Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "Why Prices Might Never Go Back Down" video.

Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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Grocery stores are still price gouging....
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 @donnelljunior4198 No we're not. That was a while ago. Corporate earnings are up.
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@danielmcdermott3558 I prefer Zizek. Besides, I literally described Marxist alienation through the commodity fetish just with different words. So, I'm good.
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@givemeabreakdoc 🤦🙄
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@danielmcdermott3558 That last line, lol. Zizek has said he's more of a Hegalian than a Marxist (as he mentioned in his JP debate), although he does have a similar concept of Marxist alienation with a Lacanian twist. Personally, I see a lot of Marx's ideas are presented as inevitabilities that I don't agree with. By keeping things continually open to a Hegelian dialectic it presents the only inevitability as sublation, rather than divining a particular direction of sublation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would prefer not to read more Marx... But I probably will at some point.
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@testing6753 The rise of capitalism took several hundred years to enclose land into private plots and move from feudalistic interest-bearing money lending through mercantilism to fleshed out capitalism on a global scale. I don't necessarily think there will be an inevitable change in one direction or another, just that change will happen, but asking why things haven't happened yet is a little premature. Personally I find the more obtuse idea to be that capitalism will persist forever and we will never find a better system. Feudalists believed the same thing about their systems, now look at us. Change happened, and I think it's important to think about what concepts can move us in a positive direction knowing that dynamism is inevitable. Focusing on decreasing alienation is important and is how people become sublated into self actualization. Capitalism has provided a lot of material wealth, which has increased the quality of life of many, and yet it has distributed it in an awful way that decouples humanity from humans.
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@testing6753 (1/2) The rise of capitalism took several hundred years to enclose land into private plots and move from feudalistic interest-bearing money lending through mercantilism to fleshed out capitalism on a global scale. I don't necessarily think there will be an inevitable change in one direction or another, just that change will happen, but asking why things haven't happened yet is a little premature.
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@testing6753 (2/2) Personally I find the more obtuse idea to be that capitalism will persist forever and we will never find a better system. Feudalists believed the same thing about their systems, now look at us. Change happened, and I think it's important to think about what concepts can move us in a positive direction knowing that dynamism is inevitable. Focusing on decreasing alienation is important and is how people become sublated into self actualization. Capitalism has provided a lot of material wealth, which has increased the quality of life of many, and yet it has distributed it in an awful way that decouples humanity from humans.
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@testing6753 I was going to respond to you but YT keeps "sensoring" my reply.... God this monopolistic capitalist platform is authoritarian.
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@gregorymalchuk272 That's not really the core issue. The problem is the alienation and commodification of human beings. Buying low-cost diversified index funds is a great strategy to build wealth within capitalism, but it doesn't address the core problems. Everybody owning stock sounds great, but it just creates a circular system of rentier alienation.
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