#Capitalist reform

[vanilla-voyeur]

[Image ID: Reply from @gorillahaut that says, 'This is called a "forming a union" :3' /End ID]

Circle of protection against capitalism

[vanilla-voyeur]

If you are willing to entertain the idea that capitalism works or could work then you need to throw out the ridiculous assumption that the reason it works is competition. It's a little weird to me how rarely I've seen this brought up. Capitalism works because of choice. Competition is one way to create choice but it doesn't always and when it doesn't it's harmful. Even when competition can create choice, that doesn't mean that it's the best way to create choice for a particular situation. Sometimes cooperation creates choice better.

Most folks who love capitalism claim to love democracy. (Sometimes to the point where they think they're synonymous.) Democracy works because of choice. Not competition.

It's pretty surprising that my fellow tech bros haven't realized this. The backbone of the entire software industry is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Every programmer past CS 101 depends on FOSS to create new apps and libraries. The most popular software license is the MIT license, which is a permissive open source license. By providing the free ability to use, copy, and modify software libraries it provides lots of choices for developers, while remaining completely free (libre). It's not through capitalist competition to sell things at the highest price the market will allow.

Focusing on competition rather than choice means that people who have less choices get left out of the benefits of capitalism. It's a little hard to behave in your own rational self-interest to maximize marginal benefit when you live in a food desert and having a felony on your record limits your job options and redlining has cut you off from moving to a better neighborhood. Maybe a strong social safety net is against the letter of capitalism, but it does help provide the true benefit of capitalism: choice.

[floortile34]

so, again. for some reason yet again:

all meds should be free and otc (including for children)

school should be free and all classes should be optional. no school should be barred by previous grades

nobody should be allowed to own more than a few properties without special reasoning (redistribution if reasoning inadequate)

everyone should just get food and a sufficient living space, free and with no prerequisites

[madfoolish]

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

we need to talk about this societal workplace thing where people brag about subservience as if it’s a flex to undervalue and mistreat yourself in the name of capital

“I work through lunch every day” MAYBE YOU SHOULD NOT

“you don’t see me making a fuss about it” MAYBE YOU SHOULD

“well that never stops me from coming to work” FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAYBE IT FUCKING SHOULD!!!!

“I’m being a good leader and setting a good example” YOU ARE BEING A BAD LEADER. YOU ARE SETTING A HORRIBLE EXAMPLE

[spewagepipe]

The Evolution of RPGs: The Landlord's Game

The Landlord's Game was invented in 1902 by Georgist activist Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, in an effort to educate the public about how the seemingly-obtuse Georgist land-tax would cure the problems of capitalism. Magie, despite having no noteworthy background in gaming, turned out to be a game design prodigy. She single-handedly innovated multiple long-standing design elements and created the single most influential commercial board game of all time.

The Landlord’s Game appears, at first, to be structured like a simple race game in the vein of Pachisi or Goose, but one of Magie's most influential innovations was the idea of a looping circuit: Upon reaching the end of the track, players simply start a new lap. Victory is decided on the basis of the play-money that is lost and gained as the players land on the various spaces. The original rules prescribe five laps, but the game can be shortened or lengthened to taste.

Race games are already tedious, so repeatedly looping the track might have been downright Sisyphean – except that Magie's board is highly dynamic. Another influential element of her design was a space where players draw a random event card from a deck, such that the space’s effect is always unique. But almost all of the track spaces in The Landlord's Game are subject to some change: players can buy a "title deed" for most spaces that then forces any subsequent players who land there to pay "rent" to the owner.

Players earn a modest "wage" for each lap they complete – but not enough to keep pace with the escalating taxes, fees, and rents. When you can't pay, you start losing turns locked in the "Poor House", which can see you functionally eliminated from the game. To win, you must charge more rent than your opponents, so that they end up in poverty instead. As the rulebook notes, this system (modelled after real-life capitalism) will eventually drive all but one player to ruin.

But players can vote at any time to adopt the Georgist "Single Tax" policy, which means that rents are paid to a new “Public Treasury” instead of to the owners of title deeds. At the same time, all of the spaces that charge taxes or fees become free of charge (either immediately or gradually as the public treasury grows). Portions of the public treasury are used to increase the players’ wages, and whenever a player would otherwise be sent to the “Poor House”, they instead move to the nearest public sector workplace (where they earn additional wages).

The overall effect of the Single Tax mode is that poverty is eliminated, and it is no longer possible to brutally extort one’s opponents. The game shifts into a much friendlier – and tighter – race to see who can make the most wealth, rather than who can cause the most harm. Unfortunately, the Single Tax mode has not survived into the modern era: as if to prove the inherent cruelty of real-life capitalism, the Parker Brothers company first refused to publish The Landlord's Game, and then later stole the design. They stripped Magie of her inventor's credit, erased all traces of Georgism from the game, and published it under the now much-more-widely known brand Monopoly.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

[exilley]

Public education is not actually about academia, it's about industry. The purpose of american schools, from day one, was to integrate members of the general people into a society that is nigh dependant on submission to the status quo. If you ask any teacher, student, parent, counselor, or any other person who is invested in public schooling, what the purpose of going to school is, they will respond with some variation on how it's meant to prepare kids for their future careers. What's important is not that one is in touch with their history, or able to perform basic mathematics, or that one can engage with literature and art in a meaningful way. The important part is that schoolchildren have a dispassionately earnest work ethic, an unyieldingly flexible standard of punctuality, and an uncompromising set of inordinate values about properness drilled into them. I don't think it's funny or ironic that school settings are commonly compared to prisons, and I don't think education should have to exist to serve the purpose of monetary and political benefit to be considered worthy of investment. Until public education as an institution is no longer viewed as an extension of industry, intellectualism will never thrive and no number of foundational reworks of the system will be effective at remedying the underlying cause of dysfunction and corruption.

[magenta-somethings]

reading tim drake's earlier comics (Batman: Rite of Passage, Robin 1991, Robin II, etc) and the politics are... Interesting.

[constructbreakdown]

Concrete Skies -- 1940's Jazz [original AI song]

[roxyandtheroxies]

Maoism-Third Worldism is based y'all, the revolutionary potential in all of these bad boys is simply, divine!

Our boy Mao was pretty much on the money, common Mao W.

But we gotta figure out how to get that Left Globalization thing going y'all...

[fuck-em-up-your-grace]

The thing the American left needs to understand is that the best thing you can do to advance leftism* is to vote for Joe Biden.

[magicaljarofbeans]

I have so many feelings about this. I am genuinely pissed off. Not in a, "this is a dumb video and I think they're stupid" way, in a "you've got me riled up and now I want to go change this whole goddamn system" way.

There are so many things wrong with how our world is set up. I'm pissed off at how our education system works, at how hard people have to work (or not) to live, how isolated people are from each other, how terrible people treat others, how hard it is for people to be healthy, and how car dependent we are!

I could make that list a lot longer. Something needs to change.

Additional recommended YouTube channels:

https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateTown

https://www.youtube.com/@sprouts (Specifically their "Alternative Schools and Education Reform" playlist)

https://www.youtube.com/@SciGuys

https://www.youtube.com/@jessicaoutofthecloset/featured

https://www.youtube.com/@leenanorms/featured

https://www.youtube.com/@evan/featured

https://www.youtube.com/@fullychargedshow (For interesting developments in EVs)

https://www.youtube.com/@slidebean/featured

Please Reblog and add your own recommended YouTube channels or other forms of media (such as books, documentaries etc.)! I am very well aware that my personal viewing content leans to a very particular demographic so additional view points is highly encouraged!

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Michael Roberts

While the leaders ‘talked turkey,’ the economic reality is that U.S. efforts to strangle the Chinese economy are not working. Western ‘experts’ continue their never-ending message that China is close to a debt collapse. If this were really so, then Biden and American capital would have nothing to worry about – but they do worry, and rightly so.

 In previous posts, I have argued that it was a big mistake by the Chinese CP leaders to adopt the Western capitalist model for urban development.  But this does not mean China is about to have a deflationary crash.  China’s net debt to GDP ratio (debt burden) is only 12% of the average in the G7 economies.  The state holds huge financial assets, so it can easily manage this property slump.

[samaspic31]

An entire art history class about st Sebastian without uttering the world homosexuality once. Kill yourself. It’s not just any eroticism the artist is being gay it’s relevant you asshole

[vanilla-voyeur]

Those are capitalist countries. For real so many US American "anticapitalists" seem to be completely unaware that the US is not the only capitalist country. If you "hate capitalism" because people shouldn't have to work 2 jobs to survive, then you don't actually hate capitalism. These things can be reformed with proper government regulation. You don't have to tear the whole system down and replace it with socialism or anarchism to get those things.

To be truly anticapitalist, you need to be against things that are essential to capitalism and true of every single capitalist country in the world throughout history. (Otherwise, it's not actually essential.) You need to have an explanation why the reforms that people who support capitalism want to see are less able to address the problems of capitalism than your preferred system. And you need to acknowledge that whatever you prefer is not going to be a uptopia free of flaws and address how those flaws are less bad than the bad things that are essential to capitalism. Otherwise you don't really have a viable reason to be 100% anticapitalist.

"No one ever tries to flee capitalism."

Well, that was a lie.

[marblebees]

“Techno-feudalism” is stupid. Its literally still just capitalism, it was always turning this way and if you align yourself with marxism-leninism you’ll realise that the distinction between the two is pedantic at best and outright covers for capitalism’s failures at worst.