@Marie

#1.2.1 And there's no such thing as "pure capitalism" either. The state is a factor in any economic organization. Capitalism is really terrible at many functions necessary to life and well being -- such as banking, education, public health and medical care, drinking water/sewage -- it's only good at exploiting inventions by others including states, mostly wants/toys that aren't vital to survival, for profit. Often enough that exploitation is short-lived. it's also good at stealing from the commons which ends up with people paying more for less.

@Cassiodorus
the ruling value everything must be masked in.

#1.2.1 This is because there is nothing to it beyond the notion that if anything is to happen, there must be a capitalist profiting off of it and taking credit for it.

The original conditions for the rise of the capitalism were characterized by 1) Europe's conquest of the world and 2) a conceptual revolution which redefined "nature" as a machine which could be retooled to mass-produce whatever the capitalists wanted to sell. These conditions became, in turn, the basis for economic propaganda. The term "economic propaganda" is a redundancy, for all economics is propaganda. Karl Marx had it right in Chapter 26 of Capital:

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.

But such a paragraph merely outlines the initial conditions of capitalism. There are several trends which define this ruination of everything:

1) The commodity cycle. The capitalist system defines everything as "natural resources," to be converted to raw materials, thus to consumer products and in the end to various species of waste and trash.

2) Standardization. To fit the commodity cycle, products must be all the same, so that their prices can uniformly fit each one. This problem shows up most distinctly in food production, in which what was once a vast variety of different foods has become apples and oranges. Heirloom varieties are an attempt to discover what existed before the standardization of the food industry.

3) Exploitation. Not only are workers not paid what they're worth -- and this must necessarily be so, otherwise the capitalist would not be able to sell the company's tendencies to profit upon the open market -- but the rest of the world, human and nonhuman, must perform innumerable acts of unpaid labor if the capitalist is to be enthroned as the protagonist of society. Eventually all this unpaid labor becomes a drain upon everything, and so (and this is especially visible in what is left of the Rust Belt) you have worn-out workers toiling steadily upon a worn-out planet.

4) Co-optation. What might seem genuine as intellectual or artistic product eventually becomes a string of cheap cliches meant to coerce money out of buyers. The academies eventually find ways of generating intellectual crap to meet the demand for more; art becomes derivative for the same reason. The trend extends to politics, in which original revolt becomes a means of advancement for the rebelling parties.

Capitalism triumphed, and triumphs, because it is more efficient at accumulation than any competing system; the ultimate outcome of the capitalist process, however, is a world of scared plutocrats with empty brains presiding over a world of steady degradation.

@Cassiodorus
Designed to fail. If so, what then. Clearly more of the same regardless of name. Then it’s just another distraction and another windmill to chase. Not a waste of time but an intended retooling of our very organized energy. Dissipated. So fuck yeah organize on small scale at the very least. Right?

#4.1.1 And you might vote for him if the spirit moves you when November rolls around. But, yeah, one purpose of his "presumptive nomination" appears to be inspiring one half of the so-called Left to get the other half to shut up. And if that purpose succeeds it becomes a fait accompli. You might as well wait for 2021 to come around on the calendar. Here's an inspiration: let's organize small-scale!

As I've suggested in all the previous essays, most of the "urgings" of those addressing the "Left" voice a vast overestimate of its power while it's being silenced.

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg [video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmhzhCKw60Y&t=115s]

#4.1.1

Or mass stupidity someone wrote a open letter to Biden asking him to get the credit card companies to lower interest rates during this economic shit storm. The tip jar got hide rated. Why? He said that the black caucus also let blacks down. This was racist diatribe apparently. And don't dare bring up any of his other horrible bills. But gee maybe the guy who MBNA of Delaware owes Biden a few favors. It doesn't seem right that they keep getting bailed out or low interest rates and then they charge us 29% on our cards.

What Obama lied about when he ended ByeDone.

This sums up their disastrous time in office quite well.

@Cassiodorus

I say "almost," but I really can't think of any reason that you would not. I'd say that it should be "self evident," if possible. As opposed to "manufacturing consent" as TPTB do when, say, promoting a war.

#10.1.1 Though isn't the idea behind the "war of position" that before any great revolution is to happen, we need to win over the public in some important way?