All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.
(Capitalism is a) brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
Edit: In this they take on the posture of a severely depressed person who views hope as a dangerous delusion.
Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.
Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.
“communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.
What are you talking about? Research how many rights women and lgbt people lost when the GDR fell for an example of how wrong-headed this line of thinking is.
For those who want light reading, I highly recommend “Why women had better sex under socialism, and other arguments for economic independence”
That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.
I remember an anecdote from an East German woman after the Berlin Wall fell saying West German women were just now beginning to advocate for what the East German women already had.
Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.
when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.
Look up how the stasi dealt with lgbt dissidents after being told to solve the issue and then come back here and say that with a straight face.
Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently.
And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh. Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.
And yet despite your copium, we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change.
Capitalism is fuelling climate change. The feudalism and classical democracy and communism of yesteryear aren’t the fossil fuel portfolio heavy ideologies that match the destructive power of capitalism.
we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change
Yeah… sure. “We all die”.
The earth isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid, it’s just going to have more and more catastrophes. If the earth reaches a tipping point with the melting of the polar icecaps, it will still take centuries for them to melt. The tipping point just means that it won’t be possible to stop it. Humanity will survive, because killing off humanity would be as difficult as killing off mosquitoes or cockroaches. What will happen, not suddenly in 20 years, but gradually over the next few centuries, is that life will get more and more unpleasant. There will be more famines, more disasters wiping cities off the map. More wars over resources. But, some humans will keep living, and they’ll have children, and those children will grow up in a terrible world where survival is a struggle. But, humans will survive, though it might be a very brutal, primitive existence.
As for “capitalism”, it’s not “capitalism” that’s at fault here, it’s humanity. It’s not like North Korea is a bastion of carbon-neutral utopian living. Humans are unable to think and act on a global scale. They’re selfish, and always have been. The difference is that now there are billions of humans, and technology has enabled each selfish human to have a massive climate footprint. Human brains were evolved to exist in small groups on the savanna. The thinking that allowed humans to thrive in that environment has meant destruction now that technology has massively amplified the impact each human now has.
The solution isn’t some random change to a different economic system or a different political system. It’s either destroying most technology so that each human can no longer have such a massive impact, or it’s fundamentally altering the human brain so that people use that technology wisely and with a tiny footprint. Neither of those is likely, so we’re almost certainly doomed.
That’s wildly ahistorical. It has allowed the creation of Labor Aristocracy, Proletarians that benefit from the fruits of Imperialism, but Socialist countries like the ones you listed did far more for the working class than Capitalist countries have. You should read Blackshirts and Reds.
Countries are defined by land-hoarding class, because the nomadic people define themselves by their group instead of the land on which they live.
Without hoarders (landlords), we wouldn’t need to put as much effort towards regulating land use, instead we could focus on regulating behaviours. Ex: “this land is a national park, you are not allowed to trash it. Go next door, there you are allowed to pour the trash from your industrial process into the ground, because it’s your private land”
All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.
Edit: In this they take on the posture of a severely depressed person who views hope as a dangerous delusion.
Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.
Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.
What are you talking about? Research how many rights women and lgbt people lost when the GDR fell for an example of how wrong-headed this line of thinking is.
For those who want light reading, I highly recommend “Why women had better sex under socialism, and other arguments for economic independence”
That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.
I remember an anecdote from an East German woman after the Berlin Wall fell saying West German women were just now beginning to advocate for what the East German women already had.
Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.
Look up how the stasi dealt with lgbt dissidents after being told to solve the issue and then come back here and say that with a straight face.
Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently.
And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh. Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.
Because they were, especially compared to West Germany.
And yet despite your copium, we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change.
Capitalism is fuelling climate change. The feudalism and classical democracy and communism of yesteryear aren’t the fossil fuel portfolio heavy ideologies that match the destructive power of capitalism.
Yeah… sure. “We all die”.
The earth isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid, it’s just going to have more and more catastrophes. If the earth reaches a tipping point with the melting of the polar icecaps, it will still take centuries for them to melt. The tipping point just means that it won’t be possible to stop it. Humanity will survive, because killing off humanity would be as difficult as killing off mosquitoes or cockroaches. What will happen, not suddenly in 20 years, but gradually over the next few centuries, is that life will get more and more unpleasant. There will be more famines, more disasters wiping cities off the map. More wars over resources. But, some humans will keep living, and they’ll have children, and those children will grow up in a terrible world where survival is a struggle. But, humans will survive, though it might be a very brutal, primitive existence.
As for “capitalism”, it’s not “capitalism” that’s at fault here, it’s humanity. It’s not like North Korea is a bastion of carbon-neutral utopian living. Humans are unable to think and act on a global scale. They’re selfish, and always have been. The difference is that now there are billions of humans, and technology has enabled each selfish human to have a massive climate footprint. Human brains were evolved to exist in small groups on the savanna. The thinking that allowed humans to thrive in that environment has meant destruction now that technology has massively amplified the impact each human now has.
The solution isn’t some random change to a different economic system or a different political system. It’s either destroying most technology so that each human can no longer have such a massive impact, or it’s fundamentally altering the human brain so that people use that technology wisely and with a tiny footprint. Neither of those is likely, so we’re almost certainly doomed.
We’re going to ALL be dead from climate change in 20 years? lol
That’s wildly ahistorical. It has allowed the creation of Labor Aristocracy, Proletarians that benefit from the fruits of Imperialism, but Socialist countries like the ones you listed did far more for the working class than Capitalist countries have. You should read Blackshirts and Reds.
Double thumbs up for the point made and link to libre epub.
A comrade here, Edie, manages the site. It does great work!
Hey Comrade, please use it/its.
Will do! Corrected.
Countries are defined by land-hoarding class, because the nomadic people define themselves by their group instead of the land on which they live.
Without hoarders (landlords), we wouldn’t need to put as much effort towards regulating land use, instead we could focus on regulating behaviours. Ex: “this land is a national park, you are not allowed to trash it. Go next door, there you are allowed to pour the trash from your industrial process into the ground, because it’s your private land”