this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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What annoys me about this meme is that it is the same relationship that underpins all business relationships. I understand you are not happy with the state of things but showing a drawing of “capitalism” at work in nature isn’t really making the point you think you are making.
This might as well be a pic of two guys in suits trading on a stock exchange floor with the same caption. Or add this to a caption to a pic of a lion eating a baby gazelle while its mother watches from the tree line. What point are we even trying to make here??
Business relationships may be mutually beneficial to those who willingly enter them, but unlike symbiotic relationships, they're usually detrimental to the ecosystem as a whole.
How profitable for both sides business relationships are detrimental to economic ecosystem?
In the example regarding the brokers look at whos labor they're profiteering from it's not their own.
Are you talking about broker taking commission when buying and selling stock? They provide service of buying/selling and the commission is the service fee. Why is it not their labor?
Moving fake numbers representative of labor is not in itself labor. It's extraction of labor value from someone who actually provided something useful to society.
Moving numbers or information representing anything or nothing is a service processed to the one who purchased the service - to the person or institution that wants to buy or sell stock. Why is it not labour? Do you not count sales person actions in a store as labour?
It’s an interesting argument but I think it is stretching things too far. Also isn’t a little anthrocentric to assume that our relationships are unique and different than all other living things here.
A pine tree drops needs that are so acidic few other plants can grow near it. Is it damaging the ecosystem?
Our relationship with bovines is weird right. probably the most successful large mammals on earth. Their success is completely due to being a great machine for turning grass into human food. It’s symbiotic in a lot of ways: we clear pasture and kill predators for them, but also, we eat them. Great for the cows and us, sucks for the trees and wolves.
Ants and aphids have a similar relationship. Great for the ants, and the aphids, not so much for the plants.
If you want to conflate human economics with the natural world, you would have to admit that nature is the domain of the most ruthless of capitalists. Christ, the whole point of a lot of leftist thinking is that we must “rise above” our animalistic nature.
but that's not an inherent symptom of buisness relationships but rather of the ones conducting them. symbiotic relationships are not usually harmful to their environment because they are usually specialized for that niche and can't just move somewhere else. humans (for themost part) can and thus aren't as immediately affected by the detrimental effects of their buisness relations (or we actively ignore those detrimental effects)