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6 days agoHm, maybe I should give listenbrainz another go then. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used it for some time now to scrobble music so it should know what I’m listening to. Unfortunately my taste in music doesn’t seem to be that predictable because all services I’ve tried out have been quite bad at it. I tend to go on manual deep dives into obscure music on bandcamp hopping from one artist to another. Most recommendations I get from algorithms like Spotify tend to be rather popular-focused music which I often don’t really enjoy. (Not trying to be edgy here, don’t think it is inherently better or worse to like mainstream stuff, this is just a genuine problem I frequently face).
Hm, I totally get how you are frustrated with people using one-dimensional, overly used and in-group accepted answers to respond to very complex questions. Yes, they can feel pretty performative at times. “Capitalism bad” is an easy way to respond to all kinds of problems and not always useful. I guess I can also understand people using “capitalism bad” as an answer because after analyzing capitalism and all the consequences stemming from worldwide capitalist domination, it gets really frustrating always having to answer with a well thought out analysis. So a shorthand like “capitalism bad” can be quite handy.
Regarding your comment, you seem like a person that believes many of the capitalist talking points. (It reads a bit like Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on capitalism).
First of all, you talk about inequality and how capitalist societies have higher equality. You realize how nonsensical this is regarding how the most powerful, rich people are coming from the capitalist country that has hardly any healthcare and people living in incredible poverty, right? If you look at a list of inequalities worldwide based on GDP, you can see that the US files on rank C, behind the Philippines, Pakistan, UAE and Russia (just to name a few). And choosing inequality is in itself probably a rather bad measure because rich capitalist countries have been oppressing, exploiting and destroying other countries to maximize their own profits for as long as capitalism exists. And this is were the myth of capitalist countries bettering the lives of people stems from. Of course people of all classes are more wealthy in countries that exploit other countries. Comparing countries in isolation then is like a faulty equation where you leave out how country A is actually robbing country B. And this isn’t only true for the US alone, but for the whole Global North. I’m from Germany and this country’s riches are solely possible on the backs of slave workers around the world. Classism isn’t local, country-based anymore, we have found even lower classes of people to exploit. Colonialism is still running the world, but now in a new design.
Even if we don’t stay at global or country level but zoom in a bit you’ll find that technology and progress is often made not because but despite of capitalism. Uncontrolled capitalism does not work in favor of people. People have to intervene and contain it all the time. Look at the pharma industry for example. Look at patents, like for important vaccines, agricultural technologies or really anything else. Look at companies giving a shit about their worker’s health (or their human rights) or the environment. All of this behavior is rewarded in a capitalist system because it is about maximizing profits and accumulating wealth alone. Sure, there are some light versions of capitalism like social market economy (like in Germany a few decades ago). But again, this is still based on exploiting people and keeping them poor.
And are you serious about the civil rights being a by-product of capitalism? Again, civil rights have happened despite capitalism. It has been grassroot movements and anticapitalists that have been marching in the streets fighting for civil rights for the most time. Capitalism in itself just doesn’t care for human rights at all, there is no advantage to them. On the opposite, patriarchy is a by-product of capitalism giving it even more control over people and maximizing the work force. Civil rights in capitalist countries may be more advanced not because of a capitalist system but because these countries are much richer. Again, because they exploit everyone else! People like us in rich countries having civil rights have caused many people in other countries to have no civil or human rights, all the time. Rich countries and companies may have civil rights at home, but they really don’t care about supporting dictators, fascist movements or discriminatory practices elsewhere. On the contrary, keeping a dictator in place is much better for maximizing your profits because you have much better control over that country. Our rich countries have an incentive to keep civil and human rights low in other countries because of capitalist logic.
Regarding what you say about capitalism not containing any “dashing revolutionaries or catchy slogans” I partially agree with you. There are certainly people that made themselves comfortable in this niche of glorifying communism or any other revolutionary movement but that secretly do not want to change anything at all. But this is then only a critique of these few people and it adds nothing to the debate at all. It actually seems more like a straw man argument by you to defend capitalism. Who said socialism, anarchy, whatever needed any “dashing revolutionaries or catchy slogans”?