh and blood human beings.
We live in a religious society that promotes a culture of bigotry. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame bigots?
We live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t take violence against women seriously. Does this mean that wife beaters aren’t to blame?
We live in a capitalist society that promotes selfishness and greed. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame selfish people? (Which is most of them.)
We live in a racist society… etc.
You are responsible for your actions and your beliefs. Step one to improving our society is accepting the reality that most humans have a poor (nearly non-existent) relationship with morality. They’re easily swayed by fallacious arguments because they are irrational and stupid. These are empirical facts about human beings that we ignore (with memes like this) at our own peril.
We should blame religion, patriarchy, racism and capitalism.
And this right here folks is why nothing will ever change. Because phantasmagorical ideological abstractions get blamed instead of actual features of reality, such as psychopathy, ignorance, greed, selfishness, and so on. You are part of the problem. Maybe even the cause.
Those are perpetuated by the stupidity and gullibility described above.
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Yeah but... Humans created capitalism, so again the root issue is that humans suck. Just think of it this way: No humans, no capitalism.
And it's not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn't capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or "communist", but that definitely wasn't capitalism) regime.
It's definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.
People often conflate capitalism with greed because the core of capitalism depends on people acting selfishly. But other systems can also reward the greedy.
I think it even goes beyond that. e.g. the sowjet union genuinely had issues with food security, but they still fucked up when they dried out the aral sea because they were acting shortsightedly.
Supporters of socialism/communism/anarchism/whatever-ism don't believe that their system will never make mistakes or that it prevents all bad people from having power. But it lessens it, hopefully. If a capitalist nation were in charge during the time the aral sea disappeared, you can bet your sweet ass it would have just the same or faster.
There are a lot of people who do believe that these systems could do no wrong or repeat the narcissist's prayer to justify any wrong doing.
True. But I suppose I should have clarified it as "intelligent, thoughtful supporters of those ideas"
But it lessens it, hopefully
It's true that capitalistic societies don't do any better for the environment (which was the point of my comment, they're BOTH bad in this aspect), but at least in capitalist Europe the common people got relative wealth out of it. In the soviet union, people were oppressed by the state, poor, and got their environment destroyed.
And now that is happening in capitalist societies.
Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?
Nature is a product of atoms. So atoms suck, right?
For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.
Some people just don't get nuances.
You don't need capitalism to suck, though. The Spanish conquistadores were slavers and genocidal murderers but they certainly weren't capitalists.
There's a bit of a fundamental difference between capitalism and other systems. Mercantilism sucked but conquistadors got some level of pushback for their atrocities. The Spanish crown fought a war over illegal slavery and the vast majority of conquistadors died poor or in obscurity.
Modern capitalism has no such brakes. Naked avarice is the mathematically correct play, exponentially growing the power of an individual at the expense of literally everyone else.
It's not likely that other economic systems could result in this level of global instability and ecological collapse. A king used to have some incentive to keep his society functioning; his personal power was tied to the power his kingdom could project, not his personal wealth. Our modern overlords have no problem destroying their country or environment, their wealth is fungible and can be taken wherever they want.
Every system finds ways to shift the blame. What they need are folks who drink the cool aide. Currently it‘s capitalism.
Redirecting blame attributable to human behavior to an abstract concept like “capitalism” is shortsighted and self-defeating. Analogously, the problem over the last 10,000 years hasn’t been slavery (the concept); the problem has been slavers.
There’s no period in human history that people weren’t unfathomably stupid, because people are literally just animals (and many would happily end the world in order to get access to cheeseburgers). They make bad choices because the average person is not capable of moral deliberation. All hyperbole aside, this is an actual empirical fact.
What progress do you get by blaming humanity instead?
Reality is always the best starting point.
if the structure of society is set up in such a way that practically every action I need to take to keep myself fed and sheltered ultimately contributes to climate change, then it's fucking inane to say it is the fault of individuals being stupid.
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Plenty of bacteria and viruses are beneficial, and contribute to the overall health of their hosts.
If humans are diseases, then it is because through learned behaviors that we act in a deleterious manner towards the overall ecosystem. We are entirely capable of shifting those behaviors, of creating social structures that select for behaviors that promote co-existence and symbiosis with that ecosystem.
There are some symbiotic bacteria, but I'm unaware of any beneficial viruses. Their entire nature is to hijack cells to replicate themselves, typically resulting in the eventual death of the host cell.
Idk if we're gonna have fascism we might as well have eco-fascism.
except eco-fascism isn’t "fascism but we save the planet! :D" it’s "fascism but to justify the genocide of brown people we add a bit of green sprinkles on the white supremacist rhetoric"
But also we could have neither, fascism isn't a fatality
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