Your average capitalism enjoyer

I appreciate the critique, but no, money is not

only worth anything because if you don’t pay the state then it will do Bad Things™ to you.

That’s “modern” (from 1905) monetary theory (MMT), which ignores that money is a commodity and can and did historically exist before states.

Michael Roberts writes:

Modern states are clearly crucial to the reproduction of money and the system in which it circulates. But their power over money is quite limited — and as Schumpeter said (and Marx would have said), the limits are clearest in determining the value of money. The mint can print any numbers on its bills and coins, but it cannot decide what those numbers refer to. That is determined by countless price-setting decisions by mainly private firms, reacting strategically to the structure of costs and demand they face, in competition with other firms.

Marx argued that money in capitalism has three main functions: as a measure of value; as a means of exchange; and “money as money” which includes debt payments. Marx’s theorisation of money as a measure of value derives from his labour theory of value; and this is the main difference between Marx and the Chartalists/MMT supporters, who have no theory of value whatsoever.

Money only has value if there is value in production to back it. Government spending cannot create that value — indeed some government spending can destroy value (consider the case of armaments, for example). Productive value is what gives money credibility. A productive private sector generates the domestic product and income that gives government liabilities credibility in the first place. When that credibility is not there, then trust in the state’s currency can disappear fast, as we have seen in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Argentina.

MMT essentially boils down to good old keynesianism in the end. It’s still a thousand times better than neoliberalism of course, but merely reformist, not equipped to handle capitalism’s crisis and not willing to transcend it.

our whole society is inherently a social construct

today’s system of survival Capitalism

it’s not “today’s system”, this is not a different kind of capitalism we are living through; it’s simply the logical continuation of capitalism.

Capitalism means profiting from owning. This systematically means, as the meme says, “line goes up”. The line must go up, otherwise owning stops being profitable, and capitalism stops. We’re just at a point where the avenues to keep growth going are becoming harder and costlier to reach, and each time those avenues are explored, they make the next ones costlier. So we’re all getting squeezed, both as workers (mass layoffs, multiple jobs etc), and as consumers (enshittification, product quality deterioration, price increases).

This is unavoidable; European countries that are currently more livable than the US will inevitably face this as well, they just took the scenic route

Why is there this idea that personal property such as phones are specific to capitalism? Why does making or reading memes have anything to do with enjoying capitalism? Other social orders also allow for making memes and using phones.

Although I do agree most people don’t benefit from capitalism, only the top 1% do so yeah the meme doesn’t really make sense in that respect.