Reply #47: This is the elephant in the living room....

[Jade Fox]

that no one talks about, because criticizing Capitalism is likely to get you called a Commie or worse by a bunch of jerks who haven't got a clue as to what Communism (or Capitalism) is.

One of the things that even fewer people talk about these days is the toll Capitalism takes on our lives as human beings. "Work, Buy, Consume, Die" is really no way to live. Sure, it beats starving to death in some third world shit-hole (many,if not most, of which have been turned into shit-holes by Capitalist exploitation). But as long as our society revolves around the market, we are doomed to unhappiness.

Here's a quote from a great anti-Capitalist social critic, the late Christopher Lasch:

Individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and wellbeing, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. . . . the market tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles that are antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image.