Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.
All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto.
artificialfish@programming.dev 1 week ago
Money is labor hours exchanged for equivalent goods and services. It’s a loop. If there’s no one to labor, and no one to buy, money isn’t anything.
yeahiknow3@lemmings.world 1 week ago
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
artificialfish@programming.dev 1 week ago
Why will people do things for you in exchange for money?