#capitalist
Many #American #Conservatives might like to critique the #UK as being too #Socialist, many of those critiques may be valid, however, the #USA is not a #Capitalist economic system any more than the UK is, with the #GDP of both nations being comprised of around 40% #government spending.
The USA has been for decades a mixed Capitalist/Socialist economic system. What's most sad about both the UK and #US is that the kind of #Socialism being deployed is actually #corporate Socialism, wherein #taxes are forcibly redistributed to #corporations and the most wealthy. The worst aspects of both systems.
#corporatesocialism #redistribution #angloamerican #economics
Among the many false claims made by various #government media, #corporate media and social #media commentators, such as the UK being a "Liberal Democracy," we are also told how terrible the #capitalist #system in the #UK is and how we need more #Socialism to save us.
While I do agree that crony capitalism and #monopoly capitalism are indeed terrible, we don't actually live in a capitalist economic system, we live in a mixed Capitalist/Socialist #economy, where for the last two sociological generations or more, government spending has comprised more than 40% of all economic activity in the UK.
#cronycapitalism #monopolycapitalism #economics #economicactivity #gdp
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5326/economics/government-spending
Cory Doctorow: Capitalists Hate Capitalism
Cory Doctorow Podcast, Episode 465, 2024-04-14 18:59
It's a reading of this. https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/
Cory Doctorow Podcast feed https://craphound.com/feed/
#economy #economists #economics #capitalist #capitalists #capitalism #audio #mp3 #cory #cory-doctorow #podcast #cory-doctorow-podcast #locus-magazine
#Taiwan, a developed country
Inequality of incomes and personal wealth remains high, as it does in most #capitalist economies. The highest-earning 20% get over six times the income of lowest earning 20%. The top 1% of wealth holders have 25% of all #wealth and the top 1% of income holders get 20% of all income.
Huge #property speculation has led to home prices jumping 50% in the last five years and accelerating, making it impossible for young Taiwanese to find decent accommodation.
The threat of an ‘invasion by China’ is probably the least of the worries of Taiwanese voters, despite the media barrage from the West and from Taiwan’s politicians.
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hope-in-common/
Hope in Common
#DAVIDGRAEBER
..."Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced.... a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack #alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of #fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable #market #economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and #propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire #capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.
...
our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” — which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring — as on production lines — that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.
Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism — and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.
...
at the very least we can start with a pledge against #evictions: to pledge, #neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of #capitalism — its moral foundation — now revealed to be a collection of broken promises — but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. ... the promise offered by capitalism — that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly.
Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?"...
Rather than lobbying or pleading with representatives, these examples highlight the power of direct action to create the material changes our so-called “representatives” deny us. By directly meeting needs and attacking #colonial, #white-supremacist, #imperialist, #hetero-patriarchal, and #capitalist structures, we can help build communities and institutions that meet the needs of all people rather than serving the ruling class. Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Direct action is how we address colonialism, #capitalism, and #imperialism and build life affirming #communities and worlds.
Why Would China Be An Enemy?
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/03/why-would-china-be-an-enemy/
#China is treated as an #enemy because the #UnitedStates has been forced to contemplate the mortality of its #economic #dominance. China is treated as an enemy because that is a chance for the #political and #capitalist classes to make yet more super #profits from the #military-industrial-complex.
But China is not our enemy. Only #atavism and #xenophobia make it so.
#gafam gonna GAFAM:
It’s Official: 3rd-Party Twitter Apps No Longer Allowed
"As per Engadget, the social networking site has updated its developer agreement to state that devs can not “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.”"
https://www.omglinux.com/twitter-bans-3rd-party-clients-official/
Inflation, Europe's energy crisis, and the Fed
https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=I43uC1mfHKc
https://therealnews.com/richard-wolff-the-feds-response-to-inflation-is-another-upward-transfer-of-wealth
' #Capitalist #profiteering is the real driver of the #inflation #crisis, and #raising #interest-rates only passes the #costs onto #workers already overwhelmed by #personal #debt and #stagnant #wages.'
#europe #energy #fed #federal-reserve #us #capitalism #politics #economics #economy #stagflation #declining #wages #germany #history
Capitalism vs Socialism is NOT Markets vs Planning
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=K-jCqjM4Kmc
#ProfWolff shows how the #economics of existing capitalist and socialist economies make use of both #markets and #planning. The opposition of markets and planning is largely false and has worked to distract students and observers of economic systems from better differentiations such as how they differently #organize their #workplaces: #hierarchical in the case of #capitalist, #democratic in the case of #worker-cooperatives. Some major implications of this critique of the "planning versus market" obsession are discussed in relation to the #US, #SovietUnion, and #China.
#richardwolff #economicupdate #capitalism #socialism #money #inflation #democracyatwork
Caitlin dares to say things that are hard to hear. That's why I listen.
They’ve lied about every war, and they’ve openly acknowledged lying about this very war, but you’re a Kremlin agent if you say they’re lying to us about this war.
#Caitlin #Johnstone #mainstream #media #lies #capitalist #elite #corruption #power #war
China-3, USA-0 ~ Beijing inflicts a severe economic defeat on America
There is no mystery regarding the reasons for this #US #failure. Paradoxically, the world’s supposed “number one #capitalist #economy” is now actually creating very little #capital. Instead, the US has become an economy overwhelmingly dominated by #consumption. New figures show that on #trade, #economic #growth and #inflation, #China’s comprehensively come out on top and #US #sanctions have #failed miserably.
I secretly think it's a great thing when people publish opinion pieces such as "Linux is free if you don't value your time", because it means I don't have to engage with more bougie people on forums mistaking the Linux community for a tech company product and mistaking voluntaries on Linux forums for disenfranchised people from the 3rd world working customer support that they can abuse and yell at because that consumer demographic is too lazy to read a 2-line wiki entry on how to install something. :)
How Gramsci Went Global
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/10/how-gramsci-went-global/
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm
https://archive.org/details/AntonioGramsciSelectionsFromThePrisonNotebooks/mode/2up
’The old has died, but the new has not been born yet.’ #Gramsci #quote
'2021 marks #50years since the first #English #edition of #AntonioGramsci's #PrisonNotebooks. His #Marxism recognized how #culture and #politics shape #economics as much as vice versa. That insight also applies today.'
#antoniogramsci #gramsci #global #italian #marxist #philosopher #legacy #pci #culture #hegemony #politics #capitalist #society #democracy #revolution #history #working-class #intellectuals
There will soon be no out of work truck drivers in Texas
All you truck drivers in need of work out there need to take a second to look into this: A company called Sisu Energy has been paying experienced drivers up to $14,000 per week. It may sound too good to be true, but it’s actually the real deal.
#Texas #truck #driver #shortage #capitalist #solution
https://altdriver.com/country/texas-company-offers-drivers-14k-a-week-during-truck-driver-shortage/
Robbing the soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’
#Origins of #capitalist #agriculture: In two great waves of #social #change, #landlords and capitalist #farmers “conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, #incorporated the #soil into #capital, and created for the #urban #industries the necessary supplies of #free and #rightless #proletarians.”
#IanAngus #angus #robbingthesoil #systematic #theft #communal #property #food #farming #history #inequality #class #metabolicrift #agrarian #capitalism #ketts #rebellion #tudor #england #enclosure #depopulation #rural #life #land #karlmarx #marx
