Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "Everything You Own Is Made By One Single Company" video.

And then Hasbro, who owns Monopoly, made that Monopoly Socialism Edition a couple years back, which was just all four or five capitalist jokes about socialism stretched over an entire game long beyond their breaking. Because ha ha, look at those idiots who want everyone to be "equally poor"! Don't they know they're Temporarily Inconvenienced Millionaires™!? Such is the nature of satire: If it's too sharp, it can be easily misunderstood for celebration rather than criticism, especially when a megacorp gets involved and consciously rounds out the more subversive edges
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Rolling back consumption is a good thing, but requiring that people develop the skills and carve out the time to make their own tallow wax candles isn't exactly selling anyone on the bright future of a greater order. Division of labor is something that comes with advanced societies of any economic makeup, it's okay that someone is compensated to take care of making soap for us. Not that there's anything wrong with doing those things yourself, of course, but as has been said a million times, growing a garden patch isn't going to bring about the revolution, nor is recycling all your bottles going to stop Climate Change, even if all of us small-timers did both. The problems are greater than we can control with our individual choices at home, and the real damage is being done by people who won't decide to stop willingly
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@MinecraftFleischer Your framework is entirely mired in that of capitalism. Yes, as others have pointed out, under capitalism, your description is accurate. Under a centrally-planned socialist economy, however, CEOs and capitalists are not the ones deciding how society's amassed wealth will be directed, but the people and the state, with careful consideration not for the profit of the few but for the benefit of the whole, make those choices instead. Gone, then, is the fear of capitalist venture and its potential associated loss, gone is the very motivation and source of that fear, and in its place, industry is aligned to more productive, less wasteful, less selfishly-inclined ends. In short, capitalists ("businessmen", as you call them, though of course business will still require professional laborers even after capitalism's end) will neither be fronting their money for research nor making those decisions themselves, but the state and the people will. The idea that individual sectors of the master class, locked in ruthless competition with each other as they are, are somehow better decision-makers for all of society is a fantasy that is immediately dashed with even a cursory examination of wealth inequality and the ongoing existence of hunger, houselessness, and all other symptoms of poverty. Real democracy doesn't look like empowering gangs of plutocrats and oligarchs, it looks like a worker's state making choices with the input and for the direct benefit of the people. One would have to pull out some very tongue-worn boots indeed and evince a love of dead-on-arrival "Reagonomics" (aka Neoliberalism) to argue that somehow society is safer in the hands of the wealthy few than in the hands of all of us. One might as well try to sell me on fealty to the Divine Right of Kings while they're at it at that point
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Do it again, Uncle Sherm!
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A centrally planned economy is not comparable to corporate monopolies vying for profit domination, there is no cognitive dissonance somehow inherent to all communists who oppose capitalists hahah. If corporations are to be held accountable to public good anyway, then we're admitting both that they need to be held in check that way, and that it would be better if they just operated for the public good in the first place. So why would removing all selfish profit motive and replacing it with planned results for the benefit of society at large not be superior? The workers can still be compensated for their efforts, and losing billionaire CEOs isn't going to destroy our factories or our industry
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"Authoritarianism" is a watery term. All statist governments are authoritarian. Talking about "degrees" of authoritarianism is even more vapid―just talk about the material differences being referred to in specific. For example, in the US, the so-called "Land of the Free", we have the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. So one aspect of authoritarianism in the USA looks like mass-internment, particularly targeting Black and Native people. We could also talk about how American policing is collectively the third most funded military organization on the planet, closely following the Chinese Red Army and trailing the Imperial US Armed Forces at number one. We could then talk about how and whether this or that might be considered Left or Right-wing, but skipping the specifics to make sweeping definitions that are supposed to neatly encapsulate all human societies is sheer nonsense: The political compass is a meme, not a scientific pursuit. Talking about specifics is actually enlightening―reducing those specifics to idealistic terms divorced from the material conditions they're describing is pseudo-academic beard stroking from which only the barest novice has anything to learn. I think the current form of videos that doesn't promise some sort of warped survey course but which focuses instead on explicit material conditions is far more in line with Dialectical Materialism and what may be termed Leftist thinking in general. An hour or two spent reading the Manifesto for free online will do more for someone trying to understand concepts like "Left Authoritarianism" than any YouTube vid belaboring the wildly oversimplified (unto the point of uselessness) meme that is the compass
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Natural Selection To be fair, it's a tough word to spell, even if you write it 25 times a day haha
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It will never change until we physically, forcefully change it. If you're completely unwilling to do that yourself, then that would be the source of your pessimism. But those who put in work for the erosion of capitalism on a daily or weekly basis see things differently, even without stars in their eyes
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If there is anti-Semitism going on here, I certainly don't see it in the script or encoded in any dogwhistles in the comments. Zuckerberg deserves to be called out for being a plutocratic would-be dictator, and that has nothing to do with idiotic bigotry. Dude has a compound on Kauai illegally blocking fishing access to the natives, he put up 12 foot barricades patrolled by men with rifles when people just started (legally) cutting through his yard to get to the beach that he doesn't own. He's a Class A villain and deserves to be depicted as such, but again, none of that justifies or has anything to do with anti-Semitism, a thing which we should all denounce alongside all base racism. But Zuckerberg being Jewish does not shield him from this sort of well-deserved, grossly-earned criticism which applies broadly to all members of the ownership class, no matter their heritage
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Mors fascismo atque classis dominorum oppressioni, sodales. Potentia populo, semper!
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@MinecraftFleischer Patents stifle innovation, they do not encourage it. Patents also don't stop pharmaceutical companies from developing a 49th acne cream rather than producing much-needed malaria medicine. Patents encourage profit for their holder at the expense of any other end, which is bad for things like consumer products and downright horrific for medicine. Patents don't push any company or society towards any goal other than the amassment of wealth for themselves. They have exactly zero other purpose, they do nothing for innovation. This is just the excuse that billionaire companies use to justify being billionaire companies who are, again, allocating their massive resources in ways not at all optimized for human life and well-being, but solely for the profit of their shareholders. The quest to enshrine all forms of private property, even making private property of mere ideas and concepts, is an inherently capitalist one, but it is not for the good of society by any means―in fact, patents, alongside other forms inherent theft, ought to be utterly abolished
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@realNeron *A black cat purrs in the shadows of industry...*
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Capitalism's end has always been down the path of unionization and labor agitation. The master class never forgot, that's why Neoliberalism has so uniquely targeted unions not just where they organize but in the very hearts of workers. The working class cheered Reagan when he fired all 11,345 striking air traffic controllers in one fell swoop, like cattle celebrating the gory meat hook
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