RingoI was listening to a podcast on worldbuilding today that was talking about the hunger games and the 3 hosts started to discuss how Hunger Games was a critique of capitalism.
WTF???
How does this happen? How can anyone read a book about a planned economy with labor and resources assigned by location, with what appears to be an actual serfdom system, and the few privately owned companies are family business owned by the political class where every single member is part of the same ultra-nationalist party and directly tied to the government? We can describe the government as feudal, as fascist, as totalitarian socialist/communist, or a variety of other authoritative systems but nothing in it resembles any defining feature of capitalism. Hell, there is not even a hint of the govt pretending that a free market exist in the books so we can’t even tie it the Laissez Faire capitalism of the late 1800s early 1900s where the western governments actually introduced super corporate friendly regulations while claiming like they didn’t interfere at all.
The worst part was one of the hosts began talking about they just learned about Roman vomitoriums and likening them to the scene where the tributes eat too much at a party and then are given something to help them vomit so they could eat more. They begin to say “Maybe capitalism is the wrong word” which it is since neither the concept of a capitalist class nor a free market would exist for over a millennium, but then another host assures them it’s correct. They literally talk about how the society depicted is reminiscent of something that predates capitalism and then somehow think that’s still evidence it’s a metaphor for it.
I don’t think it’s that important that people understand the details of economic systems. I can’t tell you the difference between Keysian, Neo-Keysian, and the Chicago School capitalism or Marxism vs lennonism vs maoism, let alone the number of specialized anarcho-marxist-post-capitalism weird things super leftists like to get into. But it shouldn’t be hard to tell the basic fundamentals of say Fuedalism, Communism, Capitalism, and Facism. We’re not even talking about the difference between mercantilism and capitalism, which still should be pretty basic.
Books can critique American or other western society, our class system, govt corruption, inequality without actually targeting capitalism. Cause like throughout history all those things have existed without it. Capitalism is simply one system that can be abused to create an ultra powerful class. It is not 100% of the things wrong in the west. Yet if you listen to modern liberals and leftist it’s the core cause of every problem and just replacing it would somehow fix it all, despite 4,000-10,000 years of recorded history documenting that we’re perfectly capable of fucking everything up without it.
This is not meant as just a critique of leftist understanding and discourse though. It’s simply an example of this weird need to put political buzz phrases into our conversations to…I don’t know what it’s for honestly? Maybe signaling what tribe we belong too? Cause the right is as bad if not worse, when they claim everything is socialist, neo-marxist, or postmodernism. When people claim Obamacare is socialist because they can’t tell the difference between a social welfare safety net and collective/government ownership of resources it’s as if not even more annoying. We could move to single payer and still not be socialist. Healthcare doesn’t become socialist until most of the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare staff work for the government or a nationalized company.
I just don’t understand how people can engage with these terms and concepts so frequently and somehow lack the most basic understanding of what they are railing against. You almost have to try to maintain that level of ignorance because even a cursory read of anything that actually engages the concepts will provide the proof of your absurdity trying to argue like that. In other news
