Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you’re still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying “well I buy a cheap used laptop” or “well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee” are completely missing the fucking point.
Don’t tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
I mean not exactly. I am not sayin the person in the photo is but excessive consumerism is what capitalism needs to stand on.
well of course not “exactly.” To get to “exactly” we would both have to write hundreds of thousands of words.
My point is that a lot of people who are proponents of capitalism aren’t actually leveraging their capital as an investment to further expand it.
For example, I just bought a house. I “leveraged” 5% of the property price from my savings (earned by a wage, by the way, not by leveraging other capital) and the bank carried the rest (which it does by leveraging capital). It’s the banks’ house for the next 30 years. I can leverage my equity in the house as that equity grows (which would be a bad idea), but even when the house is paid off, I now have an asset, not capital. Were I to sell the house - now I have capital - but I can’t do anything with, really, practically, except buy another house, again from which lawyers, banks, realtors, etc will all extract capital but I will not.
The second point is that - you need a phone and laptop to survive in modern society, just like you needed a horse in days gone. People love to gloat that people who say “those who do no work but own methods of extracting wealth from those who do should profit less” are then buying something unavoidable from those who extract capital, and point out that they should have budgeted for a slightly lower price point in order to give the wealth extractors slightly less.
And honestly, they are welcome to that opinion. It doesn’t change my opinions at all. We just disagree. They believe people (often other than themselves) are entitled to more of a share in the profit they generated than I believe they should be, either for myself or for anyone.
Anyone is welcome to disagree I just don’t understand why they want to give up their own money. Especially as such people are usually desperately against taxation, which is the same mechanism except it benefits many instead of the few.