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Capitalists are the real "consumers"

Everywhere you pick up a book or a newspaper or watch a story, you'll see the same word: consumer. It's supposed to refer to us, ordinary people, who do the consuming, as opposed to the big important people who are presumably on the other side of the equation: producers, those people who own businesses and "provide jobs."

This language is crazy for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that "consumer" is just a couple shades away from "useless eater," which gives you a good idea of how close the dominant discourse already is to straight up fascist thinking. But more importantly for my purposes here, I'd just like to point out the very obvious fact that the dominant way of thinking and speaking about all this is precisely backward. Straightforwardly backward. Capitalist society is full of these ideological reversals.

It is, in fact, the capitalists who consume and the workers who produce. There are no CEOs on the factory floor, sitting in the call centers, working the fields. They produce nothing, they simply consume. And what do they consume? The one thing that is fundamentally irreplaceable on an individual level, the one thing that you can't ever create more of for yourself: your very life. Every hour that you spend working for someone else is an hour that cannot be recovered. It is consumed in the most literal sense of the word, forever, something that can't be retrieved or returned to you. And it's the capitalist who consumes in in order to take what you've created with your very life-time and turn it into capital for themselves.

You could take this further, of course, and point out all the other things that capitalists consume irretrievably: water, energy, land, lithium, etc. The list goes on. Industry consumes far more than we "end users" ever could, and moreover, we actually get a use value out of the things we consume, we use the things we consume, and there is such a thing as having our needs satisfied, whereas the capitalist consumes simply for the sake of profit, for ever-more exchange in a cycle that *can't* ever end, can never be satisfied.

It's worth thinking about these kinds of things, how the language imposed on us by those who dominate us serves to obscure and even reverse the logic of the real situation.