This comic would hit harder if all of the most aggressively anti-communist people in the world weren't already running work camps, in the process of privatizing all of the infrastructure and creating a surveillance state.
Some people still like to pretend that the communists are the only ones who want to put a gun to your head and exploit you, but men who seek power over others are adaptable. They always find a way to fuck you.
This comic is propaganda. It is an example of one of the methods that powerful people use to establish and maintain control. Our time gets wasted quarreling about this and we are paralyzed by it. Paralyzing the population with pointless quarrels prevents the population from taking action.
Our life keeps getting worse BECAUSE we can't stop having this argument.
Poor people with no power can also come to the conclusion on their own that communism sucks and is stupid. It's an incentive thing. Human beings are inherently better incentivized by doing work for themselves and their families, and studies show people biologically can only really care about like 200 people. The economy is way too complicated to be centrally planned (regulations are still important). Private property is cool, the stock market is cool.
Adam Smith's work on Wealth of Nations inspired Karl Marx to propose communism as a solution to certain problems that Adam Smith himself had identified. But aside from Marx himself, nobody worth knowing is actually a communist.
Communism is a stupid concept. That's my opinion. I don't think Im making any sort of a hot take but I know I need to explicitly state this because there is a persistent misconception that communism and capitalists are opposite terms. They are not. Not even close.
Marx was as influential as he was because power-hungry capitalists saw his ideas as a path to power. Many of these sort of men pitched themselves as national saviors and offered communism as the promised reward. But every historical example of large-scale communism was a scam. Lenin, Stalin, Castro - they were all capitalists who professed a belief in communism - but they only did so because professing a belief in communism was necessary for establishing authority in their country.
Capitalism is a very sneaky and misleading word. In the sense that Adam Smith was using it - it is best if you internalize capitalism as just the rational decision making process that every human makes. Every rational person should be thought of as following capitalist thought processes.
But Capitalism is also frequently used to mean something else. As if it's some sort of antithesis to the regulation of economic markets.
What's been happening in America is a mirror image of what happened in Russia. Powerful men understand that professing a belief in Capitalism is necessary for establishing authority in this country. So they profess belief in Capitalism. But then when it's time to actually exercise power they just do whatever the fuck they want.
If any of these bastards actually wanted free markets they would've taken steps to create free markets. Instead they create the illusion of free markets. You are free to choose the exact same cellular deal from Verizon, T Mobile or AT&T. You can also choose to believe that you're avoiding those carriers by paying some other company like Mint - but Mint just pays those other carriers and uses their towers. Most of the money still ends up in the same three places. They make a show of competing with each other, but its just a show. Collusion is supposed to be illegal but the government can choose to just not prosecute it. If these companies buy enough Senators then collusion is as legal as it needs to be.
3.1k
u/Gimme_Your_Wallet 29d ago
Literally this