not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
It’s not capitalism per se. It’s the lazy, stupid populace that allows the system of regulatory capture we have.
The fossil fuel industry also gets a metric fuck ton of tax payer funded subsidies. That’s not capitalism. That’s a quasi state economy.
In a true capitalist system, we’d see more competitive forms of energy taking off, like solar and wind which are cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But because the government keeps fossil fuels going, we’re not getting off them.
Genuine question. how are the voters supposed to keep their leaders accountable?
By voting. The US has set term lengths at every level. If the leaders are not fulfilling their job properly, they get fired.
For representatives it’s every two years.
That requires having an informed and active constituency though, which we do not have.
And it will never happen because the people who control the resources also control the narrative. They promote their candidates, who change the laws in their favour, and progressively make things worse for your average person.
The system you describe is a pipe dream, and it’s a nice dream, but it’s not reflective of the world we live in today.
It’s literally the only possible system that could work. The alternative is just giving unrestricted power to politicians, and the people have no say at all.
Their power is ultimately derived from the voting public. That’s it. That is the power. You either have the ultimate power rest with the people, or the people have zero power.
It’s a cop out excuse to not put in the effort to be active and informed in the system. “It’s pointless anyway” is just defeatist bullshit.
I really wish I could believe in the system as much as you do. I think I’d be happier that way.
However, all the power lies with the capital. The capital controls the narrative, which in turn leads to people voting against their interest. The capital promotes their politicians. The politicians enact politics in favour of the capital. Then ultimately, capital controls the forces.
See for example how Murdoch and Thatcher completely destroyed the newspaper unions in England during the 80s. They went from having really strong worker rights and collective power, to being completely powerless and literally shot at by police within the span of a few years, all due to processes the workers were purposely locked out of.
It’s not about believing in the system.
It’s the only system we can have that the people will have any power. It’s either democracy, or being ruled over. And we will always trend towards the latter if the people abdicate the power they have.
There will NEVER be a time where we can just sit back and say “cool, things are good now, we don’t need to participate in politics anymore”. It will ALWAYS be either fighting to enforce our own power, or fighting to get that power back through revolution.
The power may lie with capital right now, but that’s because >1/3 of people (at least in the US) simply sit at home on their fat asses and don’t even try to participate in the system. And that’s for the biggest elections too. Where things really matter, at the state and local level, primaries where you get a say in who is even on the ballot, turnout is even worse.
Where I am, we have mail in voting, and a ballot is automatically sent to you, along with a booklet with everything on the ballot. The full text of what you’re voting on, a plain English explanation of what it will do, any tax changes that would happen from it, and arguments for and against. For primaries, if you’re not registered with a party you get both ballots and get to choose which one to vote in. It literally could not be any easier to vote. Our primaries this year? Thirty-fucking-six percent. 36%. And that was a “surge” in participation.
You can vote in your underwear at home, for weeks before the election date. And 64% of people still said fuck it, they don’t care enough. **That’s **entirely why the wealthy are able to control things. The people do not give a shit enough about it to even do their basic civic responsibility and exercise their vote, from their goddamn couches.
And what happens when the elections are not-so-subtly influenced by corporate lobbyists and whoever has more money to spend on campaigning?
Then the people need to put even more effort into exercising their power. It’s that simple.
And how do you propose they do that, since it’s so simple?
Well, voting for one. The US has abysmal voter turnout. More people stayed home and said they don’t give a shit in 2024 than either candidate got in votes.
The highest turnout we’ve had in over 100 years is 66%. A full 1 in 3 people that can vote put literally zero effort into voting.
That would be a decent start. Just actually doing anything to participate in the system.
And why don’t people want to participate in voting? Could it be that they feel like their vote doesn’t matter for some reason? Tell me, who should I have voted in 2024 if I’m pro-palestine?
I hear the French have ideas
I think it’s inevitable of any human system that it eventually is undermined by greed and selfishness. Some systems are just more prone to it.
If a system were to work, it would have a way to deal with the psychopaths and other cluster b folks. It’s always been us vs them, throughout history.
Capitalism only works when there’s a big bad Soviet state that they have to compete against in a popularity contest in the global stage, and if they go mask-off it scares all the fence sitting nations into communism.
If 2008 had happens in 1968 everyone involved would have been tried as Soviet saboteurs or something in a big red scare purge. “Using capitalism against itself” or something…
Not to say anhydrous communism is the solution either. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle of ⅔ communism for natural monopolies and necessities, and ⅓ capitalism for luxury goods and comoddities in purely elastic markets.
A tank of gas and a TV cost the same amount of money because competition legitimately worked for the TV, and fucking didn’t for the gasoline 🤣
It’s hard to know if the world would still suck the same under a different system.
But I agree lol
To be fair, what we have in most of the world isn’t actually raw/pure capitalism, most of the time called Laissez-faire capitalism. Most of the world has a mixed economy of different capitalism implantations across the board in different areas: state/regulated/corporate capitalism and best of all crony capitalism.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws. But I don’t have that much faith in human nature to not keep fucking it up like we’ve done so many times.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Here’s the thing…that’s true for literally every form of governance/economic planning you can conceive.
The problem with socialism will always be “the ones with all the de facto power”.
I’d go one further and note that environmentalism isn’t exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.
The real virtue of socialist policy is in it’s ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn’t see the benefit of a good policy, there’s nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.
The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?
At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It’s us or them, over a long enough timeline.
I dunno man. “Capitalism” exists because it’s what we as a people just kind of decided to do. We picked it out of all the options available. I’m pretty sure that we would be doing the same thing regardless of whether or not something called “Capitalism” was ever actually named.
If we want to change that, we have to find a way to entirely change human nature, and that’s a really big ask. I’d love it if it actually happened, but I’m not betting on it.
A basic course in psychology would tell you that’s not how human nature works. “We” (those in power) “picked” (enforced) capitalism because it is the system that benefits them the most.
Some guy didn’t suddenly one day say “let’s do capitalism”. It evolved slowly from ancient barter systems from individual decisions made by everyone in society. These are complex interconnected systems of actions and decisions that evolved over time, fed in to each other, and grew in to capitalism.
Uh, yeah? that doesn’t disagree with what I’m saying. Naturally, as different people and groups came to power through the actions and decisions you mentioned, they acted in their own self-interest. Around late 19th/early 20th centuries, the property-owning class (the Bourgeoisie) started gaining power and the Aristocratic class started losing power, particularly due to the increasing importance of capital and industry in a country’s economy. Eventually, the Bourgeoisie overthrew the Aristocracy in many countries, and began developing and enforcing the ideas that worked the best for their interests, which we know today as capitalism. As for your belief that capitalism evolved from ancient barter systems, here’s the result from a very basic internet search:
The concept that humanity evolved from a pure barter economy to a monetary one is widely considered a myth by anthropologists and economic historians. Adam Smith popularized this narrative in The Wealth of Nations (1776), arguing that money emerged to solve the inefficiencies of barter, such as the “double coincidence of wants.” However, there is no historical or ethnographic evidence that any society relied exclusively on barter as its primary mode of exchange.
Instead of barter, early societies operated on credit, debt, and gift economies. In these systems, resources were distributed through social trust and communal obligations rather than direct, simultaneous swapping of goods. For example, if a baker needed meat, he would receive it from a butcher based on social expectation, with the debt settled later through various means, not an immediate trade of bagels for steaks.
Barter did exist, but it was not the precursor to money. It typically occurred between strangers or enemies who lacked the social trust required for credit, or as a temporary substitute for currency in times of crisis (e.g., post-Roman Europe or modern economic collapses). The “barter myth” persists largely because it serves as a simplified thought experiment in economics textbooks to illustrate market efficiency, not because it reflects historical reality.The only disagreement we seem to have is that you claim it was a decision made only by those in power, and I claim it was decision via systemic interconnected feedback loops that everyone in society participated in over an extended period of time.
Hammer and sickle … I grew up in post communist country, trust me, commies were raping the nature and people even more then capitalism. Find something else to blame.
IDK if capitalism is evil on its own. It’s just an idea. I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think if a better system is implemented in the future, that that would be a permanent solution for all of our problems either. It’s all just the same cycle repeating with different faces and places.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t still strive for a better life for those who come after, and to take care of this planet like we can and should, but I think it’s kind of silly to blame some ideas when we can just look in the mirror and see what the problem really is.
Well… what the past hundreds of years of capitalism has shown us is that it has many faults in practice and is causing the destruction of the environment, no? You can have the greatest, most amazing idea in the world, but if it sucks in implementation it’s not a good idea. You may be on the right track though, I would recommend you watch some videos by the youtube channel Second Thought on socialism
The issue is there’s no real reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism. Countless societies over the ages have faced environmental collapse. The Maya were hardly devout capitalists. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea. Prehistoric stateless humans drove most of the planet’s megafauna to extinction.
We seem pretty capable of decimating the environment regardless of our economic system. A worker-owned co-op can tear down a rainforest just as well as a regular company can.
There is actually plenty of reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism, given that capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences. The two prehistoric examples you gave don’t really make much sense anymore, given that we now possess significantly more knowledge about how our actions affect the environment, as well as the tools to alter the environment in general. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea because they were in need of cotton, but this doesn’t really have much to do with what economic system the soviet union used, just that they were a country that made mistakes. Simply put, capitalism actively incentivizes the destruction of the environment while socialism does not. The People’s Republic of China is the world leader in renewable energy production, has significantly increased its forest coverage, and its CO2 emissions have already peaked.
A better question for the last example you gave might be, would a worker-owned co-op, with the interests of its workers in mind, want to tear down a rainforest to the same degree as a regular company? Or would they deforest at a more responsible level, planting replacement trees in order to guarantee a stable resource and not destroy the environment the workers live in (assuming the workers are owning a co-op in their own rainforest)?
In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there’s no reason that worker-owned co-ops can’t also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You’re not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren’t Captain Planet villains; they don’t pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I’m sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the ‘forests’ are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don’t mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I’m not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It’s Occam’s razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that’s a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.
“Why…there oughta be a law!” /s
once you control a large percentage of a given currency, you become above the law
There oughta be enforced laws. There’s plenty of laws, just rich people have enough lawyers that they make prosecution onerous. Nobody has the balls to cut through the bullshit because rich people will apply all kinds of pressure to a system that has become more and more vulnerable to the pressures wealth can exert.
the fossil gas problem is only about 50 years old. before that, levels were increasing but still manageable. carbon taxes were designed to be a solution compatible with capitalism
Tbf, jupiter looks sexy and huge , so gas chamber planet is novel idea that worthy to pursue.
Earth is turning into more of a Venus situation.
Which has beautiful persistent flesh eating clouds, I fail to see the problem
Where in the Arctic is it “100°”?
Temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic occurred on June 20, 2020, in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, hitting 100.4°F (38°C).
How will we prove that we’re the pointy end of the food chain of we don’t completely destroy everything below us?
Oh, it’s not capitalism doing all that. It’s people. Regardless of the type of government, once people get enough power they start fucking things up for everyone else to benefit themselves. People are shit.
Hence why we should stop giving power to people
Individuals may be dumb, but they’re even dumber in large groups.
Sounds very Randian.
For most of human history power wasn’t given to the most shit, rewarding shit behavior
Rofl
Seriously I love how far up their own asses some people have their heads.
Yeah rofling at history 101
I saw a documentary once and the supreme leader was chosen by a woman in a lake throwing swords at you. Societies went splendidly and were all utopian paradises before Capitalism was invented, that’s why Ghengis Khan and the bulk of old timey figures we know the names of were all renown for their diplomacy and love and those floral crowns they passed out.
Damn, if only we hadn’t invented agriculture, we would have been much better off.
I’m not sure if that’s the link that led to capitalism, but I’m not an expert
No, agriculture lead to civilisation.
What history have you been reading?
They just said human history. Work on your reading comprehension, bro.
Well shoot. And here I thought they were reading up on Martian history. My b.
People’s complacency is what really makes it work.
Oh, it’s not capitalism doing all that. It’s people.
It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Regardless of the type of government, once people get enough power they start fucking things up for everyone else to benefit themselves
Sure, that can happen in any society. The difference with capitalist societies is that this behavior is the socially encouraged one. Capitalism (or, more accurately, liberalism in its classical form) is taking the natural human greed, amplifying it a thousandfold and putting it on a pedestal. It is only natural that people in power in a capitalist system will be much more likely to try this behavior, and much more likely to succeed at it as well.
I think your argument finally convinced me. Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth. You’re right though. Our current structure rewards greed while it spits on hard work, helping your fellow man, and generally all the good things that make society work.
Tell me why a single person can be valued at a trillion dollars. Did that man really do that much work that progressed society? So much more than mine or my neighbor so that we deserve to barely get by?
As a transgender, black , height-disadvantaged man I fully agree with with his argument and find that it has changed my life as well.
Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth.
I think we as a society need to sort of build “antibodies” against that, and be educated to look closer at how self serving the people looking for power are. And obviously that needs a prevailing ideology that is not glorifying greed.
I think that was sort of the idea with the second amendment in the United States, but things were different in the late 1700s. They didn’t havt roving squads of police, backed by swaths of AI detection cameras, who are willing to bomb and murder citizens to maintain order.
I agree, something else sensible needs to genuinely exist. I would like to think it’d be teaching morals and focusing on virtues again. Like making ethics a course as mandatory as science in schools, but the Milgram Experiment makes me wonder if that would even work.
I think the Milgram experiments show the power of authority to both change moral behavior, for ill but also potentially for good. And of course the participants learned from their experience. I’m sure just knowing and really understanding these experience changes people’s attitude towards authority and creates “antibodies”.
Knowledge is power. Just like we have now run the experiment and seen that capitalism is incredibly dangerous and can capture our whole global civilization and prevent action against an existential threat like climate change. Just education and full understanding how and why this happened would create “antibodies”.
Instead we’ve been taught over and over again how endless greed is good. Of course this is just speculation about how stable or unstable a better society could be against zero sum gaming.
I agree with that. Knowledge is a true good, I believe that. The challenge is currently, from my sample size at least, society is apathetic. The desire to put in the effort to learn and the difficulty to change their lives for the better if it inconveniences even for the short term does not really exist. I mean, people freaked out and bought all the toilet paper that existed basically during covid. That’s not a necessity and yet people hoarded it.
I also want a better, more knowledgeable future, and will do my part with the people around me, but I don’t even know how to begin with making a societal change. I tried to get people off Discord when I recognized I didn’t need them and they would do whatever they needed to breech your privacy, and no one left with me even though I gave plenty of equivalent alternatives.
There is a lack of vision of how it could be better. People are angry but are constantly misdirected and distracted, and no groups seem to exist to come up with a viable alternative. Or they are suppressed or I haven’t looked enough, but that is how it feels. It feels like we’re stuck with the current system. If there was a revolution today, what now? The only thing we hear is democratic socialists suggesting that maybe we could lessen the economic cruelty a little bit.
Even the communists on lemmy are mostly “conservative” communists who seem to be mostly talking about 50+ year old textbooks and want to rehabilitate Stalinism. Technology and science (political, psychological, IT, industrial) moved the fuck on you know.
About the selfishness - it’s now surprise because that is what has been taught. And you need education / accurate news, peace / security and modicum of prosperity. Then people can be expected to act with solidarity. You see the change now in Europe. Prosperity - gone, peace - gone. News? We still have better news media but even public broadcasters are somewhat captured by neoliberals, and social media is global. The memes transmit with lightspeed. The leaders don’t know how to do anything else than escalate neoliberalism.
So I don’t see a sensible way forward either, except a gradual but unstoppable collapse and then rebuilding. But there is always hope, and we need to be clear about the reasons. None of this was inevitable. It’s just that the power inequality is immense now. A group of billionaires are vastly more powerful than millions of people. Just compare how much money either group can spend on propaganda and class warfare.
What we should be focusing on now is a better political and economic ideology for the future. And ideally technology that enables higher “tech level” without requiring a global hyper-complex supply chain and pollution, like genetically engineered plants producing biofuels, plastic precursors or bioplastics, medicines, building / insulation materials. Maybe even biocomputing. Solarpunk but by doing actual research and development and preserving knowledge.
It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Unchecked greed is not capitalist tho it isn’t exclusive to any system this argument is just lazy. “this behaviour” is “more likely under capitalism” what behaviour?
What is exclusive to capitalism that is causing this can you articulate it?
One can argue that capitalism is not a zero-sum game because prioritization and valuation of resources is not the same for every individual.
However, from the point of view of financial gain, it is a zero-sum game. In a transaction, only one party gains money (generally). In a zero-sum game where you have the options of share, steal, and give, the optimal strategy is to steal as dictated by game theory. Therefore, capitalism encourages greed.
In contrast, under an economic model such as socialism or communism, financial gain is measured across the entire system rather than any individual. In this scenario, transactions may be a nonzero-sum game because multiple parties can benefit more from working together than competing. Therefore, non-capitalist economies encourage less greed than capitalist ones.
If you’d like any sources about the game theory, let me know.
Cheating to gain an advantage is not exclusive to capitalism :/
Yet another day where no one can articulate what is actually wrong with competing_political_propaganda because it was never the problem it is the distraction.
Cheating to gain an advantage is not exclusive to capitalism
You are correct. Cheating to gain an advantage is exclusive to zero sum games, not capitalism. Capitalism just happens to be a zero sum game, while other economic models happen to not be zero sum games. In which, cheating to gain an advantage is not a winning strategy. The optimal strategy in those cases is to cooperate
Edit: To phrase this differently: under an economic system where sharing is more beneficial than cheating, having more than your fair share becomes a losing condition instead of a winning condition because it decreases the value of future trades and harms the collective valuation of resources. Under capitalism, cheating is encouraged because having more than your share is a win condition.
That is oligarchy/corruption it’s absolutely not exclusive to capitalist countries.
Okay, let’s try the numbers route:
To be clear, “cheat” or more commonly “take” doesn’t necessarily refer to actually cheating the system, it refers to reducing the amount of resources the other player has.
Let’s imagine that in each transaction you gain ‘points’ depending on how the transaction went.
If 1 player cheats and the other shares, the cheating player receives 1 point (this is your standard transaction of giving money for goods or services or working for money). If both players share, they both receive 0.5 points (this is a transaction where both parties gain money, like a brokerage account). If both players cheat, both players get 0 points (this is when you say “fuck it I don’t want it it’s too expensive” or they say “sorry you can’t afford that”). This is the standard point assignment for a capitalist system or a zero sum game. (Assuming the paying party pays an equivalent sum to that gained by the receiving parties. Failing to do so is usually called Fraud lol)
In this scenario, the optimal solution is to always cheat because it offers the highest average point return. Assuming the other player plays randomly (ie, you are a company selling your stocks to an irrational population like in reality), the average is (1+0)/2 or 0.5. Someone who is kind and always shares has an average point return of (0+0.5)/2 or 0.25. Thus cheating is encouraged.
Contrast this with an economic system that is not a zero sum game - one where creating value for other players also increases your value. The exact mechanism of rewarding “share” over “take” is specific to the economic model in question. As an example, let’s pretend you get an extra 0.6 points from Big Brother when you pick the share option. Now, your average point return is (0+1.1)/2 In this scenario, cheating is discouraged because the total points created on average are lower than sharing and in the case of repeated interactions, cheating reduces the likelihood that the other player will choose share in the future.
Honest question: What would you base an alternative system on? I think any economic system needs to appeal to something as basic as self-interest to survive long-term. If a population exists, there’s a sum total amount of labor that needs to be done to sustain them. How do you motivate the labor?
Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn’t mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like “stolen by”) a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don’t glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - “from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs”, a.k.a communism. It wouldn’t be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone… through the state.
Not that capitalism doesn’t have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Also, thoughts on how the ideal system would treat non-essential goods and best motivate innovation in “frivolities?” It’s one thing to want people to stop valuing excess wealth, but people are still going to want movies, video games, food ingredients from across the planet, etc.
After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
A tall order, but I give away a portion of my wealth regularly and like Star Trek, so I get it. Lol.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever.
Not just greed, but every negative human trait that can turn someone into a bad actor. Needing a system for dealing with bad actors and outside threats is how we got all these systems to begin with.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
I’m arguing for literally anything that moves beyond capitalism. Whether it’s a Chinese-style mixed economy where haute capitalists are allowed but regulated, a NEP-style mixed economy where only small businesses are privately owned, a full-blown planned economy where no capitalists are allowed, a federation of co-ops…
Not that capitalism doesn’t have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Through democratic mechanisms, mostly. I won’t claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist “democracies” of the west.
I won’t claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist “democracies” of the west.
Are you saying just the application of democracy was/is better or the overall living under those systems?
I came in to this comment section knowing I wpuld find this stupid ass comment.
There’s a whole school of political ideology about explicitly not centralising power in the hands of a few people
Until there are plenty of wonderful examples of that working out well, long term, in large nations with large economies then it’s as relevant as the Spiderverse.
Because when they started gaining momentum, they got crushed by powerful states.
Sure, but if a thing isn’t viable in the real world then it’s not a very meaningful theory. It sucks, and I wish it wasn’t the case, but we don’t have many lists of utopian societies that worked out and became secure members of the global community.
If the awful people currently in power in the world are just going to burn your civilization down and you can’t account for and stop that then you’re not going to succeed at making something better.
Good news! China lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years using socialism!
China is a authoritarian state with capitalism tied in…
Every state is authoritarian. The workers participate in democracy, and own the majority of production in China. Like I said, 800 million in 40 years.
No they don’t lol, fucking hell you tankies are hilarious.
Yes they do, fucking hell you dumbfucks who just get your information from the news are embarrassing. Do some googling before you open your mouth to me next time.
You guys aren’t hilarious, it’s fucking terrifying the level of confidence you have in your propaganda laden brains.
The people’s socialism of billionaires? Please.
Until there are plenty of wonderful examples of that working out well, long term, in large nations with large economies
I like how you keep having to add qualifiers.
It’s like we can see the strata of all of your previous lost arguments.
Ideology (or religion) has a strong influence. How many people around you or in power believe in solidarity? Empathy? How many in “greed is good” or that it’s perfectly natural to be self serving? What we’re seeing now is not “natural”.
Oh? What is the “unnatural” force exerting influence over human behavior and belief? You can’t try to argue that human thought, human ideology, and human beliefs are aren’t natural to humanity.
What we’re seeing is entirely natural human behavior.
“The problem is people” is eco-fascist rhetoric. It’s not indigenous people’s fault that it’s 100 degrees in the arctic.
Every capitalist society on Earth once started as “Indigenous people” that grew and evolved in to what we have today.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
- how many capitalist societies do you think there are?
- is there some issue with the term indigenous people?
- do you think that if one (or multiple?) societies have capitalism, that growing and evolving will always result in capitalism?
I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at.
- That depends on how you want to break things down. Is all of humanity one society? Do we break it down at the country level? Something smaller?
- Again, I don’t know what you mean.
- Nope, but capitalist societies came from somewhere. All humans have a common ancestor, and started as indigenous people. At some point most of them decided to adopt capitalism.
No it’s the Chinese communist party building and opening a new coal power plant every week, year after year.
They also produce much of the good and raw materials we in the “first world” use, so it’s all for you. All those coal fire plants are for you. And still they have lower per person emissions.
“look what you made me do”
“He who smelt it dealt it”
So, China?
Indigenous to where? We’re all the indigenous peoples of Earth.
And I never said it’s all people. Not all people have blue eyes, not all people are gay, not all people speak any certain language or live any certain place, not all people obsessively amass personal wealth to the detriment of others and/or their environment.
The problem doesn’t have to be all people for the problem to be people.
Okay but why does the picture look like someone put their phone on a flatbed scanner
Or they took a picture of another screen and the camera’s refresh rate caught the display’s scan line.
Do LCDs have scanlines? I thought that was a CRT thing.
I don’t know if it’s the reason for this but even with modern screens you can get screen tearing, which is why stuff like vsync exists. It happens when there’s a very brief mismatch in refresh rates.
Let’s be fair, we’ve made plenty of species extinct just for the love of the game.
