Tootfinder

The consensus seems to be that we're in Late Stage Capitalism. The questions are, how long does this stage last, and what is the next stage?
#capitalism

A shower thought I had about #capitalism is that one of the reasons why it seems so resistant against revolution is because the system keeps people too busy, and is self-enforcing.
We need to pay rent, food, etc, which means we need to keep making money, just for our survival. And if we try to escape that system, it's not just the state and the police coming for us, but our fellow cit…

#Capitalism has huge benefits and some issues. I am frustrated that we are allowing anti-capitalist ideas to be called capitalist. Those ideas are predominately about allowing huge businesses to subvert markets...
#Corruption in our political system which then allows corruption of free marke…

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
No, damn no, it maybe takes a bit more thought, but imagining the end of #capitalism is something I do on a daily basis
#anarchism

Ten Minnesota #newspapers, some in operation for more than 140 years, are ceasing publication in April.
All are owned by Alden Global Capital, which has been accused of "vulture" #capitalism by "taking over legacy newspapers and making drastic cuts, reducing

Excellent and hard hitting Episode of the Common Weal Policy Podcast on profit extraction from Scotland. Yet another example of the fact that globalised #Capitalism benefits no one but the ultra rich.
The Common Weal Policy Podcast: Episode #209 - Profit and Politics
Episode webpage: <…

Common Weal
All of Us First

"#Markets are characterised by #transparency: prices are public, and all relevant activity is visible to everyone. And because of competition, profits are minimal, little more than a ‘wage’ for the seller. Sitting on top of ‘economic life’ is

William Davies · Antimarket: Capitalism Decarbonised
When it’s capitalism that’s the problem, and not markets, the only alternative is post-capitalism. But the central...

#CalvinAndHobbes with a great short summary of #capitalism:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2

Yes, you can scale anything indefinitely with finite resources. Until you can’t. Because you’re dead. Because everyone is dead.
#capitalism #SiliconValley #cultOfGrowth

Holy crap this is a must read article - unconstrained #capitalism makes such outcomes inevitable. #regulation is vital. And the feeer5 market players you have the stronger and more competent that regulator needs to be.

America's Largest Companies Paid Top Executives More Than They Paid In Taxes
The report highlights how rampant corporate tax dodging and excessive executive pay have become among dozens of major American companies.
#capitalism

America's Largest Companies Paid Top Executives More Than They Paid In Taxes: Report
The report highlights how rampant corporate tax dodging and excessive executive pay have become among dozens of major American companies.

Thought for the day: should we think of #capitalism as a pandemic disease? What feature, if any, distinguishes it from a pandemic disease?

Premise: #Capitalism and #WhiteSupremacy are not a panchreston.

"The notion that there is a clear division between state forces and crime groups—that corruption and collaboration are the work of a few bad apples—is a hegemonic idea promoted by nation-states and the mainstream media. Undoing this binary means learning from the people whose lives have been directly affected by armed groups whose activity is carried out with impunity. Impunity is not the result of a weak or deficient state, but rather it is actively provided to the gamut of armed groups who commit crimes and acts of terror against citizens, migrants, and the poor. The provision of impunity to armed actors who are politically aligned with capitalism is part of a modern nation state’s raison d’etre."
Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley
#WarOnDrugs #Capitalism #DawnPaley #POSIWID #StateViolence
https://search.worldcat.org/title/871789626

Capitalism, working as designed.
#capitalism #newPosition #deceased #LinkedIn

The price of an #addictivealgorithm these days says a lot about #capitalism: $60 billion (!)
"By the numbers: Wedbush analyst Dan Ives puts the value of #TikTok's U.S. operations at $100…

The TikTok sales pitch
Putting a price tag on the app is tricky.

Forced labor was the foundation of an economic system that knew no color boundaries; like an open sore the plantations grew upon the Caribbean, and when the Indians died, and the supply of white trash failed to meet demand, the merchants tapped deeper into Africa, drawing away men and women not because they were black, but because they were cheap, limitless in number, and better. European class societies whose elite thought nothing of hanging an English child for petty theft, or packing indentured workers, white or black, like herring into the festering holds of ships, cared less about the origins of their laborers than the production of their labor. Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. In the first days of colonialism, when the merchants sailed away from the insular world of Europe, the color of the worker’s skin meant no more to them than it did to the kings of Africa, rulers who lorded over thousands of their own slaves, and who for a suitable profit were more than willing to pass them along. Of course, all of this mattered little to the men and women unloaded into bondage in Saint Domingue. For them the enemy had a face, and there was no doubt as to its color.
Wade Davis -- The Serpent and the Rainbow
#Slavery #Racism #Abolition #Haiti #Capitalism

Assholes gonna asshole.
#SiliconValley #AI #surveillance #capitalism

"When [we] dreamed up the #SciFiEconomics Lab(2019) we had no idea what #Graeber & Wengrow were up to. Yet, like them, we felt stuck. We felt crippled by our inability to imagine living under any system other than late-stage

What David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" has in common with sci-fi economics
Photo: Dennis Jarvis CC-BY – link A few weeks ago, I finished David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. It is not science fiction, nor is it economics. And yet, I propose it has to do with both. The book begins by stating inequality has risen to the top of the agenda for public debate. Scholars, politicians, business leaders are calling attention to it. Where, they ask, does inequality come from? How can we reduce it to tolerable levels? The authors then proceed to questio…

I'm rereading Wilkie Collins chronologically and these days I'm on The Moonstone. A great deal of the plot hinges on various members of the gentry being deeply in debt. Despite the fact that all the laws, all their violent enforcement, are in their favor, after all, they write the laws, they absolutely can't escape their debts without finding some way to pay them.
Their laws provide them with all their wealth through the violence of enclosure and slavery. They provide them with endless serfs,* servants, and employees by (a) making it illegal to be unemployed and (b) taking away every possibility of employment other than wage labor, and yet, even with their frictionless ability to legislate whatever they want they've given themselves no escape from debt other than payment or imprisonment. Why?
I can't think of any reason besides the stability of the capitalism they all rely on for their obscene wealth. Yes, they take everything from their slaves, their colonies, and their working class, but to be able to repudiate debts would take everything from the finance industry on which their wealth also depends. There'd be no one to sell to them. They'd have nothing to do with their money without the vast luxury economy which supplies everything that makes their wealth worthwhile.
So as a class from time to time they'd sacrifice some of their peers to the violence of law enforcement because it was necessary to save the whole system from collapse. But none of this adds up to a respect for the rule of law or a system of equality under the law, either of which would also cause collapse.
Capital's control over the social narrative was relatively primitive in the mid 19th century, and it's easy for us to spot the contradictions, but nothing's changed at its core. Even now the law applies to the ruling class as necessary to stabilize capitalism and to the working class, slaves, and colonial subjects as necessary to control and continue their violent exploitation. Things look a lot better now on the surface because they've had to evolve that way to preserve stability, not because anything is different in essence.
And for all that it's a really banging novel, highly recommended! This, along with The Woman In White and (my personal fave) No Name are just pure Victorian fun (bracketing the ocean of bloodthirsty imperialist capitalism on which their entire society floats, as does ours).
#WilkieCollins #VictorianLiterature #TheMoonstone #Capitalism
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* Speaking metaphorically.

There goes the neighbourhood.
#threads #fediverse #surveillance #capitalism