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This sounds like something someone would say to curtail responsibility. You realize it all comes back to capitalism right, whether it's a communist dictatorshi
by 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 agoFair, 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 agoI 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
- pasabagi 7y agoI think the point was, the socialist states of the soviet bloc were explicitly 'capitalist', and that was something they said about themselves. The point is, they thought about capitalism as something they were transitioning out of, and trying to actively replace. Capitalism is a pretty clear idea - it's a society characterized by wage labour. Non-capitalist societies don't have the concept of selling your labour-time for a wage. That's why feudal societies aren't capitalist (they didn't have clocks, for one thing). That's why the soviet block was capitalist.
- perilunar 7y ago> This is why state-owned collectives are also the worst kind of capitalism. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
- cairo_x 7y agoVery few people use the term 'capitalism' correctly, both on the left and the right. Very few. For instance, many people think it's simply the act of making a profit. Self employed people and people who run small businesses will often proudly (and stupidly) claim to be capitalists when in reality they are likely not at all. There are many organizational structures that are for-profit that are in no way 'capitalism'. And on the other side of the coin there are endless historical and current examples of self-proclaimed communist states that are just the worst kind of capitalist monopolies, which is the concept you seem to have stuck in your craw. This is not historical revisionism. This was being pointed out from the beginning of Bolshevism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Wac%C5%82aw_Machajski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Wac%C5%82aw_Machajski) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism