o_oWhy are folks so anti-capitalist?
Because it’s objectively unsustainable? I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point. We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima. It’s not the lowest point, but it feels like one to the dumbass apes who came up with it. So much so that we’re resistant to doing the work to find the actual minima before this local one kills literally everyone :)
Because it’s objectively unsustainable?
I don’t think we know that. Indeed, what we’re currently doing as a species to the environment is unsustainable. But it’s not clear to me how it’s the capitalism that’s the unsustainable part. My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?
I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point.
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree? This is what confuses me, and why I asked the question-- on my side of the fence, I don’t really understand what it means to be anti-capitalist. Hence why I asked.
We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
Well no need to be rude! Of course I care! And yes, we’re headed towards disaster in terms of the environment. But I don’t understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it. We have 7 billion people on the planet and they all need to be fed. Capitalism is the most efficient system we know of to create and allocate resources. Should we… move to a less efficient system? Wouldn’t that be worse for the environment? How does that solve anything? This is my confusion.
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
This is an interesting question! I’m parsing it to mean “how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?”. It’s a good question, and I don’t have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.
In any case, my answer is this: A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what “capital” means and rules of ownership. They haven’t done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn’t taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a “total amount of carbon emissions” that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns “rights to emit carbon” into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima
Great analogy! But… have we seen a lower minimum? What’s the rationale behind that system? That’s my question
My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?
When you look at the growing wealth inequality over the past 70 years, it’s pretty easy to argue that it is failing at that role currently.
Overall, capitalism / free market are a powerful decentralized system for resource allocation, but they have a lot of problems that aren’t being addressed.
Externalities like environmental damage aren’t accounted for, anti-competitive behaviour (like Apple’s walled garden) prevent fair competition and resources being allocated to the right spot, same thing goes for advertising and marketing which are by and large exercises in using money to psychologically manipulate people instead of making a better product. When wealth concentration is not reinvested in the product / business for societal betterment but is instead hoarded for personal gain it causes resources to be spent on frivolous rich bullshit (yachts instead of food), and capitalism has no inherent mechanism for caring for the less useful and those unable to work.
Yes it sounds great when you frame it in the context of a business making a better product getting more money, but it sounds a lot more soulless when you’re talking about someone being born a little slow having to live a shit life just because of how their dice were rolled.
Even if you correct for all of these, capitalism falls apart in an information economy. At a very fundamental level, capitalism and trading is based on the idea of things being finite, which mass and material is. If you possess an object, I cannot possess it. But information doesn’t work the same way as matter / energy. Information can be duplicated and replicated instantly, across impossible distances, and our technology to do this has gotten so advanced and global that we can now duplicate any information an infinite numbers of times anywhere around the globe nearly instantly. In this context, capitalism falls apart, because as soon as information is created, there’s no reason for it to be scarce, meaning it has zero value.
In this light we created copyright and patent systems to assign ownership of information, but what these systems really do is create artificial scarcity where there is no need for scarcity, just so that they can fit into a capitalist model.