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.
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. Fascism is the malignant tumor.
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.
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.
I'll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don't think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don't see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don't see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That's not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That's a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can't individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn't much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I've seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have seen what other people do to communal tools.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? I used to be part of a maker space and the tools were generally well cared for, and members normally donated anything we were missing
The biggest thing is tools just going missing. Joe brings it home to work on whatever and never brings it back. It's pretty common with hand tools if people are allowed to bring them to their homes.
Other common problems are people not caring for stuff properly. Not changing the oil on lawn mowers, for example.
So you're going to ban products that you personally don't like? Or anything that isn't strictly utilitarian? No flavour in our drinks, no snacks, no smoking, no anything else...
Are you suggesting I've never had oranges squeezed then drunk the juice? What an absolutely bizarre assumption.
I'm fascinated to be honest, like at some point you've had fresh orange juice and it was such a magical experience you can't imagine anyone else living through it? Or you found a dusty shack in the woods where a wizened old man let you use the juicer hes been hiding ever since whatever dystopian hell you're from banned them.
Fresh orange is pretty good, I very much recommend spending a day in a spanish orange grove, smoking weed, listening to miles Davis and drinking fresh orange over ice. The stuff in bottles is pretty much as good, in the US they do frozen concentrate which is really good because it's frozen when fresh so you still get all the nutrition and taste plus it takes up less volume so easier to transport and better for the environment.
By almost as good I mean like good stuff is a tier, fresh off the tree on a sunny day is a tier
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Limitless growth of what? Limitless growth of time past is inevitable for example. Wealth can grow with increased comfort, so I guess to come to maximum wealth you'd need to achieve total human fulfillment. I hope you can agree we've got a long long way to go till that.
You think money can't buy happiness? Somehow some rich people manage to still be miserable, but most poor people would be free to be much more happy with more money.
Infinite growth of what? Is infinite growth of happiness possible?
People need to meet their most basic needs, doesn't have to be through money. We've just set up society to work that way.
Capitalism in particular, is an incredibly stubborn idea that's difficult to throw away. And we've rigged the system to make it difficult (almost impossible) to give up.
Hell, the U.S. is notorious for trying to overthrow governments around the world who don't subscribe to capitalism, and the U.S. governments way of thinking.
At the scale of mankind, the universe is effectively infinite. The sun has another billion year to go and outputs so much energy it's virtually infinite to us.
No, that's literally the definition of growth (the variation of GDP from one year to the next, the GDP itself is defined as the sum of gross value added). We can make growth out of thin air if we want, it's a purely accounting metric.
I sell you a pebble for a $1000 and you sell it back to me and we created $2000 of growth without anything physically happening.
You missed the point. Everything you are describing is hypothetical. Cash and dollars are physical, but "value" and "growth" that you have described are hypothetical.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hypothetical", these aren't hypothesis, these are their definition. And their definition means they are limitless, just as the definition of "beauty" or "numbers" make them limitless. They aren't bound by the physical world.
(also dollars are equally abstract, currencies exists as human convention, having $1 billion more in your bank account is just a few bits flipped in a database)
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.
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.
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.
Threads like this make me miss the sort by controversial. Oh well. If you have chores, or something else to do, maybe go do that instead of reading this thread. It's mostly shit slinging and people straw manning one another.
If anyone else came here to just talk about stuff, I'm willing to talk about how great cats and dogs are. Also open to hearing you out if you don't like cats or dogs, but I want you to know that I strongly disagree with your opinion.
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.
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.
Not an immediate solution but if or when we can make space safe to work and live in, that might unlock an infinite supply of resources, which would support infinite growth.
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!"
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
thats why we have space companies and a moon covered in mineable minerals
ngl if humanity can figure out some way of sending everyone to space, we totally should
might be better for the climate if done right
Where did this meme of "capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it's impossible and bad" come from? Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous
Riiight... that's why we're the most destructive agent on the planet since the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs - because we "do more with less." Wtf?
and as societies get richer in material wealth
Which societies, Clyde? The ones that capitalism has impoverished so that a small minority can pretend their privileged lives are (somehow) "normal?"
they produce fewer children
And that's a good thing, is it? You know we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights, don't you? As in... no capitalism required at all?
90% of the stuff you encounter day to day would have been considered science fiction only a few decades ago. That doesn't answer whether capitalism actually requires growth, which it doesn't, or where the meme came from.
Our production efficiency, production per inputs, is larger now than in the past. That's doing more with less.
Which societies
These countries tend to be the most capitalist, meaning private ownership of the means and subsequent free exchange of goods and services, and they also tend to be the most wealthy with low poverty. That distribution matches fertility fairly closely. Link
that's a good thing, is it?
It is if the thing you're worried about is the impact of the human species on the rest of the planet. Fewer people means less impact with the same per person impact.
we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights
been considered science fiction only a few decades ago.
Feel free to show us the "infinite" resources you have access to any time you feel like, Clyde.
That’s doing more with less.
No. We are doing more with more. The rate at which our industries are churning through resources would have been unimaginable to anyone a century ago... and so would the wastage it creates.
private ownership - free exchange of goods
Try not to get entangled in logical contradictions in the very same sentence, Clyde. When everything is privately owned, it's only the private owners that gets to engage in a "free exchange of goods."
the most wealthy with low poverty.
And the fact that these countries are all beneficiaries of hundreds of years of hyper-violent colonialism has nothing to do with any of this, of course.
It is if the thing you’re worried
No, I'm actually not worried about it. The "overpopulation" myth is right-wing propaganda and nothing else - it's the ravenous and utterly parasitic profiteering of capitalists themselves that are driving over-consumption. Not the world's poor.
Legal rights are a luxury good, unfortunately. Kinda seems like capitalism is in fact required.
So you are fine with your modern-day feudalism... as long as your capitalist overlords throws slightly more crumbs your way than they do everybody else.
They're just referring to the fact that the universe we live in is no "finite system" per the meme
Riiight... that's why we're the most destructive agent on the planet since the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs - because we "do more with less." Wtf?
Yes exactly! They're not saying that's a good thing but that's exactly why!
Which societies, Clyde? The ones that capitalism has impoverished so that a small minority can pretend their privileged lives are (somehow) "normal?"
Regardless if the distribution of that wealth is acceptable, growth has made the overall society richer in material wealth. The distribution of that wealth is an entirely different question.
And that's a good thing, is it? You know we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights, don't you? As in... no capitalism required at all?
I'd say destructiveness of humans is kind of a Bell curve shape where the X axis is wealth. Cavemen don't affect the environment that much mostly because there can't be that many of them. Their production methods can't sustain large or dense populations. Then people in 1900 are quite destructive because they can sustain billions of people while spewing pollutants, etc. Then people today are less destructive because we have the wealth to care about such things. Wealthy countries are doing pretty well.
For crying out loud, Clyde... you need a bunch of science nerds to tell you something this obvious? Fine.
Lol, very first sentence in that source:
Three mechanisms influence the fertility decision of educated women: (1) the relatively higher incomes and thus higher income forgone due to childbearing leads them to want fewer children. [...]
Because you were replying to this statement by OP:
and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
In short your source doesn't support your claim, but it does story OP's claim
How deep does one's head have to be up one's own arrse to believe that this...
and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
It's not a meme, its both the theory and practice to require constant unending increase in profit. That is the central point that eliminates all of your points except for the one about the universe having infinite resources - my dude we do not have access to the UNIVERSE, all we have is this one planet, and due to the distances involved, space opera is bunk and every stellar system is going to have just that stellar system. Do you think that a trade route that takes 400 years to travel is going to be of practical use over a lifetime?
I do believe productivity has increased quite a bit more than wages, but that makes sense if you think about it. Productivity gains in the last few decades are not due to workers getting more skilled or working harder (which may still be a factor), they're because of technology, automation, information science, and global trade networks. If my boss upgrades my computer such that I can produce things twice as fast, why should I get paid more?
I have never really understood this meme at all, it just seems like a cynical nothing-burger cry. No substance.
Capitalism isn't really based on theoretically infinite growth. Maybe the idea is that monopoly is assumed, in capitalist ideology, to not exist, in the same way that people talk with ancaps, and they (ancaps) wish away monopolization with dogmatism to an unenforceable liberal brainrot NAP? I don't think any serious capitalist ideology discards monopoly. Not any worth engaging with, anyways. Oil barons know that the resource they peddle is finite, and everyone generally knows that every resource is theoretically a finite thing, and so is every market, and thus, all markets in sum. That's like, your basic supply and demand curve. It doesn't just go up and down linearly like the ones they use to explain to brainlets, actual supply and demand curves look fucked up because the market is weird, and they all totally plateau at either extreme end. If you charge a billion dollars for a single orange, you maybe will only get a buyer if you name the orange "X" and the buyer is [redacted]. Maybe the idea is that if you market a product enough, even if it's bullshit, then you could just charge a gazillion dollars for it and have it be over the natural or necessary amount, and I'd agree with that being capitalism but I don't really think that's like. limitless growth, that's just marketing, that's just bullshit.
Capitalists often use this assumed finity to price gouge, maximize profit, that's why you dump oranges in the desert to keep up the prices of oranges or whatever. Maybe that's like, oh, they're assuming the oranges to be infinite, but that's because oranges are recyclable. You can grow more oranges, and if we scaled back orange production massively, making it more efficient, we'd still have enough oranges for everyone (Degrowth, I guess? It can be even more efficient if you grow local flora instead of oranges but ech). Maybe you can't have infinite oranges if some other sector of the economy is dumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but for like, 10,000 years of human history, you can grow more oranges, and you can grow more oranges until the sun expands and burns the earth in like 2 billion years.
If I read this meme in a different way, the fucked up thing about this meme is that it's not real. We're not like, at the end of civilization just by some natural factor of luck, or something, or you know, suddenly all the human creativity has petered out. That would almost be better, in a way. The human creativity is actively being suppressed, underfunded, bought out and scraped for parts, because it's easier to sell people actual bullshit year over year, in a cartel that you basically control all of, than introduce something new.
At my least graceful reading of this post, it kind of almost becomes malthusian, or something. Limitless growth! Grow the market limitlessly! Of course that means we must have a limitless population! And if someone's getting mad at that fake bullshit, then what they probably really believe is that there will be/there is too many people. But then that's all instance number 700 of getting mad at a spook.
But it's also like, how are you tracking growth? Cause if growth is just entropy, I think it probably is limitless.
Let me tell you my experience with communism centralized economy as the alternative.
Planned economy = produce as much as possible, more you produce more you are rewarded. It doesn't matter if you make 100x more then it's needed than trow it away. Inefficiency doesn't matter.
Ecology ? Foreign westerner propaganda. That there are no fish, animals, half of the plants spiecies disappeared is westerners fault. Emissions ? Nothing can stand in our plan.
We produce more than anyone yet people's wellbeing is still behind west? That's not true, there are fascist to the west and it's just western propaganda. BTW if you mention it, you won't see outside for quite while.
Now let me tell you what happened after end of communism.
Nature almost recovered because crazy amount of efforts put into it's protection despite it being expensive.
If anyone produces more than people need, they ususally go bankrupt or at least are not rewarded for loss. Thus everyone tries to go as efficient as possible.
Wellbeing went up 10fold.
I don't know about OP but capitalism seems kinda best option to me ATM
Economic output doesn't have a 1:1 relationship with the planet's resources. Many countries grow by offering services as opposed to goods. Not all goods have the same negative externalities in terms of harming the planet.
so... capitalism doesn't exist in a world with infinite growth potential. fiat currencies do and when tied in with capitalism, "infinite growth" is a goal. nuance is hard but not too difficult
Limitless growth because competition and technology are supposed to grow with it. It worked really well till big tech showed up and gained a monopoly on everything
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
in biology normal cells are controlled by nucleus and it's hereditory... so it is nepotism and zero rights for others so it's also bad thing like communism
Just because someone is advocating against capitalism, that doesn't mean they are advocating for the Soviet Union / any modern dictatorship that claims to be communist. Please stop the binary thinking
Because interstellar space believe it or not it's not empty so we also get mass from it?
My god even if we chopped all the trees and burned all the petroleum and bombed the whole Small part of the planet we live in with nuclear weapons, even if all humanity that ever lived in this planet was alive and lived their lives again for a million years, we'd still have about 50 thousand trillion trillions of atmosphere to go before we consume it all. And don't get me started on the water
And guess what, even making that effort it wouldn't be enough because life would continue.
That's right, we suck even when trying to destroy the planet
Btw, capitalism doesnt mean infinite expansion any more than a socialist or marxist state could. Except if I point to anything, you guys scream "its not real socialism!" Until you are blue in the face.
But wealth and resources aren't a closed, finite system. Wealth can be infinite. Food can be grown everyday. Water falls freely from the sky. Capitalism isn't the issue. Being dependent on somebody else over being self reliant is the issue.
This doesn't make any sense, since when earth became a closed system?
Also capitalism is a system. A human one. Its not biological in nature as it is an abstraction. As such it can change or disappear or be re used again and again and again.
There is no internal mechanism for human systems that say "hey create more of this system and then die at this point" or "hey build more of this system to fix this and that" or "hey created these new systems to evolve"
Humans do that, not the systems we create
Like it or not nobody wants to die, not even a tiny cancer cell. so it is in our best interests to expand into space to multiply our chances of survival.
We are not adding materials (...yet, mining asteroids isn't that far fetched anymore), but we also aren't removing any either and can recycle old stuff into new stuff. Also we get a constant supply of virtually limitless energy from the sun.
We can just recycle coal/natural gas/oil after burning it?
Indeed we can. That's not to say we should keep burning those resources right now, but the carbon is not disappearing into an alternate universe either.
Earth is definitely a closed system. When you propose expanding to space, you are literally going out wide that system, but Earth is definitely limited
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.
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. Fascism is the malignant tumor.
The rich will eventually pay with their blood. Probably too late, but it'll happen.
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
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.
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.
Of the two, one is still far more realistic than the other.
I'll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don't think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don't see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don't see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That's not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That's a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can't individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn't much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I've seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
One was implemented and is actively ruining the planet.
The other was only used as a façade by dictators that didn’t feel like labeling themselves as right-wing.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
Human nature is a mf though
I'm a fan of pragmatism: real solutions to real problems.
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.
I think you're projecting your tribalistic tendencies onto literally everyone else on the planet.
This is the essence, corruption.
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.
I meant that it wasn't really very resistant to corruption.
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.
Not a fan of the genocide though
I'm a fan of monogamy with multiple sexual partners.
Casinos have to have rules.
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.
You're a fan of exploitation of the working class?
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
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.
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)
You're not joking. You're saying "I agree with you" in the most obnoxious smarmy way possible.
Thanks man for the compliment! It really means something to me :) And I'm not even being sarcastic. Just lack of attention & human affection I guess.
They currently have 9 upvotes and 1 downvote...
I literally said, 'It did'
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.
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
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.
Hell yeah, 100% tax over certain net worth.
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.
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.
Not really.
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.
Did you come up with this galaxy-brained tripe before or after considering the crushing 3rd world poverty that sustains global capitalism?
According to whom, Clyde? Capitalists?
If your argument is basically just conspiracy theory, than I don't know what to tell you.
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.
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.
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.
I have seen what other people do to communal tools. I bought my own tools because I know they will function and actually exist every time I need them.
I will not stop you from sharing tools, don’t stop me from using the fruits of my labor to buy my own tools.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? I used to be part of a maker space and the tools were generally well cared for, and members normally donated anything we were missing
The biggest thing is tools just going missing. Joe brings it home to work on whatever and never brings it back. It's pretty common with hand tools if people are allowed to bring them to their homes.
Other common problems are people not caring for stuff properly. Not changing the oil on lawn mowers, for example.
Could you link?
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.
What a dumb oversimplification disguised as a gotcha
Riiight... because the sugary sewage water sold by Coke and Pepsi is so vital for life, eh?
So you're going to ban products that you personally don't like? Or anything that isn't strictly utilitarian? No flavour in our drinks, no snacks, no smoking, no anything else...
You barely have any flavor in your drinks right now. Do you even know what real orange juice tastes like?
Tell you what... after we get rid of all the class-enemies and collectivised everyone's toothbrushes we'll decriminalize cocaine, okay?
It won't be communism... but everyone will be too high to care - which is close enough.
Are you suggesting I've never had oranges squeezed then drunk the juice? What an absolutely bizarre assumption.
I'm fascinated to be honest, like at some point you've had fresh orange juice and it was such a magical experience you can't imagine anyone else living through it? Or you found a dusty shack in the woods where a wizened old man let you use the juicer hes been hiding ever since whatever dystopian hell you're from banned them.
Fresh orange is pretty good, I very much recommend spending a day in a spanish orange grove, smoking weed, listening to miles Davis and drinking fresh orange over ice. The stuff in bottles is pretty much as good, in the US they do frozen concentrate which is really good because it's frozen when fresh so you still get all the nutrition and taste plus it takes up less volume so easier to transport and better for the environment.
By almost as good I mean like good stuff is a tier, fresh off the tree on a sunny day is a tier
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?
bet you thought you wrote something smart
Yeah, those billionaires will have a hard time to be only allowed millions instead. /s
https://youtu.be/ikJVTrrRnLs
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.
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 are dying because of how much consumption is taking place.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
By definition limitless growth is impossible. It just doesn't work.
Limitless growth of what? Limitless growth of time past is inevitable for example. Wealth can grow with increased comfort, so I guess to come to maximum wealth you'd need to achieve total human fulfillment. I hope you can agree we've got a long long way to go till that.
That's just another way of saying we should just keep on doing capitalism the way we are now.
Happiness, or human fulfillment, whatever you want to call it isn't a state you just reach.
Exactly, that's why you can always improve, which is usually reflected in increasing wealth.
You're completely missing the point. Happiness, or whatever name you want to give it has very little to do with how much money you have.
But again, infinite growth is not a thing in a finite system. That is a fact, not an opinion.
You think money can't buy happiness? Somehow some rich people manage to still be miserable, but most poor people would be free to be much more happy with more money.
Infinite growth of what? Is infinite growth of happiness possible?
People need to meet their most basic needs, doesn't have to be through money. We've just set up society to work that way.
Capitalism in particular, is an incredibly stubborn idea that's difficult to throw away. And we've rigged the system to make it difficult (almost impossible) to give up.
Hell, the U.S. is notorious for trying to overthrow governments around the world who don't subscribe to capitalism, and the U.S. governments way of thinking.
Economic growth is an accounting measure, and so it can definitely be limitless.
If you have infinite supply of something, it ceases to be a scarce resource with any intrinsic value. Literally nothing in the universe is infinite.
At the scale of mankind, the universe is effectively infinite. The sun has another billion year to go and outputs so much energy it's virtually infinite to us.
That's a hypothetical
No, that's literally the definition of growth (the variation of GDP from one year to the next, the GDP itself is defined as the sum of gross value added). We can make growth out of thin air if we want, it's a purely accounting metric.
I sell you a pebble for a $1000 and you sell it back to me and we created $2000 of growth without anything physically happening.
You missed the point. Everything you are describing is hypothetical. Cash and dollars are physical, but "value" and "growth" that you have described are hypothetical.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hypothetical", these aren't hypothesis, these are their definition. And their definition means they are limitless, just as the definition of "beauty" or "numbers" make them limitless. They aren't bound by the physical world.
(also dollars are equally abstract, currencies exists as human convention, having $1 billion more in your bank account is just a few bits flipped in a database)
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.
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.
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.
Threads like this make me miss the sort by controversial. Oh well. If you have chores, or something else to do, maybe go do that instead of reading this thread. It's mostly shit slinging and people straw manning one another.
If anyone else came here to just talk about stuff, I'm willing to talk about how great cats and dogs are. Also open to hearing you out if you don't like cats or dogs, but I want you to know that I strongly disagree with your opinion.
Reminds me of this article: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
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.
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.
Best way to deal with late stage cancer is radiation.
Not an immediate solution but if or when we can make space safe to work and live in, that might unlock an infinite supply of resources, which would support infinite growth.
Spot on analogy.
Capitalism is a cancer
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.
"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.
"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.
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
Love how justmy2c is gonna ignore this comment because it completely destroys their argument.
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.
I guess in some forms a lack of authority to make sure people aren't abusing each other
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
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.
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
They hate you because you are right they don't understand LATAM
Careful now, these are tankie-infested waters we sail teehee
I'm a brave soldier, they can call me what they want, but I'm ONLY RIGHT WING WHEN IN SOUTH AMERICA
In Europe I'm left wing!
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
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.
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.
Or visit south America for a decade to find out comunism isn't that great either. EVERY SINGLE FAMILY IS AFFECTED WHEN INFLATION IS 200%
Even IF they were animals, that just makes them even more worthy of respect by leeches like u
Delete your account. Thanks.
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?
So basically you don't get banned on lemmy for calling people subhuman? Like the Austrian painter... On flikflok it gets you banned.
Ps do you actually thing You Are Better. OR JUST THAT OTHERS ARE WORSE?
Please, use your two braincells to the utmost of their ability and try to create a coherent sentence.
Dude if you have trouble comprehending, just let me know what part and I'll explain in detail.
Downvote brigades arnt very nice, but they also are pretty lame.
A classic deepity
thats why we have space companies and a moon covered in mineable minerals ngl if humanity can figure out some way of sending everyone to space, we totally should might be better for the climate if done right
Or a planetary infestation.
The base of the economic problem is how to divide finite resources to an infinite need.
I got bad news, we are the cancer
Is there any evidence socialism can actually work at scale? What if capitalism is the best we got?
Where did this meme of "capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it's impossible and bad" come from? Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
Sci-fi is fictional, Clyde - not prophecy.
Riiight... that's why we're the most destructive agent on the planet since the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs - because we "do more with less." Wtf?
Which societies, Clyde? The ones that capitalism has impoverished so that a small minority can pretend their privileged lives are (somehow) "normal?"
And that's a good thing, is it? You know we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights, don't you? As in... no capitalism required at all?
Is their name Clyde or is this a joke I'm not getting
It's what I call people whose brains don't match up to their egos.
Why Clyde?
It seemed better than Kevin. Or Nigel.
90% of the stuff you encounter day to day would have been considered science fiction only a few decades ago. That doesn't answer whether capitalism actually requires growth, which it doesn't, or where the meme came from.
Our production efficiency, production per inputs, is larger now than in the past. That's doing more with less.
These countries tend to be the most capitalist, meaning private ownership of the means and subsequent free exchange of goods and services, and they also tend to be the most wealthy with low poverty. That distribution matches fertility fairly closely. Link
It is if the thing you're worried about is the impact of the human species on the rest of the planet. Fewer people means less impact with the same per person impact.
The capitalist west is the most abortion permitting part of the world. Legal rights are a luxury good, unfortunately. Kinda seems like capitalism is in fact required.
Feel free to show us the "infinite" resources you have access to any time you feel like, Clyde.
No. We are doing more with more. The rate at which our industries are churning through resources would have been unimaginable to anyone a century ago... and so would the wastage it creates.
Try not to get entangled in logical contradictions in the very same sentence, Clyde. When everything is privately owned, it's only the private owners that gets to engage in a "free exchange of goods."
And the fact that these countries are all beneficiaries of hundreds of years of hyper-violent colonialism has nothing to do with any of this, of course.
No, I'm actually not worried about it. The "overpopulation" myth is right-wing propaganda and nothing else - it's the ravenous and utterly parasitic profiteering of capitalists themselves that are driving over-consumption. Not the world's poor.
So you are fine with your modern-day feudalism... as long as your capitalist overlords throws slightly more crumbs your way than they do everybody else.
They're just referring to the fact that the universe we live in is no "finite system" per the meme
Yes exactly! They're not saying that's a good thing but that's exactly why!
Regardless if the distribution of that wealth is acceptable, growth has made the overall society richer in material wealth. The distribution of that wealth is an entirely different question.
You have any proof for that statement?
Other person here.
I'd say destructiveness of humans is kind of a Bell curve shape where the X axis is wealth. Cavemen don't affect the environment that much mostly because there can't be that many of them. Their production methods can't sustain large or dense populations. Then people in 1900 are quite destructive because they can sustain billions of people while spewing pollutants, etc. Then people today are less destructive because we have the wealth to care about such things. Wealthy countries are doing pretty well.
They are free to show us the oxygen they harvested from Pluto any time they feel like it.
Your proof for this?
For crying out loud, Clyde... you need a bunch of science nerds to tell you something this obvious? Fine.
Lol, very first sentence in that source:
Three mechanisms influence the fertility decision of educated women: (1) the relatively higher incomes and thus higher income forgone due to childbearing leads them to want fewer children. [...]
I swear... it's moments like these that it really seems like liberal brain-rot is even more debilitating than the fascist variety.
Which part of...
...didin't you understand the first time around?
Because you were replying to this statement by OP:
In short your source doesn't support your claim, but it does story OP's claim
How deep does one's head have to be up one's own arrse to believe that this...
...requires capitalism?
It's not a meme, its both the theory and practice to require constant unending increase in profit. That is the central point that eliminates all of your points except for the one about the universe having infinite resources - my dude we do not have access to the UNIVERSE, all we have is this one planet, and due to the distances involved, space opera is bunk and every stellar system is going to have just that stellar system. Do you think that a trade route that takes 400 years to travel is going to be of practical use over a lifetime?
I think that's somewhat debated now, with the original numbers being revised way up
I do believe productivity has increased quite a bit more than wages, but that makes sense if you think about it. Productivity gains in the last few decades are not due to workers getting more skilled or working harder (which may still be a factor), they're because of technology, automation, information science, and global trade networks. If my boss upgrades my computer such that I can produce things twice as fast, why should I get paid more?
then why are humans only living on this planet and not mars?
yes, there are other planets, but we don't know of a single one that can support life other than earth right now
billionaires are fucking over the environment and overworking and underpaying their workers for a bit of extra cash
I have never really understood this meme at all, it just seems like a cynical nothing-burger cry. No substance.
Capitalism isn't really based on theoretically infinite growth. Maybe the idea is that monopoly is assumed, in capitalist ideology, to not exist, in the same way that people talk with ancaps, and they (ancaps) wish away monopolization with dogmatism to an unenforceable liberal brainrot NAP? I don't think any serious capitalist ideology discards monopoly. Not any worth engaging with, anyways. Oil barons know that the resource they peddle is finite, and everyone generally knows that every resource is theoretically a finite thing, and so is every market, and thus, all markets in sum. That's like, your basic supply and demand curve. It doesn't just go up and down linearly like the ones they use to explain to brainlets, actual supply and demand curves look fucked up because the market is weird, and they all totally plateau at either extreme end. If you charge a billion dollars for a single orange, you maybe will only get a buyer if you name the orange "X" and the buyer is [redacted]. Maybe the idea is that if you market a product enough, even if it's bullshit, then you could just charge a gazillion dollars for it and have it be over the natural or necessary amount, and I'd agree with that being capitalism but I don't really think that's like. limitless growth, that's just marketing, that's just bullshit.
Capitalists often use this assumed finity to price gouge, maximize profit, that's why you dump oranges in the desert to keep up the prices of oranges or whatever. Maybe that's like, oh, they're assuming the oranges to be infinite, but that's because oranges are recyclable. You can grow more oranges, and if we scaled back orange production massively, making it more efficient, we'd still have enough oranges for everyone (Degrowth, I guess? It can be even more efficient if you grow local flora instead of oranges but ech). Maybe you can't have infinite oranges if some other sector of the economy is dumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but for like, 10,000 years of human history, you can grow more oranges, and you can grow more oranges until the sun expands and burns the earth in like 2 billion years.
If I read this meme in a different way, the fucked up thing about this meme is that it's not real. We're not like, at the end of civilization just by some natural factor of luck, or something, or you know, suddenly all the human creativity has petered out. That would almost be better, in a way. The human creativity is actively being suppressed, underfunded, bought out and scraped for parts, because it's easier to sell people actual bullshit year over year, in a cartel that you basically control all of, than introduce something new.
At my least graceful reading of this post, it kind of almost becomes malthusian, or something. Limitless growth! Grow the market limitlessly! Of course that means we must have a limitless population! And if someone's getting mad at that fake bullshit, then what they probably really believe is that there will be/there is too many people. But then that's all instance number 700 of getting mad at a spook.
But it's also like, how are you tracking growth? Cause if growth is just entropy, I think it probably is limitless.
Let me tell you my experience with communism centralized economy as the alternative.
Planned economy = produce as much as possible, more you produce more you are rewarded. It doesn't matter if you make 100x more then it's needed than trow it away. Inefficiency doesn't matter.
Ecology ? Foreign westerner propaganda. That there are no fish, animals, half of the plants spiecies disappeared is westerners fault. Emissions ? Nothing can stand in our plan.
We produce more than anyone yet people's wellbeing is still behind west? That's not true, there are fascist to the west and it's just western propaganda. BTW if you mention it, you won't see outside for quite while.
Now let me tell you what happened after end of communism.
Nature almost recovered because crazy amount of efforts put into it's protection despite it being expensive.
If anyone produces more than people need, they ususally go bankrupt or at least are not rewarded for loss. Thus everyone tries to go as efficient as possible.
Wellbeing went up 10fold.
I don't know about OP but capitalism seems kinda best option to me ATM
Ok. With what do we replace it?
Economic output doesn't have a 1:1 relationship with the planet's resources. Many countries grow by offering services as opposed to goods. Not all goods have the same negative externalities in terms of harming the planet.
so... capitalism doesn't exist in a world with infinite growth potential. fiat currencies do and when tied in with capitalism, "infinite growth" is a goal. nuance is hard but not too difficult
Limitless growth because competition and technology are supposed to grow with it. It worked really well till big tech showed up and gained a monopoly on everything
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.
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
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.
Pretty cool universe you live in. How can I join? Mine sucks.
Bro unironically called all humanity since conception to actuality mentally ill lmao
Holy shit! Really? Look at every example of communist leaders as their greed and lust for power grew.
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?
Havent pretty much all communist nations been very authoritarian? Not all capitalist nations are authoritarian
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.
do you believe countries are whatever they say they are? are north korea and congo democratic? was nazi germany socialist?
If you take Technology and Space into consideration there's an infinite amount of growth.
in biology normal cells are controlled by nucleus and it's hereditory... so it is nepotism and zero rights for others so it's also bad thing like communism
I don't understand how nepotism and zero rights for others automaticaly imply communism.
Donald Trump is a communist?
The soviet union was so great for the environment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
Just because someone is advocating against capitalism, that doesn't mean they are advocating for the Soviet Union / any modern dictatorship that claims to be communist. Please stop the binary thinking
Free Market Capitalism is based on the infinite human ability to create and innovate.
Communism refuses to acknowledge individuals and their skills, incentivastion and has no ability to allocate limited resources successfully.
Capitalism is telling people that the Earth is a finite system.
How is earth NOT a finite system?
Because we get energy from the sun?
Because we lose atmosphere into space?
Because interstellar space believe it or not it's not empty so we also get mass from it?
My god even if we chopped all the trees and burned all the petroleum and bombed the whole Small part of the planet we live in with nuclear weapons, even if all humanity that ever lived in this planet was alive and lived their lives again for a million years, we'd still have about 50 thousand trillion trillions of atmosphere to go before we consume it all. And don't get me started on the water
And guess what, even making that effort it wouldn't be enough because life would continue.
That's right, we suck even when trying to destroy the planet
Umm, what? Dude, I want some of whatever the heck you're smoking. Cause you ain't making any sense at all...
Grayox with the communist propoganda 8.5/10
Btw, capitalism doesnt mean infinite expansion any more than a socialist or marxist state could. Except if I point to anything, you guys scream "its not real socialism!" Until you are blue in the face.
But wealth and resources aren't a closed, finite system. Wealth can be infinite. Food can be grown everyday. Water falls freely from the sky. Capitalism isn't the issue. Being dependent on somebody else over being self reliant is the issue.
Capitalism isn't killing our planet. Shits like Putin, Winnie Pooh, Kim Jong Un and Erdogan are.
This doesn't make any sense, since when earth became a closed system?
Also capitalism is a system. A human one. Its not biological in nature as it is an abstraction. As such it can change or disappear or be re used again and again and again.
There is no internal mechanism for human systems that say "hey create more of this system and then die at this point" or "hey build more of this system to fix this and that" or "hey created these new systems to evolve"
Humans do that, not the systems we create
Like it or not nobody wants to die, not even a tiny cancer cell. so it is in our best interests to expand into space to multiply our chances of survival.
And like it or not, it's gonna happen.
It's a closed system as far as resources go. We're not adding new material to the earth other than falling space debris and meteorites.
Solar power wants to have a word with you
We are not adding materials (...yet, mining asteroids isn't that far fetched anymore), but we also aren't removing any either and can recycle old stuff into new stuff. Also we get a constant supply of virtually limitless energy from the sun.
we're not removing fossil fuels? We can just recycle coal/natural gas/oil after burning it? someone should tell that to all the scientists
Indeed we can. That's not to say we should keep burning those resources right now, but the carbon is not disappearing into an alternate universe either.
Earth is definitely a closed system. When you propose expanding to space, you are literally going out wide that system, but Earth is definitely limited