We live

It's easier to remove a king because a king is a single person, easily identifiable, tangible and living.

An establishment is none of those things, it's murky and unclear, it's lots of different people and nobody all at once.

Guy Debord captures the problem best in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

In theory, you could probably go against it. Problem is that the Spectacle (capitalist ideology visually manifested) is tautological and self-reinforcing. Even to critique it you have to make the critique a spectacle, which immediately undermines that very same critique (think of any YouTube video critiquing YouTube).

So no, it's no the same. The odds are insanely stacked up in favor of keeping the structure in place—unlike breaking away from said belief in the divinity of kings.

I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?

OK, how?

Refuse to buy things? Live in a cardboard box?

RIP. She wrote the best dragons

This is a nice idea. But, it’s an oversimplification. To replace capitalism, we’d need to replace it with something more powerful.

Kings were overpowered by the merchant. If we want to overcome capitalism, something new must overpower the merchant.

What does removing the king look like in our deeply ingrained, hyper capitalist society?

Nothing makes me feel better about the hopelessness in America more than platitudes. (/s)

The fact here is that most people are paying triple for groceries, 30-50% more for their rent, and have to work multiple jobs to survive. They're not going to care that Trump or DeSantis are fascists. They're going to care that Trump or DeSantis aren't Biden.

Good may come of it, but not without a ton of carnage in the interim.

Permanently Deleted

"We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources, because they align people’s incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources."

If there exists another system that can do this more efficiently, it hasn't been discovered yet.

Well it took America proving democracy works and WW1 to topple a couple of monarchies.

Capitalism is imo so hard to remove because it's a system that evolved out of our base biological nature. It's a system very close to what's "natural" if we didn't have much education or philosophy.

We have the possibility to think about better systems and ways to inhibit our base nature, but that requires effort and a willingness to do that. I think capitalism is what comes out if you don't do this.

I notice in myself all the time the impulses that fuel capitalism. To acquire more resources. To better my status. To be selfish at the expense of others. I have to work actively against them to live my life in a way that I think is right, and I still fuck up often. Unless everyone understands this and does the same, this system will stay.