Michael Parenti on what pure capitalism looks like

The way things are going around the world, “Commie” has become a compliment in the mould of “conspiracy theorist”. Keep going.

The stupidity of the right wingers in the comments to this video are a perfect illustration of how we went from a world of increasingly higher standards of living until 1971 to a world of increasingly lower standards of living that we have today. Stupidity.

Which is why capitalists took lots of production and all their worst dodgy shit to the global south and east.

American capitalism mixed with communism, rain water is nationalised but the public can't use it...

Yet by 1948 things had improved dramatically as this school textbook shows. But since the 1970s things have regressed to the 1890s

Why isn't he yellow

"The famous old story, repeated hundreds of times, that the factories employed women and children and that these women and children, before they were working in factories, had lived under satisfactory conditions, is one of the greatest falsehoods of history. The mothers who worked in the factories had nothing to cook with; they did not leave their homes and their kitchens to go into the factories, they went into factories because they had no kitchens, and if they had a kitchen they had no food to cook in those kitchens. And the children did not come from comfortable nurseries. They were starving and dying."

The sooner people realize we are living in the 2nd Gilded Age, the sooner we can start do something about it.

The term "capitalism" itself was a pejorative Marxist coinage for "free enterprise". By "-ism" it suggests that it's a "system", but it's not--it's merely Economic Human Nature allowed to be free. Of course it requires policing to prevent criminality--like other human activity.

Parenti always nails it, exposing how unchecked markets breed inequality and exploitation.

Imagine if we lived in country where Michael Parenti would have been hosting a weekly PBS show like Firing Line instead of William Buckley.

At the end he touches on the Marxist concept of ruling ideas, I love parenti so much and I am sad to hear of his passing, rip

South Africa needs a Parenti.

yap, Free State of Congo, run purely by for profit private companies ... great success ...

The opposite for Communism or even socialism. The latter has never had to stop defending itself militarily and financially from Imperial capitalists.

Was this the gilded age that he’s talking about ?

If you are compassionate, empathetic or solidarize with others, despite citing sacred texts, you are condemned and labeled a "communist", "socialist", "Marxist", "leftist" etc. Only if you care about yourself and money you are crowned a "freedom lover" and ""capitalist"...

@ProfSteveKeen General Strike!

🎯

I think I’m smarter than I think 😂 I’ve been having the same conversation with my self the past few months. The conversation I’ve been having is that there’s no country that runs pure capitalism, it may not be communism or socialism but it’s definitely never pure capitalism !

Both market camps are polorized between being either extreme capitalist or extreme socialist. Neither camp meets in the middle. It creates a pendulum of chaos that always benefits the elites over the masses. And they decide who has and who doesn’t- whether that be race, sex, etc.

We have monopolies again, yes.

...there's a lot of us talking from our privileged class perspective these days. Meanwhile we keep skirting the central problem with capitalism itself...

You have the same class bias

"People may disagree on the question of whether everybody ought to study economics seriously. But one thing is certain. A man who publicly talks or writes about the opposition between capitalism and socialism without having fully familiarized himself with all that economics has to say about these issues is an irresponsible babbler."

@GeromanAT @elonmusk

The most famous analysis is by Max Weber (1904–05) – the book *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*. Marxism is the other side of the same coin, a mirror image, no change, a continuation by another method (:

This is what happens when you mix an economic system with a political system and assume they are the same thing. That is like saying socialism is and economic system when it is only possible in a political system. Stop mixing them like masks vs jabs no comparison.