Where did this meme of “capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it’s impossible and bad” come from? Capitalism doesn’t require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
The idea comes from stagnating wages with comparison to productivity, and the fact that the average Worker works more than before the Industrial Revolution despite this jump in productivity.
Interesting! Either way, it’s still a fact that wages have been stagnating as compared to productivity, and working hours have not proportionally lowered. Capitalism is good for development, but after a certain point ceases to dramatically contribute to quality of life.
I do believe productivity has increased quite a bit more than wages, but that makes sense if you think about it. Productivity gains in the last few decades are not due to workers getting more skilled or working harder (which may still be a factor), they’re because of technology, automation, information science, and global trade networks. If my boss upgrades my computer such that I can produce things twice as fast, why should I get paid more?
allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous
Riiight… that’s why we’re the most destructive agent on the planet since the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs - because we “do more with less.” Wtf?
and as societies get richer in material wealth
Which societies, Clyde? The ones that capitalism has impoverished so that a small minority can pretend their privileged lives are (somehow) “normal?”
they produce fewer children
And that’s a good thing, is it? You know we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights, don’t you? As in… no capitalism required at all?
They’re just referring to the fact that the universe we live in is no “finite system” per the meme
Riiight… that’s why we’re the most destructive agent on the planet since the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs - because we “do more with less.” Wtf?
Yes exactly! They’re not saying that’s a good thing but that’s exactly why!
Which societies, Clyde? The ones that capitalism has impoverished so that a small minority can pretend their privileged lives are (somehow) “normal?”
Regardless if the distribution of that wealth is acceptable, growth has made the overall society richer in material wealth. The distribution of that wealth is an entirely different question.
And that’s a good thing, is it? You know we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights, don’t you? As in… no capitalism required at all?
For crying out loud, Clyde… you need a bunch of science nerds to tell you something this obvious? Fine.
Lol, very first sentence in that source:
Three mechanisms influence the fertility decision of educated women: (1) the relatively higher incomes and thus higher income forgone due to childbearing leads them to want fewer children. […]
Because you were replying to this statement by OP:
and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
In short your source doesn’t support your claim, but it does story OP’s claim
How deep does one’s head have to be up one’s own arrse to believe that this…
and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
I’d say destructiveness of humans is kind of a Bell curve shape where the X axis is wealth. Cavemen don’t affect the environment that much mostly because there can’t be that many of them. Their production methods can’t sustain large or dense populations. Then people in 1900 are quite destructive because they can sustain billions of people while spewing pollutants, etc. Then people today are less destructive because we have the wealth to care about such things. Wealthy countries are doing pretty well.
90% of the stuff you encounter day to day would have been considered science fiction only a few decades ago. That doesn’t answer whether capitalism actually requires growth, which it doesn’t, or where the meme came from.
Our production efficiency, production per inputs, is larger now than in the past. That’s doing more with less.
Which societies
These countries tend to be the most capitalist, meaning private ownership of the means and subsequent free exchange of goods and services, and they also tend to be the most wealthy with low poverty. That distribution matches fertility fairly closely. Link
that’s a good thing, is it?
It is if the thing you’re worried about is the impact of the human species on the rest of the planet. Fewer people means less impact with the same per person impact.
we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights
been considered science fiction only a few decades ago.
Feel free to show us the “infinite” resources you have access to any time you feel like, Clyde.
That’s doing more with less.
No. We are doing more with more. The rate at which our industries are churning through resources would have been unimaginable to anyone a century ago… and so would the wastage it creates.
private ownership - free exchange of goods
Try not to get entangled in logical contradictions in the very same sentence, Clyde. When everything is privately owned, it’s only the private owners that gets to engage in a “free exchange of goods.”
the most wealthy with low poverty.
And the fact that these countries are all beneficiaries of hundreds of years of hyper-violent colonialism has nothing to do with any of this, of course.
It is if the thing you’re worried
No, I’m actually not worried about it. The “overpopulation” myth is right-wing propaganda and nothing else - it’s the ravenous and utterly parasitic profiteering of capitalists themselves that are driving over-consumption. Not the world’s poor.
Legal rights are a luxury good, unfortunately. Kinda seems like capitalism is in fact required.
So you are fine with your modern-day feudalism… as long as your capitalist overlords throws slightly more crumbs your way than they do everybody else.
It’s not a meme, its both the theory and practice to require constant unending increase in profit. That is the central point that eliminates all of your points except for the one about the universe having infinite resources - my dude we do not have access to the UNIVERSE, all we have is this one planet, and due to the distances involved, space opera is bunk and every stellar system is going to have just that stellar system. Do you think that a trade route that takes 400 years to travel is going to be of practical use over a lifetime?
Threads like this make me miss the sort by controversial. Oh well. If you have chores, or something else to do, maybe go do that instead of reading this thread. It’s mostly shit slinging and people straw manning one another.
If anyone else came here to just talk about stuff, I’m willing to talk about how great cats and dogs are. Also open to hearing you out if you don’t like cats or dogs, but I want you to know that I strongly disagree with your opinion.
The idea that you only get to choose between either predatory Capitalism or corrupt Communism as your society is pretty pathetic. Truly we have some of the minds of all time in this thread.
No, but PEOPLE are. Capitalism simply balances it via competitive forces. Comunism can’t balance it. REAL LIFE AIN’T NO MARX BOOK Ps capitalism SHOULD be truly checked and balanced by government 👍
It is centralization that is killing the planet as the bigger the organization, the more power it has to control and become corrupt. Capitalism would work fine if it actually broke down organizations that got too big and also completely insulated themselves from bribes and influence. For some reason we have allowed corporations to run the show more and more which ironically is not only bad for the planet, but ultimately bad even for them in the long run. We have simply lost control and need to reign it in, but because humans are in the mix and can be bought or often coerced, there is little hope other than war resetting or AI taking over. My money is on AI taking over and while that scares many, humanity’s track record scares me more.
Regulatory capture is inevitable in capitalism. There is no reigning it in. Any small imbalance in wealth can be leveraged into a much larger imbalance. If politicians start glancing their way, then they will setup institutions to protect their wealth–anything from super PACs to Fox News.
This doesn’t make any sense, since when earth became a closed system?
Also capitalism is a system. A human one. Its not biological in nature as it is an abstraction. As such it can change or disappear or be re used again and again and again.
There is no internal mechanism for human systems that say “hey create more of this system and then die at this point” or “hey build more of this system to fix this and that” or “hey created these new systems to evolve”
Humans do that, not the systems we create
Like it or not nobody wants to die, not even a tiny cancer cell. so it is in our best interests to expand into space to multiply our chances of survival.
We are not adding materials (…yet, mining asteroids isn’t that far fetched anymore), but we also aren’t removing any either and can recycle old stuff into new stuff. Also we get a constant supply of virtually limitless energy from the sun.
We can just recycle coal/natural gas/oil after burning it?
Indeed we can. That’s not to say we should keep burning those resources right now, but the carbon is not disappearing into an alternate universe either.
Earth is definitely a closed system. When you propose expanding to space, you are literally going out wide that system, but Earth is definitely limited
Let me tell you my experience with communism centralized economy as the alternative.
Planned economy = produce as much as possible, more you produce more you are rewarded. It doesn’t matter if you make 100x more then it’s needed than trow it away. Inefficiency doesn’t matter.
Ecology ? Foreign westerner propaganda. That there are no fish, animals, half of the plants spiecies disappeared is westerners fault. Emissions ? Nothing can stand in our plan.
We produce more than anyone yet people’s wellbeing is still behind west? That’s not true, there are fascist to the west and it’s just western propaganda. BTW if you mention it, you won’t see outside for quite while.
Now let me tell you what happened after end of communism.
Nature almost recovered because crazy amount of efforts put into it’s protection despite it being expensive.
If anyone produces more than people need, they ususally go bankrupt or at least are not rewarded for loss. Thus everyone tries to go as efficient as possible.
Wellbeing went up 10fold.
I don’t know about OP but capitalism seems kinda best option to me ATM
Many of those who claim to hate free market capitalism just hate their lives and want to blame someone else for it. Amusingly enough, in a dark way, many corporations are run like they were communistic organizations:
centralized control
strong hierarchies, most benefits go to the top
collective resources
economic planning
reduced autonomy of individuals inside the organization
propaganda, both internal and external
Perhaps marxist-leninists should just join corporations and get a reasonable approximation of everything they want ;) For me personally, it makes a lot of sense to hate/distrust corporations but not so much sense to hate free market capitalism.
I agree. Corporations are indeed similar to communist planned economy model in this regard. Free market is not. People vote with they wallets after all. Stop paying half eaten apple if you hate their practice. Stop paying for certain OS if you can get community developed Linux etc… in the end It’s about people weighting their comfort vs making things better.
Sometimes state has to help them by regulations. But Free market is still way better then commies.
Just because someone is advocating against capitalism, that doesn’t mean they are advocating for the Soviet Union / any modern dictatorship that claims to be communist. Please stop the binary thinking
Because interstellar space believe it or not it’s not empty so we also get mass from it?
My god even if we chopped all the trees and burned all the petroleum and bombed the whole Small part of the planet we live in with nuclear weapons, even if all humanity that ever lived in this planet was alive and lived their lives again for a million years, we’d still have about 50 thousand trillion trillions of atmosphere to go before we consume it all. And don’t get me started on the water
And guess what, even making that effort it wouldn’t be enough because life would continue.
That’s right, we suck even when trying to destroy the planet
Not an immediate solution but if or when we can make space safe to work and live in, that might unlock an infinite supply of resources, which would support infinite growth.
Lack of resources isn’t the reason everything is shit. If we get to space it’ll just be another exploitable thing for the ultra rich to use to get more rich.
Not to be that guy, but animals of certain size are seemingly unaffected by cancer. I think Kurzkezadt (or however you spell it lol) did a video on why whales don’t die from cancer.
It’s been a while since I read about this, but as I recall, most animals (might just be mammals) won’t die of cancer without genetic modification. They have immune system factors that humans are currently considered not to have. (Either that or we eat too much food for it to work, depending where the research is going these days, lol.)
I have never really understood this meme at all, it just seems like a cynical nothing-burger cry. No substance.
Capitalism isn’t really based on theoretically infinite growth. Maybe the idea is that monopoly is assumed, in capitalist ideology, to not exist, in the same way that people talk with ancaps, and they (ancaps) wish away monopolization with dogmatism to an unenforceable liberal brainrot NAP? I don’t think any serious capitalist ideology discards monopoly. Not any worth engaging with, anyways. Oil barons know that the resource they peddle is finite, and everyone generally knows that every resource is theoretically a finite thing, and so is every market, and thus, all markets in sum. That’s like, your basic supply and demand curve. It doesn’t just go up and down linearly like the ones they use to explain to brainlets, actual supply and demand curves look fucked up because the market is weird, and they all totally plateau at either extreme end. If you charge a billion dollars for a single orange, you maybe will only get a buyer if you name the orange “X” and the buyer is [redacted]. Maybe the idea is that if you market a product enough, even if it’s bullshit, then you could just charge a gazillion dollars for it and have it be over the natural or necessary amount, and I’d agree with that being capitalism but I don’t really think that’s like. limitless growth, that’s just marketing, that’s just bullshit.
Capitalists often use this assumed finity to price gouge, maximize profit, that’s why you dump oranges in the desert to keep up the prices of oranges or whatever. Maybe that’s like, oh, they’re assuming the oranges to be infinite, but that’s because oranges are recyclable. You can grow more oranges, and if we scaled back orange production massively, making it more efficient, we’d still have enough oranges for everyone (Degrowth, I guess? It can be even more efficient if you grow local flora instead of oranges but ech). Maybe you can’t have infinite oranges if some other sector of the economy is dumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but for like, 10,000 years of human history, you can grow more oranges, and you can grow more oranges until the sun expands and burns the earth in like 2 billion years.
If I read this meme in a different way, the fucked up thing about this meme is that it’s not real. We’re not like, at the end of civilization just by some natural factor of luck, or something, or you know, suddenly all the human creativity has petered out. That would almost be better, in a way. The human creativity is actively being suppressed, underfunded, bought out and scraped for parts, because it’s easier to sell people actual bullshit year over year, in a cartel that you basically control all of, than introduce something new.
At my least graceful reading of this post, it kind of almost becomes malthusian, or something. Limitless growth! Grow the market limitlessly! Of course that means we must have a limitless population! And if someone’s getting mad at that fake bullshit, then what they probably really believe is that there will be/there is too many people. But then that’s all instance number 700 of getting mad at a spook.
But it’s also like, how are you tracking growth? Cause if growth is just entropy, I think it probably is limitless.
If you lived before Capitalism, would you say that Feudalism is the best we’ve got? What about in the years shortly following the French Revolution?
If you flipped a coin 5 times and it landed on heads each of the five times, does the probability that it will be heads lower on the 6th flip?
Essentially, I’m asking if you have any structural qualms with Socialism. If you can name specific issues with historical examples that you believe are inevitable whenever Socialism is built, what would those be?
Yep, Capitalism hasn’t shown much promise, every single instance has resulted in eventual decay and stagnation, with rising exploitation, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, and more. That’s why Socialism is necessary.
You’re being self defeating if you think democratically deciding what to use society’s productive forces will always be worse than Elon Musk using his government contract money to buy twitter so they stop making fun of him. Every example of socialism being applied at scale is evidence that it works. In the 20th century the greatest reduction of poverty in the world happened in the USSR. In the 21st century the same thing but China. Even against the headwinds of the largest and most powerful empire in human history having a genocidal desire to destroy them.
I think the fact that the USSR is not around is evidence that perhaps socialism does not work at scale. If its unable to last how can you consider that working? People in the USSR had a very hard life due to the downfall of socialism. Can you provide me any example of socialism currently that works at scale in a multiethnic country that does not rely on others for military protection?
It’s funny how you are praising China right now despite it’s heavy capitalistic nature. I bet if china collapsed you would say that wasn’t real socialism either.
I think the fact that John F Kennedy didn’t get reelected is evidence that perhaps he wasn’t a very good president.
People in the USSR had a very hard life due to the downfall of socialism
my evidence that a thing is bad is that when you take it away things turn to shit
Can you provide me any example of socialism currently that works at scale in a multiethnic country that does not rely on others for military protection?
Are you one of those “norway can only have healthcare because they’re all white” people? Why would having more than one ethnicity in a country make doing things harder or easier? Not to avoid the question, China.
I think Norway works because its a small country that is culturally and ethnically homogenous and relies on others for military defense. It’s pretty easy to have extensive social programs in that environment but it’s not indicative of it working at scale. China is 90%+ chinese so I’m not sure China qualifies as an answer to that question.
I think Norway works because its a small country that is culturally and ethnically homogenous
Why do you use these euphemisms when you mean ‘all white’? It’s such a tedious exercise when it’s already clear where you’re coming from.
And you’re not answering the question. I asked you why you think having ‘racial purity’ in a country makes it easier and better to run. You restated that you think it’s the case. Elaborate.
I didn’t say all white because I don’t believe it has to be all white, I think ethnic homogeneity allows groups to forgo a lot of issues that come from having different people with different values all amongst each other. I don’t think that should be very controversial. If you don’t believe me, go look at the most successful social policies are mostly racially homogenous. You can shut your eyes and pretend like it’s not the case but it’s not very helpful to the conversation at hand.
Can you please for example tell me what black people care about differently than white people?
Those things that don’t follow from racism and its history, of course. This is about your premise. I’m trying to uncover why and how you think different races are different from each other such that they can’t get along in the same society and we should “go back from where we’re from” if things were going to run as smoothly as possible.
What am I leaving out that you would require to answer the question? If your objection is that it is reductive. You say people of different races have conflicting values. Why can’t I ask what they are?
Lol the best we got… like we can’t come up with something new or try something different. Please. Capitalism is in place because the people in power love it. It’s the best system for them to continue to suck everything and everyone dry.
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