Transcript
A tweet saying "bruh the economy isn't even real, we literally fucking made it up, just let people have food wtf"
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
1074 points (97.6% liked)
Flippanarchy
1524 readers
136 users here now
Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Rules
-
If you post images with text, endeavour to provide the alt-text
-
If the image is a crosspost from an OP, Provide the source.
-
Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
-
Absolutely no redfash jokes. This includes anything that props up the capitalist ruling classes pretending to be communists.
-
No bigotry whatsoever. See instance rules.
-
This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
-
No shaming people for being anti-electoralism. This should be obvious from the above point but apparently we need to make it obvious to the turbolibs who can't control themselves. You have the rest of lemmy to moralize.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The pyramids of giza are obviously fake, capitalism wasn't invented yet so there was no innovation
It wasn't capitalism, but the means of production don't seem like they were owned by the population but rather individuals still. A theocratic monarchy is the closest I could guess to call it. So basically if the U.S. is almost there
True, but this was referring to people saying that innovation won't happen without capitalism.
Yeah, everyone has dreams. Sometimes it's MLK, other times it's Pharaohs. An actual democratic communist society would be nice, but I'm afraid I'll never get to try it out
Defeatism is a poison to progress.
How could they plan this without Starbucks and Microsoft Teams?!
Imagine the scale of the HR department alone.
load more comments
(1 replies)
~~Oh, I know this one! Slaves... Lots and lots of slaves.~~
Probably not, actually! Or at least, not usually. There were a lot of pyramids built over a very long period of time, and ancient Egypt definitely did have slavery in general, so I'm not going to claim there was no slavery involved. However, due to the records we have of the workers getting paid and when they worked, it's thought that most of the labour was done by farmers during the annual Nile floods since they couldn't work their fields at that time anyway
Next question, was the mass slave image created to help push the biblical idea of an oppressed society saved by their deity?
load more comments
(4 replies)
Hmm, learn something new every day!
I thought that was a myth? ^[source]:^ ^a^ ^book^ ^I^ ^read^ ^4^ ^years^ ^ago^
Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Person with degree in Econ here:
Ah, yep. This is correct.
Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic 'schools of thought' pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.
That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of 'economics' the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.
There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you'll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.
Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work... are problematic.
Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic 'schools', such as MMT.
What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems... whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.
And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / 'scientist'.
(I always found the job description of 'data scientisr' to be largely a misnomer, we're basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is 'science'? like we are... discovering new truths about the world????)
I'd say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.
Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.
Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.
Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist's toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Everything starts to make sense when you realise “The Economy” is just a euphemism for “Rich People’s Interests”.
you have to distinguish between "The Economy", which is the stock market, which is rich people's interest, and the "socio-economic situation", which is how much resources the normal people have as income and as cost-of-living.
load more comments
(1 replies)
A LOT of people in this thread seem to completely miss the fact that something is a social construct is can still definitely be real.
Monday is a social construct, but I’m still expected to go to work.
And work weeks used to be 80+ hours, but we changed that. Hell we could change Monday if we had the political willpower.
Hunger is real in the sense that the human body becomes nutritionally deficient regardless of our will whereas the validity of modern food scarcity is a sociopolitical consensus.
e.g. One can swim in the ocean but cannot reason with it.
Work weeks used to be 80+ hours, and "we" changed that, but it wasn't by requesting or voting or something. It was via violent riots involving police beatings and explosives being thrown. And it took decades.
Changing things that the rich prefer to remain unchanged can be done, but it isn't easy or fast.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Of course we can change Monday. It’s a social construct. We made it. We can unmake it. We can make it into something else. That’s the point. It’s also real.
Just like a house is real after we’re done building it.
We’ve built a machine that produces famine. It does not have to exist. But it does. The machine is real. If we want to get rid of it we have to actually tear it down. Again, like a house.
The operative word in social construct is not social. It’s construct.
I think you're really getting hung up on the fact that many people consider abstract concepts to not be "real". Monday is not an inherent and tangible thing, it's not possible to sense it in any way. You can't go outside, look at the sky and go "yep, it's Monday". That might not be how you choose to define the term "real", but plenty of people do define it that way.
Then you're angry about people using hyperbole to make a point about the evils of the powerful.
That's a bit pedantic.
Real in this sense is just being poignant about how the powerful rely on false appeals to the authority of things like the economy to evade responsibility and culpability.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yes, but hopefully you can see that if there was a rule that said you aren't allowed to eat on Mondays, how people might start to question the legitimacy of the concept of a Monday.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
"If we gave them food and housing, how would we force them to perform the labor that generates all my wealth?"
-1%
You make rice, beans, most veggies and micro-apartments ultra cheap and subsidized, so everyone can at least survive. People will be motivated to upgrade, which incentivizes work.
load more comments
(7 replies)
It's made up by people who couldn't provide value to society and had to figure out something lest they be left to fend for themselves.
I disagree, economy is just a term describing trade between people. It means that ypu dont have to be a farmer or fisher to feed yourself, but can be a mechanic and still get fed.
I do agree that the system has been exploited by greedy people with no moral or sense of compassion for fellow human.
I'm pretty sure their comment was pertaining to the current economy we live in, not "economy" as a concept itself.
Idk though, just offering the benefit of the doubt.
load more comments
(1 replies)
If I live in the woods alone, hunting and gathering my food and felling my own timber for firewood and construction, then that is my economy. Economy means how a society allocates their resources. If I live in a one-person-society as a hermit, then me gathering and hunting at least enough food to stay alive and having enough resources to keep my abode able to protect me from cold and rain is my economy.
As economy means simply allocation of a society's resources, it is not possible to not have an economy. There is always an economy. But, it doesn't need to be based on money, necessarily. Any system where goods are distributed to people who need them is an economic system.
So, the OP is misunderstanding the word "economy", but the main point of course still stands: The monetary economy as we see it in our current society is actually purely a social construct. Or simply: "Monetary economy isn't even real, we literally fucking made it up" is correct.
But economy is real.
Are you practicing for the pedantry Olympics
No. But I do get why you'd ask :)
The thing is, for toppling the current economic system, it would be important to understand that there can be different economic systems. And also, that it's not a choice between only capitalism and communism, but that there is an infinite amount of other economic models to invent and use. And their subtypes.
Understanding economy as a synonym for our current money-based economy is strongly in the interest of those who want to keep the current system unchanged.
If you don't understand why having an economy that is thought of is important, you cannot get any useful results by toppling the current one.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
When America conquered Japan at the conclusion of WW2, America overhauled their economic systems. The Zaibatsu were largely dismantled, policies to spread out wealth were installed, and many other things were done to nip totalitarianism and militarism in the bud. While this was purely for selfish reasons, this initiative transformed Japan into a place of prosperity.
It is my hope something similar happens when a 2nd American Civil War is concluded. A rebalancing of the scales is sorely needed, so that the American dream can become reality for all.
Economy is the new god, it even has priests and bishops and shit.
Why shouldn't I do X? Because it's bad for the economy, we can't stop climate chage, that would be bad for The Economy. Etc
It basically is. I remember in 2008 going outside and the birds were tweeting, people were still going around as normal etc. Basically we were told there was no money for anything and people were being laid off because some numbers in a computer said so. The mechanism that was supposed to make sure there was money for starting and developing enterprise imploded and fucked us instead.
Economy is very much real, and it's funny to see Anarchists say shit like this, can't beat the stereotype. Production and its distribution is global, you have to know what and how much to produce either via the use of markets (capitalist) or planned economies (socialist/communist) or via other modes of production and distribution.
You could previously make most things locally so these concepts didn't exist, but that's only because people were mostly living the life of a peasant, but now you have tech, advancements in medicine, and not every state has these kinds of resources.
However, the mainstream economics and its models are bullshit, the more complex people make them the more de-attached from reality they are
I believe that economy can be both a social construct, and very much real
Yes, it is something created by humans that only makes sense in a social setting and doesn't have any ties to the natural world
Yes, it also is necessary and there can be "certain rules" with universal effect, but we are still able to shape the definitions and our views according to human necessity
As a minor gripe: planned capitalist economies are a thing (there is no contradiction in it whatsoever)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
Naive looking titles like these are effective ammo against the people who use it.
Basic economics is as real and essential as law or human language, despite being made up. The problem lies beyond the basics; the stock market has largely become a pyramid scheme that glorifies gambling, which cryptocurrency does by default. It's all of these greed-inducing humanity-destroying contraptions that deserve relentless mockery, defiance, and ultimately, subversion. We need a system where profit is a vice, not a virtue.
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
It’s as real as words are.
One was created to transmit ideas, the other to transmit value. Very related. Both can be abused by those in power.
And language changes all the time
yeah we made it up, but unfortunately for you we made it up so fragile that if someone sneezes too hard you might wake up homeless tomorrow, so we can't just allow people to have food sorry. just drink fewer lattes, ok? it's gonna be fine don't think about the poors.
Agricultural patents aren't real.
view more: next ›