This point is unironically what ultimately made me start learning about communism. When I still had basically no understanding of politics I brought up how there’s more than enough food to feed everyone to a friend and he said “well if we did feed everyone that would be communism” as a dumb gotcha

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the soul of Bobby Hill the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

One snippet of my radicalization came from a partner of mine who worked at Peet’s Coffee years ago. He told me that every night when the pastries were thrown away, the manager instructed the workers to pour bleach all over them so houseless folks couldn’t eat them. At the time I couldn’t believe it

Manufactured scarcity has never been as blatant as NFTs imo. So many companies openly bragging about how they’ve finally figured out how to restrict digital products, as if that’s a good thing. If Marx weren’t already dead, reading tweets from cryptobros surely would’ve killed him.