#marketsociety — Public Fediverse posts

"My change of mind in 2025 is that democracy, far from being the natural twin of capitalism, has to watch it like a hawk. The problem is not just that people with great private fortunes can bend public life to their interests, as John Pierpont Morgan did in the Gilded Age and as the tech barons do now. That much was obvious before, even if it is unnerving how much the US government now identifies Silicon Valley’s interests as its own.
The larger problem is the attitude that business instils in people: that everyone is negotiable, that a so-called extremist must just be bluffing. (Am I pushing it if I note that Neville Chamberlain was from a commercial background?) There almost could not be a worse framework for thinking about the modern world, with its many ideological opponents of the west. Germany’s enthusiasm for a second gas pipeline with Russia right up to the eve of the Ukraine war, despite incessant warnings, was commercial naivety to a tee.

In its proper place, which is business itself, the commercial instinct achieves miracles. When it permeates a nation’s government, and especially its foreign policy, that nation is defenceless against enemies who act out of intense belief. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Two centuries on, in a secular age, it is not religion that the state needs a wall against."

https://www.ft.com/content/36c23306-6ad4-4d06-bd4f-e5c2e3e51491

#Liberalism #Capitalism #Democracy #MarketSociety #Ideology

#cartoon #cartoons #consumerism #society #economics #capitalism #marketsociety #freetrade #humor #art #artsy #drawing #mushroom

Tell me about it...

"The real breaking point is fairly simple: the higher up you go at a company, the further you are from problems or purpose. Everything is abstract — the people that work for you, the people you work for, and even the tasks you do.

We train people — from a young age! — to generalize and distance oneself from actual tasks, to aspire to doing managerial work, because managers are well-paid and "know what's going on," even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years, if they ever did so. This phenomenon has led to the stigmatization of blue-collar work (and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world) in favor of universities. Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more — though I concede that both roles involve, on some level, shit, with the plumber unblocking it and the MBA spewing it.

Sidebar: Hey, have you noticed how most of the calls for people to return to the office come not from people who actually do the jobs, but occupy managerial roles? More on that later.

I believe this process has created a symbolic society — one where people are elevated not by any actual ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by their ability to make the right noises and look the right way to get ahead. The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades. They have bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence, because real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power they've all found a way to work together.

I need you to understand how widespread this problem is, because it is why everything feels fucking wrong."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

#Management #Business #Neoliberalism #Capitalism #MarketSociety

"MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/

#Capitalism #MarketSociety #MultiLevelMarketing #MLM #PonziScheme