and just like in biology, you need a system to fight the cancer, you can’t just wish it away.
since we’ve refused to maintain such an immune system, we’re now going to have to go through a miserable period of chemo treatment to rid ourselves of the tumors.
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Sorry. We’re stage 4. It’s terminal.
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
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Wish we’d see that someday
Get into anarcho-syndicalism. Form and join existing anarcho-communist worker’s associations. The only sustainable way for us to end capitalism is if we start collectively associating and operating outside the framework of capitalism today.
Exactly. No revolution occurred because everyone wished really hard it would happen but still played by the oppressor’s rules.
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I’m a fan of pragmatism: real solutions to real problems.
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Yeah, but I don’t think communism is a bulletproof solution either. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.
The real issue is that people think the disparity in wealth should grow instead of shrink.
Maybe there’s a sweet spot in between Capitalism and Communism. They are basically the 2 extremes of the political spectrum after all. Surely there’s a spot on the spectrum that embraces worker’s rights while also incentivising commercial enterprise. Checks and balances are always necessary, even in a utopia.
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Human nature is a mf though
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I mean im Canadian and it sure keeps going that way anyway
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This is the essence, corruption.
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I think many of the socialist states of Asia and Eastern Europe are or were ridiculously corrupt. How democratic those were is of course questionable.
There was never socialism in Asia or Eastern Europe. At no point have the workers seized the means of production and had a dictatorship of the proletariat.
You can apply this No True Scotsman logic to capitalism, too. Its biggest fans say True capitalism has never been tried, either.
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I meant that it wasn’t really very resistant to corruption.
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Not a fan of the genocide though
I read the demands of the Communist Party of Germany and I didn’t see Marx saying anything about that.
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I’m a fan of monogamy with multiple sexual partners.
Gotta be able to get one sexual partner first bud
That’s some copium if I’ve ever seen it
Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives.
shrug
You cite an opinion piece out of Reason magazine and another written by a CATO fellow?
Come on, dude. Do better.
That’s not a rebuttal.
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What am I rebutting? You linked to an opinion piece and a slander.
anarcho-capitalism is not the only form of capitalism that exists
Anarchist Capitalism is a delusion. You’re always going to have someone with a bigger gun telling other people what to do. That’s a de facto state whether Peter Thiel and Murray Rothbard want to admit it or not.
Once you sever democratic control of capital and allow landlords the freedom to raise rents, the ball only continues to roll downhill. People will keep looking for chinks in the regulatory armor (or create them through brute force) until the market system collapses. There is no “regulated capitalism” that endures continuous contact with the corruptive influence of the profit motive.
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power, which will utilize that power to accumulate even more in any conceivable way. The system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced if we care at all for basic human rights and a future for this species.
What is your proposed alternative? I struggle to think of any system that doesn’t inevitably result in concentrations of power
Social Democracy. Commerce is key to strong economies, not capitalistic wealth hoarding.
as a solution to capitalism i propose capitalism (but you get 20 euro of ubi once per financial quarter)
Is there a country that you’d consider a good example of this?
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Concentrations of power is made from the greed of people. Honestly, I beliefe that any sufficiently large society will eventually fall into capitalism, and the other way around, capitalism encourages border-less states, making effectively bigger communities.
However, with the current economic trend of de-globalization, things may eventually change.
Trend of de-globalization? If anything things are more global then ever…
I’d agree, but I think public sentiment for globalization is souring. Right wing populists have been gaining in elections the last 10 years because of this, running largely anti-immigration and economically protectionist. I think they’re predicting a future reduction in globalization based on this.
Hmm, to me it seems like the populist wave has been dying out. At least in the US where they have been getting shit on for the last couple elections
so what is needed is a system that doesn’t allow the concentration of power into one entity that is using this power for personal benefit.
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The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power
No. Capitalism is one thing and one thing only: the private ownership of the means of production. The very nature of private ownership, means private citizens have the freedom to own what’s theirs, and trade it with whoever. The nature of capitalism, meaning its logical end state, is a free market in the truest sense. This is the opposite of concentrating power, because the means of power are completely disunited. In less favorable terms, the logical end state of capitalism is anarchy or chaos
Socialism is the common/public/collective ownership of the means of production. Holding the means of power in a collective is another way of saying it’s being concentrated. The logical end of socialism is the concentration of everything.
Of course, I don’t think we need to take either extreme too seriously. They both have faults, clearly, and they both devolve into something that more resembles the other with time. Capitalism adopts regulations or develop a state to concentrate their power against and enemy. Socialism reduces state power when civilians want more freedoms.
Point is, your characterizing of Capitalism seems misinformed, and it’s incredibly silly to think a fundamental replacement of our current system is in order, as if there’s some perfect ideology we can obviously replace it with
the private ownership of the means of production
You recognize how that itself is a concentration of power, right
No, disunited private actors are not a concentration of power
If you own the source of wealth, you can buy more in a positive feedback loop, thus concentrating wealth and therefore power. Them being private actors means they are accountable to nobody.
I feel like you are both arguing different things. The simple fact of ownership isn’t the concentration of power, it’s the fact that we don’t put limits on that ownership that causes concentration of power. People always argue for or against systems by taking those systems to their absolutes instead of arguing how they should be in practice. If we put a high tax on anyone with a high net worth, high yearly earnings, high estate value, etc., and also take anti-trust laws seriously, then we can largely solve much of that and still operate under capitalism. The problem is more how we are currently operating under capitalism more than capitalism itself, imo.
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I’m not a fan of any overarching system, however capitalism is the one I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, live in. Therefore the best way of addressing the problems our society faces is to do so using the tools that our capitalistic system provides (such as regulation and oversight) rather than twiddle our thumbs waiting for some grand revolution to fix everything.
Claiming that the only way to improve our situation is to completely overturn the system does nothing but promote inaction.
Sitting my kids down and telling them that the only way to send them to college is to keep buying scratch-off lottery tickets.
Angrily insisting that the only other alternative is to tear up the entire higher education system. Its either gambling on scratchers or doing a bloody uprising. No other alternatives.
Silver lining, college is much less needed today than it was 10 years ago in many industries.
Depends heavily on the career path. You can’t really be a registered nurse or a professional engineer or practice law without higher education. The service sector is a complete dead-end. Sales jobs are increasingly miserable and scammy. So much of the economy just… sucks. The jobs that aren’t completely soul-sucking tend to be the ones you need a degree to pursue.
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Just ignore all those times that regulation and oversight have happened and continue to happen in capitalist systems, right?
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Yes, you’ll have to constantly fight against that, but you’d have to constantly fight against greed and corruption in any system. The fact is that they wouldn’t be trying to overturn regulations if they didn’t exist in the first place.
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Good take. I think you could apply that logic to a lot of things, that accepting only extreme change is a recipe for nothing getting done.
You’re a fan of exploitation of the working class?
I am a fan of using ignored and undervalued resources, the unemployed (aka exploitation) in order to give people employment and a stepping stone into better jobs while also providing cheaper products for the ‘working class’.
You aren’t?
Casinos have to have rules.
You can’t have it. It simply does not work like that. We saw what happens when you try that and it’s the world we’re living in. And when I say ‘the world we’re living in’ I mean exclusively the west. This kind of thing gets you and your entire town killed if you try it where the US is allowed to set off bombs.
Yes, with corruption, we can’t have anything. So what I need to do is become the most powerful man in the universe and be loving and kind, but with fair and swift judgment. There is no I ther way. No way possible. OR, we can keep trying.
Adam Smith even said: “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”
So, we need to constantly keep fighting against corruption and harm towards other humans. If not, you are the problem. Instead of always saying how that will not happen, maybe come up with an answer. I mean, since humans keep causing problems, maybe we should get rid of humans? Right?
Yours is a failure of imagination. There’s no alternative between the current order and god from heaven coming down to smite the bad people? Because I say a strategy that was tried in the past didn’t work, and has observable and learnable outcomes, that saying it’s not the path to achieving what you want is the exact same as saying we should kill off the human race? Right?
Batshit reply. Not sure what the Adam Smith filler is for.
No
Well you’re wrong then.
Honestly I think capitalism works so long as you can make sure greedy people can only satisfy their greed through productivity rather than insider trading and buying companies that are competitive or implementing micro transactions into fully priced games infact that’s the reason why I’ve been against stock markets just like how are these people improving life for others
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They’re sharing an opinion. Upvotes don’t matter.
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You’re not joking. You’re saying “I agree with you” in the most obnoxious smarmy way possible.
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They currently have 9 upvotes and 1 downvote…
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If this post gets 100 upvotes then capitalism will fail and everyone will get sex.
You should pursue a career in sales.
I’ve so far taken part in revolution by upvoting and by gardening. Capitalism as good as dead
It’s worth a shot.
Wait what if I am already getting sex? Is this zero sum? Do I lose my sex?
I tried to updoot but it says I already completed that quest
But if you measure growth in made up numbers, you can just keep rolling them up indefinitely.
If we lived in a made up number world where people are resources can just be pulled out of thin air without consequence that would work I suppose.
Hey, it works in Tropico!
That’s called inflation.
Greed seems to be the inevitable outcome, at the expense of other humans and animals around us all. It’s disturbing and has no real end-game of benefit now that we have automation. The question is how do we take back control from the authoritarians?
Time for degrowth
Buh degrowth is genocide 😅🤣
Literally what some ignoramus on Facebook said when I suggested this.
Objectively if we were to scale back enough, many people currently struggling would die. Excess is the only reason they’re still living. Think the rainforest and rain passing the canopy trees enough to still allow life below. Remove the mass amount of rain, that ecosystem suffers.
This is just trickle down economics. It doesn’t work.
It’s working great for those in power.
Handing out new rain to the trees in the canopy may or may not increase rain at the lower levels, but reducing rain at the canopy for sure reduces rain at lower levels.
Over explaining your analogy does not make it more correct.
enough
I mean, yes, if we scaled back enough, people would die. But if we scaled up enough, people would also die. If you drink enough water it will kill you.
many people currently struggling would die
Many people currently struggling are dying because of how much consumption is taking place.
I’m all for an individual decreasing their own consumption for the environment. I try to do that. But decreasing someone else’s quality of life is where it gets dicy. You can very easily get discrimination.
Put a high upper limit only. Don’t touch the bottomline.
For example, no more than 4 cars per person: Average Joe won’t even know this rule exists but it will still reduce mineral mining due to people who collect cars.
Possible problems with my shitty example: Now a car is a controlled substance. Who decides the limit and how? What if there is a mental disease (with a better example this would make more sense) which requires a person to have 20 cars?
I believe that’s called Clarkson’s Disease and mostly affects lovable assholes.
I think a better solution is to give everyone less reasons to need and use cars, that a ban becomes unnecessary. But if we’re putting limits on things to reduce their consumption, that’s what excise taxes are for, most places already do it for fuel.
And of course there could always be taxation relative to a person or company’s environmental impact. People get angry at this one.
NO JAY LENO NOOOOO WE CAN’T SEND JAY LENO TO THE GULAG NOOOO
Cars already have defined limits. You already have to have insurance, for example. They are already registered in a person’s name. This could be actually easily implemented.
Hell yeah, 100% tax over certain net worth.
degrowth doesn’t mean worse quality of life, in many instances it very much increases quality of life.
would you not prefer to work half as much as you do? we can have that with degrowth.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding degrowth. Is it trying to decrease GDP? How does it do that? Or is it moreso increased worker rights and protections with decreased GDP growth as a byproduct? Because I’m all for the second version.
IMO Degrowth would have to start with finding better, less destructive metrics than GDP to measure and plan economic prosperity with
There is an abundance of other methods and actual economists use those other methods.
I believe that the intent is to shift focus away from material goods, since we have long passed the point of diminishing returns on increasing material wealth increasing individual well-being, and focusing on things that actually do improve it, which our system overall neglects. That would be things like meaningful work, community, art, leisure, et cetera. In short, the things that make us happy, but which GDP doesn’t measure.
That makes sense. Those activities are still adding value, but not usually taken into account in economic metrics.
at least to my understanding degrowth is about not doing things that are ultimately not actually productive for our quality of life, the prime example being the clothing industry which churns out more clothes than we would ever need every year and literally just throws it in the garbage, going so far as cutting things up just so people won’t fish it out of the container and wear it without paying.
There are a ton of things like that, which basically only serve to enrich the already wealthy, and if we stop doing that shit and just give people what they need to live regardless of if they have an employment, we can all enjoy life more while also being more sustainable.
The solarpunk movement shows one take on what degrowth can look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
Yeah, but if everyone decreases work, you get less production and less stuff, and then increased poverty. It’s easy to say more stuff isn’t always better from the comfort of the Internet, but the truth is that abundance of material production is responsible for the relative extreme wealth we do have today.
you get less production and less stuff
Not really.
then increased poverty.
You mean the poverty we already have thanks to capitalism?
Yes, really.
And poverty is many many times lower today than it was a few hundred years ago before capitalism. Even entertaining the idea that it’s not is completely insane. Capitalism correlates extremely strongly with low poverty country to country within a single time period, as well. 2023, for example.
No. Not really.
And poverty is many many times lower
Did you come up with this galaxy-brained tripe before or after considering the crushing 3rd world poverty that sustains global capitalism?
Capitalism correlates
According to whom, Clyde? Capitalists?
If your argument is basically just conspiracy theory, than I don’t know what to tell you.
decreasing someone else’s quality of life
Who said anything about decreasing quality of life?
Decreasing someones consumption will likely decrease their quality of life. Assuming they wanted to maximize their quality of life, they would consume what would do that. Though there are exceptions, like limiting addiction or short range fights.
Lemme give you a very small concrete example where reduced consumption will not alter the quality of life.
Take a small neighbourhood, maybe 10ish families there. Everybody in that neighbourhood has basic tools that they use maybe once a month or less. Hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, etc. Instead of each family having those tools, have a tool library where you have 2-3 of each tool. Anyone in the neighbourhood can borrow the tools they need when they need them and give them back when done. Congratulations, you’ve reduced tool consumption by 70-80% with no downsides.
This is just one small example, but there are methods for more efficiently allocating resources within communities.
You decrease quality of life by increasing travel time and resistance to getting the tools, plus rarely not being able to use a tool because it’s in use. But it is an efficiency improvement. Same idea with gymns, everyone can share one place instead of duplicating resources. But then you need to make sure everything gets put away and you need to keep the lights on, so you need to charge for it. All that works under normal markets. It’s just not as good as ideal because people take advantage of each other. We need more oversight to minimize that, but I don’t think it means throwing out the system.
I don’t think walking 1 minute to a library inside your immediate vicinity qualifies as a reduction in QoL. Fair point on the potential very unlikely case of 5 people all needing a screwdriver at the same time, but that can be solved by buying 1-2 extra screwdrivers.
I went to this example specifically because I thought it was not controversial and low-hanging fruit. Nobody is talking about throwing out the system. Book libraries exist, and they haven’t caused the downfall of modern civilization. All I’m trying to say here is that even in the context of our modern capitalist reality, there are ways of reducing consumption without any aggreived parties that we’re just not doing.
Nothing about capitalism prevents you from doing this. I just looked online and there are multiple apps that let you do this. It’s just a hammer is a relatively inconsequential purchase and fairly cheap. It might take $5 in gas and $20 in lost wages just to save the materials in a $10 tool. Not too mention the administration required to maintain this system. Car sharing though and parking share have become popular though.
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Could you link?
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Or not going into store to buy a new knife every time previous one dulls and just sharpening it instead somehow decreases quality of life. TIL.
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Decreasing someones consumption will likely decrease their quality of life.
Riiight… because the sugary sewage water sold by Coke and Pepsi is so vital for life, eh?
I would argue that a lot of consumption, at least in “developed” nations, is driven by artificial demand. Some examples: the tobacco industry, the invention of “halitosis,” bottled water, planned obsolescence. So much of what we produce doesn’t raise, and often lowers, quality of life. Having to meet these levels of demand is deleterious directly and indirectly; being overworked and living in a polluted environment also lowers quality of life.
But that’s not really the point. Viewing quality of life as identical to consumption is pathological and borderline offensive. If you want to increase your quality of life, spend more time with your friends, family, and neighbors. Create in ways that inspire you. Rest and relax. Spend more time in the moment. Go outside and visit nature. Volunteer and give back to others. There is so much more to being human than having the latest phone.
I absolutely agree about artificial demand, especially in situations of addiction or mental trickery. So I think those should be regulated.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, when you reduce someone else’s consumption, you’re saying you know better than them what is good for them. That can often be the case, like in gambling, scams, addiction, and a lot of marketing. But it can be dangerous if you don’t actually know better than them what’s best for them, but think you do.
I guess consumption is a bad word for it. Those activities you mention still have an opportunity cost associated with them, but you’re right, they shouldn’t really be called consumption. Let’s say allocating your effort? People usually know themselves better than someone else how they can allocate their effort for their own good. Limiting how they can do that should only be done when you’re pretty sure you know better than them what’s good for them.
So if I consume 0 bullets with my body instead of 4 bullets will somehow decrease my quality of life?
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Yeah, those billionaires will have a hard time to be only allowed millions instead. /s
Easy to say when you live in the first world.
There is no first world since 1991
I’m 14 and this is so deep.
Not that I’m capitalism’s greatest fan, but this sounds about as clever as, “evolution is impossible because the second law of thermodynamics says chaos always increases, and the sun doesn’t exist.”
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Edward Abbey
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Love how justmy2c is gonna ignore this comment because it completely destroys their argument.
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Yup ignoring your actual argument about why Capitalism is better at regulating greed. Because they know it isn’t, they have to ignore that, and rely on whataboutisms, while ignoring the fact that Capitalism doesn’t even work on paper. Classic.
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Ecuador isnt a communist government, you absolute moron.
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Estados Unidos sells a shit ton of its debt to China, doesnt make it a Communist country you absolute ham sandwich. Lol
If someone wasn’t nice and honest, and is willing to abuse power, what part of Communism specifically allows this to be taken advantage of?
I guess in some forms a lack of authority to make sure people aren’t abusing each other
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Careful now, these are tankie-infested waters we sail teehee
Using “tankie” to mean anything left of center, truly the mark of a complete moron. By the way, rightwingers aren’t people and don’t deserve to enjoy the benefits of being people.
Where did he use tankie to describe anyone left of center? You did that. And then you dehumanized fellow human beings. Great job, asshole!
For me to be dehumanizing them, rightwingers would have to be human to begin with. Which they’re not, as proved by them being rightwing.
Like it or not, rightwingers are just as human as you or me. No other creature on earth can hate like a human can. That’s a wholly human trait.
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Delete your account. Thanks.
Also, you’re trending dangerously close to fascist rhetoric by dehumanizing your fellow man.
Not really. There’s a very simple cure to not being rightwing: thinking for a single second and not acting like scum.
You seem to misunderstand the human psyche.
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Using “tankie” to mean anything left of center, truly the mark of a complete moron.
By the way, rightwingers aren’t people and don’t deserve to enjoy the benefits of being people.
Lmao
I get that your tiny little mushroom of a brain thinks that’s some kind of gotcha on hypocrisy, but it really isn’t… I’m openly communist.
I just thought it was funny
I’m glad you had a laugh, at least.
Yw
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Please, use your two braincells to the utmost of their ability and try to create a coherent sentence.
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A complete moron would start to make accusations from assumptions instead of asking to clarify. I don’t mean “anything left of center”. I’m very left of center. But I do mean the militant and belligerent tankies of the Fediverse of which I see many. I wonder, did the shoe fit or is it an anger management issue?
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Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources. Plus through greater efficiency, the same resources go much further. But it’s often easier to grow by just consuming more, so companies to that since they don’t really care. The sad thing is, I think we can have limitless growth if it’s slow and deliberate and conscious of it’s impact to the planet. But the current system doesn’t incentive that, instead everyone is flooring the growth pedal to catastrophic effect.
Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources.
They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
Better software often needs better (new) hardware.
Example?
I try to use my phones as long as I can and I ran into situations where I couldn’t update or install apps because my phone didn’t meet the requirements
Fuck vendors who do not publish kernel sources.
Games, but games can also just be better and more optimized on the same hardware. It’s just easier to throw more silicon at the problem, and we don’t incentive caring about the planet enough.
But better ones don’t require any more resources than worse ones. So you can increase value with the same resource consumption.
The development of better ones does and so does design, advertisement, …
R&D resources are usually small compared to the efficacy improvements they allow. You don’t need advertisement. Though to achieve sustanability , you’d also need a very long life on products and almost complete recycling.
The topic is growth. There is no growth in sustainability. For your company to grow, you need new features, new customers, … People say this is achievable without resources, I doubt it. That’s what I’m saying.
You don’t need more customers, you could deliver greater value to those customers
Interestingly, better computer hardware is often actually less physical matter. What’s valuable about computers isn’t the amount of material, it’s the arrangement of matter. That applies to both hardware and software. A phone and that same phone smashed have the same number of atoms. That phone and an equivalent from 10 years earlier are pretty close in number of atoms. My monitors and TVs today are a tenth as many atoms as the ones I had years ago.
Buying a phone every year is still about five times the matter of buying a phone every five years. Also: it is quite cynical to count atoms while children work in cobalt mines. The question of resources is more complex.
The matter from previous phones can just be recycled. We don’t really do it now because we’re nowhere near the growth limit OP was hypothesizing, but if it really came to it we’d mine our landfills instead of mountains.
Talking about children is changing the subject, important as that may be. We’re talking about finite materials.
There was an argument that marketing is the ultimate example of creating value without using raw resources by making an existing item more valuable.
Marketing takes human labor at the bare minimum.
It also consumes human labor when people absorb the marketing. This is an externality not accounted for in the cost of marketing, it is large, and it makes resources unavailable for more productive tasks.
Marketing is the distribution of information. Its value is not just a trick or something. You can argue we’re over valuing it, but it’s definitely extremely valuable.
I am saying the costs that are not accounted for, namely the effort spent by every not buying a product consuming an advertisement, is extremely high and outweighs the value of products sold. Moreover, there is no clear reason to think the persuasion of people in mass is good based just on selling more products. Finally, if a person is only persuaded to buy a different brand of product the value is effectively only the small marginal difference between brands.
This is a popular take that is just completely wrong. Capitalism as a system does not require growth. Capitalism is a system in which the factors of production are owned by private parties and can be freely traded. The capitalists believe is that markets will allocate those factors of production to the owners that can best exploit them. This can result in growth, but it isn’t necessary for the system to function.
There are literally a thousand issues with the system ranging from inequality to environmental concerns to market concentration (all of which capitalists tend to ignore). I really do not understand why people pick this one to quibble over.
Because shareholders demand almost always increasing growth despite the factual impossibility to provide that. The gaming sector is a good showcase where trust, release quality & creativity and monetization practices continually degrade the overall experience until the company starts to sink in its entirety. Ubisoft comes to mind. I have been burned so bad by them, started to refuse their products and certainly I seem to not be the only person.
Adding to this, “limitless” growth just refers to the idea that it’s very hard to reach all limits in our present universe.
I agree that there are more important problems with capitalism than if we’ve reached a limit or not.
the u.s. economy is measured in “growth” by average economy anylyst assholes since forever. it’s GPD per X. shitheads love that kind of metric.
There are literally a thousand issues with the system ranging from inequality to environmental concerns to market concentration (all of which capitalists tend to ignore). I really do not understand why people pick this one to quibble over.
so why are you yelling about tangential bullshit that other people are yelling about?
I wouldn’t say capitalism is based on the notion of infinite growth, but it is an inevitability of there being no limits on capital accumulation. The notion that humans have endless desire for more, always needing a stronger hit to maintain personal satisfaction, is more psychological than something inherent to private ownership itself. Capitalism feeds the natural animal reward system to disastrous effect, but it isn’t required for capitalism to work. In fact, insatiable desires are the reason capitalism doesn’t work, because if people could be satisfied with a reasonable amount of resources, never trying to acquire more than they need, capitalism would be a fairly decent system.
All organizations fail eventually. Companies lose focus at the top (management), become like a cancer, over extend, and then die off. The remaining assets are picked off. Same thing with governments. Same with unions. Hell, the same happened with boy scouts. Same thing with churches.
What is described is a human condition, not a problem specific to capitalism. Greed cannot be organized out, legislated against, nor fought with fists.
this is literally capitalist propaganda, human nature is the exact opposite, we’re an absurdly generous and non-greedy species due to how social we are, just like how ants don’t hoard food.
a few select humans who most likely have a number of mental illnesses are greedy, and they have for thousands of years now managed to convince everyone else that they for some reason deserve special treatment to the detriment of the rest of society.
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We never had barbarians pillaging for millennia before the existence of capitalism? Not to mention monarchic governments, conqueror empires? Capitalism is like 400 years old. That other stuff predates it by tens of thousands of years.
yes i said as such in my comment, the majority of leaders in the past were the same as capitalists today, likely narcissists and/or psychopaths who didn’t care that they ruined lives for their own gain, as opposed to the other 99.999999999999% of humanity that is fundamentally programmed to cooperate
this is literally capitalist propaganda, human nature is the exact opposite, we’re an absurdly generous and non-greedy species due to how social we are, just like how ants don’t hoard food.
Pretty cool universe you live in. How can I join? Mine sucks.
I don’t think being a selfish asshole is a mental illness in most cases. Dysfunctional behavior, maybe.
Perhaps greed is a development disorder?
I don’t know about greed, but self interest is the least disorderly instinct a creature can have. Your genetic line will die off very quickly if you constantly sacrifice yourself for society, which would mean the self sacrificing instinct would never propagate. Of course humans are social, cooperative, and self sacrificing under some circumstances, and that’s good because we are often better off sacrificing occasionally. Maybe investing would be a better word. But some base level self interest is good. Kinda like how you’re supposed to put your own oxygen mask on first in a plane emergency. If you try to get someone else’s first, you’ll both go unconscious and then you’re both screwed.
the illnesses i’m thinking of are primarily narcissism and psychopathy.
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Holy shit! Really? Look at every example of communist leaders as their greed and lust for power grew.
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Authoritarian systems with lots of power in few hands are risky. Can happen in capitalist systems aswell, but have there been any non authoritarian communist nations?
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Havent pretty much all communist nations been very authoritarian? Not all capitalist nations are authoritarian
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But I have to make bad analogies barely thought out to dunk on a perceived enemy without actually exploring the issue and root cause in full
It isn’t a bad analogy we are quite literally killing our planet and its ecosystems we need to survive because it is profitable. Capitalism and the greed it fosters isn’t the status quo for humanity regardless of what Capitalist propaganda has tricked you into believing.
This is a comment thread, not a paper. China is the biggest and most successful communist country. They ravage the shit out of the environment and pollute to an extent that is unfathomable. The scams going on are mind blowing. The greed of people is the failure.
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do you believe countries are whatever they say they are? are north korea and congo democratic? was nazi germany socialist?
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