In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.
We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren’t enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.
This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.
The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.
I agree with this, and I’d like to add that the wealth gap focusing on funneling money to the top is obviously not helping the quality of products, responsible production , or fair compensation for most of the world.
Yeah, but I’m trying to explain why it is happening. You’ve hit market saturation in so many companies when the only way to fuel growth now is to reduce costs.
Cumulative generational focus on acquiring and consolidating capital explains the why comprehensively, at least in the states.
Monopolies, market saturation, minimizing cost at all costs, poor labor compensation are all symptoms of a system focused primarily on acquiring and consolidating capital.
Capitalism. The longer Capitalism exists, the more it has to find new ways to stop/slow its own built-in death clock. If it doesn’t, it dies, due to problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall and rising disparity. Enshittification, so to speak.
With each economic disaster, the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie can claim large swaths of cheaper Capital at a discount, compounding the issue into a form of neo-feudalism that will eventually collapse under its own weight.
God forbid a post-scarcity world where the only currency is our reputation, honor, and credibility.
Make it so number one.
Hehehehe it started there but took an Orville hard left
Alas, the alternative to capitalism has never been socialism, but feudalism.
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices, and instead embracing neoliberal economics. I don’t accept that all ownership is theft. Trade in goods and services benefits both parties. I am so sick of people using this shorthand word “capitalism” to describe what’s going on here. We’ve had capitalism for millennia, and it’s brought us longer, healthier and happier lives, and reduced warfare. It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem, not the system of ownership of capital.
At the core, the issue is still deeply rooted within capitalism but governments should absolutely be doing their fucking jobs and curb the worst aspects of it a little until we’re ready for something better.
Fair point, I accept that. A bit like how democracy is the worst form of government apart from those other ones we tried.
Even then, there are still countless forms of democracy and democratic government. Democracy itself is a cool concept, the actual systems utilizing Democracy vary wildly, from the Soviet form, to the Chinese form, to the American form, to the European forms, to the forms practiced in more Anarchist societies like the EZLN and revolutionary Catalonia, and more.
There’s direct Democracy, council Democracy, republican Democracy, proportional Democracy, parliamentary democracy, and far, far more.
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It’s come and gone throughout the millennia, like certain pieces of knowledge. Eratosthenes very accurately calculated the circumference of the world in Ptolemaic Egypt and later on people thought the Earth was flat (and some morons still do). As for capitalism, look at prehistoric societies using shells as currency. What is that currency for?
Capitalism isn’t “when people use money”. It has an actual definition.
Liberal Democracies are of, by, and for the bourgeoisie. Because Capitalists have immense influence, the state will bend to their will.
Trade is good. Capitalism is not. Capitalism is not trade, its a Mode of Production by which there are individual Capitalists and non-owner workers. We have not had Capitalism for millenia, but a few hundred years.
Capitalism did not bring us healthier, longer, and happier lives, nor reduce warfare. Development did. Capitalism drives profit, that’s it, anything else is tangential to that end.
I think you would do yourself a lot of good by reading theory.
I agree with your last point - and I may be a bit bourgeois myself. I’d appreciate recommendations if you wouldn’t mind.
That’s a ton of reflection and openness, so I just want to commend you for that. Fantastic to hear and see.
Initially, I want to give a general basis for what can be considered bourgeois. The Bourgeoisie are those Capitalists who do not need to perform labor to survive, and earn their money via ownership alone. One can be a business owner actively and a member of the bourgeoisie if they can simply hire someone to manage in their place, but a member of the petite bourgeoisie cannot hire a manager to take their place and still make enough money to survive.
As for general reading recommendations? You have a lot of paths you can go. I don’t personally recommend going full ML or full Anarchist right off the bat, usually it takes a lot of reflection to pick a tendency. I myself don’t even have a tendency I identify with, as I believe the process towards progress is unique for each country and state.
If you want a real quick intro: Principles of Communism, by Engels, is an extremely quick read. Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein is another fantastic paper. The Communist Manifesto is good, but it’s extremely fiery and usually is better after you’re familiar with Marxism.
If you want to get a quick intro that breaks more into the theory side (as in, you’ll be more well-read than the vast majority of online leftists with little effort), read both Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labor and Capital by Marx. They are condensed and simplified versions of what Marx greatly elaborates on in Capital, his seminal masterwork.
For Anarchism, An Anarchist FAQ is a good starting point. Note that Anarchists usually align with Marxists on analysis, but not on strategy.
There’s also topics like Syndicalism, Market Socialism, the idea of Reform vs Revolution (Rosa Luxembourg has a good paper on that), and more, but those are fantastic bang for buck reads.
If you still want more, you can always read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and The Conquest of Bread, the former for Marxism and the latter for Anarchism.
Hope this helps! There are tons of YouTube videos as well that simplify Marxism as much as possible.
Capitalism is not millennia old. Capitalism (as commonly defined) only stared to take root after the black death (1350ish) flipped feudalism on its head. Suddenly the free and unfree peasant class had some control of their own destiny and could sell their skills to whomever they wanted at whatever price they could get. Serfs could declare themselves free. Land was often up for grabs.
You may enjoy this read:
Thanks for this :)
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices
It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem
Hmm, I’m trying to remember what economic system both these countries have… Let’s call it “Bappitalism”. And if the economic model is so powerful that it influences the governmental one (lobbyists, military spending, etc), then yes, that is a problem.
Read the other comments please.
That’s not how forums or discussions in general work. For reference, read other comments on the internet, please.
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Thank you for this excellent writeup.
A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).
Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.
However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.
You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
But then we wouldn’t have the triple breasted whores of Eroticon Six!
Ahhh, Excentrica Gallumbits. I remember her fondly.
I’ve seen the argument made that there was no mental illness (non phyiso-neurological, I suppose?) And therefore civilization is worse per se.
I mean… animals, disease, murder, rape, starvation, hydration… but still not living in the same ongoing trauma anxiety state of today
There’s no objective “answer” to this, just sharing an idea I’ve seen
Late stage capitalism
Things have been going great in non-capitalist societies?
Non-Capitalist societies face entirely different issues, usually due to lack of development. They don’t quite face the same issues of enshittification that developed Capitalist countries are currently seeing.
Well no. :)
It seems smaller rich countries are the best, like Norway.
Unfortunately, disparity is rising in Social Democracies and safety nets are being eroded.
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In the UK, 14 years of Conservative government has really made the rot grow.
Y’all have been going hard at Americanism for a minute now. I remember the beginning of the new world media thinking, “oh shit, there as obese and decrepit as us”
Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.
Capitalism is the answer. We’re in the part of capitalism where regular people are almost completely out of money. Bezos is building company towns preparing for a huge influx of new desperate Amazon employees.
The question “Why has the world gone to shit in the past 5 to 10 years” has routinely been asked every five to ten years throughout history. It’s largely due to the perceptual biases of the human mind.
While that’s true, the world has objectively gone to shit in the past 10 years.
If it’s “objectively”, you’ve got an objective measure of it?
Yeah, as measured by the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few
No, I mean can you show me the objective measure? This site has a bunch of data about economic inequality over time in various countries and I’m not seeing any particular trend in the graphs - it’s gone up and down over time in different ways for various countries. For the ones that have long term data, it looks like things were worse in the 1940s.
I mean, we were also in a global conflict then after one group tried to blame another for their economic and general unhappiness with how things turned out causing them to support a horrific person.
History doesn’t repeat but it sure as fuck rhymes
Granted, we’ve had quite a big spike in deaths due to war in 2022 due to the double whammy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Tigray war. But the years prior to it showed a steady decrease from the previous peak in 2014 as various middle-eastern conflicts wound down. Here’s a page with historical charts of war-related deaths. Those bumps in 2022 and 2014 aside, the world has been in a very peaceful state since 1989. And the current bumps still have nothing on Vietnam, Korea, the World Wars, and so forth.
You’re not provocative or interesting. If you believe your own bullshit, you’re dumb. Stop redirecting the conversation from OP’s point.
That’s true, but the information age allows us to be more keenly aware of problems that aren’t just local. Our new ability to be online has contributed to an uptick in mental health issues.
Fortunately, being able to shine a spotlight on problems in the world also puts pressure on us to improve. We do have issues like financial inequality and global warming that have recently gotten worse, but if you look at trends like violent crime, illiteracy, global hunger, extreme poverty, child mortality, or deaths to many longstanding diseases, it is hard not to realize that we’re actually collectively doing a good job of making the world better.
One of the major reasons is that Milton Friedman had a thought back in the 70s that fucking everyone in the western world latched onto, and the consequences have been getting worse and worse for the average person for most of the time since then.
Of course, neoliberals don’t actually believe in neoliberalism, they profit off it’s failure.
If you give a rich person even more money and it never trickles down, you just gave a rich person money. If you’re claim companies will regulate themselves and they don’t, you just gave companies the freedom to do exploitative, dangerous things in search of bigger profits.
If neoliberalism actually delivered on any of its promises, neoliberals wouldn’t support it.
It’s nothing more than a book of pre-made lies that sound plausible enough for a press conference and signal to other neoliberals that their feeding trough is being filled.
Knew the what. Not the how/why we got there. Thanks for sharing.
Indeed. Knowing how we got here is the first step to fixing it.
Shareholder primacy is older than that. Check out Dodge v. Ford
Sure, but him writing that op-ed in the NYT popularized it to the degree that it became an explicit goal of pretty much all corporate leadership people from that point on.
You see, it all started in May, 2016 with this Gorilla being killed. That’s when this timeline split off…
RIP. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone.
Things were getting really good in the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. Pay was up, more people were making money and starting companies.
Then 2008 happened.
Since then the lower 99% have been fighting over less and less. Some people try to build, but it often gets destroyed by others. Some take their anger out on the physically near them.
Every major crisis, the bourgeoisie claim more and more while the Proletariat loses more and more, because they have to spend their money on survival while the wealthy can swoop in and claim cheap Capital.
If you haven’t watched The Big Short, you should. Michael Lewis breaks it down nicely. He does really good books and movies that show the rot and corruption that we need to root out with regulations and better funding.
Then 2008 happened.
I am going to assume you reference the financial meltdown that had been brewing for years and had been fore-ordained by the weakening of regulations by prior administrations… correct?
edit: but, of course it could also he the incoherent rage of the right over a non-white president. so many options, so little thoughtfulness from a certain segment of the electorate.
They’re obviously talking about the recession. You’re ascribing malice for absolutely no reason in an attempt to distract from economic realities
I was honestly ascribing nothing to the parent comment. it was a genuine request for clarification (with a little editorializing of my own).
if my comment was not to your liking, then so be it, but I assure you that no malice was intended.
I meant the financial meltdown. I debated calling it the 2007, as that is when the cracks started. I acknowledge that the financial meltdown has is roots far earlier, but all financial meltdowns do.
You missed the 80’s. The 90’s could’ve been even better if it didn’t get fucked by Conservatives.
I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.
On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.
Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.
Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.
Greed
like… seriously this.
Normal function of capitalism. It has superseded law. Just “accumulate”.
Greed, wanting stuff, precipitates giving value in return for value. Regardless of motives everybody benefits. This is a free market.
Throw in an institution that can manipulate & distort free market forces - government - then you get parasites that use the violence of that institution for non reciprocated greed. This creates distortions in wealth and power in favour of the scrupulous.
Doesn’t that assume that resources were at one point distributed fairly? If you have all the value, you can devalue everyone else.
I mean, I think it has to do with different kind of value, some have capital, some have services, they would not work without eachother
Automation could replace all services, and only property owners would remain.
- No. Why would it assume that?
- How so? The only way I see to have all the value & devalue others is to be an absolute dictator that has enslaved everyone. This of course is not possible in a free market as it is all about private property rights/self ownership.
- Because if they weren’t distributed equally, some people would unfairly have more capital than others, which means a fair trade where people exchange the precise value of an item leaves some people with inherent setbacks.
- If I don’t own property, then I am forced into wage-slavery, which means I don’t have time to myself to innovate or property to innovate. Even if I manage to buy some property, I can innovate some, but larger players with more capital and resources can out-compete me. The more money you have, the longer you can take to turn a profit, and drive others out of business.
I do not think you understand fairness or value. Life is not fair. You cannot expect it to be. To try to make it fair requires the initiation of force against another. The happenstance of an unfair life is different to the deliberate application of force to create what one thinks should be fair. Precise value??? All value is subjective! Setbacks? Every exchange that occurs happens due to the exchange making both parties life better - otherwise the exchange would not occur. You are viewing the world as a glass half empty rather than half full! Wage-slavery? There is not such thing! You own property - always! You own your body! Other peoples ability to generate wealth is something you have no right to interfere with just as much as they have no right to interfere with your body. You may not like the terms of contract but that is simply because you have no better option and you need to upskill. Innovate? If you are working you are gaining skills. Are you showing your worth or just doing the acceptable minimum to justify your employment? If the game is unfair - it is because the system (govenment) applies the law unfairly - not because others create value.
The question is not “Is life fair?”, but rather “Should we pursue fairness?”
No. We should pursue liberty (the absence of coercion), peace, prosperity and happiness. We should defend self-ownership/private property.
Well said
For the US it all started (well more accelerated) with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion_of_the_court and since we have a knock on effect with the rest of the world…
Wtf I didn’t know that there is a clear reason for corpos getting political! Thank you for this, I really had no idea about it!
bernie talks about it. rails against it really. to bad the rest of congress is releatively silent on it given the damage it did.
