“But capitalism is so efficient at growing!”

Yeah, but now capitalism has grown out of control:

This ties into the notion of interpassivity. This is when a piece of media perform an action for you (think interactivity, but exactly the opposite). An example is the laugh track on sitcoms. Another is the series or film performing your environmental or anti-capital activism for you. Frequently the bad guy is some big polluting corp, or some evil rich guy who wants to bulldoze the community center to put his Luxury Resort there. You watch the movie, feel all rebellious and sympathetic with the main characters, and go home feeling like you’ve done something, when in fact all you’ve done is feed Disney some more money. See also movies like triangle of sadness and the glass onion or whatever.

Mark Fischer’s capitalist realism explores this and similar ideas in a much more comprehensive and eloquent manner than I ever could. Give it a read, it’s quite short!

I’ve been really interested in learning how to grow vegetables in my back garden. Somehow I just have this feeling that learning how to care about plants to make food (and not just because it flowers and looks pretty) will open my eyes to thinking about nature and the environment

At the moment, climate collapse is a conceptual issue to me in that “sure the days get warmer every year but it’s actually quite nice for me right now”, but I’m not as in tune with my environment to really notice how it’s impacting us.

Growing veg also feels like it has a higher pay off than just the cost price of a single unit of veg. There’s probably some nutritional benefit to it, knowledge etc that does beyond the price of buying an onion from the shop. I think getting in touch with this principle is the key to getting out of the ruthless capitalism structure

Basically, if we all just stopped buying shit and learnt how to fix and make shit ourselves our experiences of the things we attach ourselves to would be so much more authentic

You don’t have to buy doc martens because you feel like a rebel.

“Oh, you’re expecting capitalism to collapse into anarchy? Better BUY lots of food and antibiotics to stockpile for the collapse!”

Grinch smirk

don’t buy into the illusion that capitalism is so self-organizing and organic. it requires the direct protection and supervision of a nationwide military and a police force -multiple police forces actually - to protect capital.

Kid named Guy Debord:

Well, things would exist whether you’re in a capitalist economic system or not. People would make music and label their genre. People would write books and want to sell them. The real difference is who gets the profits.

Well it can’t commodify me! Oh wait.

Sorry, I got myself worked up.

The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.

Create a problem then sell the solution. Simple as

This is why I became comfort not owning things

This is why talking about things like government services just wash over conservatives. I was talking about transit and a common reply I get is “it’s not even profitable!”. It’s intrinsically linked that if it doesn’t make money, it’s valueless… it doesn’t matter if people use it, or if people need it, if it breaks even, or even if it’s designed to run at a slight loss because it’s value is more important than profit. People have lost the ability to understand that profit is not always the goal.

Not the greatest dude, but had a sick quote that sums up this post:

“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” - Vladimir Lenin

“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would ‘critique’ capital end up ‘reinforcing’ it instead…”