mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

336K
active users

Capitalism is just diversified feudalism.

Instead of owning 100% of a district and everything the peasants on it produce, the aristos worked out that they could diversify their portfolios and thin out the risk.

So now they own a thousandth part of the product of a thousand districts instead.

Now if plague wipes out a village or six, you don’t have to care, you’re only losing a tiny chunk of your income. Now the welfare of the peasants isn’t your problem, because they’re not, like :douchebro sniff: exclusively your peasants.

The rich produce nothing, they add no value, they perform no labour. It’s just predatory rent-seeking: the poor still do all the work, produce all the goods and provide all the services, but now somehow 99% of the value they generate goes to some smirking freeloader instead, who can just plough it into acquiring more and more peasants. They only thing they ever provided was a chunk of startup cash, which they got from exploiting other peasants anyway.

And of course, none of that cash goes to the people whose income it supposedly buys. It’s not a fair trade, it’s not a trade at all, they aren’t a party to it at all. Workers are just bought and sold over their heads, like dairy cattle. They get milked just the same, and some other fat bastard gets all the cream.

The whole system is rigged to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the super-rich, stripping it away from everyone else and leaving them struggling to survive - and keeping the ladder well and truly pulled up so nobody else gets into the treehouse.

Libertarian types like to claim that taxation is theft, but taxation is a spit in a hurricane compared to the industrial-scale looting that goes on every day. Take the profits of any corporation, and divide that by the total salaries of the workers that actually generate revenue. Theft? You don’t know the meaning of the word. What percentage of the value you generate goes in shareholder pockets? How would you feel about taxation at that level, funding not roads and schools and hospitals, but yachts and mansions and private jets for a bunch of one-percenters?

How are you not angry?

Serfs got to keep more of the fruit of their labor than today’s wage slaves do.

Also, obligatory: Libertarianism was originally and should still be thought of as a left-wing movement, but it doesn’t mean to let the oligarchs run the show - it means to allow us to tear them down, and to ideally rid ourselves of currency and private property which enable these exploitative systems. I’m a bit of a libertarian socialist myself, you see.

Libertarianism was originally and should still be thought of as a left-wing movement

lol

Rothbard is the reason we associate Libertarianism with the Right. He’s the one that suggested calling themselves Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists. Before him, Libertarianism was a Socialist thing and had little to do with Capitalism.

Basically, modern Libertarians stole the term from the Left to re-brand themselves as something they weren’t and to create this guise of pretending to care about people’s liberty and freedom—which they also don’t because Rothbard supported and advised Fascists and had no problem with slavery or indentured servitude.

The Right loves to steal and re-define terms used on the left.

J Lou

The anti-capitalist left should steal the term classical liberal from them: ellerman.org/wp-content/upload