this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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You can just say capitalism
Except it isn't companies are colluding on pricing which drives up prices for the consumer. And Chinese import tariffs are artificially inflating the price of vehicles.
I was taught that capitalism is about fair competition for consumers, and that really hasn't been the case.
Capitalism will never be fair because it requires infinite growth in a finite world at all costs.
Infinite growth AND a perfect competition environment. Neither things is achievable, let alone sustainable.
Yep. It’s absolutely not sustainable in any form. That’s what people don’t realize. It’s why we’re seeing enshittification of everything now. Companies are hitting a ceiling where innovation stalls but they’re still required to grow regardless. So they resort to essentially slowly burning down their own house and shitting where they eat. Marx and others predicted this ages ago and now we’re seeing it play out in real time.
The problem with capitalism is that we have one giant bucket for companies to pull from and none of those companies give a flying fuck about the bucket itself. So they keep taking from it collectively. Eventually the bucket will be empty and none of them will be held responsible. This is exactly why we had the Great Depression and the 2008 housing market crash. The capitalists redlined every engine until they were non-functioning. Now the working class is forced to clean up the mess, while facing the repercussions of it all.
It’s not even a hard thing to comprehend. This is how parasites work. They drain the host until it’s either dead or useless to them, then they move to a new host. The problem is that earth is the host and unless capitalists figure out how to start space mining, we’re all fucked. Because, again, they continue to take resources while taking no responsibility.
This is Capitalism still.
Capitalism itself doesn't care what consumers want, you're referring to Liberalism the ideology.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any example of capitalism ever being anything different, in terms of collusion and gouging.
The idea that it could ever be even remotely fair, let alone competitive, is more utopian than anything you'll see in post-structural socialism.
The thing is, while inflation is actually going down, prices are not, simply because corporations decided to keep them high. We have had the data to prove this for a while, and we are now getting corporations admitting to it. So if none of them have decided to work against this, to compete, as it would be a shoe-in to take some of the other corps' customers, then what is it other than a wide scale, mutual decision, to not drop prices, or even stop raising them. The there are also things like the service landlords are using to determine how much they should set their rent rates too, that is literally a collusion app.