> The third worlders fighting over cobalt don't want peace, they want wealth for themselves.

They are enabled into fighting by big, huge interests. They ship them weapons and rationales.

Who are the customers in the end? Western nations. They create the abject poverty, they use poor governments to exploit and enslave their own people. There is no "poverty" in the world only exploitation. All poverty is fabricated and sustained.

Why is it that Mali is one of the poorest nations on earth but is also one of the top 10 exporters of gold? How does that work?

Capitalism is not voluntarism. That is the myth of philosophical liberalism.

To say that someone who owns as much wealth as a few million people is equal to those same millions of persons who directly own nothing except credit(debt)? It's a myth.

Voluntarism would only be true if we were on equal economic standing. Therefore voluntarism implies that no one can be coerced or leveraged, its a moot and infantile viewpoint of social dynamics.

The "silent majority" has no real way to speak. You choose candidates based on talking points who can then REALLY do anything they please. That is called "trusting campaigns", not democracy.

In reality what happens in elections is that we are choosing a group of people to enact policies based on the market-demands of a society that cannot control its market/production. There is a huge disconnect. It's not a real influence WE have. It's an influence that is given.

IE. The majority of people dont want to use plastic materials for anything related to their consumption. But plastic is cheap and easy to produce. I'm sure that if given a choice people would rather their society work a bit more, spend a bit more of human-energy if it means we dont have nuts full of microplastics.

It is how we produce that determines what choices we have, and how we produce is determined by market dynamics which are reduced to sustainability of production and profits. It is profits that determines production, not consumers' will.

So tell me: if we dont directly control the options we have, but you say we are making a choice, what is that?

There is another word for that. Coercion, manipulation.

I dont want child soldiers killing for control over resources or kids mining for 12 hours a day, I want a good, cheap phone. It is not the same.

Is there really no other way? I would sure as hell try to have it any other way.

Whoever conflates these is doing so because they profit off of it, not because its the only way.

In capitalism the heads of production and their profits determine the directions of our societies.