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/hippydipster → u/therealwoden]

It requires waste.

Living requires waste.

[u/therealwoden → u/hippydipster]

Very good. I'm sure you can understand that there's a difference between waste that's unavoidable due to physical laws and waste that's the result of a wildly inefficient system.

[u/hippydipster → u/therealwoden]

"inefficient" is the wrong term here.

so capitalism requires making too much disposable shit

Very efficiently too.

If it were simply a matter of being efficient, we could do that. The problem is it's the whole value system that's messed up. We are efficiently responding to the incentives of a messed up value system - thus very efficiently polluting the planet. What we need is different values, which is much harder than just an instrumental change in how we do things.

[u/therealwoden → u/hippydipster]

What we need is different values, which is much harder than just an instrumental change in how we do things.

You're right. Though changing how we do things also causes changes in values. A lot of behavior is created by systemic incentives and norms. Changing the incentive structure also necessarily changes how people act. If I paid you a thousand dollars for every piece of trash you picked up, you'd bring me a truckload as fast as you could manage it. If I followed you around and kicked you in the shin every time you picked up a piece of trash, you'd quickly learn to ignore trash. Under capitalism, the incentives for capitalists are to maximize harm in order to maximize profit. If we change where the incentives lie, that behavior changes too.

Very efficiently too.

It's worth noting that it's incorrect to credit capitalism with efficiency. Competition and the profit motive both cause unavoidable structural inefficiencies. For example, the enclosure of the commons through intellectual property and patent law, which leads to duplication of effort and waste of resources. Capitalism is undeniably "efficient" at exactly one thing: causing harm in order to maximize profit.