Mine is working fine but Sabine Hossenfelder made a pro-capitalism video that ignores the deterioration of the global market in the 20th century. Can someone send her a bugfix?
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
As Marx points out in Das Kapital it’s not possible to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation since they will find a way to capture the government and its regulatory agencies, so that they work for the capitalists and not the public. So what Hossenfelder failed to acknowledge is that no civilization knows how to defend its regulatory agencies from elite influence. It also fails to address matters like the uneven distribution of wealth, which leads to failure of the state and a whole lot of violence.
And that deterioration of the global market was well underway at the time that capitalism drove the development of penicillin. Capitalist interests also drove the triggers of WWI, the overreach of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequential rise of the German Reich. And, capitalist interests figured largely in the advancement of the holocaust from concentration camps and a deportation policy to an annihilation policy and the genocide machine. ( Behind the Bastards podcast recently released a two-parter on Reinhard Heydrich, the lynchpin official who developed the whole process, worth a listen!) so as capitalism drove penicillin development to save fallen soldiers from infection, it also facilitated the driving motivations for conquest and belligerence, hence the war itself that shot those soldiers up in the first place.
And when I watch Hossenfelder’s videos, usually I can count on her to be more thorough than she was regarding the failures of a system, but it’s not the first time her biases have informed her content.
In these conversations I always get to an impasse because yeah, capitalism is very flawed and produces many horrible outcomes. But communism has failed to work at all (as far as I know). Last I spoke to a communist as passerby was asking for what my conversation partner thought was a example of true communism, to which the answer was “the very start of the Russian revolution”. I won’t pretend to be the most informed about history, and I know that there has been much interference from capitalist countries, but if communism were so clearly a better system would it not have stably worked at least once? I’m having a hard time understanding why that’s a better goal than the countries that seem to reign in capitalism with at least some success.
It’s not about switching and watching it fail. Neither capitalist nor communist ideologies are so much competing, as we’re trying to figure out how to collectively make a society that works. Anarchist / Communist / Socialist theory observes that those who have power will hoard it and get jealous of it. It’s not universally true, as we’ve had kings and capitalists who understand the proletariat need to be treated well, but they are a stark minority, and sooner or later someone else inherits our power.
At the risk of sounding tankie, communism is a dream, a final outcome, a post scarcity world where we all have what we need and can attain the things we want (within reason). So the communist ideology is working out how to get there from here. And yes, this is where the USSR and China demonstrate too failures, in which an authoritarian regime shifted away from the goal towards uplifting the public and towards preserving the provisional regime.
Capitalism has the same problem. If its leaders could work alongside a public serving government without trying to control it, destroy it or supersede it, then ultimately we’d have a regulated economy where rich folk and corporations pay their share of taxes, which assures survival of the people so they can choose their own balance of effort and excess income. But again, the rich, in an interest in preserving their power look instead in enforcing a status quo and bonding the proletariat to forced work rather than striving for a mutually beneficial future.
So we don’t know how to get to the post scarcity future we want, nor how to make it resilient against efforts to game or sabotage it. The Communist Manifesto was merely Karl Marx’ notion of how to start. It’s not to say he knew and it’s a recipe that will work, rather it’s one we hadn’t yet tried.
But right now, in the US / EU markets, those are locked down to only funnel more money and power to the elites while failing to address the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. So it’s only going to get worse until it collapses, and the longer we wait, the more irreversible, long lasting damage is going to be done. So we know the current system as it presently is is borked and difficult to reroute.
Do we try to fix it, or break it and build a new one? Does the looming disaster warrant violence to affect change? These are questions well beyond my pay-grade, and are probably questions that challenge economists and political scientists. Some folks on the far left encourage forming mutual aid organizations meant to help people in the community. As those grow, laborers have more resources by which to outlast strikes or job shortages. I still need to learn more about those. News about Unicorn Riot getting arrested and tried in Atlanta Georgia (for dispensing anarchist propaganda at that) is noteworthy, telling me the state sees mutual aid efforts as a threat to the status quo. It certainly shouldn’t the kind of thing that would be disrupted by law enforcement.
Mine is working fine but Sabine Hossenfelder made a pro-capitalism video that ignores the deterioration of the global market in the 20th century. Can someone send her a bugfix?
Sir this a is a community about firefox
That part is working. Yes. Good job!
Using adblock is like sending people to death camps. You’re literally worse than Hitler to the ads.
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
As Marx points out in Das Kapital it’s not possible to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation since they will find a way to capture the government and its regulatory agencies, so that they work for the capitalists and not the public. So what Hossenfelder failed to acknowledge is that no civilization knows how to defend its regulatory agencies from elite influence. It also fails to address matters like the uneven distribution of wealth, which leads to failure of the state and a whole lot of violence.
And that deterioration of the global market was well underway at the time that capitalism drove the development of penicillin. Capitalist interests also drove the triggers of WWI, the overreach of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequential rise of the German Reich. And, capitalist interests figured largely in the advancement of the holocaust from concentration camps and a deportation policy to an annihilation policy and the genocide machine. ( Behind the Bastards podcast recently released a two-parter on Reinhard Heydrich, the lynchpin official who developed the whole process, worth a listen!) so as capitalism drove penicillin development to save fallen soldiers from infection, it also facilitated the driving motivations for conquest and belligerence, hence the war itself that shot those soldiers up in the first place.
And when I watch Hossenfelder’s videos, usually I can count on her to be more thorough than she was regarding the failures of a system, but it’s not the first time her biases have informed her content.
In these conversations I always get to an impasse because yeah, capitalism is very flawed and produces many horrible outcomes. But communism has failed to work at all (as far as I know). Last I spoke to a communist as passerby was asking for what my conversation partner thought was a example of true communism, to which the answer was “the very start of the Russian revolution”. I won’t pretend to be the most informed about history, and I know that there has been much interference from capitalist countries, but if communism were so clearly a better system would it not have stably worked at least once? I’m having a hard time understanding why that’s a better goal than the countries that seem to reign in capitalism with at least some success.
It’s not about switching and watching it fail. Neither capitalist nor communist ideologies are so much competing, as we’re trying to figure out how to collectively make a society that works. Anarchist / Communist / Socialist theory observes that those who have power will hoard it and get jealous of it. It’s not universally true, as we’ve had kings and capitalists who understand the proletariat need to be treated well, but they are a stark minority, and sooner or later someone else inherits our power.
At the risk of sounding tankie, communism is a dream, a final outcome, a post scarcity world where we all have what we need and can attain the things we want (within reason). So the communist ideology is working out how to get there from here. And yes, this is where the USSR and China demonstrate too failures, in which an authoritarian regime shifted away from the goal towards uplifting the public and towards preserving the provisional regime.
Capitalism has the same problem. If its leaders could work alongside a public serving government without trying to control it, destroy it or supersede it, then ultimately we’d have a regulated economy where rich folk and corporations pay their share of taxes, which assures survival of the people so they can choose their own balance of effort and excess income. But again, the rich, in an interest in preserving their power look instead in enforcing a status quo and bonding the proletariat to forced work rather than striving for a mutually beneficial future.
So we don’t know how to get to the post scarcity future we want, nor how to make it resilient against efforts to game or sabotage it. The Communist Manifesto was merely Karl Marx’ notion of how to start. It’s not to say he knew and it’s a recipe that will work, rather it’s one we hadn’t yet tried.
But right now, in the US / EU markets, those are locked down to only funnel more money and power to the elites while failing to address the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. So it’s only going to get worse until it collapses, and the longer we wait, the more irreversible, long lasting damage is going to be done. So we know the current system as it presently is is borked and difficult to reroute.
Do we try to fix it, or break it and build a new one? Does the looming disaster warrant violence to affect change? These are questions well beyond my pay-grade, and are probably questions that challenge economists and political scientists. Some folks on the far left encourage forming mutual aid organizations meant to help people in the community. As those grow, laborers have more resources by which to outlast strikes or job shortages. I still need to learn more about those. News about Unicorn Riot getting arrested and tried in Atlanta Georgia (for dispensing anarchist propaganda at that) is noteworthy, telling me the state sees mutual aid efforts as a threat to the status quo. It certainly shouldn’t the kind of thing that would be disrupted by law enforcement.