Edmond Dantesk

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  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2023

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  • We shouldn’t be so angry that we think something as broad/simple as a marketplace has no use, and should not even be attempted, in creating a sustainable society worth living in.

    It looks like you are conflating market economy and capitalism. These are two different concepts, and the first one predates the second by a few millenia.

    So in the end the question was about capitalism but you argued in favor of market economy.





  • You are passing a lot of assumptions as facts here.

    But the problem is: the world won’t stop polluting, won’t stop growing its economies, won’t stop expanding.

    Unless you are a time traveler, this is a belief, not a fact.

    Even if the US and Europe cut their emissions and slow down, the developing world, India and China and Nigeria and Kenya, and so on, won’t. They see the standard of living in the West, they think their people deserve to live just as well, and they see we got there through unchecked resource consumption within a capitalist economic system, and how the hell do we have the right to tell those countries to stay poor for the sake of the environment when we got rich by fucking the environment?

    Here you are assuming a lot about how those countries / populations might analyze the situation. Also, that the path we followed to develop is the only one, and that they are bound to follow our example. That’s quite a colonialist point of view.

    So the only things that will save the world are globally organized, probably UN coordinated, technological solutions to mitigate the damage done by unchecked capitalist expansion, because we can’t stop capitalism.

    If you start from the premise that there is no alternative to capitalism, that this rather young form of social organization is the end of human history, I can understand why you reach that conclusion. But don’t assume that your line of reasoning is the only logical conclusion one can reach.





  • Hey.

    Most degrowth advocates I’ve seen or read in France are not talking about lifestyle changes for individuals - or at least, not without radical changes in the organization of society.

    I agree that blaming poor people for driving shitty cars and living in poorly insulated buildings is stupid and counter-productive. But that’s how ecology is concieved by the ruling political class, not degrowth advocates.



  • Not sure I agree with everything, let me rephrase this.

    The way I see it, capitalism is a way of organizing an economic system that is based on accumulation of wealth (capital). Instead of sitting idle, capital is injected back into the economy through investment, with the promise of a juicy return on investment (and also, it gives power to those who own capital for they decide who gets investment).

    For this juicy ROI to be possible, economic growth is a necessity - you can’t give back more to your lenders if what you did with the investment didn’t generate more value than the investment itself. So economic growth is at the very heart of capitalism.

    When the market comes to a saturation point, growth starts to slow down. So you have two options:

    1. open new markets, expanding the economic sphere (either geographically or in new segments of life)
    2. make disposable products, through engineering (planned obsolescence) or advertisement (you need the new iPhone, believe me)

    In the end, I don’t see consumerism as an ideal for a society, but rather the logical consequence of an economic system reified as an ideal. It doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t exist in another economic model, but I don’t think it can be separated from capitalism.