Doesn’t Andrew “UBI” Yang literally work for CNN? Really weird framing for something he would at least pretend to love. People are being paid to run errands for their family, a tale as old as time. It’s still labour, but now focused at helping their families and community rather than getting some higher education formal job. Europe should try this out with their army of ageing sexagenarians. Kids would kill for 800 EUR a month to actually live for once.
My “hot take” is that we are not doing anything new or different now than we did thousand of years ago (so, before the advent of capitalism and globalization) when it comes to destroying our environment.
A thousand years in the past there weren’t people in Europe/North America waging massive wars to protect their sources of oil across the world. Global imperialism is essential to this global crisis and no country would be exporting most of its resources to some foreign power to the detriment of its own people if they were not organised in a capitalist fashion. We already have many measures like hydro power that would be much less harmful to the environment but are not as profitable to the property owners as oil and therefore are not properly explored. “We” is already a loaded term because humanity was incredibly diverse in its organisations of society before the 19th century, but this whole crisis is caused mainly by our production methods, not their scale.
The good thing about this discussion is that I only need a single counter-example to disprove your thesis (but you can find many throughout history).
I think I see the misunderstanding here. The point is not that ecological catastrophes are only caused by Capitalism, but this one in specific is directly caused by it. If people owned the means of production they wouldn’t force themselves into a catastrophe we all know is happening. We already understand the consequences in this current case, but just so happen to be ruled by a bourgeoisie that is more interested in fleeing to Mars than actually solving these issues. I fail to see how there could be any solution to this crisis without ending the control of a select few over the entire production of the world to our detriment, which is capitalism.
And for you to claim that something like this is “human nature” you don’t need to just provide a couple of historical examples of ecological catastrophes caused by humans (even ones they knowingly did it), but to show that there has never been the case where humans changed course to avert one, or something of the sort.
I have listened to the whole podcast you linked and the Red Deal offers nothing of substance, just more opinions, as it has no predictive value (it doesn’t try to show quantitatively how much of the problem is remediated under which circumstance).
It would be pretentious to predict the economic effects in a manifesto from those who are not (and will likely never be) in power. If you want actual numbers you can look at how China has been leading the world in green energy production. As I said before, that one was specifically to push back against “human nature” causing this crisis when some very natural humans want to do the exact opposite but can’t specifically because of settler capitalism. Humans want to fight the climate crisis, except for those few property holders who see this as an “opportunity.”
Also what’s with “opinions”? Do you expect some lab somewhere to do an experiment proving if redacting landlords has positive or negative correlations with emissions? Social decisions are based on historical analysis which would be too long for a 30 minute interview. Since you got so interested you replied to me 8 days later and want more of those juicy facts, you can go read their actual whole book on it their positions in depth. Part 3 does a better job explaining it than I could in a single lemmy reply.
It’s anecdotal but I’ve heard a significant amount of Anglos talking about how they wish they could vote for the SNP. When both parties are austerity liberals a lot of the success for the ones out of government is in high turnout. If they don’t motivate or even actively discourage voters (see barring a bunch of leftists from running or banning them from the party) they are liable to lose just on lack of votes. FPTP helps with that, which is why they should support the popular vote, but won’t. “Controlled opposition” seems too tame a label for the current Labour leadership and people just don’t bother voting anymore. Maybe Corbyn makes his own “Workers’ Party” and gets to take the blame for spoiler votes in 2025.
They’re even blaming their loss on ULEZ now, rather than on them shooing away every engaged and hopeful leftist activist.
I mean, they’ve been fumbling ever since they suspended Corbyn for his interview about the EHRC report. It’s just now finally catching up to them due to people realising that people were onto something by calling them “Red Tories.”
Care to explain the “another iteration of the problem”? Abolishing slavery ends slavery, abolishing serfdom ends serfdom, abolishing rent ends rent. The Venezuelan case is an example of the latter. You asked how to change the social structure, here’s a tried and true method that has worked from Russia to China to Vietnam to Cuba. You’re free to present your own with better track records.
Actually it’s technically a part of Russia now. Hope they still help clean up in the case they lose the war. Though it is also the choice of the USA/NATO who provided those munitions in the first place. They’ll definitely also help clean up, right guys?
quad core laptops with IPS screens that can run up to 16 GB are like $50 nowadays. throw it out.
Feel free to send me the $50 bucks and I’ll buy one. I still won’t throw out perfectly functional hardware. Until then I’ll make use of what I have, thank you very much.
Congratulations Europe, you wasted the time of 60 countries to talk about some hypothetical 61st one. Wonder why CELAC wants nothing to do with that one war over there while their allies blockade Cuba and threaten other Mesoamerican/Caribbean nations with invasion.
Retracting a paper is a rare act, especially for a scientist of Tessier-Lavigne’s stature. A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted.
If you’ve ever read published research for a living, this statistic is frighteningly low.
It sure is weird since chatGPT is not as advanced as me yet. It also doesn’t like communism. Sadly bots are made by the very same corporations I have issues with.
Compartmentalising the impacts of a mode of production in a society is usually how we get into a bind on trying to tackle problems that arise from them. They are not just “who owns what” but also dictate how humanity and society produces and therefore reproduces. Large urban factories were not a possibility nor desirable under feudalism or North American indigenous collectivism. When one says that “capitalism is the root of the problem” it means that the climate crisis we are living now is a clear consequence of our society’s organisation over production.
So here’s some examples to illustrate. Due to the arbitrary concept of “private property” inherent to capitalism, lithium mines in the Lithium Triangle can be owned by foreign corporations. That means that despite those mines directly affecting the lives of the local communities (which includes most workers there), they are kept there and protected by world governments no matter how much they protest. That is an anti-democractic use of the local resources that can’t easily happen under either communism, anarchism or collectivism and yet is the norm under global capitalism.
Another example is the production of sugar, which relies on both work conditions akin to slavery but also constant burning of the plant that wrecks the local ecology. Populations who work producing sugar cane (in particular slaves) have revolted against that in favour of self-sustainable agriculture since sugar monocultures have been a thing, and yet they have had little power to change that economy without also locally abolishing capitalism. These often come with foreign invasions, as was the case of Haiti.
And finally in the case of the Paris Accords, the big majority of Unitedsadians supported staying in it, and yet the USA left it either way. The people who will suffer and die due to ecological crises of any scale are usually the workers and not the owners. That means that if the workers are in charge of production rather than the owners, it is easy to see how they’ll be more willing to change that production to prevent harm to themselves, even if you ascribe to individualism as a natural human trait.
There is absolutely a need to bring capitalism into this, and even more its birth in colonialism and descent into imperialism. There can be no “accountability of the bourgeoisie” if we live in a dictatorship of this same bourgeoisie. The slave masters didn’t bend over backwards to help the slaves, and the kings have routinely sent levies en masse to their deaths. We shouldn’t expect any different from our current rulers. One obvious example of a communist (“anti-capitalist” if you object to that label) nation that has done the most to combat climate change is the PRC. On the other hand the übercapitalist United States is historically the worst at that. This is not coincidence.
And on the matter of “human nature”. As I’ve pointed out before and that you’ve not acknowledged, many natural human societies parallel to European and settler ones have long pushed back against this backwards pseudoscientific notion. In order to make any universal rules for whatever domain you’d need to have complete information about it. However not a single person knows all known history, and all known history doesn’t even include all actual history. It is typical of those who know little history to make bold proclamations about how “humans have always been a certain way” against humans that are a different way right before one’s own eyes.
Your position seems to have softened to say that the issue is “selfish people controlling corporations”, but that assumes that corporations themselves are universal concepts. Either way, the existence of selfish people doesn’t automatically imply that all modes of production and equally vulnerable to it, and liberal capitalism in itself exists on the principle that all people should focus on self-interest and selfishness. It is no surprise that a system that was developed to effectively colonise a land, genocide its people, exploit workers and extract every local resource only for short-term profit will end up doing just that.
If you yourself don’t have any solution and yet feel your opinion is relevant you are the one engaging in contrarianism. The very least you can do is read (and by that I mean actually read in depth) of those who actually have ideas. The Red Deal link is meant only as an introduction for something which I assume is from your country, feel free to develop your understanding further in whichever direction you want. Even if you come up with a solution under capitalism, it’ll be a start. Just don’t come back with no solutions while complaining that others’ solutions are not good enough.
Friendly reminder to build from source and not execute unknown .exes if you’re a windows user. It is very common for a program to be “open source” in theory but add unwanted stuff in their official executables. Those programs look alright, but never hurts to be careful.