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Capitalism is killing our planet
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Of the two, one is still far more realistic than the other.
I'll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don't think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don't see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don't see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That's not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That's a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can't individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
One was implemented and is actively ruining the planet.
The other was only used as a façade by dictators that didn’t feel like labeling themselves as right-wing.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
Even if he was targeting different ethnicities just because of the risk they could’ve been spies, what he effectively did was put a different “value” on his citizens, which is the opposite of social equality, a center aspect of leftism.
Maybe in his and his followers’ minds the end justified the means and he was actually aiming to build a better society for everyone, but ultimately what he did was enact racism and social hierarchies. If that still counts as left-wing to you we have different definitions.
If an action has such a big impact and such little payoff as the ethnic cleansing in the great purge, I think that disqualifies you from actually being a leftist.
By that reasoning, even christian fundamentalists would be leftists: they want everyone to believe in god and adhere to their teachings so that we can all be at peace for eternity in heaven. But if what they’re doing to achieve it is Crusades, discrimination and antagonizing progress, the end result isn’t worth it (especially since, like with the great purge, there’s no guarantee all this suffering will actually bring results).
And we can learn from the mistakes of people even if we don’t think they align with our political stance, me considering Stalin a leftist or not doesn’t change my opinion on what he’s done.