...what is it with people who have no idea how ecology works trying to force poor ecology metaphors to justify the economic horrors of our modern times?
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fuck capitalism
- Thread starter Surface of Me
- Start date
...what is it with people who have no idea how ecology works trying to force poor ecology metaphors to justify the economic horrors of our modern times?
If we're going by 'natural laws' then humans should live as they did in pre-agricultural societies: communally and without private property. Without concepts of gender or class.
The 'it's nature' argument simply doesn't work. Nor should it be used as an comparison for how we should deal with societal affairs.
I don't know, but it sure is tiresome. Imagine writing all of that shit without a hint of irony.
I agree that budgeting, basic financial literacy, and a little self-control can go a very long way, but there are some things that are completely outside one's control. What if you'd gotten sick and your workplace didn't provide health insurance? What if you got into a car accident that your insurance won't cover? Ideally you'd have an emergency fund, but what if any of those things happened before you could build up a sizable emergency fund? Not to mention, most people aren't taught financial literacy in school. And when you're born poor, you're forced to attend lower-quality, inadequately funded schools. You're put at a huge disadvantage every step of the way, and it's hard to overcome them without a bit of luck and good mentors and role models, which again, are much harder to come by when you're poor.
Endless capital accumulation, which is enabled by capitalism, is inherently greedy. It reveals that impulse in individuals to the extreme. Diffusing capital instead amongst the people and society would curb that impulse and the outsized power any one person can have as a result to lord over the rest. Capitalism makes greed a systematic problem from the jump.
Well, in a lion pride, they did have gender & class based roles so.......
In a hyenas pack, the alpha female calls the shots :P
And in a bee hive, every drone is working in service of the queen.
So take your pick.
listen, if the lobsters do that than we should do that, those are natural law I swear.
people should have the right to question whether there are too many hard choices and if the consequences are unnecessarily harsh. Posturing and judging others because you are doing fine is generally in poor taste.
people just want to live without the almost constant fear of not having a roof under your head and not eating the next day.
...Ok, please read a book on ecology before spouting off ecology facts. Also alpha and beta males and females were based off of faulty research.
A mom who works 2 jobs and has a child probably doesn't have time to cook every night. A labourer. who doesn't have all the cash to buy a good pair of 300 dollars boots that will last him a few years has to spend 50 every month or two when his old ones break and immediately needs new ones. Many energy companies offer discounts if you pay your bill pre-paid promptly. If you don't have the money on you that means you're paying more for power in the house your renting. If you poor you likely have a badly insulated house that requires more power to heat it up in the cold months. Can't afford monthly payments of health insurance then you risk destroying your life if you have the gall to get cancer.
It's not cheap to be poor.
I dont mean to single you out, I just find threads like these and the posts in them needlessly antagonistic. "All capitalism is bad and even though we have no idea what a realized alternative would look like, anyone who disagrees is a centrist corporate apologist."
There is no give or take to the conversation. it's all take, no give. We probably agree on 99% of the ideas that would improve our current society so I fail to see the usefulness in carte blanche condemning our current system and hoping for...what...a violent revolution?
The desire for consolidation of power is not unique to capitalism. It has existed far longer and in far more sinister ways. Capitalism is merely a system which aims to guide those inherently human desires in more productive ways, and the regulations placed upon capitalism for a more equitable society are required to limit those desires.
Any effective system requires consideration for human nature and how to reward and curtail our propensities. Ignoring that part of humanity is equating human beings to ants.
I know it would never happen because of the powers that be, but I wish Marx was taught as a philosopher in schools. He's probably the most important philosopher in the past 200 years and if people actually read his work they'd realise that he had actually thought about things like 'human nature' and 'the human need for competition' in his works.
As someone who is striving and is successful in this current system, despite being born into poverty, I won't shed a tear if we adopted a better system than capitalism.
First, some of us do have an idea of what an alternative would look like. Second, you don't need to have an alternative to recognize that capitalism is bad.
With socialism/communism, power is more evenly distributed and would be harder to accumulate. And no, capitalism doesn't guide those human desires to more productive ways. Again, capitalism is killing us as we speak.
Capitalism can be really bad with no regulations like many people here have pointed out. You can make it better with the right regulations though. There are some really good ideas itt already.
Free education
Free healthcare
An income for food, shelter and other necessities for poeple who need it.
Regulations like these and other regulations which increase economic mobility should be implemented in all capitalist countries. Economic mobility is more important than most people realise. The US and UK have lowest of almost any devloped country (due to education being expensive etc) which is why so many people in the US stay poor when they were born poor.
There is a problem though. You need a lot of money to implement the regulations posted above. Governments have to make robuust tax systems which is way harder than it seems. This is coming from someone who almost has a degree in Fiscal Economics at one of the best fiscal institutions of the world (Tilburgse University). Raising the corporate tax and making all types of businesses pay that same tax seems like a simple solution. The problem is that big companies who make the most money are going to shift their headquarters to other countries with lower corporate taxes. The solution that most of my professors suggest is a jointly corporate tax with the EU for example. The problem there is that most governments want to stay in charge of their own tax systems. Other like The Netherlands don't want to lose bog companies since it's a tax have for those big companies.
TLDR: there are many regulations that would make capitalism bearable, but they're difficult to implement.
Free education
Free healthcare
An income for food, shelter and other necessities for poeple who need it.
Regulations like these and other regulations which increase economic mobility should be implemented in all capitalist countries. Economic mobility is more important than most people realise. The US and UK have lowest of almost any devloped country (due to education being expensive etc) which is why so many people in the US stay poor when they were born poor.
There is a problem though. You need a lot of money to implement the regulations posted above. Governments have to make robuust tax systems which is way harder than it seems. This is coming from someone who almost has a degree in Fiscal Economics at one of the best fiscal institutions of the world (Tilburgse University). Raising the corporate tax and making all types of businesses pay that same tax seems like a simple solution. The problem is that big companies who make the most money are going to shift their headquarters to other countries with lower corporate taxes. The solution that most of my professors suggest is a jointly corporate tax with the EU for example. The problem there is that most governments want to stay in charge of their own tax systems. Other like The Netherlands don't want to lose bog companies since it's a tax have for those big companies.
TLDR: there are many regulations that would make capitalism bearable, but they're difficult to implement.
I would love to hear what the idea is and how we get there. That would be a useful discussion in comparison to arguing over whether capitalism is bad or not.
And it depends on your definition of productive. Competition is needlessly wasteful but it also drives innovation.
Drones are the males and they don't work, they just mate with the queen and then die. Workers are females that work.
I'm on the Murray Bookchin philosophy of seeing capitalism as one aspect of the greater root evil of domination. Because yes fuck capitalism, but domination and oppression is about a lot more than just class divide and exploitation. This is where Bookchin moves beyond Marxism to integrate race, gender, colonialism, and ecology. He offers two earnest and extremely educated visions for how to understand and confront domination in all its forms: social ecology and libertarian municipalism.
To sum it up very briefly, social ecology is a theory that states that all of our ecological degradation is in direct relationship to our social degradation. In this way (and many others) Bookchin's analysis parallels and borrows from what indigenous, black, and brown theorists have been saying for centuries: domination is intersectional and all the forms it takes are (to varying degrees perhaps) inseparable.
Libertarian municipalism advocates a re-centering of our political lives to focus on both a hyper local and necessarily global perspective. It proposes neighborhood level councils as the center piece of community political life, with directly elected and recallable delegates chosen to then represent the people as candidates for local political offices such as city councils, school boards, local transit agencies, etc. But before running candidates for office, it's vital to build solid community relationships, organization, capacity, and power. This is a vital perspective shift: the root of our political power is in our relationships to each other, both as people but also ecologically as organisms and planet. Fuck, even cosmos. This is a central perspective in both social ecology and libertarian municapalism, and you'll see it echoed by some of the most shining examples of the philosophy in action, including in Rojava in Kurdistan/Syria and within the Zapatista project in Oaxaca. Build from the grassroots up. Focus on bread and butter work like growing food and helping each other eat and thrive. Start housing cooperatives, childcare collectives, community cafes, food pantries, support networks, neighborhood dinners, free dental clinics, etc. Build relationships and resiliency strong enough to face the future head on.
While organizing locally, we must also organize regionally and globally. We must make this an interconnected (and, to be specific, confederated) movement.
I could gush on and on about this shit honestly. I genuinely think this is the answer to capitalism and it's two modern forms: neoliberalism and fascism. But it's also the answer to climate change, to mass isolation and alienation and powerlessness, hunger, police accountability, demilitarizing our borders, ending war, etc. It's some next level visionary shit and I stan it hard.
brb I'm gonna edit with some educational videos lol
One of the organizers from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi:
Bookchin on domination and his transition from Marxism to anarchism. This is before he started espousing municipalism, but it's still illustrative -- and funny imo:
A panel discussion on modern municipalist organizing in Europe and North America (including Bookchin's daughter Debbie Bookchin):
To sum it up very briefly, social ecology is a theory that states that all of our ecological degradation is in direct relationship to our social degradation. In this way (and many others) Bookchin's analysis parallels and borrows from what indigenous, black, and brown theorists have been saying for centuries: domination is intersectional and all the forms it takes are (to varying degrees perhaps) inseparable.
Libertarian municipalism advocates a re-centering of our political lives to focus on both a hyper local and necessarily global perspective. It proposes neighborhood level councils as the center piece of community political life, with directly elected and recallable delegates chosen to then represent the people as candidates for local political offices such as city councils, school boards, local transit agencies, etc. But before running candidates for office, it's vital to build solid community relationships, organization, capacity, and power. This is a vital perspective shift: the root of our political power is in our relationships to each other, both as people but also ecologically as organisms and planet. Fuck, even cosmos. This is a central perspective in both social ecology and libertarian municapalism, and you'll see it echoed by some of the most shining examples of the philosophy in action, including in Rojava in Kurdistan/Syria and within the Zapatista project in Oaxaca. Build from the grassroots up. Focus on bread and butter work like growing food and helping each other eat and thrive. Start housing cooperatives, childcare collectives, community cafes, food pantries, support networks, neighborhood dinners, free dental clinics, etc. Build relationships and resiliency strong enough to face the future head on.
While organizing locally, we must also organize regionally and globally. We must make this an interconnected (and, to be specific, confederated) movement.
I could gush on and on about this shit honestly. I genuinely think this is the answer to capitalism and it's two modern forms: neoliberalism and fascism. But it's also the answer to climate change, to mass isolation and alienation and powerlessness, hunger, police accountability, demilitarizing our borders, ending war, etc. It's some next level visionary shit and I stan it hard.
brb I'm gonna edit with some educational videos lol
One of the organizers from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi:
Bookchin on domination and his transition from Marxism to anarchism. This is before he started espousing municipalism, but it's still illustrative -- and funny imo:
A panel discussion on modern municipalist organizing in Europe and North America (including Bookchin's daughter Debbie Bookchin):
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Also
Although the name might imply it, a queen bee does not directly control the hive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee
"Great for me, forget about thee." It's always egocentric people who push this shit.
It's either that or the fucking nincompoops who try to equate monetary systems with natural law of "survival." A majority of the problems humanity faces are because humanity takes its systems of symbolism and measure to such a degree that they matter more than what they're symbolising or measuring. Better to have fake wealth (money) while real wealth (the actual resources of Earth) burn.
The final example that comes to mind with this trinity of stupid are the people who call out trying to survive in the system with remarks like "if money is so bad just give me yours." It's incredible to see, even on this very forum, the level of anti-intellectualism that borderlines on religious cultish belief, as it depends upon so many untrue things for various assertions to be true beyond the domain of thought, belief, and feeling.
Marx was an anti-semitic and racist self-hating Jew whose entire philosophy was based on lashing out at the other people he perceived as being responsible for the problems he faced due to his ethnicity. He saw himself as being "one of the good ones." But this part of his work somehow never seems to taken as something that needs to be considered when contextualizing where his "philosophy" actually originated from, a place of anger, hate and resentment.
Don't believe me? Just ask him.
There's very good reasons for keeping him the fuck out of schools.
Yes, I've read Marx I know where these claims come from. I won't deny that it's likely he held anti-semetic beliefs. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves but the constitution is held up to religious significance in America. Socrates fucked children and he's the bedrock of Western thought.
This is all absolute drivel
yes, but don't fuck systems in general
We need systems that support our wellbeing and liberation, our resiliency and survival.
Oh no, not racist old white men in our schools. 😱 We've fought so hard to keep them out so far.
What scale are you talking about? Because we live on many scales. Read my rant about libertarian municipalism above, I think it offers an extremely helpful multi-scale perspective.
Thanks for this post, I'll check out the linked videos. Municipalism is really interesting.
They're not "claims", they're fucking taking the man at his words when he says things like this-
Marx is widely regarded as being an anti-Semite. The basis is an essay Marx wrote in 1844, On the Jewish Question, which was developed while Marx was formulating historical materialism. Marx makes the following argument
Marx's argument is not that Judaism creates 'hucksters' but that 'hucksters' creates Jews. The 'material conditions' of commerce creates the religion of the Jews. By turning Christians into pedallers, the Jew converts them. So long as 'capitalism' exists, the Jews will flourish.
Marx's argument is not that Judaism creates 'hucksters' but that 'hucksters' creates Jews. The 'material conditions' of commerce creates the religion of the Jews. By turning Christians into pedallers, the Jew converts them. So long as 'capitalism' exists, the Jews will flourish.
Marx did not confine his anti-Semitism to economic theory. He corresponded to Engles about a leading German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, who was Jewish. Marx called Lassalle a "Jewish N*****". In 1861 Marx wrote to Engles
Have you bothered to take an actual economics class yet?
And clearly you haven't if you don't know what I'm referring to.
And Jefferson owned slaves, and Gandhi hated black people, etc. etc. But we're still learning about and from them!
You bring this up every time and nobody cares, because it's not integral to his understanding of how capitalism works. Everyone is aware that historical figures were racist and sexist and homophobic. That should be taught too.
User banned (1 month): repeatedly harassing another member over multiple posts and threads + previously banned for the same thing
Aren't you the guy who's gotten banned multiple times for racially insensitive posts?
So I'm going to take this condescending deflection as a no. Kirblar has not read Marx. That is good to know. I'm going to make a note of that. Thanks.
I never understood the no time to cook argument. It takes less time to put together a sandwich than to get fast food.
Being poor is hard, but from personal experience I would also argue it is cheap. Of course not everyone is me. And thats the issue. A lot of people can escape poverty by being smart and budgeting. Though not everyone has the knowledge or self control to have a very strict budget. And theres still the issue of medical problems with no insurance.
And just to be clear, when I say escape povery Im not saying become rich, I just mean no longer living paycheck to paycheck, and being able to put money into some kind of savings every month.
A+ for finding new ways to keep taking things out of context. Have you even read On the Jewish Question? How do you find racial rensentment in the Grundrisse or the 18h Brumiere or an introduction to the Critique of Politcal Economy?
try harder
Well said. I think Marx's perspective was limited and incomplete, and yes his bigoted views must be both noted and discarded, but he clearly provided very important analysis.
