• Pastaguini [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    My apartment building is requiring us to pay $30 for an app to allow us to continue parking in the garage, which we already pay $75 a month for. The entire American experience is just a continuous process of being hit with random fees and charges that only exist to further pad margins. I didn’t get the app and my car got towed from a spot I pay on time each month to have. It cost me $375 to retrieve my car. All for parking in a spot I pay for.

  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    There’s an even darker side to it than greedy business owners. They are also just cogs in the machine of capital, just as the oppressor class. They are subordinate to the mechanisms of capitalism itself, and are taking an extra dollop off the top, no doubt, but the greater share goes back into the machine whose purpose is to simply turn things into more things, always increasing in exchange value, regardless of what that thing is or how much it hurts people or what ridiculous redundancies are created or what countries it destroys.

    The machine itself has to be destroyed, it’s the engine that creates the monsters.

    • Cyberwitch_7493@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Yuuup, because to pretty much everyone on top, it’s not sadistic, it’s business as usual. They don’t typically experience the crushing despair of the poor.

      This system is working as intended and must be transformed so dramatically as to be nearly unrecognizable or fall altogether.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Absolutely, it’s the same mechanic as natural selection in nature. The system creates selection pressures on society, and people act in a way that makes sense for them to act given those pressures. The system ends up selecting for particular behaviors that are successful within its constraints. A really great concrete example of this in action is what happened when USSR dissolved and the transition to capitalism happened. All of a sudden the same people who were acting as communists under the old system quickly saw the new opportunities presented to them and turned into oligarchs overnight.