Just a short rant today. I don't have time to write a longer post. Why? Because I have to work for a living of course, and Sundays are best for work because the boss pays double. Has to pay double; this is not a voluntary gesture out of the goodness of his heart of course.
Image by Comfreak - source: Pixabay
At work today I once again, for the millionth time, heard someone say how great capitalism has been to us for giving us such great technological advancements like the mobile phones we sell. I had to, once again, constrain myself to not start a fruitless discussion about how wrong this idea is... Here however, I'm surrounded by progressive minds. Not progressive as in leftist, nothing like that, but progressive in the sense that my crypto brothers and sisters are aware that the world is changing fundamentally with the advent of peer to peer, decentralized money, available to anyone without the need for government or bank. So I'll take my chances here ;-)
The economy, my friends, is like The Matrix. No, really, I mean it. Consider what happened during capitalism's latest crisis in 2008 (I say "latest" because this system needs to break down periodically, it's built-in); in the entire world economies collapsed, people lost their homes, their jobs, and businesses went under. Not one man, woman or child was not affected by this crisis; all our lifes changed. But why? Nothing in the REAL WORLD had changed; there were still exactly the same number of houses and people, the same number of buildings, the same number of trees, the Earth still revolved around it's axis and still travels around the Sun. Nothing has changed. Absolutely NOTHING! This should indicate to you how much we, as a global village, are RULED, not by common sense, but by a SYSTEM that's built to NOT SERVE the 99% but only the 1%. Even the crisis itself served that 1% as they came out even better than before.
This awfully misguided claim that capitalism is responsible for much of our technological progress is one of the lies we believe that makes it possible for this irrational way of managing the earth's resources, including all living things on it, to survive yet another day. But it's so wrong. So, the technology used to sling us into the first industrial revolution was developed when slavery was still common practice; should we now praise slavery for bringing us this far? Or how about the fact that communist Soviet Union were the first to launch a satellite into orbit around Earth, and the first to shoot a man into space and bring him back? Should we praise communism for that? Or should we just stop a second and think with our brains instead of with the ideologies our masters saturate our lives with, and realize it's simply human curiosity, ingenuity and COOPERATION that brings about progress? Technology and science will progress REGARDLESS of the systems we device. Realize that an iPhone is a collection of technologies developed with our tax-money; Apple didn't invent GPS, didn't make the software, the camera's or screens. It's just a lot of technology, developed and built by hundreds of thousands of people, assembled in a pretty package; martketing and design is what they know, and prosecuting any poor sap that dares make something that looks even remotely like their products.
Praising capitalism for technological progress is even more stupid though. Why? Now, let's see... Technological progress has enabled us to do LESS WORK. That's the whole point of progress. Even the colleague I heard talking today said something to the point that technology makes our lifes more comfortable and easier. I agree that it SHOULD, but it doesn't. Remember: we had to fight hard to shorten workdays to 8 hours. If it's up to the capitalist, children would still be employed and put to work for 12 hours a day. This Matrix like system of hours DEMANDS from businesses that they maximize profits, or else they won't survive. Back in the day, when cartoons like The Jetsons were made, it was only natural to think that one day, we wouldn't have to work even 8 hours a day, but maybe 8 hours a week; productivity keeps rising. But this increased capacity to produce isn't spent on making our lifes easier, only to increase profits; again, it's the system, our very own Matrix, that demands this. It's no use to get mad at the capitalists and billionaires; they just act as the system demands them to act; even they are slaves, not just the wage-laborers... But these wag-laborers are the ones first discarded by the system, and the owners of the means of production (that's including the HUMAN RESOURCES) are always the winners; that's built in too.
Capitalism doesn't create progress, we the people do. And it certainly doesn't make our lifes easier nor does it give us more freedom; it PREVENTS the technology to give us more time and freedom by keeping the built-in rat-race running. The citizens of the most advanced capitalism in the world, Americans, work most hours; I've read articles stating that Americans work, on average, 300 hours more per year than anywhere else in the "advanced" nations. Most earn 30,000 dollars per year and would have a financial disaster if they go for one month without work or pay. How I'd sometimes like to take people who make these irrational claims about capitalism by the shoulders and shake them to WAKE UP, to break free from this dogmatic thinking... But that would be unreasonable; it's not their fault and there's always that chance that I'm missing something myself... Well that's it for today I'm afraid, and you can thank The Matrix for that ;-) But we can do better, I refuse to believe this is the best we can do...
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