Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Something most people miss is that the speed of change is a barrier.
You can do socialism fast or slow, the fast way is like a revolution, which most people don’t want since it sucks for the individual.
The slow way, which imo is the better way, is just doing policies that get you closer and closer to socialism within the capitalist framework.
The second way often means helping people who are less fortunate than the average person first, before getting to your average voter. That’s what individualistic societies can’t get past, they want their lives improved now. They fear they will vote for things that benefits poorer people and then the next government would come in before it’s their turn.
IMO the solution to this is obvious, focus on policies that literally benefit everyone. Don’t do select benefit programs, do problems that help everyone. UBI is a perfect example.
And there’s the third method: subsume it from within. Build a capitalistic product that depreciates a category and eliminates demand, thus rendering entire industries and their related activities obsolete.
It’s why renewable energy is being fought tooth and nail.
I think you recognize a fundamental problem and yet do not address it.
Superseding an entire industry consolidates the economic weight of that industry into a smaller, more captive market. A capitalist push towards post-scarcity won’t work because the capitalists will always be motivated to implement artificial scarcity to protect their profits. Look at the current cost of computer hardware for one example.
A revolution of some sort would still be needed to truly make a post-scarcity economy, otherwise the fruits of those innovations will remain limited to the hands of the few.
Not if the push in question reassigns the value itself. And since we’re subsuming, I’ll base it off current fintech: imagine a blockchain but instead of smart contracts you do inference and buy tokens. That’s what upcoming tech is trying to work out the mechanics of.
policies cannot always benefit everyone. e.g. wealth tax won’t benefit the wealthy, consumer protection won’t benefit the corporates
Everyone except the wealthy.
Well public transport even helps the wealthy. It clears the roads for their cars
Amd moving to renewable energy sources will inevitably bring down costs and make it so if a tornado/hurricane/earthquake takes some power lines down a giant chunk of houses won’t all lose power, many of those houses will be able to keep refrigerators and necessities up until backup power from the grid gets restored.
Half the oceans ships are moving fossil fuels from place to place, so you can cut that tenfold… Making cleaner healthier ecosystems in both cities/towns and for the earth in general.
Except things arent getting better slowly are they, and the one party that pretends it is moving toward socialism just openly told some very mild,slow reformers at the DSA that the dems arent a socialist party, they are a capitlaist one. Do you need a link?
So there goes your theory on that one.
That sounds very much like must online leftists. Every single thing that improves the world slightly is pushed against, simply because it doesn’t solve every problem.
Of course, none of these people do anything for the Revolution they love so much. They’re evangelical at this point. Where the Revolution is the second coming, requiring no actual work, just believing in it.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The thing about the slow way is that it’s too readily reversible, and since the existing order allows the wealthy who would lose under such policies to consolidate power quite easily, those changes can be undone much more easily than they can be made.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Well the thing about the fast way is that it’s easily co-optable and you can end up with things really sucking for everyone just to end up in a worse position if you’re not careful.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah, so it can possibly go wrong, instead of being guaranteed to go wrong.
MrKoyun@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re right, but being careful about stuff hasn’t and isn’t really working out for us.