Deme

There’s also an unlocked bootloader, if you didn’t notice.

Ok sorry for the snide in that other comment. I think we’re talking slightly past one another. A society without banking or finance is a primitive one, but a society nonetheless. Now, all modern countries are advanced societies, but only current and former colonies started out that way.

I suppose the question comes down to whether the meme is talking about rebuilding complex society, or just society in general. You seem to be talking of the former, while I speak of the latter. I also think the meme was referring to the latter.

I’ll end by saying that while historical precedent is a very solid basis for how societies operate, I think it lacks imagination. Who knows what other ways there could be to build complex societies? I think that this is a powerful part of why people are fascinated with post-apocalyptic stories.

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Societies did exist before the renaissance, and were a prerequisite for it. Societies existed before the Hanseatic league could conduct trade between them.

A very USA-centric comment. While it is true that countries that were former colonies have their roots tied to those imperialist projects which definitely involved finance, this is not the case for countries that didn’t start as colonies. The sweat of the subsistence farmer or the feudal peasant/slave was what built the foundations of most countries.

In a truly post-apocalyptic setting there definitely would not be any need for finance of any sort. Job titles such as the one in the meme above are bullshit jobs that only exist to serve modern consumer capitalism. That is to say, they are not necessary. That’s what this meme is about in my opinion.

The soviets were constantly trying to grow their economy to stay competitive with the US and to demonstrate affluence. They switched out the old capitalist factory owners for the new class of government bureaucrats and party elite, who then carried on running the system for themselves. The state owned the means of production. They pretended that everyone owned the state, but we know this wasn’t the case. The soviet union was a state capitalist system.

If we stopped seeking profit, our economies would stop growing and subsequently our emissions would as well. Our system is built to rely on infinite growth. No bank gives out a loan without expecting that money to grow with interest. Infinite growth is incompatible with the material reality of a finite planet. What we would need to do now, would involve purposeful economic degrowth. I have no hope that this will ever happen since it would require a lot of people to consume less and we are used to a lot of bread and circuses. Whatever you define as “economic activity” is secondary to the survival of the species.

“Rentism” is just the end state of that same game of Monopoly. Some own everything and everyone else just goes around spending what little they have on rent. The game didn’t change name just because some people already won and it wasn’t us. We sell our labour to the capitalists to buy the necessities of life from them, while they enjoy the surplus value generated by our labour. That’s straight up the marxist definitions of working class and capitalist.

Just for a start, making a lot of stuff won’t make you rich. If you just get capital, invest in some random production, and go to market, you’ll almost certainly fail.

I fail to see how this isn’t a feature of capitalism. Just “making a lot of stuff” never worked even in the haydays of capitalism. You need a valid business case and customers etc…

But also, the state hands capital down everywhere

That’s the money you get every time you pass the starting square. It exists solely to keep the system functioning without the need for dramatic reform. If the tenants have no money to pay with, the landlords don’t get their profits.

freedom of initiative is severely restricted everywhere

That’s because the capitalists (people who own the means of production) have no intention to share their positions of power with the plebeians. Doing so would be against their rational self-interest. The state is a tool among many they use to perpetuate the status quo. Lobbyists and campaign funding are the most direct examples of this, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

most of what we call “capital” isn’t past produced value

Anything that can be traded for money counts as capital when even money itself can be used to manipulate the markets to generate even more money. Yeah it may well be some NFT or other such scam, but scamming is just a profitable business among others. To stick with the allegory about tenants and landlords: Owning a house is a profitable endeavour that generates passive income. The money generator box has some person inside who may at times complain about a kitchen appliance not working, but most of the time the thing just keeps generating capital for you despite the annoying whining noise coming from within. You may then invest this capital, for example in purchasing additional money generator boxes.

How is this not capitalism? It may not be free market capitalism since an increasingly small bunch of rich people at the top have way too much power over everything, but that’s just what happens when the game of Monopoly nears its inevitable end.

That song went too hard for Illumination Entertainment to greenlight it.

I understand your point. But I also feel that it needs to be taken in the wider context that our consumerist lifestyles were manufactured by those same corporations in order to sell more stuff. A good article about this. The individual can always try to consume as little as possible, but to truly break this vicious cycle at the societal scale, drastic measures would have to be taken in order to limit advertising (which is quite literally just propaganda to convince the masses to consume more) and other forces perpetuating the current situation. People can live without consumer capitalism, most corporations cannot. That’s why they’re hell bent on keeping the populace thirsty for their products through whatever means necessary.