Just one more way capitalism destroys the fabric of compassion and community in our world.
Just one more way it depersonalizes everyone and commodifies everything.
Such evil.
I work with special needs kids. They aren’t unable to contribute, only no one has accommodated the ways they are able too.
This was something I was thinking should be memified / rendered into an infographic.
Meritocracies tend to have blind-spots regarding certain folks:
- People who do useful stuff not recognized by the merit assessment system, and allotted no reward or compensation; also merits under-valued and underpaid (e.g. parenting, teaching)
- People who subvert the system, often playing to the measures of merit rather than the spirit (e.g. private equity schemes, MLMs, cults, lobbyists, trillion-dollar far-right hate-based propaganda machines)
- People who have characteristics favored by the assessment system that aren’t really meritous (white, male, related to wealthy families), and people who are devalued for characteristics that don’t affect their merits (nonwhites, women, queer, poor, fat, unattractive, strange cultures and religions, outside the mainstream ideology)
- The personhood of those people who genuinely have little or no merit at this time (disabled folk), some of whom have served (enlisted veterans suffering from TBI or PTSD, or were just blackballed by a superior officer with a grudge) or have the potential to serve (children of the wrong color, children who are below average in physical prowess, children with unusual learning styles, weird children, poor children)
Probably not a complete list. Early draft.
The suffering and cruelty is the point.
It’s honestly something I still struggle with. Issues of capitalism aside, I, from an objective standpoint, consume far more resources and services than I produce due to my disabilities. It often feels like I deserve less than I have, and I don’t have a lot.
It’s one of those confusing points in-between feeling blessed and feeling like a burden.
I don’t know if this helps, but your posts and comments always make my day just a bit better whenever I see them. Whatever else, you’re contributing to myself feeling less of a burden from gestures broadly at everything
Thank you. Unironically it’s one of the main reasons I post - I like to give people a little entertainment (the other reason being that I want the Fediverse to survive and thrive, and it needs activity for that).
I’m always happy to see you upvote and comment, by the way! Stay safe!
Agreed. How do we organize the economy to reflect this. 2024 our gdp was close to $30 trillion. In 2025 there was around 165 million workers and let’s say a population of 350 million people. Each worker produces on average $181k of productivity. Each citizen has about $85k worth of productivity each year attributed to them. Even in today’s American every citizen can afford some luxuries if productivity was more equitably shared across the country. How can we enforce this more
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Limit C-suite wages to their bottom line workers including the sub contracted janitors.
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All boards must have labor interests in the company represented.
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Higher tax on money so it can go into subsidies for the disabled and poor.
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Cancel restrictions on savings/resources money for disabled people. Have a more progressive subsidy system for the poor.
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Destroy redundancy in the economy. Health care insurance, pharmaceutical companies, military spending, and education. We spend money as a society on these endeavors they should be owned and controlled by the people. We shouldn’t be paying for the profit of military contractors, pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, and education. There should be budgets and it costs what it costs. Our military should also be brought back to America if we want to keep the jobs program we can defend ourselves from our own soil and excess military people can do public service work like bridges and roads. If the government spends money it should go to employing people directly not private corporate hands
Essential infrastructure including transport, housing and groceries should be handled by the community, either by workers coop or by municipality.
Agreed on that but I do think at least with the tax infrastructure/enforcement nowadays the money has to come from the fed budget as the economy is national/global.
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Nobody should suffer due to their ability. At the same time lacking luxuries like coffee, nice dinners, and fun trips is not suffering. I agree, everyone deserves some luxury in their life but to equate lack of luxury to suffering tells me you are totally out of touch.
I’m reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.
As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We’re being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.
Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.
And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump’s instant army.
The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn’t come out of a vacuum. We shouldn’t be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.
Ideally, we’d all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it’s not anyone’s fault they were born
frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcomewithout the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.But I’d settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.
We don’t even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.
They’re also implying that employed, not disabled people somehow magically get those luxuries just for participating in capitalism
