9mo ago

Growth as an end

113 comments

Edit: I was proven correct
- wat
  Like out of all arguments against a socialist state, saying it’s like cancer which is like capitalism is… dumb? Like how? Which socialist state metastasised and “grew” without natural limits? What even is this argument?
  
  That's not what this says. It says the real problem is authoritarianism, not the economic system.
  
  It seems that you're proposing that there's some point of sustainable economic output. Under all socialist states once that sustainable point is reached economic output would be frozen and from thereafter only that level of economic output is achieved.
  Then what happens? Do you also freeze population levels somehow? Do you start restricting who has access to resources they need because there are more people than resources than can be produced under the economic output cap?
  
  Found a tankie!
  There is no such thing as a socialist state. That's state capitalism
  The reasoning is based on two axioms of anarchist system theory:
  Systems of hierarchical power structures beget authoritarianism (i.e. monopolization of power) and domination.
  Power structures seek to perpetuate themselves.
  I don't know if he came up with that theoretical framework, but I got those ideas from Anark. Check him out.
- Despots, as bad as they are, do not necessarily need to grow their empires.
  
  They don't need it. They want it.

"I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure." -Agent Smith
- Humans lived for 200,000 years before we started acting like a cancer. It's not our species that is cancer, it's the dominator culture that evolved within our species that is the cancer.
  
  It's Capitalism. Capitalism is humans as cancer. It's why we joke about late stage Capitalism.
  
  Based and Bookchinpilled.
  
  it’s the dominator culture
  Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.
  
  True, before the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, human societies were largely egalitarian for around 290,000 years...
- Animals don't form equilibriums on purpose, eg invasive species
- Eh, roughly 1-2% of people are psychopathic and we've only really destroyed the Earth since we adopted capitalism, the system in which a very small, unempathetic minority has control of pretty much everything.
  But that's not my largest issue with Smith's comment. It's more that an program of his stature definitely should have a better grasp on taxonomy. Viruses aren't even alive according to some current classifications. Parasitic organisms would be much closer. Unfortunately there aren't really any parasitic mammals. Vampire bats, perhaps? And that simile — capitalists as vampires (the human kind) — is a bit older than Smith's virus metaphor.
  Marxferatu "The figure of the vampire is the ultimate individual: predatory, inhuman, anti-human, with no moral obligation to others."
  
  "viruses are not even alive" - viruses and other acellular entities that are part of what we call life on earth in general are finally starting to be recognized as such: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26305806/

I mean, yes, we're seeing a general rapacity balloon out of control, but hey, electric vehicles will make everything better.
- Not with these massive tarrifs in pl—
  You say they're still cheaper than american EVs? Well goddamn.
  
  Massively subsidizing EVs will do that. If only the US would fight fire with fire, rather than building a wall against it.

And we have the pleasure of enjoying the last stage of it.
- May it crumble under it's own contradictions.
  
  That's the worst possible case for everyone & everything.
  Let's hope we kill it first.

The solution for cancer is usually killing the cancer or removing the cancer. I wonder what the capitalism equivalent is…
- Yea I wonder. I wonder if you've ever seen anyone on chemo lmao

If we just let a self selected group of people have total control of our economy, things will turn out better this time. They promise.
"The previous attempts failed because they didn't do it right. We will get it right, this time."

I take it more as humans acting out of individualist self-interest (which capitalism incentivizes above all else) as being more likened to cancer. All it can take is one mutated-individualist-greedy cell to ignore the signals from the surrounding tissues to cause cancer.

The Earth isn't a closed system. The Universe might be but I feel pretty confident we'll have moved on from any currently recognizable economic system by the time we fill that up.
- For practical purposes, the earth might as well be a closed system. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
  
  This isn't actually a measure of resource usage in reference to a closed system tho.
- The Earth isn't a closed system.
  Where else in the universe there are trees and animals?
  For all ecological purposes Earth is a closed system.
  
  The sun would like to have a word
- With how climate change has been accelerating lately, I wish I shared your optimism.

Capitalism does not require infinite growth, this idea is not taken seriously in economic circles. Keynesian and neoclassical economics do not consider or require infinite growth.
You can be profit driven and not require infinite growth, if you make 2% profit every year you are not requiring infinite growth.
It's not true that maximizing profits is the duty of a company to it's shareholders, here it is from NYT and supreme court:
There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
- You can bloviate theoretically all you want, but practically, as it has played out since its inception, this is how capitalism works. This is the only way capitalism works. Very simply because those who do not grow endlessly, are consumed by those who do.
  
  Capitalism also works without growth.
- If you profit 2% every year, whether or not it’s a “requirement,” that is limitless growth.
  Regardless, the Supreme Court’s opinion about the lack of an on the books law around an obligation is not relevant. We also don’t have a law on the books about how gravity works, nor one about rain making the ground wet.
  
  The profit does not increase, it stays the same (adjusted for inflation), it doesn't need limitless growth.
  If every year I sell 100 bushels of wheat for 2% profit, I'm not experiencing any growth
- But capital that stops dies, and if you are outcompeted you stop. So you always have to do better than everyone else. And capital has to accumulate exponentially to keep growing, and not stop and die.
  The mechanics of the system make sustainable growth impossible. Tweaking the surface of the system will never change that core.
- Keynes is widely ignored in today's neoliberal mainstream economics.
  
  Neoclassical theory also doesn't require/consider imperative growth

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