And when Hugo Chávez says things like this, they call him a communist dictator

We live in a meme pool. We should start fining those companies that are peeing in the pool.

Ben Mack's Poker Without Cards is frustrating me. The author talks about the glories of capitalism on one page, and on the next explains how everything which actually characterises modern capitalism - memetic terrorism by an ever narrowing clique of corporate oligarchs, alienation and exploitation of creative labour, the cancerous ideology of perpetual growth - is a disaster that needs to be dealt with. Indeed, I think the author has the problem which many Americans have - no idea of what "capitalism" actually means.

Capitalism is not "the free market". There have been markets in every single social set-up since we got out of hunter-gathering, and there will probably be markets in a classless society. What characterises capitalism is:
a) the ubiquity of the wage- or salary-labour relationship (i.e. someone owns resources, hires labour to turn them into saleable products at less than that labour produces, and pockets the difference);
b) the ubiquity of commodities - increasingly everything, not just goods and services but entire areas of human existence, is produced as a tradeable, for-profit commodity.

Here we are with the occultism of small businessmen again - the middle-class spoilt rich kids who write these psychonautic books understand that capitalism in the big sphere is wrecking the planet, but because they have the social skills necessary to operate as small capitalists and make a profit, then somehow that is all right. The comparison is a middle-class citizen of the Roman Empire deploring the barbaric state of the massive agricultural slave plantations, but considering it only right and proper that they should own a maid, a cook and possibly a tutor for the kids as their personal property. Oh, and that the legions should go on fighting barbarians who might want to take those things away.

Yeah, I don't have those middle-class entrepreneurial skills. I was brought up on what Americans would call "welfare" from a upwardly-mobile working class family background. I only learned these l33t memetic skills because I live in a country socialist enough that even proles can afford advanced university education. But I never learned how to operate in the market as anything other than a wage slave, and when I tried I was abused and brutally slapped down. Perhaps because I don't have the skills to be able to make the system work for me, I can see that the system as a whole is cancerous, not just the parts which don't enable a cruisy lifestyle for confident bullshit artists. And I really, REALLY don't get how people working in a craft which is supposed to harness and control the ego can possibly support a social system which rewards the most success to those who are All Ego All The Time.

Anyway, perhaps more later.

ETA: Oh, here we go:

The way I see it, cultural elites are defending their power and position against a less moneyed mass. The elites resentthe mass for not respecting their place, as dictated by The Law. The lessers accuse the elites of creating the law. Bothhave morality on their side. Both manipulate the law to their own agendas; the elites are just better at it. This is a war
for power that will be played out primarily on television. Those of us who oppose changing the foundation of our government to favor either group will have an additional burden placed on us. We have to find ways to influence public opinion that don't rely on the forms of manipulation we’re trying to stop.

As I suspected - another proud warrior for the Middle who despises the elites and the unwashed masses equally, and wants to work out a way we can all live happily together, the lion lying down with the lamb and not biting it too hard. This is, sadly, once again the grey area where libertarianism and fascism come together, in the shared delusion that society is a unity. It ain't. It's a contradictory unity and if you don't choose a side you're choosing a life of parasitism. Chaos Marxism is on the side of the "less moneyed mass" because that's the side that's going to create a properly human world. And in that world all those middle-class circle-jerks of marketing gurus, designer drugs, fashionable clubs and cosy internet cliques will suddenly become obsolete. It'll be like being a Freemason, two hundred years after that particular meme came to the end of its usefulness.