- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10351845
This is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldjerking/comments/1d92dkp/rate_the_political_factions_in_my_totally/
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10351845
This is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldjerking/comments/1d92dkp/rate_the_political_factions_in_my_totally/
Because no viable alternatives have been shown to work.
Unregulated capitalism is untenable, but regulated capitalism is and remains the best system we’ve been able to come up with.
I’m all for new ideas, but you’ve got to show some kind of precedence of it working in order to change the largest system in the world.
Capitalism has proven it definitely doesn’t work, we’re careening toward ecological collapse.
Humans existed without state, and therefore with (likely multiple coexisting) informal economic systems for hundreds of thousands of years, I’d say that has been show to work.
There was nowhere close to the number of humans or level of complexity that there is today when those systems were in place.
That doesn’t mean those methods or some form of them can’t work, you just assume this is true because you’ve been given that message by those who need us to believe this for them to maintain power.
And let’s say no non-state method can possibly work at our scale, is that to essentially throw up our hands and say, “well, since intelligently shrinking our population and economy to a size that can be sustainably managed and is appropriate sized for our planet (i.e. “degrowth”) is unspeakable, and other methods we sorta tried for a bit don’t seem to work, we’ll just go ahead and continue with this known broken method until it all collapses from overexploitation” ??
Wouldn’t it make more sense to say “I want human society to exist in 100 years and for that to happen, we need to learn to live within the bounds of our planet”?
I love this logic because capitalism has made it its job to
kill any competitionprove the alternatives nonviable. Chile was trying something truly revolutionary, a fully democratic based socialism, and the CIA aborted the attempt and installed a capitalism friendly dictatorship.You won’t catch me simping for Authoritarians or anything, but when the only other mode of operation is a military strong enough to resist the CIA, there’s going to be a bias towards Authoritarian based alternatives. Convenient, if you’re trying to paint the alternatives as nonviable.
Man I love state sponsored terrorism!
That’s kind of a straw man, though, isn’t it? Governments of capitalist countries have worked hard to suppress non-capitalist movements within and without their country, but that’s just what governments do. The Soviet Union was communist (as pure communist as the US is pure capitalist, which is to say, not very), and that also suppressed any alternatives. It’s not a function of the economic system; it’s a characteristic governments repeatedly demonstrate, regardless of their economic ideology.
I agree with the grandparent argument: capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best thing we have so far. Personally, I don’t believe communism can work, mainly because I think it goes against human nature. Except for clan behavior - altruism to your family, friends, neighbors - people are generally selfish, and communism requires us to be altruistic at our own expense to people who we not only don’t know, but who may talk differently from us, look different from us, have different culture from us. And even at the clan level, communism struggles. There were hundreds of attempts at building communes in the US in the 60’s, and I honestly believe most died out not because they were subverted by the government, but because people are selfish and they collapsed under their own internal conflicts. Very few of those remain, and when you look at them, they have fairly rigid internal structures that re-enforce the commune.
Maybe if we can make it to post-scarcity, we’ll be able to afford to be communist, because then it won’t depend on altruism. But right now, when times are hard and food is scarce, most humans will look to feeding their own children first, and the priorities of the commune tear like tissue. Capitalism endures because it’s built upon greed and selfishness, and those come easy to humans. When times are hard, we tend to fall back on barter, which is capitalism.
Anyway, saying that the US suppression of communism in Latin American countries says less about capitalism than it says about the US government, and their perceived interests. The proof is in the parallels in Soviet and communist (Mao era) China regional actions.
I mean, that’s why I’m here using a p2p alternative. Since Napster and Bittorrent, they’ve proven that the most reliable way to resist their violence is to decentralize.
If the alternatives dont work then why does the ruling class work so hard to squash them?
How can we try anything new if everything has to have a precedence.
I’m all for new ideas so long as they’re old ideas.
Has anyone tried lottery? I wanna bet that picking leadership completely at random would be better representation than rich assholes like Biden and Trump. That’s how we do things with QA testing and statistical analysis. It’s how we try to eliminate bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Socialism is defined as the government owning or regulating the means of production.
When there’s an actually well regulated market, like say, we have here in the Nordics, you’ll tend to see other socialism alongside it. We have good social security and labour laws. Exactly because it’s regulated market economy we utilise.
Capitalism does not have aa monopoly on market economies.
Capitalism is to market economy what cancer is to cell growth.
Even the US employs socialist policies. As in the policies themselves are socialist in nature. Antitrust laws. Because without them, capitalism would fuck over the economy in a heartbeat.
If something has been shown to not work it’s capitalism.
Capitalism is the antithesis of a well regulated market and will always fight regulation in any form, because it’s harder to make profits if you can’t sell unsafe garbage and exploit workers to their death.