I've seen people defend capitalism unironically by arguing that you can just go run off in the woods if you don't like it, as if every square inch of land isn't privately owned.
Except you can and will be kicked out of those too. At least the Great Smokey Mountain National Forest has maximum occupancy times for its campsites, and will haul you to jail if they catch you camping outside off their official sites.
This statement has always been crazy to me. Even when I wasn't a Communist I didn't really understand this, since for the overwhelming majority of human history, we didn't even have Capitalism... Capitalism is around 400 years old, meanwhile recorded history is around 6000 years old.
And I'm not even applying materialism here, this was when I was a lib lmao
If you question people who say this they will say “sure we didn’t call it capitalism but people were trading and selling to become richer since forever!”. And you try to explain that markets =/= capitalism and you see their eyes glass over and their brains shutdown.
We say libs don’t know anything about communism, but they will die on a hill to defend capitalism and they know nothing about it either.
Libs don’t know what capitalism is, and they haven’t thought it through. “I think there were markets in Rome and markets = capitalism.” “I feel like it’s in my nature to be selfish, so it must have always been like this.”
A big part of the "selfishness is human nature" thought process comes from Puritan brainworms. The Protestant work ethic and the belief that one's desire to have the basic necessities of life is inherently selfish form the basis of American capitalism, thus the idea that one must be worked beyond their limits in order to simply continue to live becomes baked into the fabric of society.
Basically everything wrong with America is John Calvin's fault at its source.
i do this, people can do this! lots of americans (mainly the white ones) just suck and are angry at eachother :( but in my mostly mexican neighbourhood, people frequently invite eachother over to parties and things
I spent the holidays last year going to a neighbor's house, and hanging out in the balcony, with fireworks popping off from the ''cerro'' behind my home, with beers and loud music, while his boys who're off in Chicago, were videocalling us from their car, in a parking lot, drinking with us and some Mexican friends of theirs, while looking out for cops. The contrast was just sad.
Honestly, I’d probably choose something by the ocean. I DO NOT trust the deep woods in the US. I do not want to go out for a morning walk and see myself staring back at me from behind a tree further down the trail or some devious cryptid garbage like that.
I'm not into cryptid stuff but I understand the sentiment with American woods. Lord knows how many dangerous people are just wandering around wilderness areas looking for random solo victims, given the USAs serial killer/mass murder numbers and how easy it is to get a gun. And it would impossible to ever find a killer like that.
It depends where you go. There are mountain lions in some parts as well. Coyotes and wolves are carnivores as well. Carnivores generally don't go for dangerous prey unless there is nothing else to eat. Just get yourself high enough in the trees where the bears and coyotes can't reach you when you are sleeping. If you are with a group of people closeby, they have enough sense to know that messing with one of you is a death sentence.
I love being alone in the woods personally. I walk in the dark every morning. I’ve listened to missing 411 stories, and I feel fine since I’m not a small child.
Not really. Coastline is very cheap with how much of it there is, and I don’t need to be in a resort town or in the tropics. A sleepy fishing town would be more then enough for me.
And it's usually the same people that make appeals to nature wherever they can, not just when defending capitalism. Funny how easily they contradict themselves
I mean yeah, I p much just by default despise the majority of the country. Would leave it in my rear-view if I made enough money to even be able to save to immigrate. I see no profit in saving the anglos.
It seems like the petit bourgeois in my life all talk like this. I really like people and want them around me.
Of course the people like this want to relax on the beach and have people bring them food and drinks all day. They don't really want to do the survival thing.
The settler dream remains the same, 40 acres, a cleared lawn and no people around.
It is no shock that the number one complaint in our settler state by the proles is that they can no longer afford to own stolen land. Bribe us, they beg, we need our treats!
I feel uneasy when they speak of these dreams, even among my friends. I do not care to own a home, or land. I do not dream of being a landlord.
How can one possibly solve this issue? How does one change the hearts and minds of the settler? How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation? I do not know.
Call me reductive but I'm starting to think you genuinely can't. It will need to die a slow and drawn-out death of ideology, if anything. Nothing else seems to be working, not even threats of annihilation on multiple vectors at scales beyond anything in living memory. Terrifying to grapple with.
How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation?
I think they'd need to see how community is elsewhere- outside the west- to understand. Because there are so many reasons why material isolation would be absolutely preferable over settler-colonial community to most people regardless of ideology.
Community, and society at large, can be an empowering thing, something that betters peoples' lives. It can be a force for harmony and equality rather than racism, alienation, and all sorts of societal divisions. It can be a source of belonging, fulfillment, heritage and culture, etc. This is too often not the case, particularly in the settler-colonial neoliberal societies of the west.
Everything you said is valid, but within this society (and most) home ownership is stability. Rural home and land ownership in settler-colonial countries (or worse, landlordism) is another matter entirely, but home ownership is a metric that many communist and formerly communist countries, China included, are testaments to the importance of. And by "community"- well, there is community, but one has to seek out their own decent spaces here. The mainstream society here in Canada frankly, increasingly disgusts, horrifies, and terrifies me, especially as someone who is a racial minority and a communist. In such a environment, seeking to isolate oneself makes complete sense, though the preferable thing would of course be leaving altogether.
Reminds me of that quote, IIRC from Capitalist Realism, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." The way it's ingrained in some people goes very deep. When their view is that it's capitalism or nothing, it sort of makes sense their only view of an alternative is running away from it rather than confronting it.