Hell yeah, this is the free gifts of nature in a nutshell.
[…] the “free gift of Nature to capital.” Capitalist exploitation and accumulation, as Marx explains, ultimately depend on capital’s usurping of nature’s gifts for itself, thereby monopolizing the means of production and wealth in its entirety
Probably better sources, but this is the first best one I found.
So… farming is a free gift from nature?
Close. Farming is labour, which is what gives economic value to the free gifts. The capitalists skim excess value from this process in the form of wage theft and other fuckery.
I’m simplifying, but yeah.
I think the implication of the last panel is supposed to be that the apple seller can’t stop everyone, but if this was really an accurate satire, he’d chop down every tree, sue everyone that picked the apples, and then go back to selling his giant flavorless GMO apples for $5 a piece
I’m not 14 years old enough to get this
I feel like this is a metaphor, I’m just not sure for what yet.
It’s a metaphor about 13yo kid trying to understand why people pay money for anything when you can get stuff for free. The only thing a kiddo comes up with is that some people are bad and will chop trees down. Then they go to lemmy.ml and post dumb shit.
The main question around this comic that makes it hard for me to derive a message is, who planted/cared for/owns the apple trees?
I’m reminded of a speech from Gus in Better Call Saul, where technically a tree from his homeland was wild, but he was the one that made the effort to water and care for it before a critter started stealing from it.
I wouldn’t follow ethics in business advice from a meth dealer explaining why he killed a wild animal.
