Thread by @ThoughtSlime

One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that in order for it to function the people in charge of huge multi-national corporations are expected to act in the corp's best interests, but are incentivized to instead prioritize any short term gains over long term ones.

If you could make the corpo $10,000,000 over ten years, or $1,000,000 in one quarter in an unsustainable way that drains your resources and makes future revenue impossible, the corpo's best interest is for you to do the former but yours is the latter.

If you try to convince someone of the benefits of the long term approach, someone else is gonna eat your lunch and explain to your superiors that they could have fiscal growth RIGHT NOW

And so either you:
1. Prioritize the group's well-being over your own, in which case you wouldn't work for a big evil corpo
2. Prioritize your own wealth, thus not serving the best interests of the corpo

in other words, in many ways, capitalism can't best serve even the small group of assholes who it is meant to serve.

The market is not "rational", the market simply extracts. It can't do another thing, even if doing that other thing is in it's own long term best interest.

"The ideology of the cancer-cell" etc etc

We tend to think of capitalism as this meticulous invincible system designed by diabolical masterminds, but it's actually just a chaotic, self-sustaining, emergent property of the division of property.

You can see this principle in action with how capital responds to covid:
Long term, it would have been better for almost every business for everything to shut down for a couple of weeks.
They can't do that while there's even one golden egg potentially left in the goose.

This attitude precedes covid though, it's the same attitude which makes management encourage sick workers to come in anyway, infecting everyone else rather than simply temporarily miss out on one person's productivity.