Technology

Wake up, my friend. It’s 2025. Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.

Except the entire capitalist system works against us striving to be better. It's not like the American health care system sucks because the people in power suck. It sucks because to fix it you'd have to take capitalism out of the health care system because capitalism drives the profit motive within the health care system which makes it suck.

Same with transitioning from oil to renewables. Fucking Exxon knew half a century ago that climate change is a thing and will lead to catastrophic results. They were in prime position to shift from oil to renewables and reinvent the global energy system, but it was more profitable to run disinformation campaigns and actively work against the transition so they did that instead. Even now some of the oil CEO-s are like "we're already so fucked there's no reason to go for renewables so let us keep making that money".

Same is now going on with electric vehicles. It's much more profitable to sell ICE cars and fight the change instead of actually changing. I don't remember if it was Mercedes or WV or some other manufacturer, anyway one of the big german car CEOs pretty much went "we can't change to electric vehicles in time for the regulations. But you shouldn't punish us with fines because we're too big to fail."

The list goes on. The reason people here are so anti-capitalist is because most of us see that even if we want to strive to be better we can't because capitalism keeps dragging us down. It's like that scene in "Don't look up" where the world comes together to save itself and just as the crisis is about to be averted the capitalist tech bro fucks it all up because who cares if we're risking our entire planet, there's money to be made. Capitalism will try its best to undermine any effort that prevents maximizing profits.

Do you really think we'll get to the 15 hour work week in 2030, like Keynes predicted? Definitely not under the capitalist system. We have empirical evidence that 32 hour work week improves productivity and we can't even get that because the capital owners refuse to accept it. Literally something that could easily improve all our lives and we can't get it done because of capitalism.

Nobody is against striving to be better but wanting to get rid of capitalism is striving to be better because capitalism is like a steel ball attached to your ankle. It's just weighing down all your efforts to be better.

I mean, I mostly agree with this. You can boil any problem down to existence. And existence down to molecular processes.

But two things: discussing modern problems, it’s all built on systems. And the system we deal with is capitalism.

Human fallibility is the problem, ultimately. But there is no overcoming human fallibility. So building systems that place peoples well being above all else is an actionable solution. Whereas solving human fallibility isn’t.

And secondly, hierarchy in all its forms. Which I would argue is the problem boiled down past the system to look at its problematic parts. Does a system rely on or serve needs in a hierarchical manner? Then that’s the problem.

That’s as far as I think is logical to go. Digging down further to human nature is a problem for a utopian society to deal with, and that we are nowhere near to achieving. So, my point is we need to deal with the first layer of problems. And that would be capitalism. Abolishing hierarchy in all its forms comes second.

The first because the system rewards the worst parts of our nature. The second because it’s almost uniformly led to corruption. Those are the root problems, from my point of view. Human fallibility is, I’m afraid, baked into the cookie. But removing systems that reward those errors instead of eradicating them should be job one.

Public provision of services is not socialism, it's just common sense. The first mass state pension system was rolled out by that crusty reactionary Bismarck. Every rightwing country still has fire departments and (mostly) public road systems too. Not doing it that way is just stupidity, not ideology.

What is socialism is when people doing the work have control of the means of production. Control, not a token share. One example is cooperatives. By this definition (which goes back to Karl Marx), neither the USSR nor Communist China were socialist, they were totalitarian state capitalist entitites. China still is, though less incompetent than under Mao. And this isn't some revisionist point of view. Rosa Luxemburg and other contemporaries saw it happening at the onset.

It sure is. It's important to touch grass on a daily basis to stay sane. I personally go outside take a stroll and caress some leaves.

Regarding your initial point : I see "capitalism" as the family of systems that enable that kind of IT monopoly. Sure, human traits such as greed and bigotry are probably the source of evil but it seems to me they have to be tapped, and enabled. The fact that the conversation often ultimately turns back to capitalism is legitimate imho.