The Elephant in Every Economic System
Posted by Mediiicaliii@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 107 comments
The Elephant in Every Economic System
Every major ideology we're sold—capitalism, socialism, communism, whatever hybrid flavor politicians are peddling—shares one glaring blind spot: they all pretend we live on a planet with infinite resources. Capitalism demands endless growth or it's called a recession. Marxism promised material abundance through seizing the means of production. Even modern "sustainable capitalism" is just infinite growth with a green coat of paint. But here's the problem nobody wants to address: exponential growth on a finite planet is mathematically impossible. It's not a political opinion, it's basic physics.
We're having heated debates about which system distributes resources best while ignoring that all of them assume there will always be more to distribute. It's like arguing about the best way to divide a pizza that's getting smaller every year while insisting we can somehow create more slices. Until any economic or political system starts from the premise of actual physical limits—energy, minerals, arable land, clean water—we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The most fundamental question isn't left vs. right, it's whether we can build a civilization that doesn't require the impossible to function.
rekabis@reddit
Capitalism requires infinite growth on a finite planet.
Communism/socialism doesn’t. In fact, communism/socialism is perfectly compatible with degrowth, because profit isn’t its primary motive - only equitable compensation to the drivers of the economy, the workers.
Communism in particular nerfs almost all of the runaway problems inherent in the Parasite Class, as there is literally no hoarding of wealth under communism. Some people still earn more than others, true, but if you create a dollar of value, communism dictates that you should get most of that dollar of value back as a wage after all the machinery of the system of production has been fed and lubricated.
Meanwhile under capitalism, vanishingly few people get more than 50¢ of every dollar of value they create back in their wage. And most make much, much less. Fast-food workers, in particular, get less than 10¢ of wages back for every dollar of value they produce. The rest goes straight to the top, into pockets that are already obscenely overstuffed.
schlaubi01@reddit
Communism will never ever work. It is a stupidity of an economic ideology that was even when Marx wrote his book absolutely stupid.
Because it does not include how people are and how we behave as a species. Capitalism is not about endless growth, it is about the most effective use of resources. And in comparison, communism and socialism are extremely bad at it and thus make people poorer than they need to be. It thus also is bad for the environment, nature, wildlife and is worse in every social aspect than capitalism.
Fuck this normalisation of the most genocidal ideology mankind has ever developed (so far).
capt_fantastic@reddit
ffs. how old are you?
schlaubi01@reddit
Old enough tonhave seen the poverty socialism and communism have produced in the world
rekabis@reddit
And dumb enough to actually believe the propaganda that these were communist and socialist systems.
Dude, is North Korea “democratic” simply because it has that word in its name? Was the old German DDR similarly democratic? Is China? Because according to you, they were/are equally as democratic as America.
Fact is, no country has ever been socialist or communist aside from a few short months or years before the autocratic authoritarianists took over, and simply kept the name as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a kleptocratic system no less damaging than the feudalistic systems that they replaced.
schlaubi01@reddit
Well then, let's try this stupidity of an ideology once more, only to find out again that it leads to poverty, hunger and in 90% of the cases to mass murder.
Maybe start with it in your private life, just for funsies.
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JacenHorn@reddit
So Star Trek replicators??
ItyBityGreenieWeenie@reddit
The Limits to Growth (1972) and Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980) should be required reading in high school.
schlaubi01@reddit
Both of them were utterly wrong even when they were published.
Cultural-Answer-321@reddit
LOL wut?! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
ItyBityGreenieWeenie@reddit
I would very much like to know your erroneous sources? The Bible?
ttystikk@reddit
Two exceptions to this; first, renewable energy. It's just that; renewable, and as such isn't limited except by the surface area it uses. Even then, most of those surfaces are dual or multiple use; see agrivoltaics for examples.
Second, virtual economic activities can grow an economy without increasing the use of resources. The growth in usage can be offset by renewable energy and by more efficient computing.
There are more examples but these are the best known.
audioen@reddit
Unless by renewable you mean things like foliage and plants, it is most definitely still limited. You suffer from the modern delusion which is that solar panels and wind and water turbines spring into existence from nothing, rather than as end products of large amounts of resource extraction, all which is fossil fuel based and in fact is not likely to exist without fossil fuel use.
Yes, the energy is renewable, but the collector is not. It is industrial product with finite life span and uses nonrenewable inputs.
Virtual activities are all good and nice, but these come on top of a mountain of physical needs: you still need heat, water, food, transport, houses, sewage, and the virtual goods require use of physical devices whose production is among some of the most energy intense and polluting known to man. It is finite too, though all this virtual stuff can probably create something like more efficient consumption in terms of physical resources. However, it is by no means isolated from the resource base, which is completely contrary to what you assert, as there aren't datacenters, internet, phones, computers, and so forth without use of physical resources.
ttystikk@reddit
This sounds nice from a theoretical point of view but it won't happen. We're going to cook and flood ourselves long before then- assuming we don't nuke each other first.
thatmfisnotreal@reddit
We do have infinite resources. The only limitation is technology and imagination. For example we receive more solar energy every day than we could possibly use.
HikmetLeGuin@reddit
Some resources are renewable, but not all. And even the renewable resources can often only be harnessed through the use of other materials (solar panels and wind turbines use metal or plastic, for example).
You're talking about "technology and imagination" in the same way someone might talk about wizards and magic. Yes, there are ways we can become more sustainable, but conservation of limited resources will be essential.
It helps no one to say that maybe, possibly, hopefully, some new technology will be developed that will miraculously save us. That's in the same category as "thoughts and prayers" rather than genuine science.
However, I agree that many of the means to greatly improve our society already exist or could be produced in the near future, if we had a socio-economic system that allowed us to pursue a more sustainable path.
thatmfisnotreal@reddit
It’s not about “maybe some magical technology” it’s about MAKING that technology happen. The only limits are drive and imagination and the biggest killer is this hopeless mindset so prevalent on this sub. “Sustainable abundance” is real and it should be everyone’s goal. We could easily make self replicating robots that build huge space stations out of asteroids and terraform moons on Saturn if we want to.
capt_fantastic@reddit
all that takes time. do we have sufficient time before the fermi paradox comes knocking? especially when we consider that the dominant economical system is focused on short term gains over all else. meta building massive data centers powered by natural gas to run ai whose sole purpose is to convince us to buy shit we don't need comes to mind.
thatmfisnotreal@reddit
Plenty of time. Climate change will cause minimal impacts for 30 years or so. It’ll be fires and hurricanes and heat waves but nothing civilization ending for a while. Ai will be self improving leading to asi in a decade. Anything goes at that point. I’m 50/50 it’ll be utopia vs human extinction but it’ll be caused by ai not climate change
HikmetLeGuin@reddit
It's a lot easier to imagine something in your head than it is to actually do it.
What you're proposing would require massive energy and environmental resources. There's nothing "easy" about it. And even you are looking to resources outside of our finite planet.
That said, if we could get out from under the capitalist plutocrats who currently run things and govern society in a more equitable and rational way, we'd be much more likely to innovate in a way that benefits humanity and planet Earth. Capitalism is stifling the transformation in thought and action that we need.
thatmfisnotreal@reddit
Equity doesn’t help the human race or planet survive. We need a ruthless dictator that understands free market principles like China has.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Yes it should be the goal?! Nobody's arguing that? But its objectively NOT what's happening. I'm watching capitalism double down to its own detriment. It's the same fallacy that we're going to fix the problem with the problem we created. It's not a debate that's happening on capitol hill.
The real question: do we design systems just assuming breakthrough tech arrives in time, or build in redundancy so it doesn't?
It's always some future event that will fix all of our issues, instead of actually dealing with the things that created them. We will just outsource them to the next planet. And destroy that one too. I'm not waiting for space robots to have any semblance of equality. This system is coming to its mathematical end. Capitalism isnt going to save us from Capitalism.
Alarming_Award5575@reddit
This not entirely right. Economic growth is measured in dollars, not resource consumption. You can grow in a resource light way. Granted ad infinitum you are still correct, but I am not sure the reductionist approach is particularly helpful.
Erick_L@reddit
No you can't. Any population that grows use more resources.
capt_fantastic@reddit
they can grow but use less per capita.
Logical-Race8871@reddit
>"Marxism promised material abundance through seizing the means of production"
Where are you getting that from?
zerosumsandwich@reddit
I wish these people would actually read Marx. Unfortunate that they won't because there is one nation on earth that is arguably sustainable and it is communist
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
The Communist Manifesto describes capitalism as having "created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together" and argues that socialism would harness this productive capacity for collective benefit rather than private profit. The entire premise is that capitalist production creates abundance, but capitalist relations create artificial scarcity through unequal distribution.
The point isn't whether Marxism explicitly says "infinite growth"—it's that nowhere in the theory do finite planetary resources appear as a fundamental constraint. It's absent from the framework entirely, not once does it appear anywhere in the syntax of any of these systems.
scionspecter28@reddit
I agree. There are many examples in history that involve the failure of communism to promote a sustainable Earth. These include the diminution of the Aral Sea and mass killing of 500,000 whales by Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, communism shares the plight of human supremacy with other economic systems that all worship unchecked growth.
OneFluffyPuffer@reddit
Yes because the Societ Union was the only attempt at communism ever. Nice job Cherry-picking the failings of one regime in the 60s and equating that to all of communism while our natural world is systematically destroyed every fucking day exclusively to the fault of capitalist hegemony.
scionspecter28@reddit
This isn’t r/CapitalismvsSocialism where I’m in favor of the former system because I see some flaws in the latter system. I detest Capitalism and don’t ignore how destructive it is to our planet.
I’m not cherry-picking but rather just looking at the evidence of so-called Communist systems’ treatment of the environment throughout history. These include Mao Zedong China’s disastrous Four Pests Campaign that wiped out millions of sparrows and CPV Vietnam’s prosecution of environmental activists. As long as human supremacy over nature is valued in an economic system, communism is part of the same coin as capitalism.
OneFluffyPuffer@reddit
Again, you are looking at the individual faulty actions of a regime and equivocating that to an ideology, which I don't know how to view other than cherry picking with poor intentions. If you truly despise capitalism and its rot then you should stop throwing punches at the other side that wants a future which you know is better than our current trajectory, even if some past progenitors have been less than perfect. I am not going to defend every single action or opinion if Mao, Lenin, Trotsky or Castro, but the beauty of living in the future and having access to history is the ability to learn from it.
Modern communists understand limits to the material world, as it's core to how and why the capitalist system implodes on itself as profits tend to always decline over time due to technological advancement and the overextraction/over exploitation of natural resources (including human labour), so the fact that you think communists/socialists are human-supremacists and lack the scientific understanding that we live within an ecological system tells me you've never truly given one the time of day.
scionspecter28@reddit
By all means, give me a current example of one fully-functioning and stable communist system that does not have any environmental issues at all. Looking at historical examples of communist systems, they have all attempted to emulate the theoretical concept of communism by Marx but failed. Even if they did, I would also like to remind you that Marx lived and wrote his seminal works during the height of Industrial Revolution Europe, a period that was borne out of society's exploitation of fossil fuels namely coal. Can the proletariat rise without utilizing the same energy systems that empowered the bourgeoisie in the first place?
I believe in a new kind of economic system that's neither communism nor capitalism. Do I know what it should be called and the details of how it will work? Like Marx during his time, I don't have all the answers to those questions. Until then, there needs to be a radical change in how our society thinks which is to leave fossil fuels and adapt to a reduction to our way of living along with it.
JotaTaylor@reddit
The manifesto is a 19th century pamphlet that greatly simplifies and summarizes the theoretical foundation of communism. If you really want to discuss marxist theory, you have to start by the Capital, and build your way up across the 200+ years of additional material thousads of intellectuals have worked on.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Fair point. I'm not claiming to have comprehensive knowledge of Marxist theory or its 200-year evolution. You're right that Capital and subsequent work contain far more nuance than the Manifesto.
My broader argument isn't really about Marxism specifically—it's that the dominant ideological frameworks we're presented with (capitalism, socialism, various hybrids) don't treat finite resources as the primary constraint around which everything else must be organized. They treat it as a problem to be managed within their existing logic, something to be dealt with afterhand.
If there's robust Marxist ecological theory that does center biophysical limits as foundational rather than secondary, I'm genuinely interested.
But that's also kind of my point—it's not in the mainstream political discourse. Nobody is talking about this point. We're still arguing 19th and 20th century frameworks while the physical systems collapse.
JotaTaylor@reddit
What you're looking for is Roberto Acosta's theory on Post Extractivism and Degrowth.
ErikWithNoC@reddit
Look into the work by Jason Hickel, he may be of interest to you. He's a marxist and anthropologist in Barcelona. His work focuses heavily on environmentalism with a socialist/Marxist lens.
Also, I'd argue Marxism does treat the finite amount of resources as a constraint. It's been awhile since I read Capital, and I don't remember Marx explicitly saying "finite resources are a primary constraint", but it's rather implicit through the central critique Marx had of capitalism and its relation to resource usage.
Rare-Leg-6013@reddit
He's great to listen to ... very articulate.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Ill definitely check it out, thanks
OneFluffyPuffer@reddit
If you can admit you're not politically fluent then your time is much better spend organizing and reading instead of criticizing something you know little about. Mainstream political discourse still treats communism like a dirty, evil chinese/Russian word, how would you expect a nuanced conversation to come out of that?
I'm not trying to be a total dick either, I mean it when I say go organize. I joined the DSA and revolutionary communists (not the Bob Avakian ones) and they've both proved to have a very scientific approach to their theory. However, politics isn't just about the physical material world, and it's not just okay but important to center conversations around more than just the physical limits of our planet.
andreasmiles23@reddit
This is an incorrect interpretation of that passage.
First, capitalism’s goal is not to create abundance, but to create profit.
What Marx is saying here is, with democratic ownership of the means of production, instead of condensing the power of industrial production to create profit for a small class, we will be able to create a more equitable and self-sustaining society. The obvious implication is that “sustainability” would be more easily centered in our social decision making about production if the goal wasn’t (as you said) profiteering. Not everyone would get a car, but everyone would get transit. This is inherently not about “growth” as you try to frame it. Capitalism, as Marx correctly demonstrates, necessitates constant growth and exploitation. Socialism would counter that by focusing on social needs and democratic evaluation of how to pursue innovation.
Marx didn’t use modern sustainability jargon because a) the climate crisis wasn’t even a construct he could refer to nor observed (the Industrial Revolution had just started) and b) he literally is the godfather of modern environmentalism. We don’t have modern environmentalism without Marxism as a framework of analysis.
audioen@reddit
I argue that in the long run, the economic system doesn't matter.
Economics are downstream from physics, by which I mean that no matter how we organize society, we face the simple realities of facing finite resources. There is no system that can create the kind of material abundance that is result of industrialization, because there is a limit to what can be feasibly ultimately extracted.
However, it is obviously true that the economic system can control how resources are divided, but it can't do anything about the fact that resource production destroys natural habitats, poisons water and air, and that there was always going to be a time limit to how long this can be continued, whether due to depletion, pollution, climate change, etc.
At a reduced, rational rate of production, it is possible that industrial civilization could have lasted -- I don't know -- thousand years, maybe. But ultimately, it will have released long-term pollutants into air and waterways, and suffers from climate change and every ill that is related to that, because CO2 is a long-term pollutant with time horizon that lasts tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
The only way to not die within some centuries is to not play industrialization's game, and stick to only biological technology.
HikmetLeGuin@reddit
Collective benefit includes sustainability, though.
Marx himself wrote about that. John Bellamy Foster discusses this in his book Marx's Ecology.
And Marxist theory didn't end with the writings of Marx.
zerosumsandwich@reddit
So you are aware that "Marxism promised material abundance" is a reductive caricature of a pamphlet from the 1840s and are saying it anyway to make an argument that all the -isms are the same despite the several hundred years of globalizing dominance of one of those systems. The -isms aren't the same and as you already pointed out have fundamentally opposed motivations
Do ecocide and extinction sound like collective benefit to you? The document you are quoting is 185 years old... you fundamentally misunderstand Marxism if you think it's another rigid dogma where the manifesto is treated like a bible
LittleLostDoll@reddit
which country is that? Cuba or north korea?
andreasmiles23@reddit
Don’t need to read him, but read Marxist/critical theory ANY text.
OneFluffyPuffer@reddit
Midwits think that socialism is literally just "when good guys cooperatively own the factory"
collapse_2030@reddit
Yeah exactly, this is just stupidity from someone who has never read Marx.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Marx's own writing?
The Communist Manifesto describes capitalism as having "created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together" and argues that socialism would harness this productive capacity for collective benefit rather than private profit. The entire premise is that capitalist production creates abundance, but capitalist relations create artificial scarcity through unequal distribution.
The point isn't whether Marxism explicitly says "infinite growth"—it's that nowhere in the theory do finite planetary resources appear as a fundamental constraint. It's absent from the framework entirely, not once does it appear anywhere in the syntax of any of these systems.
RenewableFaith73@reddit
Your evidence is a description of capitalism from the pamphlet version of Marx's theory? You are talking out your ass. Karl Marx did absolutely discuss environmental inputs and their constraints within capitalism. Marxist theory generally also does not refer only to the words of Karl Marx himself. Within the intellectual tradition of Marxism you bet there has been a lot of discussion about environmental limits in the last almost 200 years.
Now if your point is a workers state is not necessarily opposed to a mass production which could exhaust the environment ask yourself as a worker, if the decision to poison the local river for greater production was up to you as a member of the town and also a worker in that factory do you think you would think about it the exact same way the capitalist who used to consider that same thing? The capitalist, I would add, who lives on the other side of the planet and gets way more money for the enhanced production and gets no personal downsides for poisoning the river. Be for real.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
You're right that I oversimplified, and I appreciate the correction. Marx did address metabolic rift and ecological degradation under capitalism, and yes, there's substantial Marxist ecological theory SINCE then.
But here's my actual point: even in that framework, the ecological crisis is diagnosed as a problem of capitalism specifically—that socialist relations would resolve it because workers wouldn't poison their own rivers. That's the gap I'm pointing to.
The assumption is that changing who controls production fixes the resource constraint problem. But a workers' council can still vote to overexploit fisheries if their livelihoods depend on it. A democratically planned economy can still deplete aquifers growing food. Good intentions don't override thermodynamics or regeneration rates.
A more just system is better—but it still needs to explicitly account for biophysical limits as a core constraint, not just assume democratic control solves it.
RenewableFaith73@reddit
As a socialist I agree that ecological considerations must be at the core. Which is why they are, for me, and the modern socialist movements I have associated with. In America go say to any socialist be they famous or nobody's like me hey do you think we should have an economy of infinite growth or not? 99.99% will say no the environment is a factor. Jackson Hinkle might say yes but he is a doofus hobo surfer plucked off a california beach stuffed with billionaire cash too stupid to not say into a camera "duhhh I'll say anything for money haha I don't care bro." Try it with non-socialists as a control and your going to see less but still high numbers. Everyone knows the environment has limits it is uncontroversial.
Now your real problem is but how do we enforce this reality is adhered to. The fact is you can not devise a system which matches our ecology in perfect harmony. The trees do not speak for themselves we have to speak for them. The closest we can get is to spread the responsibility, through democracy. If you do not believe that is true then okay but I have no idea what else you have in mind or why the broad swathe of humanity would prefer to poison our homes. The only way to make environmental responsibility closer to the core anyways is by education which is precisely what modern socialist movements and even historic attempts like in the Soviet Union do and did. If you doubt this google it. Also take a quick look at who is leading the renewable energy transition in the world. And sorry to preempt any commenters but no I am not going to get into "whether china is actually socialist" but I will say this the Communist party of china is a hell of a lot more socialist then the Republican party of the United States.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Im not even arguing against socialism, and im watching end stage capitalism in real time.
8 people shouldn't control 40% of the wealth, period.
zerosumsandwich@reddit
You talk about the manifesto like its a comprehensive textbook of marxism, and not a 30-odd page pamphlet intended for working people
throwawaybrm@reddit
\#degrowth
Themissingbackpacker@reddit
This right here OP. You should also check out anarchism and Solarpunk
Tayschrenn@reddit
degrowth eco-socialism a la Jason Hickel
karabeckian@reddit
OP should read about China's One Child Policy
Nizidramaniyt@reddit
The comments in this post prove OP right. Everyone would rather peddle their ideology while ignoring the issue at hand. It´s like clockwork.
PsychedelicPill@reddit
You and OP being ignorant of what terminology means does not prove them right
Erick_L@reddit
The point is that those those terminologies mean nothing in reality.
PsychedelicPill@reddit
Nothing means anything then, congrats on your I am 14 and this is deep comment
Erick_L@reddit
No. Read the OP again.
Your words that you're trying to put in my mouth.
The OP is saying all systems have the same goal of growth. Your answer is "no, because of terminology". That's the whole point. The terminologies are wrong.
Erick_L@reddit
Life itself is on a quest for endless growth. It grows via energy profit.
Economic systems mimic that, where money is a proxy for energy.
Celestial_Mechanica@reddit
There is no "energy profit". Stop throwing around made-up nonsense. Total entropy must increase.
The only effective non-negligible external input into the global energy system is solar radiation. That was converted into hydrocarbons by plants, trees and algae and then stored underground hundreds of millions of years ago.
We blew through most of that supply in about 150 years, releasing all of that energy back into the system in the form of carbon, which then acts to increase heat, tilting the entire system towards a feedback system creating ever increasing amounts of higher entropy. There is no sense in which to talk of "profit" in this situation.
Erick_L@reddit
You're completely off topic.
Species grow by spending energy to get an energy profit, allowing them to make more individuals. As population increases, so does the energy debt to maintain that population.
The economy works the same. We spend energy to get and energy profit, allowing us to build stuff. The more stuff is built, the more energy we need to maintain all that.
Every economic systems works that way. Those who say we don't need an energy profit are wrong. What changed in the last 200 years isn't the economic system, it's cheap energy, allowing us to make a lot of stuff.
Celestial_Mechanica@reddit
I'm not off topic, you just don't understand the deeper implications.
Many, many, many species live in a state of relative energy BALANCE with their surroundings. Local ecosystem equilibria.
The voracious need for more energy will doom a species, since they will devour available resources and go extinct.
This is what's happening with humanity now. We lived on borrowed time, tapping and largely depleting the largest energy supply (high entropy) to create massive consumerist waste and unsustainable lifestyles.
The inescapable end point is extinction, barring a kardeshev-level revolution in energy tech or mastering intragalactic travel. Neither is happening within the next 30 years or so necessary to restore the energy balance of the global system. So guess what will happen? :)
Erick_L@reddit
You're on r/collapse.
I understand implications very well. I just didn't write about it. I'm answering to those who think we can simply change economic systems and all will be fine.
Learn to read.
Celestial_Mechanica@reddit
Yes, we are almost in agreement. Just wanted to put a few finer points on it.
Unsure of your background. The field of biophysical economics (a physics-based offshoot, or originator, of ecological economics) studies this problem. If you haven't already, you might find it interesting to dive into.
Erick_L@reddit
I know ecological economics. Like I said, you're on r/collapse. It's discussed frequently here.
TanteJu5@reddit
Yeah, global freshwater use has tripled over the past 50 years, arable land is eroding at 10-100 times the rate of natural soil formation and mineral extraction is hitting peak availability for some elements.
Socialism and communism promise material abundance often through centralized control of production but historically haven’t accounted for ecological ceilings either.
Can humanity create a system that doesn’t require the impossible namely infinite growth? Maybe Technocracy Inc. could work, but I doubt it. It’d probably crash and burn. The plutocrats will never redefine prosperity (well-being over GDP/profit).
audioen@reddit
It doesn't even have to have growth. Merely maintaining status quo, i.e. the current level of production, is also impossible. In the long run, there is only stone age future, because in the long run everything that isn't truly renewable runs out, and eventually we're stuck with things like sunlight growing plants and similar, because even a solar panel is unsustainable. So it's back to low-tech for us.
Relative_Yesterday_8@reddit
Yes AND most humans are highly irrational, illogical, and overly emotional hairless apes
AllenIll@reddit
This is where our collective land chauvinism is so readily apparent: there is so much more of this planet to still exploit and plunder. 71% of the surface of this planet is covered in water. Of which, little of it has yet to be ~~used~~ raped for materials and resources—outside of using it as a food source.
Beyond the polar regions, it is in many ways, the last real frontier left to exploit on the planet. Most of which humans haven't even laid eyes on directly. Of course, the ocean depths have been out of reach for so long due to the costs, energy requirements, and technological and engineering challenges.
Commercially available fusion energy, which is being rapidly pursued around the world today, very well may change all this. In fact, IMO, this is going to be the real legacy of fusion—full-scale exploitation of the oceans. If and when it becomes readily available as a cheap energy source. Not some sci-fi fantasy world where so many of our problems are solved. Granted, it may address some... likely leading to further levels of exploitation of our surroundings in other ways.
This is our basic pattern as a species going back 1.5 million years to Homo Erectus: environmental exploitation till exhaustion or collapse, then in desperation, looking to technology as a savior from the wasteland created. And then repeat. Over and over. From farming to AI.
This is the general human pattern of survival for the last million-plus years. Can an economic system address this and arrest it? Yes, it's possible. But there's a million or so years of evolutionary headwinds going in one direction.
AllenIll@reddit
This is where our collective land chauvinism is so readily apparent: there is so much more of this planet to still exploit and plunder. 71% of the surface of this planet is covered in water. Of which, little of it has yet to be ~~used~~ raped for materials and resources—outside of using it as a food source.
Beyond the polar regions, it is in many ways, the last real frontier left to exploit on the planet. Most of which, human eyes haven't even laid eyes on directly. Of course, the ocean depths have been out of reach for so long due to the costs, energy requirements involved, and technological and engineering challenges.
Commercially available fusion energy, which is being rapidly pursued around the world today, very well may change all this. In fact, IMO, this is going to be the real legacy of fusion—full scale exploitation of the oceans. If and when it becomes readily available as a cheap energy source. Not some sci-fi fantasy world where so many of our problems are solved. Granted, it may address some.
This is our basic pattern as species going back 1.5 million years to Homo Erectus: environmental exploitation till exhaustion or collapse, then in desperation, looking to technology as a savior from the wasteland created. And then repeat. Over and over. From farming to AI.
Formal_Contact_5177@reddit
At least with Chinese style communism pre-Xi, they had the one-child policy which was specifically informed by a recognition of finite resources. The entire world should have followed this example, instead China under Xi gotten rid of it.
moosekin16@reddit
China abandoned the policy because they implemented it poorly, and it caused a lot of problems that are still being felt today and will continue to be a problem.
The penalty for having more than one child was just a fine. So wealthier, city-dwelling parents would just pay the fine and have more children.
enforcement wasn’t even; they had special rules for specific groups.
Autonomous regions within China were usually exempt from the policy.
some families would just hide the amount of children they were having, deciding to not report their birth to the government. This caused lots of different issues with doctor’s visits, taxes, resource management, and children not going to school. It also increased home births, resulting in higher children and maternity deaths.
in Chinese culture, sons are preferred over daughters. So parents would abort their daughters, because it was cheaper than paying the fine to “try for a boy next.”
Now China has a huge gender gap between the number of men and women, which is causing all sorts of problems. And they keep having adults popping up that have no government records, no formal education, no medical history, now needing resources and help.
The One Child policy was implemented extremely poorly and will continue to be a problem for China.
Distion55x@reddit
Socialism and Communism very obviously do consider that resources on earth are finite that's like one of the most basic things about them. This em-dash riddled nonsense has to have been written by AI.
It-s_Not_Important@reddit
Em-dash is automatically injected by iPhone’s keyboard anytime the user presses hyohen/en-dash.
Em-dash is a prevalent part of style guides in modern English writing.
Whether or not OP used AI can’t be determined by presence of em-dash alone. People who go on crusades against anyone because — appears in their post are 99% more likely to engage in ad hominem attacks that debase their positions even more than the use of AI.
MachineMalfunction@reddit
That weak-ass pizza analogy could only have been written by ChatGPT.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
So show me? Instead of another corny adhoc personal attack? Show me how resources are the central tenants?
Im having a discussion about something I feel strongly about. You are the only person throwing personal attacks. You dont care about proving me wrong, just that Im wrong. I'm literally sitting here asking you to show me this information.
StrictDirection8053@reddit
Check this book out. Was really helpful to explore Marxism and socialism from an ecological perspective
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7656_the-ecological-rift-review-by-matthijs-krul/
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
Thank you, ill check it out after lunch
Distion55x@reddit
This person, if there is even a person behind this, knows nothing about socialism.
lowrads@reddit
Socialism, like the democracy upon which it depends, is about facing challenges with the dignity that comes from being a full participant in the process.
The oligarchs can only be trusted to look in vain for personal exemptions to the greater crises, and they'll rely on your submissiveness to do so.
Mediiicaliii@reddit (OP)
To clarify, my contempt for Capitalism is seething and palpable. I just dont see any movements, including capitalism, focused on finite resource restrictions as the basis of an economy. Im not knocking the entirety of Marxism or socialism. I just don't want to inherit another half assed version of reality where its an outlier issue, and the economy is based on GDP vs actual quality of life and, an economy based on the resources available.
breaducate@reddit
If your hatred for the world-wrecking hegemonic paperclip-maximiser burns so bright, then you should begin the long process of unravelling the enormous amount of capitalist propaganda you've implicitly and unconsciously accepted.
lowrads@reddit
Human beings have never done that before. They've always gotten everything they needed from the environment which selected them, then made middens as it processed all things it had the metabolic keys to resorb, and in quantities limited by high mortality rates.
We don't seem to have the experience not to deal in exotic polymers, and we don't have the tools to grapple with our momentary success. It's not a bug that nature must reassert her usual economy in regards to us, but a feature of a system in which we are but a replaceable component.
We don't need economic democracy to contend with the world, but with ourselves.
IchabodChris@reddit
Marxism doesn't promise material abundance but offers a critique of capitalism. socializing production and abundance would be the goal of socialism and communism would be that fully actualized. capitalism is the current, global ideology we have. it operates on exclusive abundance and control of production. even socialist countries must contend with the realities of a hegemonic and globalized capitalism. what you are complaining about is STRICTLY capitalism.
breaducate@reddit
Famously when leftists say "growth for its own sake is the ideology of a cancer cell", what they really mean is capitalism is the final form of human social development and just needs some tweaks around the edges.
poop-machines@reddit
Not to mention there are no marxist countries.
There's Marxist-Leninist, but it's important not to conflate the two because they're wildly different. If you read a lot of Marx's writing you can see that marxist-leninist countries don't match what he envisioned at all. That's because Marxist-Leninist countries are not truly Marxist, they're capitalistic with a idealisation of Marxism, with no pathway to actually reach it. It's a "we will give you Marxism, eventually, but we have no plans for that now".
So it's no surprise that places like China are places people look at and say "Communism? Capitalism? It's all the same."
The last genuinely Marxist experiment might have been Catalonia, and even that was fleeting--Marxism is incredibly difficult to put into practice.
Honestly, I think the solution lies in union-led communism: unionise across every industry and leverage collective control of the means of production to push for change on a national scale. But with so many charlatans co-opting communism to chase power, it’s no wonder the movement keeps getting set back.
Union-led communism could also lead to degrowth, if enough industries demanded it.
We are so incredibly wasteful. With the way we produce so much more food than we need, create plastics with no use that fill up landfills, use disposable plastics without second thought. Who looked at single use plastics and said "this is the future?", because they may have doomed us all.
Distion55x@reddit
Thank you.
MeadowShimmer@reddit
When the gauge hits Africa
Rare-Leg-6013@reddit
You're absolutely right, though there is a big difference between Marx's early thought and his later thought, as explained perhaps best by Kohei Saito. Early Marxism was productivist, in focusing on control of the means of production, though later in life he got very interested in the natural sciences and saw the social metabolism of capitalism as contradictory and causing a metabolic rift, e.g., how agriculture degrades soil which undermines the productivity of land, just as the exploitation of labour undermines the consumption on which capitalism depends. The solution, per Saito, is degrowth eco-communism.
PrizeParsnip1449@reddit
Marx promises sufficiency, not abundance. They are not the same.
sim16@reddit
With a view to under promise and over deliver in the interest of self promotion.
PsychedelicPill@reddit
Crazy level of #everysideiswrong with that “analysis” of the different economic systems. Only one system has unquestionably doomed the planet: capitalism
andreasmiles23@reddit
As others said, you are conflating a lot of explicitly-capitalist ideas with things that are actively trying to reorient us AWAY from the capitalist concepts you are referring to. For example, in socialism, the nature of “consumption” would be different because there would be no more consumption for need (we would develop local economies and systems that sustained the people in them) and there would be no class status to signal with consumption. Thus, “abundance” means something VERY different than it does in modern capitalism.
And, I cannot stress this enough communism is not a political-economic model. It is the inherent and underlying imagination of classless society that every human has and that drives social progress via revolutionary actions to bring about new historical stages. Aka, the “spectre haunting Europe” as they famously start the manifesto with. Marx and Engles say that socialism (democratic ownership of the means of production) will emerge as the next stage of human development. They speculate that socialism will be the result of the revolution triggered by the inherent contradictions of capitalism (which includes some environmental concerns) and the ever-evolving struggle to achieve “communism” (classless society) that has driven change throughout human history.
Additionally, as others noted, while Marx didn’t center environmentalism - that’s more of a problem of when he was writing and the data he had available to him. The full scope of the environmental harm of industrialization was not realized. It is through many of Marxism’s theories and predictions that we have come to learn the scope of that harm. We wouldn’t have this sub without Marxism, dialectical materialism, etc. And again, he did voice what we would now call environmental concerns (the harm of pollutants on workers, the disproportionate impact of pollutants from industrialization on workers, the extraction of natural resources for profit, etc). It doesn’t get centered in the way we talk about it now because now we have the climate crisis very observable around us. For how new many of this was during his time, Marx correctly saw the environmental harm of capitalism. He just didn’t voice it like modern environmentalists would today.
Eiswolf999@reddit
You can't build something sustainable without controlling of the means of production and distribution of goods. As long we live in a world where people barely understand what money is in a society, we are doomed to repeat the same shit over and over again till our species finds an end. But at least you can choose between 365 different branches of tooth brushes, glorious!
Sorry for my English, I'm drunk... maybe.
rosstafarien@reddit
Marxism offers a fantastic diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and the decay products thereof. Unfortunately, when it attempts to provide any kind of prescription, all of its alternatives to market pricing are significantly worse.
High regulation variants of capitalism (the Nordic model, etc) seem to have the best outcomes of all seriously attempted economic systems. On a per-service/market basis, they identify market flaws from complete failure (police, fire, education, healthcare) to those requiring minimal intervention to maintain information equality (consumer products, etc) and then let the market determine winners and losers.
mapsandwrestling@reddit
Twinkl, the saviour for every lazy and desperate teacher.
Expensive_Future327@reddit
I think this is an interesting and robust debate, and I’m glad to see it. And presently some of the biggest degrowth advocates at present are in fact also socialists. And I too take a lot of interest in the political innovations in Spain (I’m thinking the Mondragon system). And I think getting hung up on the finer points of Marxism is counterproductive…I largely agree with the critiques of capitalism, for sure, and its fundamental reliance on growth. And functionally, in modern history (and these were noted) countries that claimed non-capitalist systems were just as fixated on growth/GDP as the capitalist ones. So maybe a critique of nation states and/or corporate control is more in order. As an aside, refreshing to see the suggestion of anarcho-syndicalism.
Wide-Chart-7591@reddit
Lmao looks familiar
HikmetLeGuin@reddit
Marxism would allow resources to be used in more rational and sustainable ways. It includes a strong acknowledgement of the need to recognize material realities, including environmental necessities.
lufiron@reddit
If we removed speculation, interest, and debt from capitalism, what then would we have?
krichuvisz@reddit
We have known that for 50 years. Most carbon was emitted after the climate conference of 92 in Rio.