Tag: anti capitalism

im interested in your views on luxury communism or post scarcity economics. like while i agree that scarcity is a myth and we should all have nice things don’t you think there are things we would have to sacrifice as well? for example, there is not a safe/ethical way to mine the precious minerals for our electronics and i feel like there are other things like that as well.

What if we invent remote controlled robots, and worked towards technological advancement so we can come up with alternate solutions.

Also figuring out ways to recycle the old metal bits from old electronics (seriously, there are a ton of old and/or broken electronics in the world, it’d take effort but we can get stuff out of them), and probably figuring out a way to get stuff from space rocks.

If there isn’t a safe/ethical way, we’ll invent one, capitalism deems it cheaper to waste human lives in such pursuits rather than pursuing the research that would allow us to move past it.

We’ll also have time to do things like explore space which may allow us resources so that no human ever has to do without.

http://electronicrecyclers.com/2014/03/retrieving-what-s-precious-business-of-mining-minerals-from-recycled-electronics I mean honestly we need to stop wasting as much crap, there’d be enough if we stopped being so nonsensical in our resource usage, which is a thing we can do.  We can drop our old computer off at the old computer depot, and we can build electronics for greater upgradeability and less bullshit planned obsolescence  (which there is a ton of).

I don’t think we’ve got to give up anything but our chains and getting a new phone every two years and not recycling.  Instead they’ll just manufacture the best possible phone technology allows in the first place, like the iphone 1 had a space for the camera it didn’t have because they could already put one in, and make it easy to upgrade as tech improves.  We’ll have to give up shoes that fall apart after one days walking and go straight to a land fill only to be replaced with similar shit, everyone will have plenty of nice well made things instead.  We’ll have to give up using brute force instead of ingenuity.  We’ll have to give up shitty appliances that break too fast.

We have nothing to lose, which doesn’t mean that the revolution will be easy, bloodless, or that the first few years while we work out the bugs might be rough, but we can do this.

We’re human, we’re marvelous, our capacity for invention is endless.

Also gold can be extracted from sea water.  

We also need to work on agriculture as right now what we do is causing massive long term desertification/environmental devastation because of what plowing does to fungal networks that distribute water between plants, but I think that just means we need to come up with better methods of agriculture.

And we won’t get on to fixing any of this until capitalism ends

Imagine going to the market in a post scarcity society, leisurely picking out cereal knowing there is no checkout, no worries about money, just picking out what you need, and chatting with your shopping buddy.

Imagine how that would feel.

Perfume to the people, tchatchkies to the people, power to the people, but also knickknacks to the people, flat screen tvs and elective surgery to the people.

Fun shit distributed in an equitable manner to the people along with control of the means of production

Bourgeois Decadent Asceticism Will Probably Result In A Hedonistic Revolution.

Thinking about the French and Russian revolutions, the French rev you had the neo-classicism replacing rococo, because like yeah people were fucking pissed at aristocrats and their ultra fun carefree “everything is candy colored and covered in gold and I’m having a feast of candy while everyone else starves” and I mean if you’ve ever read Lost Splendor you know what that was like “Oh we have a train car full of birds on our train we go on vacation on in case you don’t like train noises, oh we have like 20 houses we’ve forgotten about and like a bunch of warehouses full of treasure we’ve forgotten about and another train with luxury dining and a car full of birds we never use, whatevs” (that’s literally true) and both of those lead to kind of… dour anti-hedonism stuff, where frivolity and luxurious ultra fancy stuff was frowned upon, but now?  Now the rich are all about eating kale and drinking water and minimalism.

Think about it, think about the post revolutionary reaction to shit like bougie “superfoods”.

This is going to be great.

For Me Leftism Is Hope

Hope that we don’t have to just agree “oh well life is unfair” and never ask why that is or what we can do to fix it.

Hope that we can not only preserve but repair our enviornment with the products of our ingenuity.

Hope that the world does not have to be cruel.

Hope that there is a better way, that this is not the best humankind can do.

For so long I accepted the tired old liberal refrain of “well reform to the fucked up system is the best we can do, this is the best we can do” and accepted the cruelty, the meanness of the world, but we don’t have to accept that.

Humans are marvelous, creative, innovative creatures and yet somehow this nightmare that destroys so many lives is “the best we can do”?  Capital does everything it can to deny the possibility of something better, jeers at those who even consider alternatives, and yet somehow we’re supposed to believe, that there’s nothing of interest behind the door they so desperately want to keep locked?  It is the church suppressing Galileo’s knowledge for fear of having its authority undermined.  They know they are wrong.

Tumblr’s Lifting Blogs Really Really Show What’s Depressing About Capitalism

Basically: We have all these abundant commodities, and for the vast majority of people shopping is like being a Victorian urchin with their nose pressed to a toy shop window.

God that’s sad.  Shoplifting isn’t something I do personally, I’ve been lucky enough not to need to, but you seriously can’t help but feel really awful about how the abundance of consumer goods exists, and people are so totally excluded from participation.

Like there are posts like “For the first time in my life I get to give gifts and have things” and it’s just heart breaking

Marxists Who Are All “Asceticism” and “Anti-decadence”

negative-julio:

thepeacockangel:

This is you

You are the fancy ass minimalist trend.  Have you ever experienced material deprivation?  The desire for parties and beautiful things and frivolity is a response to the dourness of our lives, you fucking egg. 

Trying to make a virtue of deprivation is the bougiest shit.

Like “Oh look at me I’m so virtuous and tasteful, I’ve eaten 5 organic almonds today and that’s all, my house is a white room, I don’t own things because I’m tasteful and not a horrible proponent of the worst kind of consumerism the way poor people are”

It’s easy to love minimalism and your 5 fucking almonds when you’ve never had to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

Get out of leftism and take your smug cultural protestant shit with you, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

“We hereby reject any form of self-imposed austerity. We posit that we want nice shit for everybody and that is not only feasible but desirable. We will not put forth graphs announcing how much work (or not) will require such a project but will state that such a project is part of our desire for communism. We hereby reject all forms of feigned punk slobbiness, neo-hippie shabby chic, or pajamas in the outdoors. We see the stores in the bourgeois parts of town (& the newly-gentrified ones too) and say that we want that shit and even more. Capitalism is that which stands in the way of us having the shit we want with its hoarding of commodities only to sell them to highest bidder.”

NICE SHIT FOR EVERYBODY (link to rest of text)

Yes, seize the means of production and the good table cloth. I refuse to be your virtuous prole, I reject the idea of saintly undemanding poverty, we the proletariat demand bread and exquisitely made shoes. I refuse the idea that we deserve merely the minimum required to sustain life, that or less is what we get under capitalism. I believe the whole of the proletariat wants and deserves more.

What amazes me is capitalism’s ability to show us the greatest abundance imaginable and insist on a the absolute scarcity of all the means of life

It is evidenced by out wastage of good and edible food, the fact of commodious and beautiful houses left empty to rot. 

 What obscene parsimony to ignore developments that could improve the lives of all in favor of focus groups to attempt sell more pointless widgets to those of us who for lack of money are denied such necessities as medicine and safe homes? 

 How is a system that puts to work its brightest mathematicians and inventors not to assist the many but enrich the few not dismissed as ridiculous the moment it is proposed? 

 They call us utopian dreamers as an insult but is it not indicative of an incredible lack of imagination to call this the best we can do? Is it not absolutely absurd to suggest that the might of human ingenuity could not devise something better than this lumbering mass of inefficiency and waste?