this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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I think one thing people need to think about is that if we succeed in abolishing capitalism, then all medicines become public domain, no more proprietary formulas, and no more profit motive.
So instead of a few dozen or hundred scientists and business-persons figuring out production of medicines strictly constrained by maximum profit (industrialized automation, single point of manufacture, distribution, etc), instead, we'd have potentially millions of people looking at the science and working on sustainable, local, and easy-to-produce formulations that put people, not profits, first.
We need to understand that the reason medicines currently require complicated expensive machinery and huge supply chains is due 100% to the profit motive. That reality ceases to exist post-capitalism. We HAVE to learn to think outside of the confines of "capitalist realism."
I mean is it 100%? I do agree with most of what you said and I am very not familiar with meds manufacturing, but I will give example with similar product, fine electronics.
In that case rare earths are just... rare so there even tho patents and the profit motive play a role and even a big role, it is not 100%.
Electronics are an interesting case. In our capitalist global economy we use extortion and threats to secure rare earth metals so we can use them for critical green technology and warfare while also using them to pump out televisions and phones for people to buy to replace ones that work fine (or could be kept working fine if we avoided software bloat).
Plastics are similar, they're essential for medical applications but we also use our limited fossil fuel resources for cars and to wrap bananas at the store.
You could ask the question of how we could afford to let capitalism distribute these resources.
Working in the software industry I see tremendous waste, absurdly inefficient technologies being used because they're cheap, etc.
We could all work less, work on the more important things, and make better use of our resources if not for the unnecessary inefficiencies introduced by duplicating effort, hiding technological advances from one another. We should be moving towards a cooperative rather than competitive economy.