Here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts if you’re interested – https://lemmy.world/post/36592343
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I read your link. Again, the idea of a utopia, a perfect society free from any problems whatsoever, heaven on Earth, is just as fictional as its opposite. Dystopia, a perfect hell on Earth free from any hope whatsoever, where a New World Order forces digital transactions and herds you like sheep, is just as fictional. Both are good settings for fiction, as you point out, but real life is more complicated and realistic than that.
The ruling class, the capitalists, don’t do evil things for the sake of power or control. They do it for profits. Everything is subservient to that end. The genocide committed in Palestine is to keep Israel as a settler-colonial project to secure the US Empire’s interests in the region. The fact that you get paid less than you create while a tiny owning class plunders the real fruits of your labor is for profit. The idea of a “New World Order” as you say using control of digital currency and a new third world war just to gain… power? Control? Works against those interests.
Reality doesn’t work on such Marvel logic. Again, I am going to recommend reading theory. Here’s an intro Marxist-Leninist reading guide I made, that I’ve linked before. A better world is possible, and it is neither easy nor impossible, it’s merely difficult and real. We must roll up our sleeves and get to work so that we can plant the seeds of the trees our successors rest in the shade of!
Well said. The key point is that our goal must be to deliver tangible improvements to people’s everyday material conditions. Chasing some abstract, Platonic ideal of a perfect society is a pointless exercise. It’s also unrealistic to expect any human society to become a Utopia.
Instead, we should focus on maximizing personal agency. That means accomplishing concrete things like reducing work hours, guaranteeing access to basic necessities, and providing public spaces like parks, libraries, and sports centers.
The goal isn’t to have some nebulous “freedoms” promoted in the West. It’s about ensuring that our collective labour and resources are directed toward raising the standard of living for everyone. And that process can only begin with the collective ownership of the means of production.
Absolutely. It’s also important to recognize the objective laws governing how capitalism works, where it’s headed, and why. If we just stumble blindly in the dark, hoping to chance at building something better, then we can’t get anywhere. Doomerism is often very counter-productive, and removes our agency.
Exactly, human societies are dynamic systems and we have to analyze them as such. We have to look at the selection pressures the rules of the system create, and interpret human behavior within the context of these rules. When we see that the rules create perverse incentives, we have the power to change the social contract.
Understanding how and why the system works is one of the best antidotes to doomerism, hence why we incessantly tell people to read theory. Once you understand why things work a certain way, and the mechanics that drive the evolution of the system then it no longer feels like a force of nature. It’s a machine that we’ve constructed, and it operates because we collectively allow it to.
Correct, which is why Marxism-Leninism is such a useful tool for not only understanding the world, but changing it, and is why socialist countries like China are doing so well right now despite outside hostility.
I agree with you on everything except one aspect: money is power and control in this system. Abstract authority is meaningless and most of those who seem to have only this are pieces to be moved when appropriate, but the moving is done with money. That’s where the real power is nowadays.
As it were, money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can make it a lot easier to compensate for the sadness.
Yes, correct, money is power in capitalism. However, power is only sought as a means to aquire more money. Power that undermines ones own profits, such as what OP describes in their other post (that they linked), is not realistic and teeters more into conspiracy theory territory.
Said it yourself, “power [is a] means to acquire more money.” And the way society has been structured means we, the workers and consumers, are the product - we are the money (arguably always have been).
As such, it honestly makes sense to establish more and more layers of control, not only as a means of reinforcing and securing their positions (it’s harder to fight against Fascism if you can’t even call it Fascism, for instance), but also to wrangle the cattle, as it were.
I mean, if you’d be making your money off of rearing cows, you wouldn’t want them rebelling in any way. Complicates the road to profit.
Control can help facilitate making more money, but not always. Slavery was horribly inefficient for industrial work, for example, so the industrialists in the Statesian north went to war with the slaver agriculturalists in the south to expand the supply of wage laborers. Wage laborers are under less direct control, but are more willing to do complicated work, as they don’t have an assured existence.
Power is the means to the end, the end being profit. It isn’t the other way around.
In non-monetary historical societies, the rulers still sought power.
They still sought power to obtain more material posessions and luxury goods. Power is a tool, not an end.
Why does someone with €20 billion strive to get €30 billion? Will that get them nicer food or a softer bed?
Because capitalism is a control system that selects for those that are most profitable. If you don’t grow, you die.
You’re making a distinction between
- Seeking power for profit
- Seeking profit for power
How would we empirically tell which is happening?
Didn’t you know all that capis want is a big number? They’re basically harmless little redditors trying to get a high karma score that’s all.
No, they aren’t “harmless” either. It isn’t about “getting a high score.” Capitalism is based on profits and selects for those that are most profitable, there’s no such thing as an “ethical capitalism” because even if a capitalist decided individually to stop pursuing profits above all else, others would overtake them and the “ethical” capitalist would go under.
The ruling class, the capitalists, don’t do evil things for the sake of power or control. They do it for profits
Are those very different things? Wealth certainly grants power and control, no?
Having said that, I agree with the spirit of your comment.
They are different. Capitalism only cares about profits, morals don’t come into the picture, nor does power or control except to the extent that they facilitate profits.
To be honest, I’m not in the best financial situation right now and I just don’t have the strength to explain everything in more detail. And I know that in reality everything can go a little differently and here you need to constantly follow important news in order to make more detailed forecasts.
For example, there is a global energy crisis in the world right now, and there is a solution to it, but it is not beneficial to certain people, so I prefer to expect the worst. I’m not sure I’ll find any evidence, but you can try it yourself and maybe you’ll find something, so to speak, you’ll have to look between the lines.
Energy is a problem, yes, but it’s one where solar is now becoming the cheapest form of energy, and nuclear energy is advancing rapidly. Countries like the PRC have made it a clear and important goal to resolve. Countries like the US Empire that desire oil use for their own profits are still forced to cave to this trend, electric cars are becoming more prevalent and solar is expanding.
I don’t expect you to explain everything in detail, but I do think you’ve dug yourself into conspiracy theory doomerism and that’s taking up a lot of your mental energy and attitude.
In fact, I learned about the energy crisis and how serious it is from a scientist who said that he has been trying to solve this problem for several decades and not alone, because the solution to the problem exists, but there are people at the top who are afraid of losing power.
Believe it or not I have too little evidence.
Yes, this is a problem faced by climate scientists within capitalism. It’s different in socialist systems.
Believe it or not I have too little evidence.
i’m convinced that this is my doomscrolling is so prevalent in our society since we’re kept ignorant of our options.
The ruling class, the capitalists, don’t do evil things for the sake of power or control.
Yes they do, that is literally the only reason. Once you reach their wealth, you are not sated with merely making more money.
Money is relatively meaningless to a multi-billionaire, power and control isn’t, it’s why they fantasize about holding the keys to the food storage room in their bunker and not about running their own printing press to make Bison dollars.
No, this is wrong. Capitalism is a control system that selects for those capitalists that obtain the most profits. It isn’t about pursuit of power at the top, if you cease seeking profits you are overtaken by other capitalists. There’s no desire for power for power’s sake, power is a tool and its purpose is higher profits, not the other way around. Capitalism is driven by profit, not power.
False.
Money is not the end goal it is a tool, it is a physical embodiment of power. Money for money’s sake does literally nothing, it’s why billionaires start hiring lobbyists, buying media stations, starting charities, etc to push their views and influence onto society.
Capitalists only seek influence to better facilitate higher profits. You’ve got it flipped, money isn’t pursued for power, power is pursued for money, as capitalism is a control system that selects for the most profitable and discards the rest.
Damn, “They need power for the sake of even more power because there is nothing higher” This sounds extremely relevant.
It isn’t, actually. Capitalism only cares about power to the extent that it facilitates profits, capitalism doesn’t systemically place “power” as principle.
People have thought for thousands of years that they were living in the time of a great final battle against eternal tyranny — and that they were destined to fail.
There’s a strange comfort in being certain of doom. It makes the world simple and understandable. Predictable, and therefore less jarring. Doom is invulnerable to good news — in fact, good news is always bad news in the framework of doom, because it means delaying the inevitable and inviting false hope.
But the real story of the last several thousand years is that the world is complex. People are more complex than we could’ve understood even a hundred years ago. And the universe may be even stranger than we possibly can imagine.
I’m not telling you to be certain of a positive outcome. I’m just telling you to let go of certainty.
More realistic when you hope the end of the end of the dystopia in which we already live. As Karl Valentin said “In the past anything was better, even the future”
We’re gonna end up in the Super Mario bros movie dystopia.
It is more complicated unfortunately. Effectively every Utopia is someone else’s dystopian nightmare.
For all the people who love the white picket fence fantasy there are even more that see it as a hellscape.
For every positive thing that exists there is a negative thing on the other side of it. And yes the degree of positive and negative can have different weights.
Hmm, you reason well and are quite right. The so-called utopia is a comfortable cage, in essence, people live there like animals in a zoo, but at least they are safe.
Damn, for some reason I remembered a passage from novel: Imagine how people used to live with their families in houses, it’s so disgusting that it makes you shudder.
