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Pluralism go brrr (media.piefed.zip)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com/p/1650861/pluralism-go-brrr

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[–] 27 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

To be fair, what we're doing now isn't capitalism, it's corporatocracy. It's the end stage of capitalism, the part of the Monopoly game where one guy has all the properties except the dude with the railroads, and the rest of us are hoping to land on Free Parking.

You shop from a handful of large conglomerates and they're fixing the prices.

There's no (beneficial) innovation. There's no competition. We're essentially in a truck system going into debt trying to survive from the company store.

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  • [–] 44 points 2 weeks ago (39 children)

    just to be a pedantic ass: the “end stage” of capitalism is still capitalism. it’s like the end stage of cancer is still called cancer; we need to continue to reference the fact that capitalism is destroying all it touches.

    new phrases or labels only cleave attention spans in a world already designed (by capitalism) to have no focus.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 weeks ago

    I don't think it still counts as capitalism when it's no longer a market economy. We get all our goods from an oligopoly that fixes prices like a cartel, only for all goods and services that consumers buy.

    It's like when the body in question is more cancer than it is healthy tissue, the system doesn't come close to behaving like its prior iterations.

    The only step from here is collapse into war and famine.

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  • [–] [S] 25 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    what we're doing now isn't capitalism, it's corporatocracy.

    Capitalism is an ideology that favors the accumulation of capital over all else and, corporations being the most effective vehicle for doing so, corporatocracy is an inevitable component of it.

    It's the end stage of capitalism, the part of the Monopoly game where one guy has all the properties except the dude with the railroads, and the rest of us are hoping to land on Free Parking.

    AKA the goal of capitalism.

    Monopoly was originally called The Landlord's Game, and was created by a Georgist as a critique of and warning against the inevitable consequences of capitalism and rent seeking as well as an education tool about Georgism.

    It even had a cooperative game mode where the goal was to beat the bank by engaging in the kind of mutually beneficial trade that's antithetical to capitalism.

    That Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) took it and turned it into a popular CELEBRATION of rent seeking is exactly the kind of bullshit Elizabeth Magie was trying to warn people about.

    There's no (beneficial) innovation. There's no competition.

    And that's a natural consequence of capitalism.

    Contrary to the pro-capitalism gaslighting, capitalism is NOT about improving conditions for the many via healthy competition. It's about increasing the wealth of the privileged few by eliminating competition.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    free parking

    That's the tile where nothing happens?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    The board game, like the kleptoctacy, was house ruled to death.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Hmmm, true. Isn't it less fun when the game just ends abruptly because someone rolled into free parking? Unless it's endgame like the other person described but I don't imagine that lasting long enough to get too boring. IDK, I don't have friends to play monopoly. This is opposed to other house rules that, could sometimes make the game more fun. Like "you can stack plus cards" in uno makes the game play more like those funny internet videos about it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Normally Free Parking is a square where nothing happens, much like landing on GO or Jail. Some households have a rule where they get a bonus for landing on Free Parking, such as all the taxes paid (like Luxury Tax), but officially, it's just a blank square.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    what do you mean by beneficial innovation?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    Beneficial innovation is the development of new features of goods that are a benefit. Examples include the invention of interchangeable parts, the power loom which makes textiles better quality and more cheaply, the invention of the point-and-click interface (by Xerox, not Apple) that fundamentally changed computer operating systems and productivity software.

    Contrast malignant innovation such as shrinkflation packaging, software as a service or lobbying government to get subsidies and pass anti-competitive legislation. ETA: A lot of malignant innovation we see in the present day as enshittification but we also see it at the enterprise end, say when Enron pivoted from managing power to manipulating the market after it got overvalued to preserve the illusion of growth, and in so doing defrauding power consumers of California.

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