5 ms·
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
by 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]