4 ms·

Somehow I doubt that future generations will think that capitalism has much to do with any mitigations of the climate change catastrophe it spent the last fifty

Somehow I doubt that future generations will think that capitalism has much to do with any mitigations of the climate change catastrophe it spent the last fifty years charging into. A society that cooks itself in its own gasses is obviously sick. Healthy societies don't charge headlong at their own destruction. It's an obvious failure of thinking, organization, and culture. If capitalism is the organizing principle of a society, then capitalism is responsible for that society's problems. If they are small, then that is to capitalism's credit. If they are gigantic, catastrophic, senseless, and avoidable, but unstoppable due to systemic roadblocks, and cultural derangement - then there's no way to spin it - it does not reflect well on capitalism.

anm89 7y ago
This attitude is baffling to me. We have a government which has spent the last half century giving special incentives and privileges and essentially free money in the form of tax incentives to the fossil fuels industry (ie the exact opposite of capitalism in the free markets sense) and then people complain that because "our society is capitalist" that capitalism is at fault. No way it could have been 50 years of idiotic policy. Yeah it was the free exchange of good and services for money.
- cairo_x 7y ago
  This sounds like something someone would say to curtail responsibility. You realize it all comes back to capitalism right, whether it's a communist dictatorship giving your company permission to pump shit into the atmosphere, or the bastian of democracy, the US, giving companies permission to sell bombs to dictators, and so on. It still comes back to the companies themselves. And if the communist state(aka state-capitalism), or the representative democracy refuses to give them permission they will move to another place and try again, or turn to aggressive lobbying, because capitalism. In case you've forgotten, capitalism is when you reward the investors over the workers with the surplus value the workers created, moreover, the investors control the company. The capitalist gets their investment back, and then they continue to get a chunk of the surplus created at the expense of the people who actually created said surplus, who instead get a wage. Oh yeah, and they control how the surplus is spent. What is the alternative? A co-op. In a co-op the workers do not get a wage, they get profits from the value they were responsible for, minus funding needed to purchase the next round of raw materials. In a co-op the company functions as a direct-democracy. The workers literally control the surplus and the way it is re-invested into the company. In case you weren't aware, the majority of companies responsible for large chunks of the climate change pie, are/were driven by investors (and/or states) looking for profits without regards to the health and future of the people who produce said profits, the health of the locales in which they operate, or the health of the planet. The worker/citizen does not get a say, because they are kept on a wage, and because they literally have no say. This is why state-owned collectives are also the worst kind of capitalism. It's as if there is one company who holds the monopoly (the state) and the state is not 'the people' but a small number of, again, psychopaths who have nothing but quotas and profits to fulfill and positions to maintain. A large portion of climate change is driven by a psychopathic disregard for both the worker and their environment.
  - anm89 7y ago
    > "the communist state(aka state-capitalism)" Well at least you show your hand here. "Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening." I would love to hear you layout your definitions of capitalism and communism in a rigorous way. You've replaced "person doing something I don't like" with "capitalist". Well in that case yeah, not hard to understand how you see capitalism as causing the world's problems.
    - gattilorenz 7y ago
      > Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening Well, not the OP, but even the USSR did not call itself "communist" (it was a "socialist state on its way to communism" or something like that). I don't think it's unfair to make a distinction between "communism" as described by Marx and the "communist countries" which were/are at best socialist (at worst plain capitalist with a veneer of state participation) and ruled by a "communist party". And I also think you can say that without attaching any value judgment to either cases: I'm not defending Marx's communism, it's an unreachable utopia and trying to implement it can only degenerate into the horrible examples we have seen.
      - anm89 7y ago
        Fair, but my argument would be what wouldn't be capitalism by this definition. Literally every government post feudalism was capitalist if you are going to say Stalin, and the US and everything idealogically in between were capitalist. At that point I'd argue, whatever it is that this person dislikes, capitalism is just an empty word to represent it. "Reality", or "the world" would appear more accurate to me.
        cairo_x 7y ago
        I literally defined capitalism for you. I meant exactly what I said. As for state-capitalism, it is not some archaic historical revisionist concept, it has roots all the way back to the beginnings of Bolshevism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  And who or what drove those policies? Are you arguing that the fossil fuel industry was resisting those subsidies, incentives, privileges, free money, and tax incentives with every fibre of their being?
  - anm89 7y ago
    People? Paying off politicians isn't some feature of capitalism. It's called bribery and corruption and it exists in all socio economic systems. We happened to have endorsed a specific brand of it and bizarelly don't see it as a problem with our publicly elected politicians whose sole job is to represent our interests but as a problem with the people offering the bribes who we didn't publicly elect to represent our interests. Do you think that producers in Soviet Russia weren't or in modern day Norway arent forcefully influencing policy like this and this some unique problem of capitalism or the US?
    - dTal 7y ago
      >Paying off politicians isn't some feature of capitalism Exchanging money for goods and services is the most essential feature of capitalism. If you wish to prevent such exchanges, you need some strong socialist regulation or norm, like "politicians exist to serve the will of the people". Without it, what you call "bribery" and "corruption" isn't even considered wrong - it's just how the world works. Why shouldn't rich people be able to buy policy? They can buy everything else.
      - rumanator 7y ago
        > Exchanging money for goods and services is the most essential feature of capitalism. Trying to pass off corruption as a "most essential feature of capitalism" is disingenuous and simply wrong on many levels. There's no need for petty ideological jabs. If you have nothing to add to the discussion then refrain from adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion.
        dredmorbius 7y ago
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I think you've got a weird definition of capitalism. Capitalism is not, nor has ever been, characterized by the free exchange of goods and services, any more than feudalism, or even communism, is. It's characterized by the political, social, and economic power of Capital, as opposed to other social bodies (say, the church). I also don't really understand what a market is without a state, either theoretically, or practically. You need some independent guarantor of property rights to have property - since property itself is not a fact of nature, but rather a result of laws and rights. Practically, all states are by necessity involved in every legal transaction, either as a neutral arbiter in disputes, or as an active participant.
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    Caveman Ug can own a fire: When Zog tries to take it, Ug kicks him in the nadgers. In fact, Ug and Zog could be spiders. Property is based on potential violence. States are just organisations dispensing it on a controlled basis.
    - pasabagi 7y ago
      Eh, Ug could just kick Zog in the nadgers for any arbitrary reason. Norms are necessary to separate legitimate from illegitimate kickings, and a state is necessary to enforce them. Using your argument, you could say that 'not looking at people funny' is a natural law, because I once got beaten up in a bus station in the midlands for it.
      - hyperman1 7y ago
        Not looking at people funny could be a natural law if enough UGs don't like it. (In fact, I believe medieval Japan actually had something like this). The only thing Zog can do is co-operate with friends, multiplying Zog's force. And what's a state more than an organized cooperation between its people.

anm89 7y ago

This attitude is baffling to me. We have a government which has spent the last half century giving special incentives and privileges and essentially free money in the form of tax incentives to the fossil fuels industry (ie the exact opposite of capitalism in the free markets sense) and then people complain that because "our society is capitalist" that capitalism is at fault. No way it could have been 50 years of idiotic policy. Yeah it was the free exchange of good and services for money.

cairo_x 7y ago
This sounds like something someone would say to curtail responsibility. You realize it all comes back to capitalism right, whether it's a communist dictatorship giving your company permission to pump shit into the atmosphere, or the bastian of democracy, the US, giving companies permission to sell bombs to dictators, and so on. It still comes back to the companies themselves. And if the communist state(aka state-capitalism), or the representative democracy refuses to give them permission they will move to another place and try again, or turn to aggressive lobbying, because capitalism. In case you've forgotten, capitalism is when you reward the investors over the workers with the surplus value the workers created, moreover, the investors control the company. The capitalist gets their investment back, and then they continue to get a chunk of the surplus created at the expense of the people who actually created said surplus, who instead get a wage. Oh yeah, and they control how the surplus is spent. What is the alternative? A co-op. In a co-op the workers do not get a wage, they get profits from the value they were responsible for, minus funding needed to purchase the next round of raw materials. In a co-op the company functions as a direct-democracy. The workers literally control the surplus and the way it is re-invested into the company. In case you weren't aware, the majority of companies responsible for large chunks of the climate change pie, are/were driven by investors (and/or states) looking for profits without regards to the health and future of the people who produce said profits, the health of the locales in which they operate, or the health of the planet. The worker/citizen does not get a say, because they are kept on a wage, and because they literally have no say. This is why state-owned collectives are also the worst kind of capitalism. It's as if there is one company who holds the monopoly (the state) and the state is not 'the people' but a small number of, again, psychopaths who have nothing but quotas and profits to fulfill and positions to maintain. A large portion of climate change is driven by a psychopathic disregard for both the worker and their environment.
- anm89 7y ago
  > "the communist state(aka state-capitalism)" Well at least you show your hand here. "Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening." I would love to hear you layout your definitions of capitalism and communism in a rigorous way. You've replaced "person doing something I don't like" with "capitalist". Well in that case yeah, not hard to understand how you see capitalism as causing the world's problems.
  - gattilorenz 7y ago
    > Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening Well, not the OP, but even the USSR did not call itself "communist" (it was a "socialist state on its way to communism" or something like that). I don't think it's unfair to make a distinction between "communism" as described by Marx and the "communist countries" which were/are at best socialist (at worst plain capitalist with a veneer of state participation) and ruled by a "communist party". And I also think you can say that without attaching any value judgment to either cases: I'm not defending Marx's communism, it's an unreachable utopia and trying to implement it can only degenerate into the horrible examples we have seen.
    - anm89 7y ago
      Fair, but my argument would be what wouldn't be capitalism by this definition. Literally every government post feudalism was capitalist if you are going to say Stalin, and the US and everything idealogically in between were capitalist. At that point I'd argue, whatever it is that this person dislikes, capitalism is just an empty word to represent it. "Reality", or "the world" would appear more accurate to me.
      - cairo_x 7y ago
        I literally defined capitalism for you. I meant exactly what I said. As for state-capitalism, it is not some archaic historical revisionist concept, it has roots all the way back to the beginnings of Bolshevism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
dredmorbius 7y ago
And who or what drove those policies? Are you arguing that the fossil fuel industry was resisting those subsidies, incentives, privileges, free money, and tax incentives with every fibre of their being?
- anm89 7y ago
  People? Paying off politicians isn't some feature of capitalism. It's called bribery and corruption and it exists in all socio economic systems. We happened to have endorsed a specific brand of it and bizarelly don't see it as a problem with our publicly elected politicians whose sole job is to represent our interests but as a problem with the people offering the bribes who we didn't publicly elect to represent our interests. Do you think that producers in Soviet Russia weren't or in modern day Norway arent forcefully influencing policy like this and this some unique problem of capitalism or the US?
  - dTal 7y ago
    >Paying off politicians isn't some feature of capitalism Exchanging money for goods and services is the most essential feature of capitalism. If you wish to prevent such exchanges, you need some strong socialist regulation or norm, like "politicians exist to serve the will of the people". Without it, what you call "bribery" and "corruption" isn't even considered wrong - it's just how the world works. Why shouldn't rich people be able to buy policy? They can buy everything else.
    - rumanator 7y ago
      > Exchanging money for goods and services is the most essential feature of capitalism. Trying to pass off corruption as a "most essential feature of capitalism" is disingenuous and simply wrong on many levels. There's no need for petty ideological jabs. If you have nothing to add to the discussion then refrain from adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
pasabagi 7y ago
I think you've got a weird definition of capitalism. Capitalism is not, nor has ever been, characterized by the free exchange of goods and services, any more than feudalism, or even communism, is. It's characterized by the political, social, and economic power of Capital, as opposed to other social bodies (say, the church). I also don't really understand what a market is without a state, either theoretically, or practically. You need some independent guarantor of property rights to have property - since property itself is not a fact of nature, but rather a result of laws and rights. Practically, all states are by necessity involved in every legal transaction, either as a neutral arbiter in disputes, or as an active participant.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Caveman Ug can own a fire: When Zog tries to take it, Ug kicks him in the nadgers. In fact, Ug and Zog could be spiders. Property is based on potential violence. States are just organisations dispensing it on a controlled basis.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    Eh, Ug could just kick Zog in the nadgers for any arbitrary reason. Norms are necessary to separate legitimate from illegitimate kickings, and a state is necessary to enforce them. Using your argument, you could say that 'not looking at people funny' is a natural law, because I once got beaten up in a bus station in the midlands for it.
    - hyperman1 7y ago
      Not looking at people funny could be a natural law if enough UGs don't like it. (In fact, I believe medieval Japan actually had something like this). The only thing Zog can do is co-operate with friends, multiplying Zog's force. And what's a state more than an organized cooperation between its people.