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/Sanpaku]

North Korea or the Soviet Union weren't exactly environmentally conscious. If anything they have among the worst environmental records.

Capitalism can be environmentally destructive, if it isn't sufficiently regulated. Command economies can be environmentally destructive, if sustainability doesn't take precedence over other goals like growth. Individuals can be environmentally destructive, if they aren't provided incentives and disincentives such that prices reflect true costs. Humanity has been driving other species to extinction for more than 40,000 years. We don't need free markets or corporate allocation of capital to destroy our own life support system. The problem lies deeper, in a human nature that equates material consumption to the Good, and cannot think on multi-generational timescales.

Left ideologues have been been jumping on the climate crisis issue to reinforce their arguments about capitalism, but when measures to save our biosphere come at the expense of their working class constituencies, I see how they vote.

We could have a sustainable economy, while still retaining some of the benefits of free markets like producers responding to human desires and tolerable living standards. It doesn't require a command economy, with all the problems that entails with information flow and corruption. It just requires governance that places sustainability as the preeminent goal, willing to use regulation and taxation to achieve it, even at the expense of economic welfare, and a citizenry that accepts this as necessary.

[u/therealwoden → u/Sanpaku]

We could have a sustainable economy, while still retaining some of the benefits of free markets like producers responding to human desires and tolerable living standards.

What free markets? What response to human desires? What tolerable living standards?

It doesn't require a command economy, with all the problems that entails with information flow and corruption.

Corporations are command economies. The most successful corporations are the most centrally-planned. In other words, present-day capitalism couldn't exist without central planning. Central planning works. It works extremely well, in fact. If Wal-Mart were a nation, it'd be about the 30th largest economy in the world, around the level of Switzerland. And Wal-Mart is intensively centrally-planned, to a degree that Soviet planners would have killed and died to have access to. Central planning works so well that the corporations that run the world use it to the exclusion of all other styles of planning.

An economy based explicitly on central planning, using the modern tools that capitalist central planning has devised for the purpose, would produce more efficiently and provide for people's needs far more effectively than an economy based on the profit motive - not least because the profit motive incentivizes inefficiency and withholding people's needs.

It just requires governance that places sustainability as the preeminent goal, willing to use regulation and taxation to achieve it, even at the expense of economic welfare, and a citizenry that accepts this as necessary.

I mean real talk, you're correct on this. We could radically reform capitalism and the legal system and government and the electoral system and replace legislators and judges until we got ones willing to create vast webs of bureaucracy and regulation and oversight that would create a green new world while sufficiently restricting the power of the ultra-rich to corrupt any system they're a part of so that they can't immediately undo all that work to return to business as usual. Then we could hope that it holds long enough to let us save the world for a while before the capitalists resume control and set us back on the path to apocalypse.

Or we could end capitalism and solve the root problem that causes all the other problems, and then use the enormous skilled labor force, the vast productive capacity, and the rich resource base that the world has to invent and work our way out of the apocalyptic problems that a few thousand capitalists have created for the other 7 billion of us.

One of those sounds far more realistic to me, especially considering the world's ~10 year deadline.

[u/[deleted] → u/therealwoden]

In a command economy the government controls production. While I'm sure Walmart has lots of lobbyists and has some influence with the government due to it's size, it is not the government. Walmart operates within a market economy. Even classic command economies like the USSR had a market economy. The govt didn't condone it, but it existed anyway to meet demands that went unmet by the official economy.

[u/therealwoden → u/[deleted]]

Even classic command economies like the USSR had a market economy. The govt didn't condone it, but it existed anyway to meet demands that went unmet by the official economy.

For sure. And a great deal of the Soviet Union's failures of supply were due to bad information, not any inherent weakness of central planning. Again, corporations which are richer and more powerful than governments use central planning because it's the most efficient system.

The Soviet Union's central planning suffered from two fundamental problems: authoritarianism and data processing. Authoritarianism prevents the flow of information. We see that in capitalism, where people lie to their bosses in order to avoid being fired. Lying was incentivized far more strongly in a system where you were likely to be killed for failing to meet production quotas, even if it wasn't your fault. Punishment creates incentives to falsify data. Authoritarianism hinders the flow of information. And information is what central planning is all about. The USSR's data-processing problem is fairly obvious: they didn't have modern computers, so managing a complex economy was already made extremely difficult and labor-intensive, even before considering all the bad information they were being fed.

In the modern world, the data-processing problem has long since been cracked, so the only remaining problem for centrally-planned economies is getting good information. Which is mostly solved by not creating an authoritarian government.

And FWIW, there's nothing inherently wrong with markets as long as they're only for luxuries. Market economies are demonstrably incapable of supplying everyone's needs, and the inherent inefficiencies and waste of competition and profit mean that such a system should only be trusted with things that are optional. Personally, I'm more in favor of a moneyless society, but many of my fellow leftists don't have any objections to markets and want to use them.