Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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wjfox
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Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Post by wjfox »

Great piece by George Monbiot.

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Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Instead of focusing on ‘micro consumerist bollocks’ like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up

Last modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 09.47 BST

There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.

When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that it isn’t happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct.

Here is what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the planet’s webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.

:arrow: Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... estruction


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andmar74
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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The planet is in great shape, it's not going to die anytime soon.
Higher temperatures and more CO2 is good for plant life and therefore animal life.
If you are talking about how climate is going to affect humans, then that's something else.
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wjfox
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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andmar74 wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 12:42 pm
Higher temperatures and more CO2 is good for plant life and therefore animal life.

Only up to a certain point...

https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/2017/01/30.htm
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R8Z
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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I wouldn't trade technological progress speed that an utopical perfect market creates, for something wasteful like the planned economy in China that builds ghost towns or an anarchoprimitive ("return to monke") society that lives from scraps.

Consumerism on the other hand is sickening, people have extremely low time preference nowadays (rather buy now than save and invest later); this should change IMO as it only builds waste and incentives for building worse and therefore cheaper products.
And, as always, bye bye.
Tadasuke
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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Billions of people are poor and you are proposing not making people wealthier? People have dreams and wants, they will pursue that, because that's what makes us who we are. However, I am a supporter of virtual reality, computer realms. There you could potentially do whatever you want, whenever and wherever, without making high footprint on the planet. Only a little electricity will be used. It's already going in that direction, Metaverse is the future, but I prefer it to be more open than Facebook or Epic Games want. About 90% of Earth's population have some kind of access to electricity, so it's already possible for most people to engage in virtual computer interactions.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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R8Z wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:19 pm I wouldn't trade technological progress speed that an utopical perfect market creates, for something wasteful like the planned economy in China that builds ghost towns or an anarchoprimitive ("return to monke") society that lives from scraps.

Consumerism on the other hand is sickening, people have extremely low time preference nowadays (rather buy now than save and invest later); this should change IMO as it only builds waste and incentives for building worse and therefore cheaper products.
What makes you think China is a planned economy?
I thought a lot of the ghost towns were created by businesses like the defaulting Evergrande.
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

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Tadasuke wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:20 pm Billions of people are poor and you are proposing not making people wealthier? People have dreams and wants, they will pursue that, because that's what makes us who we are.
Don't put words in my mouth. I never suggested that billions should remain poor.

And of course, people should be free to pursue dreams and goals.

However, we've reached the point where our current form of capitalism literally threatens to make our planet uninhabitable. So we can either continue down that path, which leads to our inevitable collapse and extinction, or transition to a new economic model. I suggest we adopt a new "circular economy" that isn't focused on turning every inch of nature into the cold, dead stuff of money – but instead respects the Earth's natural limits and is based on the long-term collective good. This surely makes logical sense?
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Post by R8Z »

Set and Meet Goals wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:38 pm
R8Z wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:19 pm I wouldn't trade technological progress speed that an utopical perfect market creates, for something wasteful like the planned economy in China that builds ghost towns or an anarchoprimitive ("return to monke") society that lives from scraps.

Consumerism on the other hand is sickening, people have extremely low time preference nowadays (rather buy now than save and invest later); this should change IMO as it only builds waste and incentives for building worse and therefore cheaper products.
What makes you think China is a planned economy?
I thought a lot of the ghost towns were created by businesses like the defaulting Evergrande.
Corporations and business respond to incentives. Incentives that affect how to behave with capital and investments. I am not gonna go into a lecture on what happened in China but suffices to say that there was an incentive for building real state where there was no demand, and that incentive wasn't natural.
And, as always, bye bye.
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Post by Ozzie guy »

R8Z wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 2:39 pm
Set and Meet Goals wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:38 pm
R8Z wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:19 pm I wouldn't trade technological progress speed that an utopical perfect market creates, for something wasteful like the planned economy in China that builds ghost towns or an anarchoprimitive ("return to monke") society that lives from scraps.

Consumerism on the other hand is sickening, people have extremely low time preference nowadays (rather buy now than save and invest later); this should change IMO as it only builds waste and incentives for building worse and therefore cheaper products.
What makes you think China is a planned economy?
I thought a lot of the ghost towns were created by businesses like the defaulting Evergrande.
Corporations and business respond to incentives. Incentives that affect how to behave with capital and investments. I am not gonna go into a lecture on what happened in China but suffices to say that there was an incentive for building real state where there was no demand, and that incentive wasn't natural.
Ahh yeah China is Keynesian imo
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erowind
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Re: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Post by erowind »

R8Z wrote: Sat Oct 30, 2021 2:39 pm Corporations and business respond to incentives. Incentives that affect how to behave with capital and investments. I am not gonna go into a lecture on what happened in China but suffices to say that there was an incentive for building real state where there was no demand, and that incentive wasn't natural.
That same "unatural" incentive exists in various forms across the capitalist world whether through the state and or cartels of corporations. Let's take the American example. In a "perfect" market economy housing supply would be mostly built where there is natural demand for it. Yet, such balance of supply and demand doesn't exist. There are more vacant homes than homeless people in the United States. Why? Because "natural" competition in a "free" market leads to capital accumulation. (In American housing leading to rampant speculation and vacant unaffordable homes.)

Capital accumulation enables capitalists to control the market through means that don't involve merit of their product or service. Meaning, where competition begins with equitably equipped capitalists competing to make the best product, it ends with the capitalist who wins using that accumulated capital to fix the market through one malicious mean or another.

A monopoly that has formed through initial fitness can then artificially lower their prices for a time to price out capitalists with less capital even if that the smaller capitalist has a superior product or more efficient means to bring the product to market. The monopoly is then incentivized to maintain it's old worse product in order to maintain an artificially high margin on it.

A monopoly can collude with other monopolies to form cartels and fix prices at high margins, extracting rent from the population for essential goods instead of bringing prices down or building better products.

A monopoly can buy out governments and write laws that benefit it, regulating the competition out of the market.

A monopoly can buy out startups with superior products and then destroy their products locking them beyond intellectual property laws that the monopoly itself lobbies to enforce.

In some cases like is rampant in both China and America cartels can simply become the government as they lobby for privatizations and then fix prices on the services of formally public infrastructure.

So there is no "invisible hand" that is seeking "perfect" "natural" prices in a "free" market. The market if it were ever free, the closest any society came was post-civil war America, rapidly degenerates into cartels as capital accumulation gives capitalists unfit advantage in the market. Free markets that initially begin by producing value in the economy evolve into fixed markets where rent-seeking is rampant.

Simply breaking up the monopolies doesn't work. Simply demanding more competition and supporting small and medium enterprises doesn't work. They will come back as capital accumulates even if a bandaid social movement to that end is temporarily successful. Capital accumulation is a phenomena inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Lenin describes this phenomena in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Marx described it in more detail before him.

Capital accumulation won't simply go away. Hearkening back to an ideal era when capital accumulation wasn't as rampant doesn't solve anything, it doesn't move the society forward. The only way forward is abolition of the profit-motive entirely. This will come to be as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall continues to take its toll on capitalist economy. The cartels will be forced into greater labor exploitation and total rent-seeking activity to remain profitable. They will attempt to shift into a neofuedalism of sorts, as is very evident by the continued death of the middle class and the World Economic Forums mask off display that became a meme. This is already and will continue to flare into increasingly intense class-conflict leading to world revolution.

Edit: I would also question the idea that there can be a critique of consumerism without a critique of capitalism. It is profitable to serve consumers all these endless useless commodities they "demand," no? It is profitable to manufacture consent and spend trillions around the world over decades on private propaganda (advertising) to brainwash people into buying things they don't need no? It is profitable to build advertising algorithms that use psychological manipulation on people to get them to buy things based on a profile of preferences that their electronic devices track against their consent no? Some individuals are very strong sure, some individuals can resist this of course.
But what of the individuals that through no fault of their own can't? Are we just to assume a simplistic understanding of the situation, that consumerism is bad because most people are "weak?" Or is it more reasonable to point out the utter onslaught their brains are subjected to that is manipulating them?
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