Hey, you, who's reading this in the future: you can find out who I am today at https://rarf.zone/about/. 💙


E-mail me at:
info@rarf.zone
Mastodon/Fediverse
yiff.life/@katja

This post about late capitalism is totally right in its observations of how severe the grift economy is in even the most pedestrian, shouldn't-be-grifty businesses these days. However, it's worth noting that a lot of us are only now being hit by this level of rent-seeking because there's no growth left to squeeze out of most of the world. Just like fascism stricto sensu is basically "the violence of colonialism is finally being applied to the relevant herrenvolk in their metropole", the definitional thing about late capitalism (in the sense we've been talking about it since the ascent of the politics of Thatcher and Reagan) has been that the absolutely brutal urge to squeeze every single penny out of every single human now needs (for the purposes of sustaining capitalism) to be aimed at the same citizens of the imperial core who have historically been paid off with a decent chunk of the superprofits of exploitation abroad to keep us from overthrowing capitalism. The rate of profit is continuing to approach zero, so keeping up the infinite growth which the pyramid scheme of capitalism relies on means finding more and more incremental ways to make more money off of whoever can still be exploited further.

The far future of what we're currently calling "enshittification" is the kind of horrors we've been assured we'll Never™ have to face, because we're The First World™. Public services being entirely gutted and becoming absolutely unreliable; inflation in the tens or hundreds of percent; child labour and horrific work hours returning; the violence of unaffordable healthcare spreading beyond the US; so on.

The end state of this pattern? Us, or our descendants, are dead. The pattern of wiping out entire nations to clear a path for more Growth™ started right around the birth of capitalism, from Columbus's own genocide and enslavement, has continued in all of the remaining settler states, and threatens to spread to every place in the world which is at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change. There's no telling where the strategic dealing of death might end, but the example of Nazi Germany indicates that even if you meet your local definition of "white", "abled", "cishet", and what not today, you're not safe in the long run.

The one surefire way to prevent this is eradicating capitalism worldwide as soon as possible, with all the medium-term uncertainty and difficulty that might entail.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @kda's post:

If you want to see the end state of this system here in the imperial core, just go to Louisiana. Cancer Alley is the goal of these capitalists; an inland colony, with an exploitable, disposable workforce. Our schools are factories to churn out new workers to feed the industrial machines, who die younger and younger thanks to the poisons these factories create. The game NORCO by Lutz is a damn documentary in a lot of places, not just cyberpunk dystopia.