A story by IVOR TYMCHAK
Fuck You, Capitalism
‘This machine creates fascists’ should be written on the casing somewhere. It encapsulates the ultimate goal of capitalism: the elimination of all human kindness. It demonstrates how capitalism seeks to actively destroy human connection – Fuck You, capitalism, as I call it.
In the beginning, capitalism just wanted to make a profit.
A car park is a straight-forward example. It cost x to construct it and y to maintain. The owner works out how much they would need to charge each car to cover those costs over so many years to break even. They add a profit margin to the charge to make the whole project personally worthwhile. Drivers could happily park and the carpark owner was happy to make money. In reality though, the car park owner was making more money than was shown in their business plan. Customers needed a ticket to park their car so they had to estimate the time needed to conduct their business and buy a ticket for that period of time. If they finished their business much earlier than expected and left the car park with unexpired time on the ticket then the owner could make extra profit from another customer coming along soon after. The space was paid for twice over. The car park owner should have been more than happy with this outcome.
But then the owner observed humans operating in the real world.
What tended to happen was this: an early returner would walk up to a stranger studying the paying machine and offer them their ticket with however long there was left on it. I know this because I was often the recipient of such a gift. Sometimes, the time left was sufficient for me to complete my own business and it didn’t cost me a penny to park. But I remembered the favour being passed onto me so naturally, if I found myself in a similar situation, I too would offer my ticket to whomever was studying the paying machine. And I felt good doing it. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. I wanted my money to be fully utilised and go as far as possible even if it meant sharing it with strangers.
The car park owner however doesn’t care about any of this.
They just want profit.
So observing these people give away their profit makes them mad. Now remember, they’re not being cheated because the customer has paid for the time. All they’ve done is share that time with a stranger. They’re practicing socialism. The car park owner’s profit is exactly as they’ve calculated, more so, in fact. But they get greedy. They buy a new paying machine.
This new machine requires the customer to input their registration number. The ticket only applies to a particular car now. It gets the customer to do administration work too, like some unpaid clerk. It requires them to read new instructions and jump through hoops in a particular order. It requires them to remember a sequence of letters and numbers. And for what purpose? Purely to deny the passing of a favour to a stranger.
If you think I’m over-reacting about this particular example you clearly cannot see how this scales up into life and death situations. Take Nestle.
In underdeveloped countries, mothers breastfeed their babies. I won’t go into the long list of benefits this provides for both mother and baby but if I did it would give you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Nestle makes formula milk. For profit. Some Nestle employees saw all these mothers breastfeeding their babies for free and got mad. Why should they cheat Nestle out of potential profits?
So the Nestle sales team starts persuading mothers to switch to formula milk. They use every deceitful trick they can employ such as dressing up the reps in nurses uniforms who then tell the mothers how bad breastfeeding is. Mothers switch to formula milk and are then forced to buy the milk along with the bottles, etc., and learn the process of sterilisation. Of course, things go wrong and the sterilisation isn’t up to scratch (or even non-existent) and some babies get infections and then die. Needlessly.
But hey-ho, that’s Fuck You, capitalism for you.