“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
lawfare, regulatory capture, monopolies, proprietary lock-in, planned obsolescence are all attempts to cope with the tendency of the rate of profit to decline
this is another reason a large portion of the US economy is now the trading of financial assets and services associated with trading, doing actual production is much more difficult to keep profitable
There’s a reason it’s somehow profitable to have trees of businesses larger than some cities when nobody in any of that structure makes a fucking thing.
I’d be interested in seeing what things would look like if we didn’t let people offload liability to society.
I think workers owning their means of production is about as short as you can make that line of connection
capitalism is based in the abstraction and obfuscation of that line of connection
That is the shortest chain and ultimate goal. Peeps can group up, but still have to be able to handle the risk they take on. Once people become chess pieces or statistics in an org there’s no way for a human to consider them as individuals, regardless of that person’s psychology - the structures we have turn good people into monsters as surely as religious zealotry.