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Haven’t used this blog in years. If folks are interested in hearing my thoughts these days, I started a substack where I’m posting articles semi-regularly. Here’s one I wrote recently!
Just got a donation request in the mail from a summer camp I used to work at that paid me like $180/week for 92-140 hour weeks depending how you count them (I slept in the same cabin as the campers, so I was effectively on call every night with the exception of my 4 hour “night off” and my 1 actual day off a week).
That’s a fucking bold move to be like: Hey, I know I used to pay you less than minimum wage, but will you give me money please?
Rather than putting the onus on individual consumers to choose less desirable but more sustainable options, what if we just made the path of least resistance better for the planet?
Like, instead of takeout being shipped in single use plastic or cardboard, what if we used reusable metal containers and then just had a truck that came by once a month, collected your containers, washed them, and returned them to the restaurants to be used again?
New video is out! The goal of this one was to give folks who are new to far left politics a jumping off point to understanding some of the criticisms of capitalism.
I made a YouTube video! I guess that’s something I do now!
I often wonder what metric people are measuring by when they claim “capitalism is the only system that works.” I mean, capitalists have only been in the driver’s seat for like 240 years and they literally managed to destroy the entire planet in that time.
The idea that people “get more conservative as they get older” is predicated on a change in economic condition that makes upholding the status quo in their material interests (or at least appear to be).
The thing about capitalism is the hyperfocus on the prosperity of the individual capitalist prevents the system from maintaining itself in perpetuity. As it grows and gets more efficient at extracting value from the working class, it can’t help but reveal the material interests of different factions among the working class to be unified against the capitalist class.
As working class people develop a common shared understanding of how the system operates, the state must implement increasingly stronger pressures to counterbalance their material interests. These pressures can come in the form of voter suppression, misinformation (including lying by omission), villinization of minorities, and even state sanctioned violence.
But the system is fundamentally unstable and given a long enough time frame (which it is unclear if we will have), it will tend towards an equitable society in which our material interests are not in direct conflict with one another. Much like a chemical reaction, once we reach the activation energy threshold, I believe our economic and political system will tend towards a more stable state.
It’s also important to understand that this process is iterative. The next “big movement” is probably not going to be communism, but some brand of “democratic socialism.” Then that system will exist until it gives way to something more stable (because there will still be material interests in conflict, just less pronounced or overt than before). Some form of communism is the logical endpoint of this system, as it would be the most “stable energy state” for the system to rest in.
Tldr; capitalism sows the seeds for its own destruction, let’s hope they bloom before climate change kills us all
If paying poor people a living wage would make money lose all meaning, what does that say about the meaning of money?