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  • Work to live.

    Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.

    • For me it's that for a culture that fetishizes "freedom" we sure are fucking willing to accept a reality where we have to give it up for most of our waking life just to be able to live and provide for our families. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

    • How is that an absurdity? Humans have needed to work ever since we evolved from other species.

      • Yeah, it would be more correct to say "work for others to live" is absurd.

        People always had to do some work to survive, but in a world were all the land is owned, if you are one of the majority which is born landless you generaly can't work for yourself (even to open your own business you need starting money) just enough to live by with (say, build your own house and do subsistence farming), so unless mommy and daddy have lots of dosh you're going to have to work for others within the constraints of the existing system (or become a criminal, in which case the system will punish you) and unlike when just working to provide to yourself, working in this system means competing with everybody else - and were, again, how much support mommy and daddy can give you makes a massive difference - to such a level that you have to run just to stand still.

        Compared to plain old subsistence farming the whole way work is done in the current system is absurd, mainly because it has to produce way more than what is actually needed to provide for all, since a tiny slice of the population are massive money hoarders leeching out of the rest so tons of extra wealth has to be created just for them.

        Whatever the optimal system is for "the greatest good for the greatest number" (which would be more than just everybody doing subsistence farming), mathematically it's clear it can't be one were some people have control over billions of times more resources than others.

  • Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just "capitalism" or its consequences.

    • Unfortunately, a lot of people don't think about the root causes of these problems. So there's a lot of focus on the symptoms without thinking about the underlying dynamics of capitalism that cause these issues.

  • Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.

    • It's kind of like religion for me. Don't try to preach to me and I don't care what you do.

  • Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.

  • Throwing away food to maintain profits while people starve, but since I'm not the first to think this I'll let my man Steinbeck explain it:

    The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

    There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

  • Everything.

    • We are run by an oligarchy of nihilists that gladly want to make humanity go extinct to buy yachts they can already afford.
    • I am constantly told I need to lower my expectations for everything day by day, and then told I am entitled for simply wishing for the life a white boomer had in the 60s. If that makes me entitled, what does that make the white boomer that DID get to experience all that? No, I'll never own a house, now even renting is out of reach. Looks like porky's all set with his workforce and the only jobs left pay 14 an hour tops.
    • Just how fucking boring this world is. Look around you, there is so much to see and do and you will never experience any of it because you were not born a multimillionaire. You will never experience the beauty of Sierra Nevada, you will never get to enjoy Niagara Falls, even if you are lucky enough to have stable employment. Americans proudly call vacation a thing of the past, and the few times people do go on vacation, it's practically suicide for their career.
    • Bigotry is somehow being paraded as this noble thing, actually and that actually being tolerant is supposedly this sign I'm some big dumb-dumb.
    • If blue cities are so bad, why are property values there so high? Shouldn't red areas have higher property values since most people are fascists and want to live in a place where minorities are more optimally oppressed?
    • If this country hates me so much, why isn't it easier for me to simply move to another one? Even
      would be leagues better than this shithole.
    • Some of the worst atrocities being justified because it is for "the economy". Ol' Vivek argued that climate change isn't real because if it was, the consequences of doing something about it would hurt "the economy", as if consumerism is a human right that transcends clean air and water. Hence my first point about us being run by nihilists. If they sincerely believed in God, they wouldn't be doing this, or be claiming "it's okay, I'll be dead before anything bad happens! YOLO!" They only believe in their God whenever they need a justification to do whatever they want. Ironically, God seems to tempt more people into sin than Satan and Lilith combined

  • Capitalism.

    • Tell us what makes it absurd. And please stick to demonstrable facts for proof of cause and effect.

      Thank you

      • The basic unit of production, where capital meets labour to produce goods and services, is the capitalist firm. And every profit-maximising firm is owned by a private capital.

        Capitalists extract profits from firms. They can spend only a fraction of their profits on luxury consumption. Because if the rich spent all their profit on luxuries their capital will rapidly diminish and expire, compared to competing capitals who invest their profit in further profitable activities. Profit income must be reinvested in order to make more profit. This is the prime directive for anyone who possesses a capital sum of money.

        Owners of capital — that is capitalists — can’t put all their eggs in one basket. That’s too risky because firms can go under, or assets that store value might depreciate. So capitalists spread their risk by owning a portfolio of investments with different risk profiles.

        A typical portfolio will consist of cash held in different sovereign currencies, government, municipal and corporate bonds, shares in different companies, from risky start-ups to blue chips, and all kinds of income-producing assets, such as land and housing. Basically anything that might yield a higher than average return.

        Each individual capital must aim to maximise the return over its portfolio. If it fails it will diminish in size relative to other capitals, and eventually cease being a capital at all.

        And it’s right here that we again find the causal structure of a feedback control system. An individual capital — when we consider it as a social practice mediated by a privately owned large sum of money — also has its own goal state, sensory inputs, decision making, and ability to act upon the world in which it is embedded.

        Let’s take each of these in turn. (i) The goal of an individual capital is to maximise the average return from every dollar (or pound) invested. (ii) The “sensory inputs” are the different profit-rates earned across the portfolio. (iii) The capitalist, or the financial experts they employ, compare the different profit-rates, and (iv) the feedback loop is closed by actions that withdraw capital from poorly performing investments, and inject capital into high performing investments.

        This control loop manifests as an insatiable and ceaseless search for high returns.

        Capital doesn’t care how its money is actually used in production. It entirely abstracts from all concrete activities. The only thing it can sense, compare and use is abstract value.

        So the commanding heights of the global economy consists of an enormous ensemble of individual capitals, each manically scrambling for profit, reacting to the signals of differential returns received from its tendrils that extend to every productive activity under its rule, continually injecting and withdrawing capital to and from different industrial sectors and geographical regions. The entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities. In the space of months, entire industrial sectors may be raised up, relocated, or thrown down.

        Capitalists are possessed, mere machine components of capital.

        What about the individual people who participate in this social practice? Surely their individual consciousness, their ideas, and their behaviour matter, and make a difference?

        To a certain extent they do of course. But individuals come and go, but capitals live much longer than any individual human. The people controlled by the capital — that is the workers that supply labour to firms, and capitalists that exploit them and extract profits — are mere replaceable components in the control loop, mechanically performing prescribed functional roles.

        For example, Marx writes in Capital, that:

        “to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.”

        We often say that a capitalist possesses capital. But it is more accurate to say that capital possesses them. Capitalists are the human face of an inhuman intelligence with its own logic and its own goals.

        “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality” (Communist Manifesto).

        Bigger capitals enjoy the advantage of larger portfolios, which spreads risk. In consequence, capital tends to concentrate in a few hands. So we find a large number of small capitals, and a very small number of astronomically large capitals, which earn profits that dwarf the GDP of many nation states. The scale and power of some capitals is truly titanic.

        And these titans are so much in control, that they are out of control. Again, a quote from the Communist Manifesto:

        “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

        Every day millions of workers, around the globe, have no choice but to sacrifice their time, and their vitality, to produce new profit for the autonomous controllers. No matter how hard, long or efficiently we work, the imperative to work remains.

        Why? Because every labour-saving technical innovation takes the form of profit, which is then captured by individual capitals, and immediately re-injected into the material world to animate new activities for further profit. This is why, despite huge advances in automation, the working day remains as long as ever.

        Take another example: the logic of capital demands maximum profit extraction from firms, and that means minimising wages. Those possessed by capital live an exalted existence. But the world’s dispossessed must feed, clothe and maintain a home with an average income of about 7 pounds a day.

        Another example: it’s better to be exploited than not exploited. We are subject to the whims of the business cycle and periodic crises of accumulation. Recessions regularly throw large numbers of people out of work, through no fault of their own. Suddenly bills can’t be paid. Families are thrown onto the street, as happened in the US during the 2008 mortgage crisis, and is happening again now.

        Why? Because individual capitals are almost blind. They see only differential returns across their portfolios. And returns may be good even if unemployment is high, or human misery spills onto the streets. Capital does not care.

        Another example: capital deals in abstract value, and things that are not owned, which aren’t bought and sold, therefore have no value to it at all. So the material wealth of nature — the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere — is relentlessly plundered without any regard for the consequences.

        Capital destroys us, and the environment. The endless production and profit-making cannot stop, because each individual capital must compete to survive. Marx summarised the prime directive of capital as:

        “Accumulate, accumulate! … reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value … into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”.

        So all the autonomous control loops have the single-minded goal of extracting profit from the world’s activities. If an activity fails to satisfy this goal, then the controller withdraws its capital, and the activity stops.

        So at the apex of the economy we have a competing collection of identical controllers — with an atavistic, low level of demonic intelligence — which inject and withdraw a social substance that appears to possess the magical power of animation, of bringing things alive, of creation; but also appears to possess the power of annihilation, of suffocation, of bringing things to an end, of destruction.

        We are definitely not in control. And something else definitely is in control.

        So what are we really talking about now?

        We’re saying that a new kind of supra-individual control system emerged, quite spontaneously, from our own social intercourse, and then — in a very real sense — has taken on a life of its own, turned around, and started controlling us.

        Capital in a scientific, not a metaphorical sense, is a control system. And it is capital, as a control system, that ultimately creates and maintains the abstraction we call exchange-value. Capital is the abstractor.

        more here: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

      • The fact that we live in a land of plenty but people die due to malnutrition or lack of access to healthcare because it's not profitable is pretty damning.

        Capitalism is like a rabid dog. It has its uses, but you don't just let it roam freely, you keep it on a tight leash.

      • Very simply: how can it be fair that someone who contributes nothing to the process profits from my labour?

        I am the skilled craftsperson who produces furniture. And yet someone takes from me the profit of my work. Beyond the cost of materials, workshop, arranging buyers etc.

        After all those costs are accounted for there is still someone else who captures most of the profit instead of me. How is that not absurd?

      • if someone makes a one word comment, they're unlikely to want to write you a research paper justifying it. but i'll give it a li'l go.

        the whole core concept of capitalism is that some few people 'own' the ovens, and they get to tell other people to bake cookies, and even though these cookie-bakers bake all of the cookies, the oven-owners get to keep most of them, and the cookie bakers only get a small portion. also there aren't any ovens that aren't 'owned' by an oven-owner, so if you wanna eat cookies, you have to give most of the cookies you bake to an oven-owner. and this model is extended to everything.

        i don't know that this allegory will mean anything to you, and maybe you think of something different when you hear 'capitalism' (maybe you think of 'markets', or 'money', or, i don't know, just seeing benefits from ones own hard work or something), but this is basically the usual meaning of capitalism, and probably what most people who oppose it, myself included, are talking about. there are a lot of other criticisms, of course, but that core scammy unfairness of it, i think, is most absurd.

      • Your comment is textbook sealioning.

426 comments