femoids:

mystical-lyrical-spiritual:

femoids:

The argument that capitalism lets you freely express yourself as an individual is hilarious…and it’s debunked by the people who argue it.

“Hey, I’d like to pursue art and philosophy.”

“Heh, this loser is gonna end up poor.”

Acceptable expression of yourself as an individual must be profitable. The fact that doing what you love will leave you struggling in life is miserable and a direct result of capitalism.

Life has literally always been that way, under any circumstance. You’re line of thinking here is a perfect example of the most fundamental fallacy in Marxist thought; nearly all the faults percieved in capitalism that cannot be fixed are truly just fundamental conditions of living. People have always had to do shit they don’t want to do in order to fuction as a society and as individuals. In fact, art and philosophy has never allowed common people to make a living until capitalism, however difficult it may be.

No, life has NOT always been that way, because you can make a living without capitalism.

Capitalism only transformed production units into consumption units. Instead of producing for yourself and your community, which humans have literally always done before capitalism to survive, you now produce for a company in exchange for a wage. The problem with this is there’s no guarantee the wage is high enough for you to even buy back what you helped make.

I’m an artist, and I’m not going for an art major under capitalism. Why? Because treating creativity as a tool for profit drains me. Same with writing. It actually limits your abilities because you must produce certain things within a certain amount of time. This will sound silly, but a great example is Adam Ellis from Buzzfeed. While working for Buzzfeed he churned out the same unoriginal comics and didn’t even bother to draw characters differently. After leaving Buzzfeed, his comics suddenly improved. This is because companies looking to make a certain amount of money in a short amount of time HAVE TO limit creativity.

Capitalism took what humans created and put a price tag on it. How great is that? Well, billions of people are starving while the ruling class makes more money than ever before off their cheap labor. It’s so bad the World Bank literally manipulates global poverty statistics to make it look better. Capitalism is upheld by exploitation.

This honestly isn’t even exclusively a Marxist criticism of capitalism, a lot of sociologists, historians, economists, and anthropologists have the same to say regardless of politics.

You are treating economics, a social science, as a natural science. However, even IF these things were a natural state of being, why in the world would we accept them?