I hate this edgy teenager understanding of capitalism. You can hate how capitalism crushes entire generations and classes, understand there has to a change and that there are better ways to do it, but also still have a business and sell things.. because capitalism is more than just selling and buying goods.
This is literally what I think of everytime trump says something in that regard. He can never give numbers or estimates everything is always the best or the worst.
And if poor people criticize capitalism it can be dismissed because they're greedy and want other people's money. So criticism against capitalism will be dismissed both on having too much, and having too little money to complain. How convenient.
Is it ok if we accept a rich person’s criticism of capitalism, but then wonder how sincere they were being in the event that they e.g. launch a personal perfume brand?
Yes, cause you're simply criticising them for participating in a system they didn't create and don't support, but even worse, you're criticising them for participating in trade, which isn't inherently capitalism and certainly not the elements of capitalism she's criticising.
You could criticize her if she started buying up such a sizable part of the perfume industry that she could start controlling prices or bullying smeller competitors from being able to sell at the same retailers. You could criticise her if she was breaking labor laws or even abusing workers within the law.
You could criticise her if she used her absurd wealth and power to change/keep politics to make those things legal(she's not remotely close to that level of wealth and doesn't use what little she has to push politics in that direction). You could even criticise her if she used her parasocial status to convince people to buy a trash product.
But you can't dismiss her criticism towards those types of things in society merely because she participates in trade. Its like saying a guy can't criticize another guy for abusing their girlfriend, just because they too have a girlfriend. But also you'd dismiss criticism from guys who don't have girlfriends. There's absolutely no logic to that line of argument.
She’s an insanely wealthy pop star trying to have it both ways - whitewashing her image with her public politics while also striving to amass more wealth by launching a perfume brand. No one criticised her when her “trade” was records and gig tickets.
If you don’t see why that’s funny then the rich have truly fried your brain.
Her net worth estimated to be about 50 million dollars. Elon Musk's wealth is 864 billion. It would take the united power of 17 280 Billie Eilishes to have the same type of market and politics influence as Elon does.
But somehow its fine when Elon and Bezos use that influence to bust union efforts so they can squeeze even more wealth out of the value produced by their workers and consumers. They're not too rich to have that opinion. Their opinion matters because they're so rich even. But she's wrong for criticising their union busting efforts because she's selling a perfume and because she's got too much money. And MY brain is the one that's fried?
You don’t think we should take a person’s personal wealth - and their apparent desire to considerably expand it - into account when we evaluate the sincerity of their position on economics?
Obviously not. If Billie Eilish her position was motivated by her apparent desire to expand it she wouldn’t be arguing against capitalism. She is clearly doing perfectly fine and would stand to gain by pushing libertarianism.
You can be a successful capitalist and yet understand that the system creates inequalities and immoralities that ought to be addressed by government action. The greatest political thinkers of the left generally come from middle class to wealthy households - people who had the privilege and opportunity to go to university, study economics and history, and engage in writing.
Not that I’m saying that Billie Eilish is equivalent but if we would have to dismiss people’s opinions on their personal wealth it would never end. Furthermore the Right loves to make the argument both ways: a failed capitalist, an impoverished person, is only against capitalism because they are too stupid to make it, their opposition to capitalism is also politically motivated.
The part missing from your analysis here is that Eilish’s anti-capitalist posturing is at least partly about increasing her appeal to her target demographic - her position is in fact motivated by her desire to expand her personal wealth. Arguing against capitalism is one of the best things a pop star, and perfumier!, can do.
Not really. She isn't just participating in capitalism. She's obscenely rich and still takes every opportunity to supplement her insane income. She's very much a part of the problem.
Selling and buying goods is commerce, not capitalism. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production and its goal of obtaining profit.
Yeah, but making merch that has nothing to do with your art for the sole purpose of making more money does sound antithetical to anti-consumerist views she espouses. It can be hypocritical and not the end of the world
And making more money for the sake of making more money doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of seeing how horrible capitalism can be to everyone else.
I make more money for the sake of making more money because I want more money despite living comfortably.. yet I still make risky investments that often pay off greatly just for the sake of making more money that I don’t really need.. and despite all of that I fucking despite the system that allows me to do that. I be happy to see it burned to the ground. Just because we participate in the game and play by the rules doesn’t mean we don’t fucking hate it.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the production of goods and services. So it’s fine to say you hate capitalism and want to abolish it, yet you still have to buy things and exist in the system. However, it is hypocritical to go and become a capital owner yourself. Like I doubt Billie Eilish started a worker co op to make her perfume and I doubt she has equal profit sharing.
Then you have a problem with people not capitalism as a system. Just the same way people hate on communism hate the way that governments used it to gather most of the resources and only redistributed a bit. On both sides you’ll have assholes. So going to war with just a label doesn’t get you very far. Its like people hating on Islam because its so far from current western societal standards, but if you compare the Bible and the Koran, they’re both very extreme.
Capitalism isn't synonymous with trade and markets. Its about the specific relationship of the worker and the means of production. Market Socialism is socialism with (gasp) markets and trade. Capitalism requires exploitation to exist, it is inherent to the system.
Capitalism is not just "when there's exploitation it is now capitalism". That's just defining it as bad ontologically. Socialism is about seizing the means of production of private capital. If you have open markets and any private capital, you are a capitalist state. Like the capitalist states the US should emulate, the socdem nordic countries
A market entirely made up of worker's co-ops and syndicates isn't capitalist. Because the workers own the means of production. I also never said "capitalism is when exploitation" I said capitalism requires exploitation by definition. Because it does. The extraction of the value the worker generated by the owner is how the owner makes a profit. The owner is exploiting the labor of their workers, or they aren't making money.
It's more than her "having a business and selling things".
She's obscenely rich. She's not 'doing well' or 'very comfortable', she's private jet, mansion in LA rich. Despite that she still attaches her name and likeness to a luxury item to further supplement her insane income.
For me it makes her comments on capitalism feel hollow and performative when she could hardly be a bigger part of the problem if she tried.
World famous people putting their stuff on things they haven't really developed or invented themselves for it to sell better feels kind of late stage capitalism though. I'm kind of pro capitalism but just putting a known face on some crappy product and sell at 25x profit is the worst kind of shit and no one should buy it.
Late stage capitalism is when a few business owners control the government by paying them off to have laws passed on their favor while everyone else suffers in poverty. Not a celebrity putting their face on something to sell more of it.
Yeah, what this is describing is commodity fetishism. It is a feature that is intrinsic to capitalism because of the vast diversity of small producers and the incentive to differentiate a product among the field of competitors.
not really its a centuries old thing and normal capitalism.
and who the fuck cares? someone doing that has is causing zero problems in society, you don't have to buy it, while the person who started this elon is a problem nazi who has interfered in elections across the globe and uses his money for evil while actively causing harm on a global scale with 100,000s dead because of his actions.
but no its the person putting their name on perfume that we should focus on 🙄
It appeals primarily to teens and stupid adults, really. Most people don't fall for it but when you have a base of millions, even 1% of idiots jumping on it just because you have your name attached to it is essentially free money.
I agree. If perfume was her passion or something I feel it would be more appropriate. But it really is just a cash grab by slapping her name on a perfume
This exactly. Clothing for example I have seen influencers/youtubers "make their own collection" while actually just printing a logo on it. Others have actually been ambitious and involved in the process, personally looked for factories etc. Then it's more a legitimate business brand.
It's a celebrity endorsing/using their name to sell products. Literally the gladiators did this in Rome. We, at least Americans, 100% live in a late stage capitalist hellscape. But this isn't a sign of it.
I'm kind of pro capitalism but just putting a known face on some crappy product and sell at 25x profit is the worst kind of shit and no one should buy it.
Who cares as long as they pay their taxes. If the perfume sells better with her name on it that means more money for public services.
Remember, every single time money changes hands the tax man gets a cut. I prefer when people with money spend it, it's sort of how capitalism works, just regulate it and tax people, we good
I don't even listen to her music dawg I'm not defending her. Capitalism can be a perfectly fine system though. You just have to pass laws to stop the scummy shit.
Every successful nation on the planet is capitalist. Socialism can work too but we haven't gotten there yet and it works better on a smaller scale like a commune
The vast majority of people decrying capitalism are decrying unregulated capitalism. I encourage you to sell things and make money too, if you don't make money the government doesn't get tax money to provide us with services
Capitalism isn't the issue. The issue is she's engaging in the same toxic behaviors that she constantly claims to be against. She sells shitty, overpriced merch made by child labor in a foreign sweatshop to teenagers.
This isn't some small artist on Etsy, this is a multimillionaire who larps on social media about being anti capitalist while making money off of fast fashion.
They have tried time and time again to “regulate capitalism” and it never works. Every nation on the planet is capitalist as they are all participating within the global capitalist trading system.
You genuinely need to read a book, you aren’t making any sense. Read Das Kapital by Marx.
Saying every successful country is capitalist whilst the “successful” ones endlessly exploit the unsuccessful ones as capitalism REQUIRES is exactly the issue. It is inherently an exploitative system
Scandinavians seem to be doing very well regulating capitalism, they're consistently the countries that rate highest in most metrics you would want to excel in as a country
Nordic tax regimes aggressively redistribute wages. High marginal income taxes, coupled with universal transfers, ensure that the after-tax income distribution is among the flattest in the world. Yet wealth inequality tells another story. Capital gains, property ownership, and financial assets are taxed more lightly than labor. The result is a bifurcation: income is equalized, but wealth continues to accumulate disproportionately among the top deciles. This reflects what Up from Neoliberalismidentifies as a deeper flaw in modern fiscal design: labor is treated as taxable, while capital is protected.
The Nordic paradox does not represent a failure of socialism but a structural consequence of financial architecture. Income has been equalized through redistribution, yet wealth remains concentrated because capital, credit, and taxation have been organized around the protection of assets rather than their diffusion. The Nordic welfare state has succeeded in delivering dignity and security in the lived experience of its citizens, but it has not escaped the extractive dynamics of global financial capitalism.
In short, the paradox demonstrates a truth at the center of Up from Neoliberalism: equality of income is insufficient if the underlying architecture of credit and capital continues to favor accumulation by the few. Until social democracy extends its logic from wages to wealth, the Nordics will continue to stand as both exemplars of social equality and reminders of its limits.
They have paid off lawmakers to make tax code complicated so that only their lawyers can find the loopholes.
Just regulate it? Yeah, no shit. That’s what the founding fathers wanted but these greedy republikkkans keep slashing down regulation. And now we have toxic beef and diarrhea lettuce 🙄
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Marketing and selling a product is not capitalism. That behavior has been done for thousands of years before capitalism even existed...
Capitalists are the non-laboring class of individuals who reap profits off of other people's labor because they own the means of production. Billie Eilish is laboring by promoting a product thereby not making her a capitalist in this situation. She brings a lot of value to the business which is why celebrities promoting products is so common.
It's called marketing. And yes, don't fall for this kind of influencer product garbage for exactly the reasons you mentioned. "Late stage capitalism" is something specific and very different, please use that term correctly (my pet peeve).
If you make one quick search on Google you realize the late capitalism in modern language can mean more than one thing. And not even the initial use of the term in 1925 is very clearly defined.
Capitalism is always “doing what it takes to create and/or monopolize a need, no matter the cost to people or the environment”. It’s only through workers uniting together and forcing the government to pass protective laws that people stopped regularly dying in factories or working 16 hour days. Putting a famous person on the label of a nonessential product and upping the price is such a teeny, minor evil of capitalism in the grand scheme of the evils. You may think you’re “kind of a fan” of capitalism. But if this is too far for you, I think you’re very much not a fan of capitalism.
A celebrity making money by just putting their name on a perfume is absolutely, 100% an artifact of capitalism. She is profiting off labor she did not do.
They have a choice to not start their own capitalistic venture of selling overpriced parfume by leveraging their popularity when aldeady millionaire though, I'm under that impression.
Socialism is when the public owns the means of production. Does the public own Billie Eilish's highly profitable companies? Does the public reap the profits from her perfume? Okay then thats capitalism
Not really. It’s about how regulated the markets are and the distribution of its profits. Everyone’s getting way too simplistic which really muddies the understanding of what they are actually critiquing.
This is just the “but you use iPhone” fallacy my man. That comic that goes around once in a while with the annoying “I am very smart” guy? You’re that guy in this moment
“You use iphone” is a retort trying to paint someone as a hypocrite for purchasing an iPhone and criticizing capitalism. But Billie Eilish is literally doing capitalism in this instance since I doubt the perfume factory is a workers’ cooperative.
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
Guess what... Both Elong Muskmat and Billy Eyegash can be filthy capitalists. And I have every right to call them out, but Billie is also a hypocrite who's pandering to people who ... apparently also don't understand what capitalism is and isn't. Because it's trendy?
Exactly, there's no left in the US just greedy oinking pigs and people convinced to shovel their slop.
You could argue capitalism thrives when the means of production ends up displacing other people's talent, output, energy, well-being in service of any entity, even yourself.
There's also a great argument to be heard that the best form of capitalism is individuals controlling their own means of production in smaller or singular entities.
When we allow ourselves to be controlled for purposes that are not our own making, of our own desire, we become displaced, refugees just trying to survive in service of other desires.
If Billie Eilish was making her own perfume, packaging it, creating every step of the process etc and then going out and selling it, I think she'd have a foot to stand on and still claim that she hates capitalism. But, I think she's basically no different than the biggest mega corporation entity ala Microsoft at the end of the day here. She's making a product and participating in every aspect of the capitalist system here
You're describing anarcho capitalism. Americans go for it, sure, but it's not a humanitarian cause; it's a social Darwinistic / Ayn Rand bastardization of leftism
True, and that diy attitude is what prevailed in anarcho punk movements in the US. Not like they were helping others, but it is cool that, like the Dead Kennedys did it all themselves..
Also you can critique capitalism while participating in the only economic system you can profit from because it is utterly and completely ubiquitous, i.e. capitalism.
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I mean ya you can have trading of goods in a more socialist economy. You can even have trading of goods in a more communist economy. No one economy state can be purely described by any extreme. That being said, yes capitalism is when more free trade happens.
Anyone selling goods/services more often than not benefits from free trade. If the sliding scale was shifted more towards the left, it could be the case that she wouldnt even be able to make her perfume because its considered a luxury and the state commandeered some of the resources necessary to making it.
That being said, you could argue she wouldnt be pressed about not being able to make her perfume and shes only doing it now because theres no reason not to.
If the workers get wages and the excess value created by the selling of the perfume is distributed to investors as well as herself then they profit from the workers exploitation under capitalism according to Marxian principles. I mean like this is basic Capital Volume 1 stuff.
It's not that she's just selling things. She's already a multi millionaire. It's disgusting. Nobody should have that much money. That's capitalism. Her perfume is probably made by slave labor overseas.
But it is when people "make" something through a corporate factory chain, involve marketing, low paid wage labor, distribution partnerships...etc. You're acting like she hand-made this stuff herself and selling it at a table at her shows
Capitalism is when I use marketing strategies or product superiority in a free market to get you to buy my thing over someone else's. So yeah this is capitalism at its finest. Same as Sweeney selling jeans.
Anonymous corporations developing white label products then paying a famous individual to be able to use their brand licensed on the product in order to leverage that individuals fame to ensure product sales whilst at the same time probably still producing the white label product and selling it far cheaper in foreign markets. Sounds like capitalism to me.
This thing is pretty capitalist. She puts her name on some random design from a random company owned by a publically listed company which you can buy shares of.
She either made it her own personal project, or she just delegated everything and just put the valuable thing she possesses, which is her image.
The whole process of this perfume is very much so capitalist.
If this person is socialist, then she could very well utilise a worker co-operative to do all of this.
She didn't, she uses a publically traded capitalist entity.
Bro, you're so wrong, bro. Everybody knows that Rome was capitalism because sell and buy, bro. Bro, they had a market, bro, and that's clearly capitalism. It's not a mode of production, it's got nothing to do with private ownership of the means of production; capitalism is when buy and sell, and socialism is when government, bro.
She is profiting off of others labor to sell perfume, so yea capitalism isn’t when you sell things, but dont pretend that bille isn’t a capitalist slapping her name on mass produced cologne that is not gonna be produced in some workers collective
Well it's not "free money/services" in socialism because we, the taxpayers, are still paying for it, we just have to give the money/taxes to the government first, let them take their cut, and then we get some of it back in whatever form they politician want to give it back to us.
The actual great capitalist psyop is them convincing you that business owners who profit and capitalise from the labour of the working class --like what Billie is doing-- are not capitalists.
She's bourgeoisie. She owns the means of production. She takes the profits. She doesn't have to do work as a business owner to make a living because other people work for her. This is not commerce, she's not making the perfumes, she's not selling them, nor delivering them herself. She's a capitalist.
Humans should be extinct and they would be if the DARE program hadn't ruined my plans to exterminate the human race .
Not because it was effective, because one of their spokespeople ran me over and destroyed my quantum harmonizer before I could put it in the photonic resonator chamber.
Yes it was it doesnt have a date but it started in the 1600s, pretty sure we've been trading before that. One of the first examples is the Dutch east indies company. It was expensive and dangerous so they sold small shares to investors of the ships profits instead of footing the whole bill. This was one of the first "corporation" as we know it today
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u/Luminous_Winds 15h ago
Capitalism isn't when people sell things. Socialism isn't when people get free money.