this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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We only have one rudder and it's the capitalists at the helm.
The only direction that boat can go is "more profit!" even if the waters that leads us to are literally boiling. :/
there is no water, just people carrying other people... all the way on top are a couple few sitting on their machines sucking out the lives of those who are carrying them while throwing out trinkets in hope to direct the masses... or something.. a nightmarish spike of steel and flesh, a spring fountain of value next to a smokestack of death, all the way down beneath the machinery: on all fours, crushed backs, hands desperately scratching up dirt to feed the machine in hopes for a smidgen of anything and the bottom of the machinery would be a boot..
No. Capitalists aren't an individual. You can't apply individual logic to them because they fundamentally behave differently. They go for "more profit" because of simple motivations and fundamental limits of perception.
Saying they're at the rudder is like saying maggots purposefully decompose a carcass. They do decompose it, but little intelligence or coordination was involved, other organisms also contribute, and they're all just living life. The actions that send us into boiling water weren't done to move the ship.
It's the plural of a capitalist, or "they." They act as a collective and their singular drive of "more profit" collectively are what "hold the rudder" (lobbying, bribing, funding fraudulent scientific studies, etc...) like the collective action of the maggots decompose the body. Maybe one maggot isn't trying to decay the whole thing, but it is the result of their collective action.
The result might look similar to steering, but not only is there no single steering rudder, capitalists don't monopolize all of them. The result being the same might incentivize ignoring the truth, but it does matter. If the model has deficiencies, extrapolated inferences can lead you astray. In this situation it's accurate, but in other situations it might not be.
The net effect of capitalist behavior moves us one way, but other forces are at play. With the move away from neoliberalism and the rise of nationalism, capitalism might not be the net force in the near future.
Fascism doesn't primarily serve capitalist interests, but capitalists believe it serves them better than social democracy. However, capitalists are dead wrong because they are human, just like everyone else. Nationalism, religion, and culture are essential to the equation. Capitalists can exploit social phenomenon, but they don't control them, no matter how much lobbying or propaganda they use.
They don't hold the rudder. They push it, but don't monopolize it.