Feeding homeless people is also a form of praxis. Even if you aren’t arming for the revolution, you are still contributing to fighting against capitalism.
Feeding homeless people is also a form of praxis. Even if you aren’t arming for the revolution, you are still contributing to fighting against capitalism.
Not to be pedantic, but assuming you are purchasing that food isn’t it still contributing to capitalism? Therefore, grow your own food and share with those in need
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
I feel like that falls under “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.
We could take this further. Where are you getting the seeds? Was a purchase from a capitalist source anywhere in the chain of the history of the plant’s ancestors? Are these distant offspring of monsanto seeds? Does that make it worse, or better if you didn’t pay for yor your own seeds but sourced them a different way?
Very fair, and to be clear I’m not arguing that perfect be the enemy of good enough here.
Interesting considerations in your hypotheticals, I’m sure it depends on your perspective
You suck dude, and have very clearly never grown your own food or provided for yourself. Get out more, that kind of ideological “purity” doesn’t hold up to sunlight well
I see how this comes across as me arguing “if you can’t beat capitalism, it’s not worth trying.” But I’m really just saying do both. Help your unhoused, and also try to do so in a way that does not contribute to capitalism.
You should really relax though, this personal attack is not very solarpunk of you.
Redistributing wealth is redistributing wealth. Just because you’re doing it within the systems your born into doesn’t make that any less true.
That being said if you can prepare fresh meals from home grown veggies, fucking go for it!
There’s also more than just growing your own and sharing it. We’ve got a community garden, underground farmer’s market, and crop-share programs in my area, and those are also great options.
Tell me more about this underground farmer’s market? I haven’t heard of this concept. I’m working on reviving the community garden in my area, and unfortunately crop-sharing farms have all fallen apart near me.
Haha, it’s just an ad hoc thing that gets set up in the park every summer. No licenses, no permits, no advertising, just garden fresh veg in ziplock baggies in exchange for cash.
The real farmer’s market is a half hour drive away, and this is just a nice little cottage industry for people who don’t sell enough to justify booth fees and paperwork at the real one, but want to make some money back on their home garden.
Very cool, thank you for the lesson
Food not bombs prioritizes food that wouldn’t be sold like day old baked goods and produce that’s still fine to eat, but is no longer fresh enough that people will buy it.
The difference is that capitalism is more than just an economic system, it is a form of class domination. Its a whole set of social relations that reinforce dominance. Voting with your dollars is not a viable strategy for opposing capitalism, there is no individual consumer decision that can make a dent.
A good example is Boycott/Divest/Sanction. That’s like voting with your dollars right? And it is objectively an effective tactic against apartheid regimes, themselves driven by capitalist incentives, the same way that slavery was in the US. But BDS isnt an action taken by an individual, or rather, it isnt only that. It is a movement of people organizing with each other to take collective action to resist injustice. Capitalists and their political proxies fucking love Israel, who cares who is exploited or murdered in the name of economic development? Same in South Africa. And these campaigns infuriate the capitalist and political classes, they literally imprison people for showing support for Palestine. If it was one guy, or a few people scattered who decided they just weren’t gonna buy goods from Israeli companies, nobody would care. But they’re organized against the capitalists as a class, they educate people, convince them, and are effective.
Capitalism organizes people too, it organizes us to sell our labor to someone who uses it to make themselves rich. When we organize on the basis of our own enrichment or self defense, against the interests of the wealthy, that’s where the cops show up and the president starts calling the most harmless and caring people “domestic terrorists.”
When capitalism seems like just some economic system, then it doesn’t feel as repressive. We can go whole days without spending money. But capitalism is more than markets. Its practically impossible to avoid enriching capitalism as an individual. But spending a little money to organize and help people is resistance to the system as a social system rather than an economic one.
Mutual aid can draw criticism on this basis too, like there are plenty of left criticisms of mutual aid. But by my reckoning, wherever people are helping each other rather than competing for a slightly higher wage, there is a pocket of anti capitalism. The capitalists have total control over the all production and markets. In order to free ourselves from it on a mass scale, we have to be principled and practical, and we have to do what it takes to get enough people to unite and take action. If that means giving someone money or doing mutual aid as a tactic, then that can be part of an anticapitalist strategy.
I appreciate this perspective, thank you for detailing your thoughts. I will have to do some thinking on this one.
Exactly capitalism is more than just an economic system its a scapegoat for every single problem in my life.
Good one!
Here’s a list of the 10 richest people in 2019: Jeff Bezos ($131B), Bill Gates ($96.5B), Warren Buffett ($82.5B), Bernard Arnault ($76B), Carlos Slim Helú ($64B), Amancio Ortega ($62.7B), Larry Ellison ($62.5B), Mark Zuckerberg ($62.3B), Michael Bloomberg ($55.5B), Larry Page ($50.8B)
Here’s a list of the 10 richest people today: Elon Musk ($480B), Larry Page ($270B), Jeff Bezos ($255B), Sergey Brin ($250B), Larry Ellison ($245B), Mark Zuckerberg ($230B), Bernard Arnault ($190B), Jensen Huang ($120B), Warren Buffett ($115B), Steve Ballmer ($110B)
So, during covid the rich made so much fuckin money, and they made it so fast that they can’t go back. Line must go up, and at a greater rate of profit than before. Yet after covid, the fed raised interest rates to suppress wages. They said the cause was inflation, they always say that increased wages increase demand, which lowers supply, which causes prices to increase. But even in the midst of the war in Ukraine, which was used to explain away inflation, independent economists confirmed that at the time, around to 50% of price increases were arbitrary and not connected to higher costs. https://www.epi.org/blog/profits-and-price-inflation-are-indeed-linked/
So if the government and the banks can then decide to raise interest rates in order to suppress our wages, as they did after covid, while the richest people have multiplied their own wealth astronomically, all during a period where the working class is under attack in order to increase the unemployed reserve surplus population, then how exactly, in your opinion or analysis is capitalism something other than a system that takes your wages and gives them to the wealthiest people on the planet?
Recall a guy named Jeffrey Epstein who was close personal friends with the people above, and what they got up to. That is who you are defending, pedophiles, rapists, and psychopaths. Do you think it will help you quadruple your income in the next 5 years? If so, I would love to talk to you about some beachfront property I think you’ll be interested in.
I’m not calling you a pedo defender, just making a point that capitalism is a system that fucks us and rewards them for fucking us. So which side are you on?
Ok, I dont know why you would i probably hate him more than you.
The world isnt America and capitalism isnt only rich people. Those billionaires fuck us and run wild because of weak governance. Under another economic system with equally weak governance we’d likely see equal amounts of oppression from those with power.
Capitalism needs to be regulated and in most countries it is. We’ve had like 50 years of completely unregulated business from the US. They need to put the beatdown on their businesses to bring them inline and establish fair practice and prosecute those who are criminal.
So far in my city there has been enough food waste from groceries and supermarkets that the primary limitation is labor. That is to say, you get way more food per hour of labor (skip, maintaining a kitchen, food prep, and distribution) by working outside of capitalism than working within capitalism.
I imagine the same holds for most places in the western world, if there were enough people to sustainably work the entire chain. Though maybe skipping is more dangerous in other jurisdictions.