Every conceivable social arrangement is slavery except actual slavery which is fine

Top tier answer lmao

Damn you’re right, it’s almost like we need to also restructure society in such a way that prioritizes human need and equitable access to resources and education on an ongoing basis, instead of the maximization of profits at the expense of literally everyone on Earth. It’s a good thing the world isn’t currently being ravaged by an economic order reliant on murder, starvation and inefficiency, otherwise this persistent handwringing about logistics and overpopulation would seem really strange and premature.

Like dude, no person or faction with the political will to go up against the forces keeping people in poverty is currently in any position to do so. We’re talking about a make-believe scenario, and the fact that even then your mind goes immediately to “overpopulation” is mega sus and indicative of where your priorities are.

parents bedroom

Gen X coolguy detected, opinion double discarded lmao

Damn bro thats crazy who do you have to pay this totally real money to, and why, and what happens if you don’t? You need to grow up and open your eyes, you’re like a medeival peasant telling me that the King’s authority is a natural and divinely ordained part of nature. It’s sad.

Just asking questions about if poor people should have enough food to live or if that would make them breed too much, no fucked-up Malthusian undertones here, nossir

Hm no you’re right, better to let millions starve

Money is imaginary

I mean it’s literally what happened. It implies a bit of a rosy anthromorphization of the many varied and impersonal security interests that lead a nation-state to war, sure, but factually speaking, that’s how it went down.

Oh no not you, the people downvoting

Ukraine stuff really brings out the No Theory mfs to downvote

Tbh I’ve spent a long time without libs to bully and now I’m on lemmy I feel like a demon someone released from a stone

it seems that moderators in 196 are deleting those comments from lemmygrad posters in a way that appear as visible while seen from lemmygrad while they appear as deleted by mods from any other instances

Whoa, that’s pretty 1984 Animal House of them

You want to put me in a box in your heads ;)

Hey Mr. Actually Laughing, that’s what you came in here to do. Don’t want to fit in the box? Don’t be a square

You’re not here for a dialogue, you’re here because of a nagging sense of being complicit in something monstrous that compels you to justify your shallow beliefs and corrosive way of life by spewing half-digested propaganda at people discussing the problem.

There’s that empty liberal appeal to an assumed normative opinion again, combined with “uhh actually you have now proven my nebulous non-point by asking a basic question”

My man is floundering

I have not been shown wrong,

Corncob moment

For real, they complain about “authoritarian tankies and their echo chambers” when we’re not even censoring them like they do to us, they just can’t handle being shown to be wrong.

At what point does being clowned on by an entire instance spur self-reflection?

What is your opinion on the standing rock protests and the Kentucky state massacre

Also the 1956 Hungarian coup attempt that the epithet “tankies” comes from was literally full of nazis lmao

This turned into the longest thing I’ve written in ages.

You gave quite a good explanation, and there are just two big points I want to add to it. Sorry if I get basic with it or seem condescending, but I’m also writing with new people in mind. The first point is that liberal capitalism is capitalism that is not yet fascist, and the second point is that for anyone living in one of the many places the west exploits, it already is fascist. Because of how writing this shook out, I’ve tried to make these points in the opposite order, because it’s easier to follow that way.

Nothing is static, everything is a process. A mountain is the process of plate tectonics, an animal is the process of cellular life, and a capitalist economy is the process of accumulation. It outcompeted and replaced feudalism, a more primitive form of accumulation. Every form of social organization has inherent contradictions, inherent tension points where the interests of one group pull against the interest of another. Peasant vs landlord, yeoman farmer vs slave, industrial worker vs factory owner. These roles are defined by their relationships to the means of production and to each other, and when conditions make those relationships untenable, they break, and a new dynamic arises. For example, when the conditions of defeat in the Civil War but also a paltry reconstruction effort by the US made chattel slavery an unviable arrangement for the wealthy, they started up the sharecropping industry, a form of wage slavery the new government found acceptable. Obviously prison slavery also started ballooning afterwards, and now we have more prisoners in a larger carceral system in the US than anywhere else on Earth. The profit margins of chattel slavery were stabilized by other types of slavery. Because a capitalist economy requires infinite growth, it requires new frontiers to exploit, places where resources and labor can be had cheaply and sold for more elsewhere. In US history, these frontiers (and the wretched economic conditions necessary to extort cheap labor) have always been enforced by military and intelligence organizations. Look into the history of any country the west uses for cheap labor, cheap materials, or as a trash dumping ground, and you’ll find a history of naked imperialism that set the conditions for all these “voluntary, free market” transactions that always seem to screw over anyone who isn’t part of the so-called first world.

The need for profits drove colonialism, it drives neocolonialism today, and when one frontier closes, another must open. If no external frontier can be opened, it will be an internal one. Fascism, economically, is is the attempt to open up an internal frontier against a segment of ones own society. It’s capitalism in crisis mode, a rampant imperial economy that has begun chewing at it’s own flesh to make up for the caloric deficit. This is the stage at which decline will be felt by the people living inside the empire, with things like infrastructure failures, mass poverty, mass incarceration, crimes of desperation, an explosion in new cults, and outbreaks of disease becoming commonplace. These conditions are symptoms of the contradictions between the classes becoming irreconcilable: decades of austerity, of public funds and programs being looted by the wealthy, of endless imperial wars, of the privatization of every industry and resource, even vital resources like food and water that people need to live. This is where we’re at now-and I havent even mentioned the concentration camps.

Looking at it from a class perspective, these are conditions that the American and westen bourgeoisie have inflicted both on the proletariat of their own countries, and to a much greater extent on the rest of the world. The people of all these countries we ruin don’t choose fascism, our ruling class chooses it for them. The people of America don’t choose to go to war, or for healthcare to cost a million dollars, or to give the police tanks and combat robots. Our ruling class chooses it for us. We don’t actually live in a democracy, we live in a dictatorship of the rich.

When we consider that a capitalist economy has only one goal -to accumulate capital, to make fewer and fewer individuals richer and richer- and that it will fufill this goal at any cost and when we consider that extreme fascist policies are very good for private accumulation, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: that any liberal capitalist economy, after exhausting or losing access to it’s external frontiers, will inevitably become fascist, must inevitably become fascist, or be outcompeted and absorbed by a more ruthless competitor.

As long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production on this planet, fascism is it’s only logical endpoint.

TLDR what we think of as liberalism is actually just when the fascism is contained in the countries we inflict it on.