Remember everyone, if your utopia relies on the idea that everyone just peacefully gives up their power, it is doomed to fail.
IMHO: We all should strive to be the change we want to see in the world. But sometimes it’s even enough to just be the person that you wish to see in the world more often.
Tbf the chance I want to see in the world is “common sense” tho, so not much I can get better upon to help.
Like people are geniuenly trying to make fascism popular again so what am I supposed to self-improve at, punching?
IMO: punching would be useful in keeping fascists out of a community, if nothing else helps.
You speak as if you are dissatisfied with having a system that fucking implodes by concepts of “automation” and “technology” in the “automation and technology” era.
Why should Capitalism collapse? The rich already own almost everything. Some will go broke but the system can continue forever. If nature collapses and food becomes scarce, it will just become more expensive.
Look at election results all over the world. Capitalism is already collapsing… into fascism.
If history is any indication, this means being not productive enough might not only get you fired, but also imprisoned or disappeared. Gotta kickstart a whole trillionaire class soon.Fascism is still capitalist and the two co exist. Capitalism to put it simply is an economic system and fascism is an ideology after all.
Seems robo-factories in China are going to take over the world. Hope they have some mercy, because no one can compete with China now.
Woody Allen, as flawed as he is, had a good quip about enjoying whatever brings you pleasure without feeling guilty.
The world isn’t going to get better. Evolution created a system where those bereft of morals make the rules. It’s literally in our nature to lie cheat and steal. Current humans are a statistical anomaly, aside from the tastier class.
The industrial mechanisms that promote climate change would not die with capitalism.
What would die is the goal of limitless growth (and limitless externalities). And it would presumably put the decision making about the right tradeoff between “industrial mechanisms” and the climate back in the hands of the people… instead of leaving that choice to self-interested billionaires.
you gotta make it happen.
Covid 2.0 could definitely do us all in.
i’d be glad if it did honestly
Because lard ass orange pile of shit is not preparing the world for a new pandemic and instead is destroying green energy and allowing AI to waste and pollute the environment.
If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.
I wish to highlight that between the Bell Riots and the Phoenix, ST predicted that there would be both the Eugenics Wars and WW3, which leave the world so badly broken that the only “nations” that remain are the Western Alliance and the Eastern Coalition. Alameda, CA gets completely blown off the map; and it’s not the only such place.
It’s not a pretty picture, when you look at the history they gloss over.
For a while. Maybe the rest of our lives. We’d come out of it eventually.
Maybe in 1000 years democracy will have a resurgence and we’ll have a global democratic government.
Until people get complacent and it stops working and the whole thing collapses in on itself resulting in a return to feudalism.
I also wish all my problems would go away magically
Maybe it’ll be the same day my Mrs. Right appears. It’s been so long, the universe must really have a romantic surprise up its sleeve for me! Squee!
Stop the passive waiting, OP
Burning everything will surely help Climate Change!
It has to get worse before it can get better.
I mean, in this theoretical situation it would. Ignoring the fact that it’s metaphorical, it’s sort of like saying we shouldn’t build windmills or nuclear power plants because the construction produces co2
I mean… maybe burning everything down would mitigate climate change. But the collapse of global supply chains would lead to billions losing access to sufficient food, clean drinking water, internet, electricity/modern heating, medicine, etc. We would see mass migrations, war, famine, disease, and ecological devastation, all on a scale never before seen in the history of humanity. Ie, all the things we are trying to stop climate change in order to avoid.
Like, let’s say you murder the CEO of Exxon Mobile and light all their facilities on fire. The company vanishes, and everyone is scared to try to fill their niche (this wouldn’t happen, btw, they would just beef up security). Now whatever nation you are in has no oil. Immediately, the entire economy based on ICE vehicles grinds to a halt. Food shortages start within days. So do shortages of critcial medicines. Rural people are forced to decide between scratching a living off the land or abandoning their homes. All production of new plastics stops. Everyone who used to drive a car now spends hours more commuting each day. Everyone involved in oil and gas loses their jobs and start rioting in the streets. Blackouts and brownouts become common as coal and NG plants go offline. People start burning whatever is nearby in order to stay warm. Stressed out moms start murdering each other at the grocery store over rolls of paper towels. Etc.
This is a fun thought exercise but also a total strawman argument. There are many more reasonable ways to get rid of an oil company than to burn it all down overnight. Lots of countries have demonstrated examples of phased reductions of subsidies or increases in taxes to achieve a big policy shift in specific industries. A more radical but still not pants-on-head example is to nationalize a company or industry and then slowly and responsibly unwind it until there’s nothing left.
I mean… in a sense it would, no? (Not that I would want that tho)
Oooh using gasoline to fight climate change. Literally fighting fire with fire. I like it.
There are so many people like you wanting the violence, but waiting for someone else to shoulder the risk. Performative rebellion.
That’s a lot of assuming you’re doing there.
Are you out there burning it to the ground?
If they were, it would be extremely foolish to answer your question honestly.
Even if they did say yes, you wouldn’t believe them anyway, so what’s the point in asking?
Capitalism will burn itself out but that literally comes with the burn out of humanity. The only way to reverse capitalism is to revolt and impose our own socialist agenda. I know its not what you want to hear but its the only solution to not ending our lives in horrible desperation. Our new policies for climate change will ensure mitigation of greenhouse gasses but the button has been pressed on our future and we will see climate disasters and a global warming that we will need to endure. Endurance and ensurance are the only outcomes possible with the impotence our society is achieving. We are so stuck in this capitalist hellscape and incapable of fighting the systems that rob resources and leeches on the world. We only have this planet and we are sucking it dry quite literally.
My sweet summer child… We missed our chance. The revolution isn’t coming. Or maybe it will happen and then we will die anyways. The climate is fucked. There is no unfucking it. We can fuck it a little less than we currently are every year, but that isn’t going to save us.
The effects of this will rival the Permian extinction in the near term and in the long term, barring a miraculous turnaround through geological processes after a few thousand years, it will certainly be worse.
For reference, the Permian extinction wiped out 90% of ALL LIFE. Like 75% of land based life and 95% of all sea life (of which there was considerably more) at the time died out. It was caused by a sudden and severe increase in atmospheric greenhouse gasses over the course of several thousand years. We are outpacing that by orders of magnitude. So we could quite conceivably reach the levels seen during that time and we could do it much faster, giving all life even less time to adapt to the worst catastrophy in the history of life.
We’re boned, my dude.
We haven’t crossed the point of no return. We are accelerating because we keep press on the acceleration. If we stopped (as we did temporarily during Covid), stuff would get back on track. We have to act now
While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.
As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.
We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.
We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]
That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.
Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.
We really need the death of money more than we need the death of capitalism. Because you’re right, even before rampant capitalism, we still weren’t really great to each other.
What’s amazing to me is I’m perfectly content to live and let live. My neighbors, friends, family, all of us…ain’t got no beef with anybody. Why does this fail so badly when scaled up?
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
My neighbors, friends, family, all of us
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.
There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Or that’s how i see the problem.
Well that makes the problem even more blatantly obvious…the problem is social hierarchy. It’s impossible to have equality and hierarchy simultaneously…they are mutually exclusive.
They (the ruling classes) are vastly outnumbered, yet they manage to gain control over the masses below them, such that we must support them or the whole thing crumbles.
They’ve got the supporting class believing that we need them…but really that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The problem is, though, as soon as one ruler is gone, another replaces them, and that one is equally corrupt. And the cycle repeats.
But conversely, I don’t see how a non-hierarchal society could function, because that implies there must be some sort of order, mediation, and enforcement, which automatically means that some people will have authority over others, no matter how you slice it.
There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.
Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.
It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.
lol.
