this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
165 points (97.1% liked)
Firefox
17301 readers
82 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
As Marx points out in Das Kapital it's not possible to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation since they will find a way to capture the government and its regulatory agencies, so that they work for the capitalists and not the public. So what Hossenfelder failed to acknowledge is that no civilization knows how to defend its regulatory agencies from elite influence. It also fails to address matters like the uneven distribution of wealth, which leads to failure of the state and a whole lot of violence.
And that deterioration of the global market was well underway at the time that capitalism drove the development of penicillin. Capitalist interests also drove the triggers of WWI, the overreach of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequential rise of the German Reich. And, capitalist interests figured largely in the advancement of the holocaust from concentration camps and a deportation policy to an annihilation policy and the genocide machine. ( Behind the Bastards podcast recently released a two-parter on Reinhard Heydrich, the lynchpin official who developed the whole process, worth a listen!) so as capitalism drove penicillin development to save fallen soldiers from infection, it also facilitated the driving motivations for conquest and belligerence, hence the war itself that shot those soldiers up in the first place.
And when I watch Hossenfelder's videos, usually I can count on her to be more thorough than she was regarding the failures of a system, but it's not the first time her biases have informed her content.
In these conversations I always get to an impasse because yeah, capitalism is very flawed and produces many horrible outcomes. But communism has failed to work at all (as far as I know). Last I spoke to a communist as passerby was asking for what my conversation partner thought was a example of true communism, to which the answer was "the very start of the Russian revolution". I won't pretend to be the most informed about history, and I know that there has been much interference from capitalist countries, but if communism were so clearly a better system would it not have stably worked at least once? I'm having a hard time understanding why that's a better goal than the countries that seem to reign in capitalism with at least some success.
Communism has never worked because every time it's been enacted, it focused on funneling as much wealth to as few people as possible.
Communism is only successful if it reduces the disparity in wealth, not grows it.
Needless to say, any nation that even attempted to do this has been the enemy of the world. Look at Burkina Faso and Cuba for examples.
No, it's because of the ever-growing disparity in wealth.
As wealth becomes more concentrated, more people are incentivized to serve those with excess wealth than those without.
This is all by design.
Greed is a feature of people, not political systems. People will always seek power. How can that be limited without a powerful legitimized structure? Power gaps get filled, and to be it seems better for the powerful structure to be a planned part of the system then "whatever gets to it first".