I get that this is going rather OT, though I hope the mods will allow it - at least I find this to be an interesting discussion, even if it's veered more explicitly into politics rather than its initial "ugh, crypto sucks" form. I'm aware that some of the post below is directed at
@PowerPC directly rather than "the discussion", though when discussing ideology IMO it's essentially impossible to separate the two, especially when one has to argue not only the points presented but their presentation as well. So I hope it'll be allowed.
Here are some points for you:
- Inequality doesn't say anything about the lives of poor people. Unless you are still stuck in the "us" vs. "them" mentality, which you clearly are.
- Capitalism hasn't just "contributed" to it (literally everything is better), it has caused it. Also, capitalism doesn't exclude bargaining, which is why even workers can still easily have rights within the system we have. Your argument against capitalism is hollow. It caused all the progress we see today. Socialism sure as hell didn't. We would have stayed in the Stone Age if we had socialism back then.
- We have been "rapidly running out" of everything for decades. But we have more trees today than 100 years ago due to reforestation. Only 3% of earth is covered by cities. Eradication of poverty is also happening at unprecedented rates in the world (except in a few countries that still don't have capitalism). And it's also accelerating. Especially the last 50 years have been by far the best for the poor in world history. Together with that progress, population growth is also decelerating quickly. We might cap out at 10 Billion and after that, the human population may even start shrinking according to many predictions. Birth rates in countries like Germany and Japan are already below replacement. This is actually a problem that we may face in the world in general soon.
- Thanks to progress and new efficient technology, new ways to produce everything we need (even food) can be done with far less land for far more people. The footprint we leave is actually shrinking. As I said, literally everything is getting progressively better over the last 100 years, at least in capitalist countries. It's NOT getting worse!
And here's a kicker:
- Real socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea are still burning old tires to heat their homes and it's getting worse every year if you can even get information out of those countries.
You haven't actually refuted any of these FACTS. You haven't looked into the facts and you expect me to accept your claims which are nothing but bullshit? Who's being manipulated by propaganda? It's fear-mongering to get ratings on the news. Turn off the TV and read something based on reality for once.
Okay then. There's a pretty high level of ideological bias going on here, and a lot of twisting of the truth to serve a narrative. Apparently another wall of text is required. Sorry not sorry, I guess? Let's do this point by point:
- "Inequality doesn't say anything about the lives of poor people." I mean, come on! Are you actually arguing that poor people don't suffer? This isn't about some "us vs. them" straw man that you're conjuring up. There is no country on earth where a high level of economic inequality doesn't also mean a high level of poverty. And poverty ruins lives. Poverty forces people into cycles of struggle, suffering and abuse. And capitalism offers no real recourse to this. Hard work? Not even close. Tell that to the poor people in the US working three jobs and still struggling to feed themselves, or pay rent or utilities. Tell that to the modern slaves working in mines, coffee plantations, cocoa plantations and other sites producing the luxury goods we the global rich enjoy. Social mobility within capitalism is a convenient lie to make it palatable to the masses. The myth of the poor being lazy (and lucky, and happy, and not really struggling that much, and effectively choosing to be poor) and not working hard enough to not be poor is a core myth of capitalism. And it is, and has always been, nothing but a myth. Repeating it doesn't make it any more true.
- Please show me a study proving the causal link between capitalism and global progress. Because that's a pretty bold claim - saying that one single factor is the cause of essentially all global development since the industrial revolution. It has contributed (partly because greed is a powerful motivator), but is it the sole reason? No, as I said previously: without anti-captalist action we would all still be working 16-hour workdays for slave wages in dangerous and harmful working conditions in factory towns owned by robber baron industrialists. General wealth and prosperity can far better be attributed to workers' rights movements, women's rights movements, unions, and politicians (typically from parties stemming from said movements) implementing distinctly anticapitalist policies such as taxation for the redistribution of wealth. (Also, did I say socialism was the answer? I don't remember actually mentioning that whatsoever.) Capitalism is more conservative than progressive, as it inherently seeks to minimize costs and protect existing streams of profit, which is inherently contrary to progress and development.
- I mean ... sure, we plant more trees these days. Please tell me how we can grow more minerals at the same time. Or replenish the rapidly dropping global fish population, which feeds a huge proportion of the world. Or re-grow mountains leveled by mining. Or remove the methane gas leeching into groundwater from fracking. Or reverse the massive environmental damage created by mining and industry. And stop the global extinction event currently underway. And so on, and so on. The answer (to the degree that one exists)? Anti-capitalist action. Spending money on restoration and environmental protection is fundamentally anti-capitalist. Not only is this proven by it being money and effort spent without an expectation of material returns, but also through history: capitalist companies and corporations need to be forced into doing these things. There has never been a large-scale capitalist corporation that has, on its own accord, stopped and said "you know, the way we've been doing things is harmful, let's make it better". Why? Because that goes contrary to continuing profits. R&D costs money. Changing modes of production costs money, and is inherently insecure. And capitalism, being a fundamentally conservative ideology, only accepts risk when it is sufficiently small and the potential payoff sufficiently large. Environmental benefits can come from purely profit-driven development (like expending fewer resources to produce something), but they are then a lucky side-effect, not the intended goal.
- A lot of what you cite here is irrelevant to the point at hand. 3% of the world is cities, but 95% of earth has been modified by humans, with 85% showing signs of multiple forms of human modification. More trees than 100 years ago hardly counts for much given that global capitalism had been ravaging the forests of the world for centuries at that point (and the economic value of forests is generally much, much lower today than it was 100 or 200 years ago). Nature reserves are also a relatively recent invention, created explicitly to stop them from being ruined by capitalist exploitation. The industrial revolution partly accelerated due to the near total deforestation of the British isles, forcing them to mine coal instead. Reforestation is an anti-capitalist measure, attempting to counteract the harm done by centuries of capitalist exploitation. Sustainable farming practices exist solely because of anti-capitalist environmentalist action. Eradication of poverty is great, but is mostly fueled by anti-capitalist action - from NGOs and foreign aid to development programs and education. Exploitation of the (global) poor for cheap labor is a central dogma of modern global capitalism, which is demonstrated every time a workforce manages to fight their way out of poverty (again, typically through unionization and anti-capitalist action) just to see the factories move to a new location where poor labor is still abundant, rather than actually improving working conditions and making the jobs decent in the first place.
- Portraying the way capitalist industrialization is ravaging our planet in the hunt for resources as the scarecrow of "running out of resources" is also a gross oversimplification. We'll manage to make the world essentially unlivable long before we actually run out of resources, but that doesn't negate the fact that large-scale resource extraction is an incredibly harmful process. Capitalism has no interest in reducing this harm, as doing so means doing things in more expensive ways, thus reducing profits.
- Progress and technological development are not intrinsically linked to capitalism. In fact, the vast majority of technological development in capitalist countries is fundamentally reliant on a century-long history of publicly funded research. The results of this research are often commercialized and sold in capitalist markets, but the production of knowledge and development of new technologies is to a very large degree entirely reliant on non-capitalist structures for their existence. Neoliberalism and the gradual deconstruction of government that goes with it has worked to change this for decades, but it was only in 2013 that US federal funding dipped below 50% of all US research funding. In the EU government funding still represents the vast majority of research funding, as is the case in other areas with high volumes of research. Please don't conflate the commercialization of the output of publicly-funded research with some intrinsic and inevitable outcome of capitalism.
- Your definition of "real socialist countries" is apparently not based on any actual definition of socialism. Venezuela was indeed building a social democratic state, but it was still a mostly capitalist economy (as are other more or less comparable examples like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, etc.). Blaming their crisis on "socialism" is also a pretty glaringly selective interpretation, given that it was triggered by the one-two punch of an oil price crash (which was the core cause, as their economy was nearly entirely reliant on the publicly owned oil industry, yet the crash was caused by global capitalist structures) and US trade sanctions isolating them from their previous trade partners. As for North Korea being socialist ... I mean, come on. It's an autocratic dictatorship. Nothing more, nothing less. The ideology used to "sell" the dictatorship is largely irrelevant once it has gained power, and is especially not so when the principles of said ideology are in no way followed. NK has no equal distribution of wealth, no social ownership of means of production, no means of public control of government, etc. Of course it's all in name controlled by the Workers' Party, but that party is entirely controlled by the Kim dynasty. Which makes it an autocratic dictatorship, even if it is one trying to portray itself as a socialist people's movement. There is literally nothing socialist about the North Korean government, just as there was barely ever anything socialist about the Soviet Union - any attempt at that was utterly broken by systemic corruption long before anything resembling actual socialism could come to be. The closest thing the world has seen to actual socialist government is what has been done in social democratic countries. And, given that public control and ownership of resources and means of production is the central tenet of socialism, a strong argument can be made for undemocratic socialism being fundamentally impossible, as any single organization/party/ruling class will inherently stand in the way of public control.
One of the key points here is that capitalism is to some degree an opportunistic system, which means it to some degree must allow for anti-capitalist work and organizations to exist within it, and even for their methods and goals to be commercialized where possible (as that might allow for new avenues of profit). Hence the current proliferation of startups (and large companies) selling "environmentally friendly" consumable junk that might do
slightly less damage when they end up in landfills, but does nothing to curb the runaway expenditure of resources or massive inherent waste that is the fundamental driving force behind capitalist consumerism - after all, if there wasn't waste and loss, there would be far less of an incentive to buy new stuff.
Oh, a fun recent example: did you catch the
recent large-scale long-term scientific study showing that worsening pollution caused more than 22 000 extra deaths in the US in 2019 (that's pre-Covid) directly attributable to the deregulatory policies of the previous US president? It's almost as if unregulated capitalism cares nothing for people, and only for profits, and that without regulations curbing capitalist profiteering, it will regress towards more harmful but profitable modes of operation. Who knew?
It's kind of funny how you first waltzed in here claiming that I had no numbers to back up my claims (which I did), and then that I couldn't refute the "FACTS" you presented, which ... weren't really facts in the first place, but more like highly selective ideological readings of complex global developments. Almost as if your "rational optimism" (no idea whether it bears any relation to the source you mentioned, hence the quotes) is rather an irrational one, as it seems to be underpinned by a heavy ideological bias causing you to have a highly selective view of the world, how it works, and how it has come to be. I by no means claim to have all the answers, and there are far more things I don't know or understand than I do, but at least I'm relatively aware of my own political leanings and how they affect my view of the world.
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