In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.
We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren’t enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.
This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.
The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.
I agree with this, and I’d like to add that the wealth gap focusing on funneling money to the top is obviously not helping the quality of products, responsible production , or fair compensation for most of the world.
Yeah, but I’m trying to explain why it is happening. You’ve hit market saturation in so many companies when the only way to fuel growth now is to reduce costs.
Cumulative generational focus on acquiring and consolidating capital explains the why comprehensively, at least in the states.
Monopolies, market saturation, minimizing cost at all costs, poor labor compensation are all symptoms of a system focused primarily on acquiring and consolidating capital.
Capitalism. The longer Capitalism exists, the more it has to find new ways to stop/slow its own built-in death clock. If it doesn’t, it dies, due to problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall and rising disparity. Enshittification, so to speak.
With each economic disaster, the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie can claim large swaths of cheaper Capital at a discount, compounding the issue into a form of neo-feudalism that will eventually collapse under its own weight.
God forbid a post-scarcity world where the only currency is our reputation, honor, and credibility.
Make it so number one.
Hehehehe it started there but took an Orville hard left
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices, and instead embracing neoliberal economics. I don’t accept that all ownership is theft. Trade in goods and services benefits both parties. I am so sick of people using this shorthand word “capitalism” to describe what’s going on here. We’ve had capitalism for millennia, and it’s brought us longer, healthier and happier lives, and reduced warfare. It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem, not the system of ownership of capital.
Liberal Democracies are of, by, and for the bourgeoisie. Because Capitalists have immense influence, the state will bend to their will.
Trade is good. Capitalism is not. Capitalism is not trade, its a Mode of Production by which there are individual Capitalists and non-owner workers. We have not had Capitalism for millenia, but a few hundred years.
Capitalism did not bring us healthier, longer, and happier lives, nor reduce warfare. Development did. Capitalism drives profit, that’s it, anything else is tangential to that end.
I think you would do yourself a lot of good by reading theory.
I agree with your last point - and I may be a bit bourgeois (not to mention ignorant) myself. I’d appreciate recommendations if you wouldn’t mind.
That’s a ton of reflection and openness, so I just want to commend you for that. Fantastic to hear and see.
Initially, I want to give a general basis for what can be considered bourgeois. The Bourgeoisie are those Capitalists who do not need to perform labor to survive, and earn their money via ownership alone. One can be a business owner actively and a member of the bourgeoisie if they can simply hire someone to manage in their place, but a member of the petite bourgeoisie cannot hire a manager to take their place and still make enough money to survive.
As for general reading recommendations? You have a lot of paths you can go. I don’t personally recommend going full ML or full Anarchist right off the bat, usually it takes a lot of reflection to pick a tendency. I myself don’t even have a tendency I identify with, as I believe the process towards progress is unique for each country and state.
If you want a real quick intro: Principles of Communism, by Engels, is an extremely quick read. Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein is another fantastic paper. The Communist Manifesto is good, but it’s extremely fiery and usually is better after you’re familiar with Marxism.
If you want to get a quick intro that breaks more into the theory side (as in, you’ll be more well-read than the vast majority of online leftists with little effort), read both Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labor and Capital by Marx. They are condensed and simplified versions of what Marx greatly elaborates on in Capital, his seminal masterwork.
For Anarchism, An Anarchist FAQ is a good starting point. Note that Anarchists usually align with Marxists on analysis, but not on strategy.
There’s also topics like Syndicalism, Market Socialism, the idea of Reform vs Revolution (Rosa Luxembourg has a good paper on that), and more, but those are fantastic bang for buck reads.
If you still want more, you can always read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and The Conquest of Bread, the former for Marxism and the latter for Anarchism.
Hope this helps! There are tons of YouTube videos as well that simplify Marxism as much as possible.
At the core, the issue is still deeply rooted within capitalism but governments should absolutely be doing their fucking jobs and curb the worst aspects of it a little until we’re ready for something better.
Fair point, I accept that. A bit like how democracy is the worst form of government apart from those other ones we tried.
Even then, there are still countless forms of democracy and democratic government. Democracy itself is a cool concept, the actual systems utilizing Democracy vary wildly, from the Soviet form, to the Chinese form, to the American form, to the European forms, to the forms practiced in more Anarchist societies like the EZLN and revolutionary Catalonia, and more.
There’s direct Democracy, council Democracy, republican Democracy, proportional Democracy, parliamentary democracy, and far, far more.
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It’s come and gone throughout the millennia, like certain pieces of knowledge. Eratosthenes very accurately calculated the circumference of the world in Ptolemaic Egypt and later on people thought the Earth was flat (and some morons still do). As for capitalism, look at prehistoric societies using shells as currency. What is that currency for?
Capitalism is not millennia old. Capitalism (as commonly defined) only stared to take root after the black death (1350ish) flipped feudalism on its head. Suddenly the free and unfree peasant class had some control of their own destiny and could sell their skills to whomever they wanted at whatever price they could get. Serfs could declare themselves free. Land was often up for grabs.
You may enjoy this read:
Thanks for this :)
It’s not “Capitalism”, it’s governments not doing their job in regulating capitalist practices
It’s Thatcherite/Reaganomic practices by governments that are the problem
Hmm, I’m trying to remember what economic system both these countries have… Let’s call it “Bappitalism”. And if the economic model is so powerful that it influences the governmental one (lobbyists, military spending, etc), then yes, that is a problem.
Read the other comments please.
That’s not how forums or discussions in general work. For reference, read other comments on the internet, please.
Alas, the alternative to capitalism has never been socialism, but feudalism.
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Thank you for this excellent writeup.
A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).
Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.
However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.
You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
But then we wouldn’t have the triple breasted whores of Eroticon Six!
Ahhh, Excentrica Gallumbits. I remember her fondly.
I’ve seen the argument made that there was no mental illness (non phyiso-neurological, I suppose?) And therefore civilization is worse per se.
I mean… animals, disease, murder, rape, starvation, hydration… but still not living in the same ongoing trauma anxiety state of today
There’s no objective “answer” to this, just sharing an idea I’ve seen
Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.
You see, it all started in May, 2016 with this Gorilla being killed. That’s when this timeline split off…
RIP. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone.
In the UK, 14 years of Conservative government has really made the rot grow.
Y’all have been going hard at Americanism for a minute now. I remember the beginning of the new world media thinking, “oh shit, there as obese and decrepit as us”
Late stage capitalism
Things have been going great in non-capitalist societies?
Non-Capitalist societies face entirely different issues, usually due to lack of development. They don’t quite face the same issues of enshittification that developed Capitalist countries are currently seeing.
Well no. :)
It seems smaller rich countries are the best, like Norway.
Unfortunately, disparity is rising in Social Democracies and safety nets are being eroded.
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Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They’re just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.
There’s always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there’s always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.
What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don’t see the stick.
And we’re willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we’re dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.
The uber rich believe they’re better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.
I agree broadly with much of your assessment of history and many of the problems that bely current western society. The rich might be exploiting capitalism to their benefit but a capitalist system with proper regulation will always be better (in terms of Quality of life and freedom) for larger groups of people Than a planned economy.
Possibly but I can’t think of a time that’s been attempted, let alone successfully implemented. Capitalism always (it seems to me) ends up morphing into a system to protect wealth and the wealthy. They would never, ever allow ‘proper regulation’ (by which I assume you mean regulation to protect workers as much as the rich) to happen.
Capitalism isn’t a national thing - its global - there’s always going to be places where what one country forbids another country allows. All a rich person or company has to do is transfer their base of operations there to circumnavigate most laws and pay lip service to the laws of the countries they operate in. Look at Amazon or Starbucks.
Planned economies were the means to the end not the end. Basing it around authoritarian, suppressive, dictatorial government is what made it the end. That said, apart from freedom of speech issues. Capitalism struggles in most aspects to truly be better, even at its best. Because capitalism ends up authoritarian and suppressive as well. Those with all the wealthy and resources don’t tolerate those who are against their theft.
We should be moving past both.
Okay, but what does a system look like that moves past both? How do you ensure people get resources if you don’t want capitalism or a planned economy?
By implementing the thing Marxist-leninists were loathe to implement despite giving a lot of lip service. Actual communism. Not the Engles lenin variety. But the kind Marx spoke on. The thing to remember is that the Soviet Communist party was as communist as the national socialist party of Germany was socialist. Which is to say neither of them were.
This of course all starts with actual large scale engagement. We absolutely need to change the voting system etc as a start. For all the flaws and problems of the founding fathers, the fact that they saw us needing to largely rewrite the Constitution every few decades, let alone every few hundred years was not one of their flaws.
Then we need to uncap the House of Representatives. That’s a century overdue. Followed by abolishing the electoral college. Then reforming the house, Senate, judiciary and even the concept of the presidency. Basically take as many steps as necessary to make things as democratic/granular as possible. Dilute power.
One of the other important things we could do is abolishing the concept of private property. Private property is little more than theft. Allowing the wealthy to horde resources to the detriment of everyone else. If you own a home, you should be living in it. It shouldn’t be some sort of an investment that you never spend time in. Used for speculation on markets etc. Replace private property with something much more sane like the more limited concept of personal property. As in property, a person would actually use themselves. Tying legal fines and fees to a person’s income and wealth along with impartial enforcement is another good start.
Your suggestion would only usher in a different kind of tyranny.
Really? What kind of tyranny would increasing democracy while reducing concentration of power cause? Lol I’d really like to know.
There’s a reason the people who wrote the Constitution decided upon federalism as our form of government. It protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. This concept is especially important as the urban majority seeks to assert its ignorant tyranny on the rural minority these days.
The United States isn’t a single government like most non-federal nations. There is plenty of democracy in our local and state governments, and we have our bicameral Congress which accounts for both the equality of the states, no matter their populations, as well as the inequality of the states, taking into account their populations. Remove that equality and you will be unable to get enough states to ratify your new constitution.
It’d need some pretty strong regulation, but it could work out very well
Capitalism is the answer. We’re in the part of capitalism where regular people are almost completely out of money. Bezos is building company towns preparing for a huge influx of new desperate Amazon employees.
I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.
On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.
Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.
Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.
The rise in interest rates meant easy money dried up for corporations. They all had to “monitize” at the same time. That’s why enshitification happened everywhere at the same time. Things are easing. Enshitification will slow down.
The question “Why has the world gone to shit in the past 5 to 10 years” has routinely been asked every five to ten years throughout history. It’s largely due to the perceptual biases of the human mind.
While that’s true, the world has objectively gone to shit in the past 10 years.
If it’s “objectively”, you’ve got an objective measure of it?
Yeah, as measured by the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few
No, I mean can you show me the objective measure? This site has a bunch of data about economic inequality over time in various countries and I’m not seeing any particular trend in the graphs - it’s gone up and down over time in different ways for various countries. For the ones that have long term data, it looks like things were worse in the 1940s.
I mean, we were also in a global conflict then after one group tried to blame another for their economic and general unhappiness with how things turned out causing them to support a horrific person.
History doesn’t repeat but it sure as fuck rhymes
Granted, we’ve had quite a big spike in deaths due to war in 2022 due to the double whammy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Tigray war. But the years prior to it showed a steady decrease from the previous peak in 2014 as various middle-eastern conflicts wound down. Here’s a page with historical charts of war-related deaths. Those bumps in 2022 and 2014 aside, the world has been in a very peaceful state since 1989. And the current bumps still have nothing on Vietnam, Korea, the World Wars, and so forth.
You’re not provocative or interesting. If you believe your own bullshit, you’re dumb. Stop redirecting the conversation from OP’s point.
One of the major reasons is that Milton Friedman had a thought back in the 70s that fucking everyone in the western world latched onto, and the consequences have been getting worse and worse for the average person for most of the time since then.
Of course, neoliberals don’t actually believe in neoliberalism, they profit off it’s failure.
If you give a rich person even more money and it never trickles down, you just gave a rich person money. If you’re claim companies will regulate themselves and they don’t, you just gave companies the freedom to do exploitative, dangerous things in search of bigger profits.
If neoliberalism actually delivered on any of its promises, neoliberals wouldn’t support it.
It’s nothing more than a book of pre-made lies that sound plausible enough for a press conference and signal to other neoliberals that their feeding trough is being filled.
Knew the what. Not the how/why we got there. Thanks for sharing.
Indeed. Knowing how we got here is the first step to fixing it.
Shareholder primacy is older than that. Check out Dodge v. Ford
Sure, but him writing that op-ed in the NYT popularized it to the degree that it became an explicit goal of pretty much all corporate leadership people from that point on.
Are you American? Because I seem to recall between five and ten years ago a particular event that changed the way we ran a lot of the government.
People underestimate the depths of the fuckedupedness of practical every day functioning regulating govt shit as a result of it
For the US it all started (well more accelerated) with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion_of_the_court and since we have a knock on effect with the rest of the world…
Wtf I didn’t know that there is a clear reason for corpos getting political! Thank you for this, I really had no idea about it!
bernie talks about it. rails against it really. to bad the rest of congress is releatively silent on it given the damage it did.
