this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.
Land/capital shouldn't be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society's expense as it is.
Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they'll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it's quarterly private profit expectations.
The innovation of capitalism is that the right to own land or other capital assets isn't an exclusive right of the aristocracy. There is no law in letter which says you cannot ever own a home, and that is a new thing in the west. The next capitalist innovation was that you don't have to own something to have the rights of people who do own things, which was unheard of prior to the liberal capitalist revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s.
It's important to understand that things we take for granted in the present day did not always exist, nor are they necessarily guaranteed to keep existing unless specific effort is made to prevent them from being destroyed by the forces that want to go back, in today's day and age, that being the emerging class of inheritance billionaires who through various means are acquiring more and more outsized political power as well as more and more outsized ownership of resources, creating an in fact reversal of the liberal reforms of the feudal system which even Marx hailed as a huge and essential step in the right direction for the era it happened in.
These things did not happen because of capitalism. These things happened despite capitalism.
Not even Marx would agree with this statement.
You are not permanently tied to your landlord, nor is your landlord your judge and president. You don't usually work for your landlord, either.
Capitalism is different. It still sucks and exists because of the squeezing out of surplus value. It isn't feudalism.
As for economies being lowly tools, they're not. They're quite literally the most important part of society. They're how we eat, drink, and survive. Unfortunately we live in a class society, and have done so ever since a couple of dudes during the dawn of agriculture started racketeering. As a result, "a few thousand sociopath families" have distributed resources in their own favour for a very long time, and will continue to do so until class society and the state are abolished.