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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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I thought the chemo treatment was WW1.
Are we really gonna pretend killing a bunch of people is better than doing business with them?
WW1? I;m curious as to why your mind went there? I assumed they were referring to WW2, and having to fight against fascism AGAIN.
The rich will eventually pay with their blood. Probably too late, but it’ll happen.
Sorry. We’re stage 4. It’s terminal.
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
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.
What am I rebutting? You linked to an opinion piece and a slander.
Hey no better authority on the evil of socialism than irresponsible anarcho-capitalist assholes, right? Good one, bro
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.
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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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I’m a fan of pragmatism: real solutions to real problems.
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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.
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Of the two, one is still far more realistic than the other.
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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.
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I meant that it wasn’t really very resistant to corruption.
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Casinos have to have rules.
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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Why did you think a well thought out thought would get you upvotes? I mean, it did. But that’s not normal! 🤣
They’re sharing an opinion. Upvotes don’t matter.
I’m joking. Replies don’t matter either.
Actually, very little that we do is important.
But still, just try and laugh when you can (to compensate crying at night)
They currently have 9 upvotes and 1 downvote…
I literally said, ‘It did’
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.
Is there a country that you’d consider a good example of this?
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I’ve so far taken part in revolution by upvoting and by gardening. Capitalism as good as dead
It’s worth a shot.
You should pursue a career in sales.
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.
Not really. Eventually just counting those huge numbers uses so much energy it fries the planet with waste heat.
I’m 14 and this is so deep.
It’s really not that deep lol
I think that’s the point. It seems deep to 14 year olds, but it’s really just a shallow observation if you really think about it.
When you grow up, you’ll see that it’s not.
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.”
Evolution and the stars reside in a local entropy minimum but they speed up the increase of entropy by converting a lot of energy. So low entropy and the global increase aren’t contradicting each other. But yes, I agree equating cancer and capitalism isn’t very useful. Especially when the main problem with capitalism is distribution and not scarcity.
I had an argument with someone about the nature of motivation within a capitalist system. Specifically related to people who find their motivations in non-monetary ends such as personal pride, the greater good, morality, etc. He said that those people were rubes, but I countered that surely those people were suckers. We still haven’t resolved…
You are trying to resolve whether to call them rubes or suckers?
Yep. Hard to tell from a pure capitalist point of view. I’m firmly in the “suckers” camp.
I don’t think greed is necessary. I’d argue markets exist to cater to human wants and needs. If someone is using an inherently fucky system (as all non-voluntary systems are to some extent) to find happiness, then it’s working at least a little.
“evolution is impossible because the second law of thermodynamics says chaos always increases, and the sun doesn’t exist.”
The second law only applies to closed system systems. Neither earth nor sun are closed systems (they interact with each other) and if they were there your statement would probably be true but not for the reason you suggested.
Okay you don’t think it sounds clever. Does it sound wrong?
I think their point is that it sounds clever but it’s wrong.
Yeah no shit that’s their point. My point is they have no substance.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Edward Abbey
Specifically for neoliberal capitalism, it’s a fitting metaphor. The lack of tying capital to any concrete resources, constraints or externalities, with a supposition that infinite capital growth is possible, would actually lead to… the 20th century. Though nobody really buys this anymore, and is clearly just a justification to do horrible things in the name of making money. While greed has and will always destroy lives, communities and environments, the real damage of neoliberal capitalism is that it’s ahistorical. Removing people from the philosophical and social context in which the system was born and operates, makes it hard to see and hard to question for most people.
🔝 Communists centralized economy.
What party of “worker ownership of the means of production” is too complex for you?
The genocide part.
Ohhh - you believe an obvious authoritarian regime when they said they’re communist. I suppose you’ll defend the DPRK as a robust democracy for the same big brain reason.
I’m not sure what any of this has to do with economics, but you’ve made your irrelevant, dumb, definitionally wrong point - I hope it brought you some brief satisfaction.
Ya done yet? Fuck off commie.
You’re trying to insult me with a word you’ve just proven you don’t understand, and you expect that to sting rather than look pathetic?
I’d tell you to just grab a dictionary, but with your tongue buried that deep in the arsehole of the billionaires that are robbing you blind, that’ll be a bit much to ask - maybe take a step back, eh? Sort your life out.
You’re too stupid for there to be any sport in this, and too ideologically chucked to learn - yeah - I’m done with you.
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.
Living 100% sustainably on this planet is counterintuitive to what it means to be human. We don’t need a political revolution, we need a psychological one.
Exactly. Democratic systems serve society better than non democratic ones, but a strong democracy can only be as good as its people. If the voters lack the wisdom to limit their consumption, both for sustainability and their own satisfaction, they’re doomed to make things worse.
Someone with fewer resources can be much happier than someone with a ton of them. Philosophers have long recognized that certain pleasures only grow more demanding when you feed them, while having sustainable consumption and gratitude is much more stable. As you consume something like meth or opiates, your brain gets used to it, requiring larger and larger doses to get the same effect. With pleasures that are similar drugs, this will eventually harm your happiness and well-being. Our brains cannot remain in a perpetually euphoric state, so we must limit these pleasures.
Certain drugs or pleasures are so euphoria inducing that there is no moderate consumption. Some people have a harder time moderately consuming pleasures that others can tolerate, resulting in addiction disorders.
With the wealthy, their greed is dangerous and addictive, but because it often doesn’t directly harm them and they warped society to accommodate it, it should be handled as more of a criminal condition than a clinical disorder. They get hit after hit from opulent excess, but they always try to get more, and will never satisfy their desire. We must criminalize excessive consumption from individual wealthy people.
Average people also overconsume finite resources, but that is better addressed by taxes, regulations, and incentives for alternatives. Law will be used, but not in the same way as when dealing with the rich.
I would disagree, most people want a more sustainable life, be it economical or ecological, people actually vote for that. But we are never given what we vote for, because of pressure on government given by the big corps, we’re always given some half-assed version of what we actually want.
Agreed. Assuming such a thing is playing with the meaning behind words more than understanding the purpose and function of the dogma itself.
I think there’s one important distinction.
Capitalism is a “rich-get-richer” system.
In any finite economy, this is immoral, because one person (or small group) wins, and everybody else loses. By definition. And once you’re a loser, you’re sunk.
So capitalist apologists rely on the illusion/dream of limitless growth because it means they get to pretend that when they steal from you they are somehow “creating value”.
Just because the rich get richer doesn’t mean the poor get poorer. Look at the data.
… The data that shows that as worker productivity increases, worker income doesn’t increase proportionally?
Time for degrowth
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, those billionairs will have a hard time to be only allowed millions instead.
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.
Easy to say when you live in the first world.
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.
COMUNISM is based on the fact that people are nice and honest and won’t abuse power.
Shamefully, this has no correlation with real life.
ANY AND ALL COMMUNIST LEADERS ARE DICTATORS
Okay, you made your point.
Now let’s talk about democratic socialism.
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“No no, it’ll be better this time. I promise.”
That is what “argument is purely against existing historical applications” immediately puts into my head.
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“Am I admitting that I don’t”
Ok monkey, you’re talking about a system of governance that everyone would be a part of in the richest country on Earth. That country being filled with people who have all been taught that “fuck you I got mine” is the law of the world.
Magically, somehow, in every one of every Communist garbage essays I’ve seen on this site; you people fail to recognize the key factor that will absolutely cause communism to fail. People. “No no, control will go to the right people, you’ll see!”
Sick brigading, now shut the fuck up.
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Por que no los dos
Yesss! That works fine if your lefties are balanced with righties in a multinparty system in a modern healthy economy in a wester country. (e.g. EUROPE). it Shamefully does not work in ECUADOR, VENEZUELA ARGENTINA COLOMBIA PERÚ BRASIL And That’s Just the ones I know of.
Let disregard us of a(holes). They don’t have politics, just LOBBYists
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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.
A small tiny example can be this: a communist government buys from China, shitty works, no guarantee, high interests, no local staff hired.
A capitalist government buys (loans) from us and actually has an insurance and guarantee and warranty that their hidroeléctric dam will be finished and 100% of promised capacity.
One is basically STEALING (with help of local president, in south am or Africa or Asia).
The other may make rich people Richer.
BUT AT LEAST THE PROJECT IS DONE.
AND THE US IS NOT ASKING FOR 11% INTERÉS NOR FOR 3$ DISCOUNT ON EACH BARREL OF CRUDE. NOR TO SIGN AWAY THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS IF DEFAULT ON DEBT. (this is Ecuador, I can do Venezuela or argentina or african countries too, just let me know which you want a passionate lecture on.
LET THE DOWNVOATS COMMENCE.
If you’d really like to know, there is a Wikipedia page that has a huge list of dictators killing their OWN population. Even the Austrian painter called his party (Nazionale) socialist…
But if you don’t count him, he would be one of the ONLY ones that has killed over a milion of their OWN people that was NOT a supposed communist.
COMMUNISM IS A FANTASTIC IDEA!
(but not more than that, unfortunately)
I WILL VOTE COMMUNIST WHEN THEIR LEADER IS me. Or an Ai.
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DUDE I LIVE IN ECUADOR. shit ain’t a joke. Comunists are just drug cartels fooling the PLEBS.
Ecuador isnt a communist government, you absolute moron.
15 años de correistas hijodep I’m talking about 11% interest payments to China for projects that aren’t EVER finished… To give 100million to Cuba for generators that are NEVER delivered.
That’s just a small taste of how a former president (Correa) can make 30 years of misery by signing away the country. Argentina even worse it’s now OWNED by China.
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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No, it’s the lack of respect for common sense and the extreme greed of its leaders. Historically 99.99% of comunist leaders live lavish lifestyles, kids in private schools and holidays in miami
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.
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.
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.
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Wow, such a… deep comparison
It is centralization that is killing the planet as the bigger the organization, the more power it has to control and become corrupt. Capitalism would work fine if it actually broke down organizations that got too big and also completely insulated themselves from bribes and influence. For some reason we have allowed corporations to run the show more and more which ironically is not only bad for the planet, but ultimately bad even for them in the long run. We have simply lost control and need to reign it in, but because humans are in the mix and can be bought or often coerced, there is little hope other than war resetting or AI taking over. My money is on AI taking over and while that scares many, humanity’s track record scares me more.
Regulatory capture is inevitable in capitalism. There is no reigning it in. Any small imbalance in wealth can be leveraged into a much larger imbalance. If politicians start glancing their way, then they will setup institutions to protect their wealth–anything from super PACs to Fox News.
This is not a Len exclusive capitalism thing though as centralization in any political or financial is always a risk of getting too big as you pointed out. But it can and has to be managed. History has lots of examples, but it seems to come and go in waves as it is hard to clamp down when the times are good.
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And here I thought the problem was releasing carbon. What a fool was I. Corruption! Once again you’ve ruined a perfect system!
And of course the solution is to not have any centrally organized response. That way leads to corruption!
Not to be that guy, but animals of certain size are seemingly unaffected by cancer. I think Kurzkezadt (or however you spell it lol) did a video on why whales don’t die from cancer.
Oversimplification: Their cancers get so big their cancers get cancer and die before harming the animal
Unfortunately in real life the cancers form a cancer Monopoly and the immune system prefers to protect the cancer over normal cells
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Kurzgesagt
Kurzkezadt
Are you thinking of Kurzgesagt?
(Bonus info: the word is German and means “shortly said”)
It’s been a while since I read about this, but as I recall, most animals (might just be mammals) won’t die of cancer without genetic modification. They have immune system factors that humans are currently considered not to have. (Either that or we eat too much food for it to work, depending where the research is going these days, lol.)
