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Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist? Is the current energy transition, funded by massive amounts of capi

Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist? Is the current energy transition, funded by massive amounts of capital, and the result of industrialization of technology, somehow less capitalistic? Are the ESG efforts somehow less capitalist? Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years. > Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis. You know what else is grow-or-die? Life itself. All of life is a series of exponential growth, followed by slower growth. It's all logistic curves. This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism. I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph. Essays like this degrade the critique of capitalism into nonsense, ultimately weakening any attempt to change the system, because they discredit the idea that there are actually lots of legitimate critiques of the system. They also cheapen critique by broadening the definition to basically "what I don't like at any given moment."

toastercat 4y ago
> Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist? Can't say if every form of industrialization is capitalist, but the USSR and Communist China were/are state capitalist.
chaostheory 4y ago
There’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism. Like capitalism, socialism needs working adults to outnumber both retired seniors and non working age children. The only way socialism can avoid the constant growth requirement is if they have a “you only eat if you work” rule. Historically, socialism’s rate of pollution is on par with capitalism
- jerojero 4y ago
  There are a lot of people proposing models of economic development that don't necessarily rely on growth. There's a lot of work done on degrowth and similar modes of production. Though I haven't really read too much into it (just getting into this topic recently) a lot of the authors are staunch critics of capitalism so it leads me to believe that there are other systems out there that aren't necessarily capitalists and probably align with socialism much more. Just to give a brief example, think about private ownership of a firm versus worker ownership of it and how it would change the way that firm approaches pollution. In the first it is very easy for the owners to be detached from the pollution they produce as they can simply move to another city without the firm really be affected in any way. Whereas in the second one it wouldn't be possible for workers to move as they would be unable to continue working, so pollution affects them and their families directly in which case there are much stronger incentives for them to cut profits in order to greenify their production. First is a capitalist mode of production, second is a socialist one.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Imo co-ops aren’t socialist because it’s not directly controlled by a government. They also already exist and thrive in modern mixed capitalist economies
    - jerojero 4y ago
      The government controlling production is not all there is to socialism, at all. Markets are not an exclusive feature of capitalism. In very simple terms, the economy from a leftist perspective can be separated into two areas: distribution and ownership. If you have private ownership and markets then you have the current system; capitalism, if you have state ownership and markets then you have the system that China has. If you have worker ownership (co-ops) and markets then you have a system that actually has a name: market socialism. Of course every economic system has lots of pockets of different things inside it, the economies of walmart and amazon for example work, internally, through planning. So even in our market system we still have pockets of central-planning. But to me at least, the fundamental characteristic of the capitalist system is precisely ownership and the power relationships that come with ownership. So although co-ops exist in capitalism, imo, they're the seeds of new forms to come.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
> This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built. Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption. Yes, some companies die, and that's part of capitalism as envisioned by Adam Smith, but the companies that survive are the ones that are able to produce products cheaper, usually by producing more, by consuming more energy. > Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years. > Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism. We have failed to do anything about climate change within the system of capitalism in the past 30 years, so isn't it the people who refuse to consider the possibility that it's a problem that capitalism is unable to address who may be trapped in a mental frame?
- nightski 4y ago
  Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe. Also capitalism is about efficient allocation of capital. It really doesn't require growth of the economy as a whole (imho). Sure it encourages innovation and growth of new ideas, but that is usually at the expense of stagnating and old ideas.
  - resoluteteeth 4y ago
    > Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe. I didn't say that energy was bad. What I wrote was > Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption. I think you may have overlooked the part in italics. In other words, capitalism incentivizes energy consumption. This is okay. But it's now important to regulate co2 emissions in a way where energy that does not produce co2 emissions is consumed. (However, the reality is that capitalism is also having difficulty doing that.)
fridental 4y ago
Bravo! You've nailed it.
amelius 4y ago
> You know what else is grow-or-die? Life itself. All of life is a series of exponential growth, followed by slower growth. It's all logistic curves. Isn't that true in pathological cases only? Like when a bacterium takes over an entire petri dish? In balanced ecosystems, I don't think what you say holds (there may be logistic curves but it's not one species that takes over the entire habitat). In contrast, in capitalism without government intervention, we all know that the end-game is a monopoly that may even span multiple markets. So in your biology analogy this would correspond perhaps to humans taking over the planet and destroying all other life.
- epistasis 4y ago
  All of life is ever changing, there is no stable ecosystem except in a moment, and only if you ignore the parts that are undergoing massive death after massive growth. Calling bacteria in a Petri dish "pathological" doesn't even make sense, it is the way of life, how life grows all over. Disease and escape from disease are omni-present in biology, not mere pathology. Ever present extinction of species, ever present evolution of species, ever present birth and death of individuals, all make real life an ever-changing unbalanced dynamic. Life is ever changing, ever "growing" yet somehow always dying. Follow the simple population models in biology, and you get chaotic boom and bust, feast and famine. "Capitalism" is the same as biology here. Claims of requirements of ever-present growth are a factual. Capitalism survives recessions, depressions, just fine. There is no requirement of global growth for capitalism to survive, and the supposed "logic" that leads to that conclusion is ridiculous, full of holes. For the past decades, even the supposed "capitalism needs ever expanding amounts of energy" has been proven to be false. GDP is not tied to energy, GDP is tied to whatever humans value. Which is ever changing, ever evolving. I think that the critique of capitalism embodied in this essay is a century too old. It misses the basic understanding of the past 100 years of biological discovery and better understanding of complex systems that happened not only in biology, but in many other academic fields. Life persists even with individual species continually expanding exponentially until they hit population collapse. Capitalism is the same. And even relegating capitalism to only the "completely unregulated" system, whatever that means (all property rights exist within a legal system with regulation), capitalism does not tends towards ever-present monopolies. That at best leads to feudalism, to autocracy like in Russia, but feudalism/autocracy is itself unstable.
Aunche 4y ago
Meanwhile, if you ask the interviewee what he thinks about the billions of people who gained access to basic amenities like running water, electricity, and antibiotics, he'd dismiss that capitalism had anything to do with this. > I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph. A lack of critical thinking is a feature. They want loyal followers to help them overthrow the current system. Whether the new system is actually more egalitarian is secondary to the fact that they would sit on the top.

toastercat 4y ago

> Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist? Can't say if every form of industrialization is capitalist, but the USSR and Communist China were/are state capitalist.

chaostheory 4y ago

There’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism. Like capitalism, socialism needs working adults to outnumber both retired seniors and non working age children. The only way socialism can avoid the constant growth requirement is if they have a “you only eat if you work” rule. Historically, socialism’s rate of pollution is on par with capitalism

jerojero 4y ago
There are a lot of people proposing models of economic development that don't necessarily rely on growth. There's a lot of work done on degrowth and similar modes of production. Though I haven't really read too much into it (just getting into this topic recently) a lot of the authors are staunch critics of capitalism so it leads me to believe that there are other systems out there that aren't necessarily capitalists and probably align with socialism much more. Just to give a brief example, think about private ownership of a firm versus worker ownership of it and how it would change the way that firm approaches pollution. In the first it is very easy for the owners to be detached from the pollution they produce as they can simply move to another city without the firm really be affected in any way. Whereas in the second one it wouldn't be possible for workers to move as they would be unable to continue working, so pollution affects them and their families directly in which case there are much stronger incentives for them to cut profits in order to greenify their production. First is a capitalist mode of production, second is a socialist one.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Imo co-ops aren’t socialist because it’s not directly controlled by a government. They also already exist and thrive in modern mixed capitalist economies
  - jerojero 4y ago
    The government controlling production is not all there is to socialism, at all. Markets are not an exclusive feature of capitalism. In very simple terms, the economy from a leftist perspective can be separated into two areas: distribution and ownership. If you have private ownership and markets then you have the current system; capitalism, if you have state ownership and markets then you have the system that China has. If you have worker ownership (co-ops) and markets then you have a system that actually has a name: market socialism. Of course every economic system has lots of pockets of different things inside it, the economies of walmart and amazon for example work, internally, through planning. So even in our market system we still have pockets of central-planning. But to me at least, the fundamental characteristic of the capitalist system is precisely ownership and the power relationships that come with ownership. So although co-ops exist in capitalism, imo, they're the seeds of new forms to come.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

> This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built. Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption. Yes, some companies die, and that's part of capitalism as envisioned by Adam Smith, but the companies that survive are the ones that are able to produce products cheaper, usually by producing more, by consuming more energy. > Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years. > Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism. We have failed to do anything about climate change within the system of capitalism in the past 30 years, so isn't it the people who refuse to consider the possibility that it's a problem that capitalism is unable to address who may be trapped in a mental frame?

nightski 4y ago
Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe. Also capitalism is about efficient allocation of capital. It really doesn't require growth of the economy as a whole (imho). Sure it encourages innovation and growth of new ideas, but that is usually at the expense of stagnating and old ideas.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  > Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe. I didn't say that energy was bad. What I wrote was > Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption. I think you may have overlooked the part in italics. In other words, capitalism incentivizes energy consumption. This is okay. But it's now important to regulate co2 emissions in a way where energy that does not produce co2 emissions is consumed. (However, the reality is that capitalism is also having difficulty doing that.)

fridental 4y ago

Bravo! You've nailed it.

amelius 4y ago

> You know what else is grow-or-die? Life itself. All of life is a series of exponential growth, followed by slower growth. It's all logistic curves. Isn't that true in pathological cases only? Like when a bacterium takes over an entire petri dish? In balanced ecosystems, I don't think what you say holds (there may be logistic curves but it's not one species that takes over the entire habitat). In contrast, in capitalism without government intervention, we all know that the end-game is a monopoly that may even span multiple markets. So in your biology analogy this would correspond perhaps to humans taking over the planet and destroying all other life.

epistasis 4y ago
All of life is ever changing, there is no stable ecosystem except in a moment, and only if you ignore the parts that are undergoing massive death after massive growth. Calling bacteria in a Petri dish "pathological" doesn't even make sense, it is the way of life, how life grows all over. Disease and escape from disease are omni-present in biology, not mere pathology. Ever present extinction of species, ever present evolution of species, ever present birth and death of individuals, all make real life an ever-changing unbalanced dynamic. Life is ever changing, ever "growing" yet somehow always dying. Follow the simple population models in biology, and you get chaotic boom and bust, feast and famine. "Capitalism" is the same as biology here. Claims of requirements of ever-present growth are a factual. Capitalism survives recessions, depressions, just fine. There is no requirement of global growth for capitalism to survive, and the supposed "logic" that leads to that conclusion is ridiculous, full of holes. For the past decades, even the supposed "capitalism needs ever expanding amounts of energy" has been proven to be false. GDP is not tied to energy, GDP is tied to whatever humans value. Which is ever changing, ever evolving. I think that the critique of capitalism embodied in this essay is a century too old. It misses the basic understanding of the past 100 years of biological discovery and better understanding of complex systems that happened not only in biology, but in many other academic fields. Life persists even with individual species continually expanding exponentially until they hit population collapse. Capitalism is the same. And even relegating capitalism to only the "completely unregulated" system, whatever that means (all property rights exist within a legal system with regulation), capitalism does not tends towards ever-present monopolies. That at best leads to feudalism, to autocracy like in Russia, but feudalism/autocracy is itself unstable.

Aunche 4y ago

Meanwhile, if you ask the interviewee what he thinks about the billions of people who gained access to basic amenities like running water, electricity, and antibiotics, he'd dismiss that capitalism had anything to do with this. > I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph. A lack of critical thinking is a feature. They want loyal followers to help them overthrow the current system. Whether the new system is actually more egalitarian is secondary to the fact that they would sit on the top.