4. δημοσιότητες που δεν ξέρετε τις πραγματικές πολιτικές τους σκέψεις
Whitewashed Radicals: How We Sanitize Our Icons
5. η θέση της γυναίκας στον καπιταλισμό μέσα από τα πρότυπα ομορφιάς
Beauty standards: a Marxist analysis
6. γυναικεία θέση στην Σοβιετική Ένωση
7. κατανόηση του καπιταλισμού
8. Το κλίμα ως προϊόν
9. Αποδομώντας τα επιχειρήματα του συστήματος
10. Σχετικά με την Κίνα
Προσωπικές σκέψεις
Προσωπικές σκέψεις 2
------------------ ENGLISH VERSION ------------------
We now live in the age of artificial intelligence. If you believe your life will get better because AI will take over your job and you'll work less or not at all while still getting paid, you're mistaken. People believed the same thing during the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, and the same will happen now. Those who have always held the means of production in their hands have only one goal: profit. This means that workers are a "labor cost" that they would gladly get rid of. As you can see in the image above, this is already happening. Your turn is coming. If you want to know why, I've selected some videos that analyze the system we live in and its goals. I chose video and audio because it's easier to understand, and besides, most people don't read "boring books." Nor are they interested in politics, "since that's just the way things are and nothing ever changes, and everything else has failed." But is that true, or were you taught to think that way?
This video series documents how the economic elites began using propaganda in the media, initially in newspapers and later on radio and television. Through paid placements and the systematic slandering of the public sector and public services, they managed to convince citizens that this system is the best there is. The system that is today considered the natural and inevitable order of things is nothing more than a long and expensive brainwashing campaign, from cartoons for the less educated to school textbooks and university chairs, all designed to cultivate a specific culture of acceptance of the system and your place in society, even changing the very father of capitalism in the "Wealth of Nations."
Books like the new 3rd Grade Middle School book that teaches children that when there is scarcity, it also exists for the rich and the super-rich (*I lost the source during my research but it exists and I'll add it when I find it).
The 1928 crisis, the great crash, and the Second World War briefly interrupted the oligarchy's assault on society. For a short period after the war, states had some social policies, mainly due to the opposing force of communism.
However, in the '60s, they returned in full force. After all, what people considered to be rights were nothing but privileges granted by the ruling class, and now they wanted them back. Capitalist theory had to be academically entrenched, and so paid university chairs were created to teach the most aggressive doctrine of capitalism: neoliberalism. The "market" is the holy grail, and humanity or democracy is secondary.
The spearhead was Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago. The first test was Chile, which had a dictatorship and was an easy place to impose the new doctrine with force. Everything was privatized (with American businesses as the beneficiaries), and the results were disastrous for the people. Thatcher and Reagan applied the doctrine to the steam engines of capitalism, America and England, respectively. Of course, they couldn't use the violence of Pinochet's Chile, but in England, there was a terribly violent suppression of demonstrators, such as the coal miners.
The US did everything to crush any other model of organization that appeared, mainly communist ones. Although their motto is "socialism doesn't work," they didn't allow a single example of its failure to appear because they were afraid of its success. Even in the collapsing Soviet Union, with the dark contribution of Gorbachev, they carried out a coup when the parliament impeached Yeltsin. That's when the Chicago boys moved in and dismantled every concept of the public sector.
The "postmodern" person is not homo economicus; they are homo entrepreneur, the corporate person. The model of society in Thatcher's words: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." The state exists to serve the fiercely competitive market where, in addition to companies, every person competes with everyone else, and their existence is capital that must constantly be increased (self-improvement). They are responsible for increasing their wealth based on their own success. Their success in this system is, of course, the failure of others. And with the Darwinian logic that our own neoliberal Adonis also espoused, whoever doesn't adapt, dies.
The person is measured as a product. Like on dating apps, a man is graded with a perfect score of 666 (six-figure salary, six feet tall, six-pack abs). A woman is graded by the beauty standards (when she isn't self-sufficient) imposed by advertising in the past and now by Instagram and TikTok filters, and they are even trained in this oppression from a young age. This creates new consumers and new markets for competitors to clash with all potential rivals and with their own self-improvement.
This creates a jungle where one must devour the other, and of course, the elite and their lackeys in the political parties benefit. Parties that have no fundamental differences, as history has shown, with some being "right-wing" and selling out the homeland and nation to divide and frighten, and some being "left-wing" who, while having no difference and continuing to fuel unbridled competition, grant privileges that ultimately create new markets (and I wondered why a system with no sensitivity for people supports and promotes diversity). Communist parties and anarchist ideology are excluded.
Individualism as the fulfillment of the individual is fulfilled not through self-realization and a personal internal and external journey towards the completion of one's personality, as each person designs and defines it, to create a society composed of complete individuals who interact. Instead, it wants predators in the market arena to compete as gladiators constantly. Your death is my life.
The "American Dream," which in the '50s was about having a decent standard of living with a secure job and family and community, became the "American nightmare," where people have the illusion that they will soon, at some point—in two terms—become rich. Their role models are multi-millionaires, since success is measured by money, and money is the measure of one's value. A motto (which I've seen tattooed on a young man's chest) is "Get Rich or Die Trying."
Now, these same multi-billionaires who control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population have the reins, and either they become presidents themselves or they are treated as authorities on lifestyle and political consciousness. A new feudalism. Primarily technological and financial. And the poor? The so-called and constantly shrinking "middle class"? Deceived by the sirens of the dream of getting rich or the chauvinistic incitement of racism and fascism, they vote against their own interests, they applaud the cutting of public services and the theft of wealth by the very people they have come to admire.
However, the system we are experiencing is not written on stone; it is a common acceptance by all of us that things will work this way, and at any moment we collectively decide we don't want this way, we can change it. We can shape it with humanitarian values. Solidarity, equality, tolerance, respect, justice, fair distribution of resources, cooperation, empathy. And you must want this to apply to everyone, not just some.
We must realize that what started with the "modernization" of Simitis was the beginning of a process leading to barbarism and extreme inhumane conditions. The Memoranda were a violent transfer of wealth upwards and a commitment by the International Monetary Fund to privatize public social services to create new, competitive markets in which the public also participates, e.g., paying for afternoon surgeries.
And of course, public opinion is also being prepared for water. Greed has reached the point of privatizing "even rainwater" (there is a movie that shows the true story in Latin America). To give you an idea, EYDAP (Athens Water Supply) has been granted all freshwater sources (lakes, rivers, springs, underground reserves) and all water states (these can only be solid: ice, liquid, and gaseous cloud). If they find a way, they will privatize the air we breathe too.
Wherever privatization occurred, there was an absolute disaster for the whole. Energy costs for the consumer more than doubled. Trains, 57 dead on a single line with no safety measures. Security, optional supplementary private insurance for retirement (in Chile, it led to disastrous results for Chilean retirees, here the bailout governments took care of it).
And all this while they distort the words that carry the essence of meaning. The most used word is "freedom." While they tell you that you have the freedom to chase your dream and to "become what you want" (mostly rich), this is the bait. Basically, what will happen is that you will have the "freedom" to be a cog in the machine that will produce the surplus value that the elites will reap, and you will do it with pleasure. As they said in the 1800s when they were trying to pass laws on child labor (12-hour shifts for 12-year-olds in factories), "You can't take away the right (another abused word) of the child to choose to work!" And today, Republican states in the US are lowering the working age for children to 14!
We must not allow the journey toward barbarism to be completed.
The view that "Western man" has acquired of socialism/communism is distorted, a result of the long, continuous, methodical, and expensive propaganda, as proven by the analysis of the videos and the sources they cite. To these, I would like to add my personal experience from my studies in economics; I studied computer applications in administration and economics in the US, at a university with the philosophy of the Chicago School and Friedman. The axiom was, "The state exists to create the secure conditions for the entrepreneur to operate." The example of Chile under the boot of Pinochet's junta was considered successful, and "it's not profitable for the state to provide pensions." Hong Kong with two competing currencies is an excellent example of a free market. "The free market is more efficient than democracy because the consumer directly chooses which product they like and which they don't." That is, the choice of a political leader is downgraded to the same value as the choice of toilet paper.
The strong point of these videos is their understandable language and their documentation with either historical or economic data. I have tried to put them in a logical order. And if you're wondering, but doesn't socialism have problems?
Obviously, it does. It is a human creation like all the systems humanity has devised to constitute and hold its society together. And the experience of the experiments that have been carried out is knowledge for a better application. After all, from theory to practice, there is always try and error and beta testing.
Besides, apart from the example of America with its enormous inequality and widespread poverty where homelessness is considered a crime to the point that a journalist on television says, "Let's kill them with a lethal injection," the so-called Western world benefits from the criminal exploitation of colonies (see Leopold of Belgium and the genocides in the Congo) and the overall brutal oppression and exploitation of "third-world" countries.
And if you accept this fact because you buy cheap NIKE and ZARA, your turn is coming because with excuses like the economic situation, the rearmament of the West, and the rating of the markets, the sweater of public services, the standard of living, and labor rights is being unraveled everywhere (except for China, which is following the opposite path) (specifically for Greece, the Memoranda with the violent transfer of wealth upwards and real estate to funds, the six-day thirteen-hour workday, the increase in medicine prices, and the recent afternoon surgeries). Because it is harder to satisfy a rich person than it is to feed all the hungry.
A few more analyses on the coups carried out by the US, on , on , the , that help with understanding are listed below.
1. Every CIA Coup Explained in 23 Minutes
2. About Stalin
3. How "Moderates" Serve The Right