Capitalists: “This system is great - money can theoretically flow indefinitely as more people spend money!”
Rich People who hoard wealth: “Allow us to introduce ourselves.”
More like, "Why aren't people buying my commodities? Guess I'll hire a focus group to see how I can improve the advertising. Can't be because they can't afford it. It's fairly priced among similar products."
It's actually kinda interesting. Companies that practice what is sometimes referred to as conscious capitalism actually tend to drastically outperform their traditional infinite growth peers. Turns out when wealth is all accumulated in the pockets of a rounding error of the world's population the economy begins to slow down. A lot.
It's still not likely as good as something like a co-op but some corporations actually understand that customers, owners, investors AND employees are all stakeholders in their business. When the company's earnings directly impact how much an employee can make they tend to be more driven to try their best to improve how much the company makes. Likewise happy employees often (unsurprisingly) have a tendency to simply try harder at what they do. When they aren't constantly worried about being able to pay their bills, they tend to be happier. The whole thing just kind of turns into a giant feedback loop of growth.
Only thing is that a lot of conscious capitalists will in the same breath as stating all of this say that socialism is bad which amuses me, because what they suggest does certainly start to sound a lot like it.
The invisible hand needs the glove of regulation to grab the money.
On the individual level we can surely all agree that the capitalist's behavior is inhumane, but I don't think it's dumb or short-sighted as implied by the comic. The capitalist employer is making an optimal move from the perspective of profit-maximization, business competitiveness and perhaps even class solidarity with other employers by paying its workers as little as possible. They're responding to incentives in order to maximize profit. It's implied here that the long term effects of this may prove unsustainable, but then, are we ready to consider the possibility that they may not? On the other hand, forcing all employers to pay their employees more (by raising the minimum wage, for instance) might very well positively impact the economy as a whole (not that I'd know for sure - not an economist), along with, of course, the quality of life for working class citizens, though we should consider that it'd likely disproportionately affect businesses with thinner profit margins (potentially reducing competition, negatively affecting the cost and availability of some goods and services in the long run).
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such, as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries. That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry. The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
