PostmodernPythia

If they provide a service(an easy-to use, legal platform) in a capitalist system they didn’t create, I can’t get mad at that. What’s fucking stupid are their assumptions about inelasticity of demand. People have free choices, and if you make the paid choice sufficiently onerous, you’ll lose customers. Natural consequences.

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

That and the cancerous need for infinite growth on a finite planet, which is destroying our home…

Only a small percentage of socialists (albeit larger in this instance) hold the USSR up as anything but an example of an early, ham-fisted attempt at socialism with a lot of mistakes. If there have been no places socialism has worked yet (debatable, but I’ll argue from this position), that disproves nothing. The first several hundred tries at the lightbulb were probably failures, too, but capitalists talk about that failure as a side effect of innovation without realizing that social systems might need innovation too. I’m sorry if you suffered under an authoritarian socialist government; there’s nothing inherent about the connection between those two characteristics. But authoritarian governments tend to survive better against the kinds of conspiracies and attacks established capitalist governments launch against socialist ones, so you get to see what’s left. (If you don’t know about this, go to a library, start with…maybe Allende in ‘73…It’s very well-documented.). In sum, it has nothing to do with not caring about people harmed by authoritarianism. It has to do with seeing the evils of the system around us and refusing to accept that this is the best humanity can do. I’m sorry you can’t see that. But I’m not letting my friends’ access to insulin sit in the greedy hands of insurance companies without a fight. I’m not living in a pay-to-play political system where donors’ interests matter more than voters’ my whole life if I have anything to say about it. Regardless of your beliefs.

Given that the corporations own the politicians who make the laws that structure our lives and allow planned obsolescence and a lack of transparency in things like phones, still going to put 90% of the blame on the rich here. Your perspective might be correct in a functional democracy, but that’s not where most people (nor even most Westerners) live.

Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.

Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.

If you think Karl Marx was an idiot (not just wrong, but an idiot), you don’t understand the conversation well enough to participate.

Diplomacy is like an oxygen supply: You only notice it when it fails. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t generally work.