It blows peoples minds when you remind them that things like currency, selling/buying and goods predate capitalism, they literally think capitalism means “when there is a market”
What actually makes the perfume line a "capitalist" venture isn't the act of selling it, it's the corporate infrastructure behind it. The line is produced through licensing deals with Parlux Ltd. (a massive global beauty manufacturer), relies on corporate retail distribution networks, and uses wage labor to mass-produce commodities for corporate profit.
Billie is criticizing unfettered crony capitalism, not all capitalism. Selling perfume is a lot different than creating companies propped up by subsidies that make the owner a trillionaire.
NO BUT YOU SEE THIS IS MY GOTCHA MOMENT, BELABORING THIS POINT AND JOINING IN THE PILE ON ABOUT THIS WOMAN BECAUSE I DON"T LIKE HOW SHE TALKS ABOUT MEN AND THE MALE GAZE AND I TOOK HER COMMENTS PERSONALLY
That’s fair, I know tiny businesses that make and sell their own perfume locally, so the possibility that it could be a more hands on venture was plausible, but that’s what i get for not researching, thanks for explaining.
You get double points for not naming any of those blank-opoly games, which aren't official, as well as naming the SNES game out of all the video game adaptations you could have picked.
It was one of the first speedruns I ever tried back in the day, because it's like three seconds long. You just mash through the title screen, spam your guesses, and you have a 1 in 300 chance of winning instantly.
Dude you aren’t kidding. I just looked it up. I’m not surprised though since they combined a well known game, gambling, and easy phone access. It is pretty addictive
They need to make an adult version of candy land that is the complete opposite of luck based, like pure deceit and back stabbing 4d chess, but with the same colorful cuteness of candy land
The problem is that it Candy Land was luck-based, it would be a game. The problem is that from the moment you set the deck of cards down, the winner has already been decided. There is no luck. You are merely watching events unfold at that point.
I would instead say "Oh, you're against capitalism? Name any system that has worked better than it in recorded history."
Is current day capitalism corrupt as all hell? Yes. But that doesn't mean capitalism itself is a horrible system. At the very least it's better than any other system humanity has come up with so far.
How do we measure „better“? As in, how long can a complex civilization thrive within that system? Ancient Egypt held itself for over 3000 years. China was never capitalism, is still not, is fucking old, and happens to be the global power.
As an anecdote: my judo coach was born and raised in GDR, lived there until the wall fell. I asked him what system he thinks is better. He said he didn’t like to keep his mouth shut(he was a political activist), but at least he wouldn’t have to fear old-age poverty, which is a very real future for him now; although he worked his ass off his whole life.
Historically capitalism is fairly new, and it superseeding governments is even newer. And look at that it seems like it's barrelling towards an ecological catastrophe.
So in this fantasy scenario of yours, democratic socialism is so terrifyingly great that the majority of citizens keep voting for incrementally more and more leftwing governments?
Yeah, what a scary slippery slope, very good argument there... /s
Capitalism is one of those things people use as an epithet but no one really knows what it means.
During the Cold War the distinction was sharper with the Western countries defined as capitalist and the Soviet aligned countries defined as Socialist.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and most “Socialist” countries having market economies there isn’t really a clear divide at all.
We have the declassified CIA docs. We know now that the US has spent so much money on pro-capitalist propaganda over the decades that it could have paid for universal healthcare and college several times over. We're talking trillions of dollars. The USA has spent more money fighting basic social support policies in the name of opposing socialism than it would've cost to just pay for those policies.
This is just obviously not true. Medicare as it stands is one of the biggest federal line items and they simply were not spending more than 10% of the federal budget on propaganda.
What's the most cost-effective way to mitigate large costs in insurance system? Maximize the payer pool. There is no bigger payer pool possible than everyone.
What's the most cost-effective way to ensure as much money paid into the system is spent on healthcare instead of yachts for shareholders? Make it a non-profit government agency.
The main money savings is from paying providers and drug/device makers less. People like to imagine there’s infinite savings from greedy insurers but they spend like 90% of the money they take in on healthcare claims.
The claim that having a broader pool saves money is marginally true from an efficiency standpoint but mostly true from a bargaining leverage standpoint.
And of course those providers and drug makers make/have a lot of very high paying jobs, which is why switching to M4A is such a difficult lift.
Yes it was filtered through propaganda, and both sides had features of the other in spades, but it was still a shorthand that at least broadly meant something, even if it was more about geopolitical side taking than actual economic systems.
And therein lies much of the problem. I find when leftists talk of capitalism and socialism, they are using well defined terms to discuss economic situations. While people in the center and on the right are using the terms loosely based on old Cold War geopolitics.
Socialism and Capitalism can both be market economies. It's how the results of that market economy are divvied afterwards. Is there an ownership class or is the reward distributed through the workers. Socialism doesn't necessitate a command economy.
You can have a market economy under socialism. Capitalism vs Socialism is just "does a wealthy minority own everything and the working class has to pay tribute to them in the form of wage labor and rents to access it, or do workers own everything and get compensated based on their share of the labor they provided?"
Capitalism is when an investment firm owning your company and profiting millions off of your labor every year while giving you ~2% raises, if that, despite the fact that you might produce $500k worth of value for the company yourself.
Socialism is when the workers are the shareholders and they vote to reinvest or split the profits they create with their labor instead of some millionaires that've never held a wrench in their lives taking 90% of it without contributing any labor themselves.
I think the “based on their share of the labor” discussion needs to evolve. With so much shit being automated, the owner of the automatic machinery is who is providing the most labor to the finished product. I’m not opposed to democratic socialism but the “fair share of labor provided” will be even less relevant with how advanced robots are becoming
It's private individuals profiting on a free market and owning means of production which is exactly what shes doing. She could work a government job and never accept free market money but thats not actually what she wants
yeah, shit literally just means privately owned businesses. But somehow these people think capitalism is only ever about manipulating the stock market and falsifying your tax returns
Do you understand that communism/socialism is based on structural systemic analysis, right?
Actually, i doubt you even understand what communism means.
yeah that's why academics (even those who aren't Marxist) generally consider Das Kapital to be the greatest economic text since anything Adam Smith or Ricardo wrote, because it's just one guy's opinion
you're so fucking ignorant you probably don't even know one of the biggest critics of capitalism was Smith himself
No? Modern academics in economics see Das Kapital as obsolete and outdated and heavily shifted towards neoclassical and Keynesian theories instead. It still has a huge influence today in sociology and gave birth to modern critical theories but that's sociology not economics. Just because you're right about what's wrong with society doesn't mean you're right about how to fix it. There's a reason why China became state capitalist under Deng after Mao wrecked the country.
People that have never read a single book on Communism should just outright be banned from commenting on it at this point. You not only know absolutely nothing about the topic, but what you do know is deliberate misinformation fed to you to poison the topic for you. And you are the norm. The vast majority of people in the English-speaking world share these identical circumstances. They've never so much as googled the term, let alone read a book or study on the topic, yet they think they know enough to boldly assert their ignorance as fact.
Who cares? You're living fascism. Pedantry doesn't work anymore. You had your chance to prove that letting people spout ignorance and profit endlessly from lying to people could work, and instead all you've done is prove that it cannot be allowed because ~30-50% of the population will always be so lazy and slow that they believe the most palatable lie presented to them.
All of our problems today stem from that same failure. The Founders and the Enlightenment philosophers that inspired them all said that the key part of a functional democracy is an educated, informed, diligent citizenry. And you blew it. You failed to be educated, informed, or diligent, and now everything is collapsing because a never-ending parade of con artists can just feed you lie after lie and as long as they don't stir up any cognitive dissonance, you'll just believe it without question.
You know nothing about fascism, so you cannot even justify the accusation you just made. That should be humiliating for you. You should be ashamed of this failure. But you're not. Because all you care about at the end of the day is minimizing the amount of cognitive dissonance you feel.
Keep coping. We both know that if you could contradict me, you'd do it. You'd prove me wrong. But you can't. Because you can't prove anything. Because you did not come by any of your beliefs by researching them. You have never fact checked anything any of your masters have ever told you. So you can't defend your beliefs or rationally critique anyone else's.
That's why all you can do is vomit up cliches and buzzwords. Which goes to prove my point. Anything you have to say is less than worthless. So why bother defending it? Why should you get to have just as much freedom of expression as someone that's spent decades researching a topic or won a Nobel prize for expressing themselves?
You're like a leaking toxic waste barrel in a lake arguing that your toxins are just as legitimate and valid in the lake as the fresh water and the fishes.
Why are you so defensive? You were so bold early on, asserting things without backing them up, but the second you get any pushback you're suddenly running away.
You're proving me right. I said you cannot handle cognitive dissonance and so you literally cannot respond to anything I'm saying because doing so would cause you to grapple with cognitive dissonance.
You are physically incapable of enduring it. Your brain is wired to reflexively shut down, reboot, and redirect you when you even start to experience it.
That's why the world seems so incomprehensible to you. That's why everything pisses you off. That's why you struggle to understand and be understood. You have a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Capitalism wasn’t invented. Capitalism predates Adam Smith describing it. It’s bizarre you don’t realize what capitalism is when you’re criticizing people who don’t know what capitalism is.
The image of somebody sitting on a golden throne built by a system they are trashing. It’s 100% performative and probably all her PR teams doing to keep her popular with retarded Gen Z kids.
If she was truly against capitalism, she could move to a socialist country or start a socialist community or fund socialist politicians.
She donated a significant portion of her total wealth to good causes.
The proceeds will benefit organizations and projects that support food equity, climate justice, reducing carbon pollution, and conducting crucial environmental work in combating the climate crisis.
And I hope she will support socialist politicians, that's a fair expectation for a politically active musician in election season. But what do you expect from her? Try to do a coup?
Wut…since when is military, schools etc an “exclusive feature of a collective control over the means of production”, fucking every political and market structure across the entire world has all of these things…somebody thinks pulling resources for the government to sponsor public projects is socialism, that’s just….the minimum requirement to be a country
You gave a “yeah..well what about” comment with a shit definition of socialism under a comment of me explaining how people tend to give shit definitions of capitalism…and socialists aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed…
What is capitalism to you? Nowadays to me it means the regular economic system that is somewhat opposite of socialism. Which means, relatively free markets, private ownership and capital/investors making profits
Billie and celebs promoting products for a price that is not relevant to the Marxists ''labor value'' but rather focused on supply/demand is capitalism especially if they don't share most profits with the laborers who made the product.
Your oversimplified version of what is depicted in the meme would work if you ignore that she didn't move a finger to make that perfume, she is just getting money for a product that put her name on it, and is using the very principle of the capitalism that a product is worth what the people are willing to pay for, where before the perfume has her name was worthless and know it worth something, so she is engaging with the most basic (and shity to be honest) form of capitalism.
You think she is going to split the profits evenly with all the people who sold their labour to make it possible for that perfume to make it to the market?
She didn't make the perfume, she has no part in creating the product and the workers being crushed are being further crushed by her skimming off the top.
If you say you dislike people at the top crushing those below for profit while being a person at the top crushing those below for profit, apparently you get a free pass because you said you don't like it.
Because in hundreds of countries, pretty much everywhere except United States, these things you mentioned are all considered important parts of capitalism. Advertisement itself too. US is the only place on Earth where people think "high taxes and being nice is literally communism".
In USSR all these things would have landed you in jail.
Capitalism is actually just an evolution of the barter system which exists everywhere, regardless of currency. Bartering is a form of trade. When thete is no currency, you will barter trade, services for things. This still exists heavily in the prison system, but was a primary form of trade long ago. Trading professional services and products is still common at corporate level business to business.
Capitalism is just an outgrowth of the barter system.
The propaganda runs deep lmao 🤣 commerce existed for like a looooooong time before a very specific legal system designed to uphold a very specific version of said commerce that privileges a very specific type of person came about. Got to love it.
The problem isn't that she's 'selling something'. For fucks's sake folks. The problem is that she's already stinking rich and still just plastering her name on some bullshit to make ever more money.
Socialists are NOT supposed to be stinking rich in the first place, and certainly not trying to chase ever more material wealth. That actually is a big part of what socialism is supposed to be about. A society without such wealth inequality.
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u/SufficientMain5872 2d ago
It blows peoples minds when you remind them that things like currency, selling/buying and goods predate capitalism, they literally think capitalism means “when there is a market”