this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Blaming everything on capitalism is oversimplistic and reductive, to be honest.
Climate collapse is a result of industrialization and not capitalism, to start. Unless you want to explain how Stalin and Mao were still burning coal.
Whatever social economic model which can funnel power and authority to the very top is bond to ruin us. Humans are too greedy to sit at the top of such hierarchies.
Yep, that's why decentralization is so important, and why leftist organizational structure ie decentralization and democratization of production is going to be so critical moving forward.
If only thats what politically active leftists actually pushed for.
Many do, not all of course. Factionalism hurts everyone, at the end of the day.
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are inseparable from one another. The failure of 20th century Socialist states to adequately address green energy goals can be attributed to rapid industrialization to attempt to keep pace with Capitalist entities.
Going forward, the reason why Green Energy isn't the standard in the US is due to oil companies, not efficiency. The profit motive stands in direct confrontation with the good of all.
That's just Climate Change, too. Capitalism's failures of hierarchical and consumerist nature will exist as long as Capitalism exists.
Not every problem is because of Capitalism, but many are, and at the end of the day this is just a meme.
Besides what another commenter noted about indistrialization being product of capitalism and then fierce competition, here's one more thing:
Do you see all those green activists buying reusable bags? Taking their bottles, recycling everything? Well, this has already been there in the past, and most notably - in socialist countries. Pretty much till its death USSR, for example, heavily favored reusable things, there just weren't plastic bags and plastic bottles and all that waste, and recycling, especially of glass and metal and paper, was a super normal thing and people got money/trade-in for that.
Uhm, USSR was very much socialist. It officially strived to reach communism, but the actual economic system was socialist. It's often called communist due to the ideology claiming communism to be the perfect and inevitable endgame for the country, which is a big disambiguation. Suffice it to say, communism was never reached.
China, on the other hand, is capitalist, despite being ruled by a communist party. It has a private property on means of production, which defines a capitalist country as opposed to socialist or communist one (source: Wikipedia)
What kind of f*cked up argument is that? I don't think the climate models were quite as advanced back then.
They had no idea that influencing the global climate was even a possibility, so you can hardly judge the morality of their decision-making by how much CO2 they produced. Or do you want to blame them for not building enough solar panels as well?
The problem with capitalism in this regard is not that it produced a lot of CO2 back in the days, but that it won't stop even after learning about the destructive effects.
The USSR totally knew about climate change being a thing. Climate change is not a "new thing". Oil companies have known about it for almost a century now, they built their oil rigs to withstand rising sea levels for example.
The USSR did know about it as well, at least since the sixties: https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_329370_smxx.pdf
Notice how you are getting downvoted but no one is providing an argument against this. Even in the most directive form (fascist) of socialism, they still choose not to go with the better option for the world.
whines about reductionist rhetoric, uses insanely reductionist example
Capitalism provides incentives to externalize as many costs as possible (such as pollution), and incentivizes and cannot even function without growth (which leads to more resource usage and pollution). Just because the forms of government/society under Stalin and Mao were also bad for people, doesn't mean capitalism is not also bad for people.
So your only response is to get defensive when called out on the matter instead of focusing on stopping climate change which is what ultimately is the only thing that matters right now?
Yeah, humanity is fucked
??? I did not get defensive. I was explaining why capitalism incentives pollution. Climate change is not the only thing that matters right now. Other things that matter are global nuclear war, genocide, fascism, authoritarianism, mass surveillance, etc. If governments were not mostly captured by money/capitalists, one solution could be the government forcing the internalization of pollution costs (carbon credits, fines, or taxation). Free markets will not do anything about climate change, it is a well-known and well-studied example of a market failure.