Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go
NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip 11 hours agoeven with these horrific conflicts occurring today, >humanity as a whole is still living through one of the >least violent and most peaceful periods in recorded >history when measured against the enormous scale >of human history and global population.
Across the globe, humanity is gearing up for an enormous war over dwindling/ shifting resources, as we deplete the liveability of the planet thanks to the consumerism fostered by your beloved Capitalism.
I also really hate how all of these Capitalism apologists like to attribute advances in the standard of living to an economic system. No. Improvements in quality of life and the standard of living were made possible by technological advancement. The scientific, rational thinking that enabled that technology began with the Enlightenment, which predates ‘The Wealth of Nations’ by several hundred years. The most Capitalism can claim is providing the motivation for distribution of those advancements.
And any examples of non-Capitalist countries that suffer from impoverishment, should be evaluated for whether the Capitalist West has been engaged in economic warfare/ exploitation against them for a half century.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You’re making a prediction about a hypothetical future and presenting it as though it disproves a statement about the historical present. It doesn’t.
Yes, climate change, resource scarcity, geopolitical competition, and environmental degradation create serious risks. Nobody is disputing that. But “therefore humanity is gearing up for an enormous war” is a prediction, not an established fact. There is no evidence that some inevitable apocalyptic conflict is waiting for us around the corner.
And the capitalism argument is just as selective. I’m not claiming capitalism single-handedly created modern prosperity. Technology, science, medicine, education, infrastructure, and countless other factors obviously contributed. But pretending that economic systems have nothing to do with how those advancements are financed, produced, distributed, and adopted is equally ahistorical.
More importantly, you seem to have conveniently ignored the enormous number of countries that are both capitalist and extraordinarily successful. Countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea aren’t prosperous because they somehow escaped capitalism. They have different varieties of capitalist economies combined with different levels of taxation, regulation, social welfare, labor protections, and public investment.
That’s actually the interesting question: not “capitalism good” or “capitalism bad,” but which institutions produce the best outcomes and under what circumstances.
And yes, Western economic exploitation and economic warfare have contributed to poverty in some countries. That’s a legitimate historical argument. But “this country is poor because the West exploited it” cannot simply become a universal explanation for every impoverished country that doesn’t fit your preferred narrative.
Ultimately, you’re replacing one simplistic historical explanation with another. Capitalism doesn’t deserve sole credit for human progress, but neither can its critics simply remove it from the history of that progress because it complicates the argument.
And the accusation that I’m somehow a “capitalism fanboy” is particularly lazy, considering I explicitly stated that I do not outright support capitalism. You are arguing against a position I never expressed because it’s considerably easier than engaging with what I actually said. Recognizing that capitalism has contributed to economic growth, technological development, and improvements in living standards is not the same thing as worshipping the system or believing it is inherently good. If your argument requires you to invent my position before you can attack it, that’s not a particularly strong argument.
If you must know I support social democracy and further down the line democratic socialism. Which I assume you’ll