Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 on Nostr: This is a common reaction to criticisms of capitalism. To me it comes from a place of ...
This is a common reaction to criticisms of capitalism. To me it comes from a place of immense privilege and boils down to a claim that capitalism works for some people and before they'll agree to get rid of it we have to convince them that their privilege won't be disturbed. I know that's not necessarily obvious, so let me try to explain.
First, by capitalism I mean our current world economic system, which has since its inception in the late 15th century exploited labor by enclosing common land in order to force people to cede most of the value their work produces in order to have access to the necessities of life. At least since the late 19th century up to a rounding error everyone in the world lived has lived under capitalism in this sense. It's possible you understand the word to refer to something else, and that's fine, but this is what I mean by it in this conversation.
That being said, when you say that your "problem with the capitalism critique is that no one seems to know what replaces it, nor evinces appreciation for how unbelievably destabilizing it would be to change the economic system," you're saying that despite capitalism's negative aspects it's worth going on with it until something better comes along, no matter how bad the negative aspects are. But capitalism has killed hundreds of millions of people since its inception, mostly on purpose, sometimes negligently, from indigenous people in every colonized place to enslaved people stolen out of Africa to people worked to death through all the various ways capitalism finds to exploit them.
This goes on today without pause. There are more than 600,000 homeless people in the United States alone, every one of them kept homeless by governments in order to protect the rental housing market, 2000 a year die in Los Angeles alone, all of their lives shortened by 30% or more. There are well over a million prisoners here, again, locked up to feed various capital schemes. Again, they're not necessarily killed outright but their lives are shortened significantly because capitalists are making money from it. People all over the world are killed by weapons manufactured solely to generate profits for arms dealers. The US private health insurance industry shortens and ends lives for the sake of profit. Rare earth mining in former colonies relies on slave labor.
Capitalism turns death into money. This is what you're claiming we ought to keep on with until someone comes up with what seems like a viable alternative to you. But that's not what the victims think. They just want it to stop, as would you in their place. Like I said, it comes from a place of immense privilege.
First, by capitalism I mean our current world economic system, which has since its inception in the late 15th century exploited labor by enclosing common land in order to force people to cede most of the value their work produces in order to have access to the necessities of life. At least since the late 19th century up to a rounding error everyone in the world lived has lived under capitalism in this sense. It's possible you understand the word to refer to something else, and that's fine, but this is what I mean by it in this conversation.
That being said, when you say that your "problem with the capitalism critique is that no one seems to know what replaces it, nor evinces appreciation for how unbelievably destabilizing it would be to change the economic system," you're saying that despite capitalism's negative aspects it's worth going on with it until something better comes along, no matter how bad the negative aspects are. But capitalism has killed hundreds of millions of people since its inception, mostly on purpose, sometimes negligently, from indigenous people in every colonized place to enslaved people stolen out of Africa to people worked to death through all the various ways capitalism finds to exploit them.
This goes on today without pause. There are more than 600,000 homeless people in the United States alone, every one of them kept homeless by governments in order to protect the rental housing market, 2000 a year die in Los Angeles alone, all of their lives shortened by 30% or more. There are well over a million prisoners here, again, locked up to feed various capital schemes. Again, they're not necessarily killed outright but their lives are shortened significantly because capitalists are making money from it. People all over the world are killed by weapons manufactured solely to generate profits for arms dealers. The US private health insurance industry shortens and ends lives for the sake of profit. Rare earth mining in former colonies relies on slave labor.
Capitalism turns death into money. This is what you're claiming we ought to keep on with until someone comes up with what seems like a viable alternative to you. But that's not what the victims think. They just want it to stop, as would you in their place. Like I said, it comes from a place of immense privilege.