BRUH EARLY STAGE CAPITALISM WAS SNAKE OIL, SLAVE TRADE, WORK HOUSES AND CHILDREN IN SALT MINES, WTF DO YOU MEEEEAN?!
And it always has been, we just moved those things to the brown countries and they’re coming home now! Fuck you!
Ahem. I’m fine.
it’s not capitalism. it’s crony capitalism.
muffled screams of anguish
make your displeasure known to them directly into their ear
I used to wonder what profit could be
(My Little Crony)
Until you all shared its magic with me
“Capitalism isn’t bad, it’s just late-stage capitalism that sucks”
Even if it was true, it’s funny because of course the late stage of something comes after and from the early stage of it.
This is also just a labor imperialist perspective. They yearn for the time a few decades ago with stronger unions and slightly less domestic exploitation in the imperial core, they don’t care about the exploitation of the global south.
“Double-fisting cigars for 30 years isn’t bad for you, it’s the cancer that sucks”
That sliver of a few decades between, on the one hand, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and brutal industrial labor including children; and on the other hand, the current “late-stage capitalism” involving debt traps and monopoly —
Those few decades were enough to convince liberals of the “true” benevolent nature of this system. Just don’t look outside of your own immediate circumstances, nor read history; that might ruin the illusion. Don’t even ask your parents what their own life was like during this fabled golden age.
It was great for some heterosexual white men. There were good movies and music I guess?
The capitalism that works is always conveniently outside living memory (or in childhood nostalgia - yeah that time you didn’t know what rent is was the best period of human history, no shit)
My favorite is “we haven’t had REAL capitalism for x years, it’s all crony corporatism now”. I actually got one of those comments this very week. LOL. Tell me you know absolutely NOTHING about anything in one sentence, plz.
The only thing that means is that the person is a Keynesian liberal or a straight up fascist who thinks that the companies are woke now
Late stage capitalism has those things too, just outsourced from the imperial core and periphery to the developing world.
Capitalism like: I used to be bad, still am, but I used to as well!
Has any country successfully turned the clock back to an earlier economic condition or, like everything else, is the only option to not dwell on the past and push forward to something new?
17·4 days agoWhat happens if you turn the clock back? It simply continues to go forward. If you somehow succeeded in turning the clock back, all you would do is to push the problem onto your children.
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Depends how you count counter-revolutions, in which case most of the former USSR, Chile, maybe Spain.
The post-USSR wasn’t really turning back the clock to pre-USSR though. The post-socialist states and economies bear little to no resemblance to what came before the revolution.
Its not 1:1 but the guys who run sectors of extractive economics aren’t entirely dissimilar to robber barons like Yusupov and Nobel (Yes, that Nobel)
Logically one would use the knowlege of the things that did and didn’t work in the past to spur people to make something better, but capitalism seems to think improving things is childish idealism.
I hate the term “late-stage capitalism” especially in common usage. It just dilutes the critique at this point
Also, besides all that, what’s the point in saying “well, it’s ‘just’ late stage capitalism”? We don’t really have the option of reverting to an earlier stage, do we? If you want capitalism, this is the capitalism you get, so trying to save the sterling reputation of what you imagine older versions to be like when you concede that this is their legacy seems silly.
Obviously this is not what I’d view as the most profound point one could make about the topic, but I think it might be easier for getting someone to think critically about their thought-terminating excuses.
To call capitalism good but late-stage capitalism bad is like saying a kitten is good but a cat not. It makes no sense.
Well, a lot of people seem to think that way with how they adopt baby animals of various species and then abandon them when they are no longer babies.
Ok. But children rule and adult humans ruin my day
If you hear people talking like this irl, I would usually say 'you’d better fucking hope this is late-stage
People who support capitalism the most know the least about how it works.
“It’s corpoporprpomonopolopoocrorprism”
Even taking that at face value it doesn’t make sense. Capitalism necessarily leads to late stage capitalism. Therefore, even if you could RETVRN you’d just be kicking the can down the road. Which I guess is fine if you don’t give a fuck about your grandkids.
