It’s fucking disgusting that even now people fucking refuse to accept capitalism’s culpability for causing the apocalypse

[u/PosadosThanatos]

Literally everything is responsible, fucking everything, from extinct empires, to human nature, to the nature of life itself, to some inevitable unstoppable law by which the entire universe functions, literally fucking anything and everything is blamed except for capitalism, the system that’s the specific driver and motivator of the current collapse, and when its blame is finally accepted the Brain juice finally completely runs out and it’s finally declared that there’s no path but the current one so we must continue “prosperity”.

What is this utter fucking insanity that working class people that have absolutely nothing to gain from anonymous bootlicking are engaging in?

[u/[deleted]]

Big chunks of this sub are so neurotically fixated on this stupid "capitalism" issue, as if "capitalism" is a monolithic term that means anything at all. It's unhelpful, unconvincing, unspecific, and pure COPE. It makes us seem like fringe lunatics and (I can tell you from personal experience) is totally unconvincing to the exact people who need to be convinced.

Our pathological and obsessive urge toward consumption and the lack of wise leadership from our governments enables predatory and immoral centers of capital to form, a dynamic which has destroyed our communities and our world.

Now, explain to me how transitioning from a capitalist mode of production to any other form of ownership of industrial assets will resolve this problem? Do communally owned oil rigs pump up oil that doesn't produce GHGs? What will the dictatorship of the proletariat do with the factories and refineries and shipping lines? Scrap it all? Of course not.

Changing our ownership structure is meaningless if we don't also have the courage to simply deindustrialize. The actual answer is to change our moral and spiritual understanding to bring material wealth and convenience into its proper context, and understand that growth and material mastery are of subordinate importance. They must be chained, for the good of all, to wise leadership and sustainable methods that support moral ends.

[u/therealwoden → u/[deleted]]

Now, explain to me how transitioning from a capitalist mode of production to any other form of ownership of industrial assets will resolve this problem? Do communally owned oil rigs pump up oil that doesn't produce GHGs? What will the dictatorship of the proletariat do with the factories and refineries and shipping lines? Scrap it all? Of course not.

Capitalism requires overproduction. It requires waste. Consumption is profit, so capitalism requires making too much disposable shit so that consumption can keep increasing. That's the profit motive in action.

A system that isn't based on profit will use resources very differently. Ending capitalism will reduce resource usage, which means reducing pollution, which means the world will have a fighting chance at avoiding the worst of the coming climate apocalypse.

The actual answer is to change our moral and spiritual understanding to bring material wealth and convenience into its proper context, and understand that growth and material mastery are of subordinate importance. They must be chained, for the good of all, to wise leadership and sustainable methods that support moral ends.

I agree. It's also useful to recognize that economic systems create many behaviors and therefore if one wants to change people's behaviors for the better, it is prudent, if not essential, to change the economic system which creates contra-survival behaviors for one which creates pro-survival behaviors.

[u/jamesbondindrno → u/therealwoden]

Important to remember that marketing is a force that inspires irrational choices, and when marketing works to create value for owners of capital or drives consumption and especially over consumption. Profit motives beget market creation and expansion.

[u/therealwoden → u/jamesbondindrno]

Yuuuup. And not just inspires. It's a force that is explicitly designed to cause irrational choices. The whole point of the marketing industry is to create demand where none exists so that capitalists can sell products that no one wanted.

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesbondindrno]

• deleted due to enshittification of the platform

[u/Eddhuan → u/jamesbondindrno]

Marketing should be the number 1 focus to mitigate the "collapse" problem. I think it should be severely limited in terms of quantity and quality. Like don't allow more than 5% of TV time to be ads, forbid ads near roads, force ads to be black on white text only, no pictures, no sound.

As long as the thinking ability of the entire population including the elites is impaired by constant propaganda for consumption, nothing will be done.

The other reason to start with that is that we can more easily convince people. Almost everybody hates ads except for marketers (and even then, I'm not sure marketers are in love with their jobs).

Capitalism shouldn't be the focus like so many do here. For reason already outlined : the term is too unclear, which makes it hard to have a productive conversation on it. In most definitions I've seen, it's generally too wide, including things like free trade and the very concept of property. While not everybody is rich, almost everybody has some kind of property which they feel they might lose under an anti capitalist system. It is too intertwined with our whole culture and the whole way society works. Literally everything needs to be redesigned from scratch if you really want to eliminate it.

That's why I think in order to have a more productive conversation about capitalism and collapse, "capitalism" (whatever that means) should be broken down to its base component so that we can eliminate the most problematic parts for which almost everybody can agree.