/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Bourgs are slaves to capital. If higher profits are to be made by designing products to break down, they are forced to do it or lose their privileged class position.

there is tremendous popular confusion over the terminology when it comes to capitalism because capitalists have always very aggressively pushed the idea that capitalism is synonymous with markets and buying/selling things and that capitalism is the only economic system there is, thou shalt have no other gods before me etc. but the real definition of capitalism is right there in the word: capital-ism, an ideology solely devoted to the accumulation of capital. buying and selling and trading things doesn't make you a capitalist, it just makes you a human being conducting business like humans have been doing since the beginning of recorded history. it is when you make perpetual expansion and accumulation of greater wealth your one and only priority that you become a capitalist.

if you open a hamburger store and sell hamburgers and it stays the same size forever and you are perfectly content with making an honest practical living cooking and selling hamburgers to the local community, you're not a capitalist, you're just a humble hamburger merchant. but if you expand it into a multi-billion dollar international franchise with 50,000 hamburger stores all over the world staffed by desperate poor people and stoned teenagers and multi-million dollar ad campaigns featuring happy african-americans eating fake photo-enhanced prop hamburgers and saying "yeeeeeeeeeah booooooooi!!!!" and you're a billionaire ceo riding around in private jets and helicopters and going to secret yacht parties in international waters doing coke and having sex with 12-year-olds that get thrown overboard and fed to the sharks when you're done with them and you don't even remember how to cook a hamburger anymore or what a hamburger even tastes like anymore, then you are a capitalist.

>>2903846
>living cooking and selling hamburgers to the local community, you're not a capitalist, you're just a humble hamburger merchant.
mate, that hamburger merchant isnt gonna last long. if you dont expand, youre gonna get fucked by competition.

>>2903834
"honeymoon period" aka late victorian england lol

>>2903861
nta, but this is 100% capitalist propaganda that you have fallen for. this is one the things that capitalists say and spend billions of dollars on propaganda repeating the same sentiment so as to justify their lifestyle and worldview, their infinite greed and to justify a system that serves this desire to the detriment of anything else. go to any city, any town, any village, and you will find countless upon countless of examples of the petty bourgeois shopkeeper and proprietor who get along just fine. in fact, the only reason these places go out of business is because of the type of person who was described in that post you quoted, the capitalist who is ravenously hungry, infinitely greedy, who wants to corner an entire market and drive all his competition out of business, and he sells this as something that's "good" for society.

>>2903861
This is only true in an absolute sense, yes eventually the rate of profit will be so low they will end up cannibalized by capitalists, but that shit could take 10 or 500 years.

I have the most unpopular proposal possible: a abundance and anti monopoly liberals are historically progressive and should be supported. The current enshittification regime is in no way inevitable or unfixable within the scope of the mode of production and only by fully developing the means of production under capitalism will we actually transcend it.

Socdems, other leftish libs, and even Revolutionaries are naive to the problems of monopoly (thinking they can either regulate it fairly or outright control it in the public interest) when what is almost always required is competition.
(Not for nothing does Theil tell us openly that competition is for losers while only monopolists get power and control- well, let's make a loser out of him.)

>>2903834
>feudalism
Cope harder
>People should have picked communism
Not how it works, but you certainly didn’t choose the real movement yourself

It is kind of interesting how a century and a half ago people seriously believed that capitalism was about to collapse and communism was immanent, when capitalism was still in its 'heroic' stage and so much industrial expansion and progress had yet to be built out.

And nowadays we're living in material abundance and immense inequality, capital has no room to expand productively and we have mass underemployment, rent-seeking and asset speculation. But workers have been so thoroughly domesticated by capital that they simply cannot imagine a way of life where you don't work for a wage or produce things for the purpose of market exchange.

>>2903834
Early capitalism was not nice, whether you say it's 16th century merchants making their own little slave islands to sell sugar like at Cape Verde, or peasants being kicked off the land so they can work 12 hours a day in dingy factories where they lose fingers and inhale noxious fumes and live in cramped shanty towns full of horse manure and garbage. See: "The Condition of the Working Class in England" by Engels.

>>2903900
Let’s be real, there hasn’t been a form of human organization that’s been nice. Hunter gatherers were completely at the mercy of nature and would starve after a failed hunt or in bad weather. Slavery and feudalism were much the same but on a larger scale with bad harvests and the occasional plague or foreign invasion. Communism isn’t going to be nice until it’s mature enough to have shed bourgeois subjectivity and birthmarks entirely and none of us will see that in our lifetimes assuming another socialist experiment can ever even get off the ground again.

Early capitalism gave us the transatlantic slave trade.
<The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

>>2903893
>capital has no room to expand productively
capitalism has barely touched africa. unfortunately I don't think they will develop before global conflict re-aligns all the capital centers like the first two world wars did

>>2903911
actually it was the rise of human society itself that gave us the global slave trade, rome was built on the backs of conquered foreign slaves. clearly this means that society is fascist and we need to back to being tribesmen in loincloths genociding each other for coconuts

>>2903861
>mate, that hamburger merchant isnt gonna last long. if you dont expand, youre gonna get fucked by competition.

yes, there are no local stores anywhere in the world, there is only mcdonalds, every town in america doesn't have a hundred of rinky dink family-owned shops that have stayed in business with the same staff in the same place selling the same product for decades. and the corporate world is full of highly stable and reputable firms that don't operate on razor-thin margins with constant turnover and don't constantly get bought out and rebranded under different names and end up being owned by some holding company in saudi arabia.

like i said, this is the religious mythology and nihilistic psychological projection of the capitalists, that there is no other economic model but capitalism, it is impossible to run a business sustainably and rationally, everyone in the world is elon musk and being greedy and stupid and insane is all human beings have ever been or will ever be capable of. it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, braindead dogmatic cult mentality where if you repeat something often enough it becomes fact.