This is why talking about things like government services just wash over conservatives. I was talking about transit and a common reply I get is "it's not even profitable!". It's intrinsically linked that if it doesn't make money, it's valueless.. it doesn't matter if people use it, or if people need it, if it breaks even, or even if it's designed to run at a slight loss because it's value is more important than profit. People have lost the ability to understand that profit is not always the goal.
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The view that public transport is not profitable because it does not directly turn a profit also completely misses the bigger picture. Imagine in a city where public transport operates at a loss, but provides transportation to and from work for loads of people. Without public transport, they'd have to switch to something like cars, causing congestion, causing delays, causing loss of profit for the city as a whole. Not to mention less time spend with your family or your hobbies, causing unhappiness, decreasing people's desire to work to the best of their abilities etc etc. I could probably go on quite a while listing things public transport provides that indirectly works in favor of capitalism.
Not to mention the expenses that cities waste on the consequences of cars, like crashes and infrastructure maintenance.
"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would 'critique' capital end up 'reinforcing' it instead..."
Well, things would exist whether you're in a capitalist economic system or not. People would make music and label their genre. People would write books and want to sell them. The real difference is who gets the profits.
Sure, sort of. Commodity production, ie the production of goods purely in order to sell and make a profit, likely won't last forever, especially as the rate of profit trends towards 0.
It's also how driven the profits are. All the choices on the way, are they directed for maximum profit or for good. And many things that are made didn't need to be made, and wouldn't if people didn't care to buy them. The effort instead could have gone into good things.
The Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" makes this point in a (typically) very chilling way.
Not the greatest dude, but had a sick quote that sums up this post:
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" - Vladimir Lenin
I also like "My death comes by a thousand cuts, and I paid for the knife" - Dopamine by The Arcadian Wild
Kid named Guy Debord:
"A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it."
-- Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
If a system needs constant growth to survive it will eventually collapse.
Well it can't commodify me! Oh wait.
Sorry, I got myself worked up.
do you sell your labor on the job market?
Grr
Infinite growth in a finite system is the definition of cancer. And like a cancer it will keep poisoning us, and must be cut out and eradicated.