netdenizenlain said:
Another thing I have realized along the way is that there is something fundamentally wrong with our consumer capitalist that is a "democracy". Why do I need to buy products I don't need? Why do we produce trinkets that serve no purpose other than to be collected? Why do we claim to be a democracy when I do not have a vote in many places, such as my work place or in how our economy is run? To that end I do have to say that since I started work in 2017, I have begun reading and listening to Marxist and Communist theory to try to find alternatives to our system and now identify as an anti-consumerist communist.
I think that a lot of us feel like this, that there is an ever-present undertone of tedium in existence that is brought about by modern society.
I'd have to agree, although the main flaw with the American "democracy" is that America isn't a democracy, at least not in the sense of how that system evolved in Ancient Greece. America is a
republic, which has a representative democratic form of government, and that's how everyone back in the 18th c. figured the new country would work best. Back then, they didn't have the tech needed for a true democracy, given that that new country was far more spread out than anything that the Greeks saw circa 500 BCE.
Unfortunately, this bastardized "democracy" concept filtered down into things such as business models, societal aspects, etc, which is why that so-typical Us vs Them nonsense pervades everything in the USA nowadays. Worse still, certain scumbags figured out how to weaponize that, which has led to MASSIVE internal rifts in the country. Now, everyone has to have their own policy about who they're "supposed to like" and who they're "supposed to hate". One side of the equation MUST be oppressed because...uh, makes sense, right?
Well, no. It DOESN'T make sense. There should be enough whatever-you-need to go around, whether that's money or housing or food or toilet paper or whatever. But you also have a weird micro-class of billionaires that NEED things to balance that way, so the idea of a more socialist approach to government in the USA is something they shovel money at opposing, so they can quash it. This isn't exactly like Marx envisioned class struggle. His view of "aristocracy" was the old-world rich, not the vicious curs that just happen to pull down ten figures due to whatever accident of birth or hard work or (more likely) underhanded fuckery they have on their side. Big Daddy Karl certainly could NEVER have foreseen something like, say, the Koch brothers; if he HAD, he'd probably think he was going insane!
But he did get it right in observing that those people desperately need an underclass. Fact is, capitalism REQUIRES an underclass in order to "function normally"...whatever that means, given the subject matter. But whatever it means, I don't think that it's supposed to mean that whole swaths of the population worldwide have to do without education, clean water, proper nutrition, a free media, proper health care, etc. But that's what we've got now...and no, I'm not talking about the third world; everything in that list...and more besides...can easily be found here in the USA.
Yeah, shit's broken. When everything devolves down to a "service economy", but those services don't actually accomplish anything meritorious, then you've got a problem. However, most people don't see this, so when they start handwringing about how things are so scaaaaaaaaary, they don't pick up on the things that they need to be REALLY afraid of. Those people protesting all over the world are just "bad people with too much time on their hands" as far as they're concerned; I suppose it would be far too much to ask for those "nice people" to also realize that they play a huge part in
why these other people are protesting. Years of bad role models and leadership have really pumped out the brain-fog "nice people" live in, and I'm not just talking about the USA here.
It's very tempting to look at the present clusterfuck that's posing as human civilization and just...well, throw up your hands and start looking for the exit, frankly. On the one hand, there's a lot of stuff that was created that's truly amazing. But on the other, we may be looking at our grandkids some 40, 50 years hence and be shocked when they ask "Did people really go into space?". It's not a good trend.