“Passive income” is an insidious metaphor.

If you’re collecting “passive” income, then there is most assuredly a worker very actively generating that income and a cop very actively ensuring that income is taken away from the worker and given to you.

#capitalism #PassiveIncome #TheViolenceInherentInTheSystem

@beanvoid well, considering the global destruction and contamination of the biosphere, and the insidious nature of #theviolenceinherentinthesystem maybe we can call it the worst.

Let’s imagine some feudal serfs.

They’re told by their lord to pay him a share of their crops each year as rents in exchange for permission to live on and farm his estate—his “property.”

The serfs sustain both their lord and themselves by their own labor, living off whatever product is left over after they paid their rents.

Now let’s imagine feudalism is suddenly abolished and the lord’s manor is converted from feudal to private property. The serfs are suddenly free to do as they please!

But the freed serfs find themselves in a pickle: all of the nearby productive land they could farm is owned by the ex-lord and his ex-lord buddies. “Get off my private property,” he tells the ex-serfs. They are, after all, trespassing on his private property.

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#capitalism #anticapitalism #wages #rents #wagelabor #feudalism #capitalistcritique #property #privateproperty #theviolenceinherentinthesystem

Scott Alexander (who is deeply problematic but occasionally insightful) once shared a thought experiment about a “dictatorless dystopia” in which a fairly simple set of rules, once established as habitual, create a system that everyone hates but from which no one can escape:

“Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures.”

(https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

I share this because many conversations I’ve had on, ahem, social media have convinced me that a lack of a *systemic critique* explains quite a bit of popular support for capitalism and hostility to anti-capitalism.

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#capitalism #anticapitalism #property #theviolenceinherentinthesystem