Submitted 3 weeks ago by Yasmeen@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Tbh I don’t get “shopping”/“retail therapy.” Obviously I have wants for luxuries, but usually I pine after these for months and hold off on the decision until I feel I have saved enough and worked hard enough to justify it. Spontaneously going out to buy luxury items is a much rarer impulse for me.
Ah but have you tried just never thinking through the consequences of your actions? It seems like about 75% of people never do.
Iddon’t buy shit I need, but I can get behind the feeling. When I walk through the hardware store I would like to buy a grinder, a saw, a drill and many more things. Not that I need any of them, because most is already in lower quality at home, but I really would have fun buying shit.
I really like shopping for clothes but I don’t buy new I always go thrifting. There is something so satisfy with finding a nice unique dress that fits right for $10.
Most of my local thrift stores have LOST THEIR MINDS. The goodwill’s carry target clearance, for the same price target cleared it for.
Most are now savvy to what old properly made clothes are worth. most of the fun of thrifting had priced me out of participating. If i’m going to pay 80% of the retail price, I’m going to buy it new, or buy it dirt cheap from china.
Yeah, Same here honestly
My brother in the Invisible Pink Unicorn, you can still shop in communism. And whatever you need is free.
No you see capitalism is commerce, and both have always existed. Somehow everyone knows this true fact, which is super normal.
Obviously ancient history shows humans never had any trinkets, toys, or keepsakes until the Industrial Revolution/s
To be fair, Usagi did go on to cure death and create a neo-socialist workers paradise while bloodlessly uniting all the people of earth…
All the people of earth at that point were the few people in Japan that she happened to save from a global freeze. So, bloodlessly is probably not the right term for that.
Eeh, Great Freeze was an ecological disaster caused by sailor chaos. When Usagi is interred on the Silver Throne after revealing herself as Neo-Queen serenity, she restores the population to their rightful place on earth, then loses her daughter to time manipulation hijinks, which prompts her to ally with Sailor Mars embark on her great crusade to unite the Sailors and find her lost sons, accompanied by her loyal yet enigmatically powerful servant Mamodor…
More evidence yet that Capitalism wins over Marxist-Leninism the end.
This is blatant consumerist propaganda!
Also shopping not fun. I want to walk into a store and pick up Balsamic Glaze and leave. I don’t want to have to assess the minute differences in weight, cost, and quality of 30 different products that are all in the same race to win over my dollar and maximize their profits.
A couple of years ago they started putting the per kg price under the item price in Germany. At first I thought that’s for idiots who cannot calculate. Now I absolutely love this. I hardly even check the item price anymore, my eyes go straight to per kg. Fuck my idiotic entitled smartass past self, per kg prices are the best thing that ever happened to capitalist supermarkets
In the US we have a mix of:
And different products from the same category will choose different ones so you have to do the math anyway.
E.g. Sometimes our berries will be sold in split tubs so you’ll get the price for the whole thing and then on the comparison tag a price for half the tub. That will be sitting next to a different brand of the same berry in a package 2oz smaller and it’s comparison text will have the price per Oz, sitting next to that is an entire other brand and it will list the price of the whole unit and in comparison will list the same price again labeled explicitly as “per unit”.
Like every thing the US manages to shit out it’s an utterly terrible system.
You can still shop under communism
No, communism no iphone vuzelevuela
Its only fun with the suffering included.
I heard that Marx was, ironically, rather financially irresponsible and often had money troubles. Once he had money he spent it all on parties and nice food and such.
Gauche caviar of him ngl
[x] Trigger half of lemmy with one post
💖🧸 come on Marxi, let’s go party 🎉💖
You can touch, you can employ
You can exploit my labor all day . . .
I’m a Marxist girl
In a Marxist world
Life in proletariat
I can bear it
If we have a communist revolution, then we can all go shopping at the free store!
Artists not having to worry about money means they’ll all disappear though 😭 /s
compelling argument.
Will the sailors be there?
If they are, I’m not going. Something terrible always happens to whoever they hang out with for the day.
Have you ever been to a free shop?
Exactly! All the stuff is yours AND you didn’t spend a dime!
Only at OPs mom’s house…
I get it now 🥲
That’s more of a climate critique between Russia and the US.
Right.
Because communism doesn’t exist, it’s completely free of problems.
(not /s, by the way.)
We didn’t get fat by accident :)
I think he probably considered this - part of commodity fetishism?
Nah that’s when you get off on 5 tons of iron ore that you only symbolically own
It’s a chore. And boring. And a chore.
It’s so strange, when my mother used to tell me we were going shopping it was just misery. We were going to k-mart or woolworths where she would stop and look at every piece of clothing in the store. twice.
In the end she’d buy nothing, or one thing. Hours of time before devices, I was left alone in the toys section where i’d have seen everything of interest in 5 minutes.
Wife or I go shopping, it’s a surgical strike. The first acceptable item, bought, and extracted.
I do like going shopping but that’s because then I get stuff, and having new stuff is cool. But you don’t need a capitalist hierarchy to make any of this happen
Library socialism can do that
Yeah but under communism you have a leader who puts a collar on you and calls you a good puppy and you waf at them :3
I’d like to wear a collar and be called a good boy. That’s about as far as the fantasy goes. I don’t really like the puppy play stuff. Certainly things about it I like but not as a whole. Also if I may inquire, what is uniquely communist about that?
Under capitalism, nobody calls you ‘cumrad’.
It is my definition of communism which i think is much better than whatever the fuck Karl was doing.
Well then do i have an opportunity to preach the good word of syndicalism to you.
I prefer foraging in the forest.
Sidebar, actually accounting for human behavior isn’t as simple as telling people to not be cruel to one another.
I won’t upvote this, but it did make me laugh
oh god my brain hurts
Trade would be more fun
One side of me shuns consumerism.
Other wants to participate in the stereotpical feminine tradition, out of spite.
Thrift shopping!
I adore thrift shopping but it can become an easy way to lift your conscience after overconsumption. I have a friend who tries to buy nothing new and good for her and the environment, but she constantly treats herself to thrift shopping sprees, realizes that she doesn’t need most of it shortly after, and declutters boxes of stuff each week and puts them in “for free” giveaway cupboards in the city where, let’s be honest here, 80% of the stuff ends up getting trashed. Tldr: thrift whenever you can but it is no excuse to go berserk.
Is shopping for groceries fun?
Didnt get it
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
No, he did not.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism
tl:dr, Marx described that capitalism produces a semi-religious veneration for and obsession with products themselves, as a byproduct of alienating the worker from the work, from themselves, from their humanity, and from others.
An extremely rough, modern, internet slang way to say it might be ‘you being a shopping addict is basically you just being kinky for capitalism’.
stickly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Marx’s analysis doesn’t make the meme incorrect. He could be aware of the visible effect without fully understanding it’s mechanism and potential magnitude. Let’s not forget that Marx was working on Capital while the cutting edge of behavioral and cognitive science was phrenology ffs. His pool of knowledge and prognostic fidelity were fundamentally limited.
Shopping and commodity addiction are no doubt exploited by capitalism but the neurobiological causes will exist independent of any economic system. You could live in a socialist utopia and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.
In the language of the meme, Marx considered “Shopping is fun” but not “Shopping is so fun! ❤️”
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days is because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
In capitalism, the consumer need only care about two things: the product, and the price. This makes it easy for consumers to compare products and prices, and pick the best “bang for the buck”. Which in turn, incentivizes production efficiency.
Sometimes externalities are factored in. For example carbon taxes. But these are simply factored into the price, so the consumer can still compare products and prices like before.
This “commodity fetishism” that Marx complains about, is exactly what makes capitalist economies so effective and efficient.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Not true, not since at least the 1950s, or at least incomplete and misleading.
The consumer also cares about what the object implies about them, how them having that object will make them feel about themselves and others feel about them.
Commodity Fetishism.
This is why almost nobody does the extremely literally grounded-to-the-product marketing of the 1800’s anymore, they all switched to selling emotions, identities, concepts… attached to the object, conveyed by the object.
Its why capitalist economists have for over a hundred years been plauged by things like ‘animal spirits’.
This, and other things like this, contibute to actors in capitalism being not actually rational, neither at a micro or macro level.
A vast chain or network of irrational decisions, compounded over time, is not what I would call flatly ‘efficient’.
JIT logistics are efficient in the short and medium term.
They’re catastrophic in the long term.
You can say thats because the externalities of all the fuel consumption are not properly factored in, I can say the predictable future rises in many forms of insurance that will be created by climate change are being irrationally ignored… because the logic of capitalism incentivizes that delusion.
Hopefully I do not need to explain that it is extremely obvious that capital markets are also not rational, that ‘efficient markets’ are … not.
"Guys lets spend $5 bazillion dollars on AI! Oh whats that? 90% of companies saw no to negative productivity gains from the largest reallocation of capital in human history?’
Capitalism may be efficient in the short to medium term, and but its extremely inefficient in the long term.
Capitalism also has within it many forces and effects that redistribute and concentrate real wealth upward as it generates new real wealth.
Eventually, broadly predictably, the credit supercycle peaks and then crashes… and you get a mass immiseration, as the sum of years or decades of delusion must now be reckoned with.
Short to medium term efficiency and stability.
Long term, predictably inefficient and chaotic.
So basically, yes, commodity fetishism is part of what makes capitalism efficient, but that efficiency is short to medium termed, and it reliably produces delusion and long term instability… which I would struggle to describe as ‘efficient’.
ragas@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Wow that is pretty weak reasoning entirely focused on his perogative.
Counterpoint: Take a craft market where the people selling are actually immediately the people making the thing. Isn’t it nice to buy something pretty there? And isn’t it an added bonus that you actually got to talk a bit to the people there?
So the effect of being happy to have something nice works beyond disembodied consumerism. And is even heightened by personal contact.
mattyroses@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
You’re just talking about alienation here
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
The entire point is that capitalism makes craft markets exceedingly rare, it makes that experience you describe more uncommon, it makes everything more abstract.
The commodity fetishism grows out of that, the more abstracted away the thing is, the more mystically and irrationally products are treated by people.
Hell, in the US right now, you can find tons of stuff at ‘Farmers Markets’ that are actually just some product of a massive corporation being rebadged, repackaged, and trying to get flipped for a margin.
That ‘authentic’, ‘small-batch’, ‘bespoke’ product? Yeah that’s just a marketing tactic now, in many cases.
Stanley cups? Beanie babies? Fast fashion? Pokemon cards? Fancy pantsy sneakers?
Perfect examples of fetishized commodities, consumed and ‘shopped’ for with essentially crazed, religious zeal.