Capitalism won't overthrow itself.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
184 points (80.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
29677 readers
1585 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics
- NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
- Political posts often end up being circle jerks (not offering unique perspective) or enflaming (too much work for mods).
- Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct-----
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's collapsing by itself but I don't think that's fast enough. (And a hard crash will mean a lot of trouble, we need a transition)
And for the accelerationists in back - no, a crash doesn't imply anything nice will come later. We could end up back at feudalism.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
load more comments
(6 replies)
Perhaps we live in a post DATA scarcity society. But information is still a scarce commodity
load more comments
(3 replies)
Your premise is wrong in like... A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn't say everything is post-scarcity.
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.
load more comments
(1 replies)
So you're saying that everyone has sufficient and easy access to information? How does that relate to capitalism?
load more comments
(33 replies)
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
lol. Tell that to the scientific papers you have to pay for otherwise they’ll run out and the researchers won’t be able to research.
A post-scarcity society doesn't mean a post-resource society. We have enough resources to make sure everybody has what they need. None of it is scarce in the slightest. We just need to distribute it equally.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Capitalism will collapse eventually, whether planned or not. The best we can do is build up parallel structures that can weather that collapse, like complex networks of Mutual Aid, strong Unions, FOSS software, and more.
I like this view of parallel structures
Best we can do is fascism and climate apocalypse.
Fascism is similarly unsustainable, if we fail and can't achieve Socialism from Capitalism then fascism will take its place, and will also collapse. Same with climate, if we fail to properly handle it we will almost certainly go extinct, but the door remains open for life in millenia.
Even Socialism seems transitory to me. Much better than Capitalism, but once labor can be more broadly automated, we need to think of something other than money quickly.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
We do not live in an post information scarcity society. Also information doesn’t work like electricity, so even if we did this is still stupid.
We live in a world where it costs essentially nothing to replicate a piece of information 7 billion times and distribute it everyone on earth.
A world where the pirate bay does that for the couple of grand that they get from some porn banner ads.
We live in a world where there is no reason for information to be scarce. The entire systems of copyright and patents and IP are hamfisted ways of creating artificial scarcity so that information retains value in a world where it could be ubiquitous.
I see what you are saying but it’s somewhat different from resource scarcity. There is no scarcity in the ability to transmit information, but there is still information scarcity.
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
This doesn’t even factor in the costs of filtering through misinformation and disinformation.
Edit for clarity / sentence structure
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
It's actually valuable in a real world sense yes, but the point is that the mechanisms of capitalism say that if it's completely unscarce its value should be $0. So in a world without IP Law, the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it's value rapidly drops to $0 since it costs fraction of a penny for someone to make a personal copy off the closest person / server to them.
We could easily afford to let information be replicated and distributed freely, except for this problem that it doesn't fit neatly in the mechanisms of capitalism because we would stop rewarding first discovery.
So what did we do, did we come up with a new system that rewards first discovery but still allows information to flow freely?
No. We decided to reward first discovery by inventing made up concepts like patents, copyrights, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all of which function by creating artificial scarcity, just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(16 replies)
I'd be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn't even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I think the simplest way to put it is "an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital"
Technically, Monarchism falls under that definition as well, which is why it gets a bit more complex than that.
A monarchy can be capitalist as long as peoples property rights are respected. The moment the monarch decides to lop somebodys head off and take their stuff you'll be back to the old-school feudalistic "might makes right" societies.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
The reason you are post scarcity is because other people around the world are not. This imbalance in wealth is because of capitalism
You fail to understand in your eagerness to jump on a soapbox.
The numbers simply do not lie:
There is not one reason for anyone, anywhere, to go without food, water, or shelter. That some regions lack the production is irrelevant, others over produce and still refuse to meet the needs of their own, much less others.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The rubes need something to collect so they can lord over you. They don't want an intelligent society. They want something they can game to get big numbers.
In 1980, 'middle class' was still defined as one job paying for a family of four. In those days $1 million was still considered a vast fortune. By the time Bush Sr. left office 'middle class' was two salaries to support a family and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
load more comments
(21 replies)
ITT : People who want to argue about dictionary definitions and ignore the topic of the post.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.
load more comments
(1 replies)
What's the alternative then?
The problem is that while we have infinite information we do not have infinite energy/resources yet. The shift when we get it to remove power from the structures will be larger but reminiscent of the piracy/copyright battles lately
We absolutely have enough to shower every single person in lavishness. Its just not distributed. We arent post resource, but we are post scarcity.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
Firstly, capitalism isn't going to just "poof" away just because there are more resources available. The rich will just hold them back to create artificial scarcity - like is done with diamonds.
Secondly, even discounting that, there are plenty of resources that are genuinely scarce no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
But if you're referring to just the scarcity of information - then you're still not quite right as not all that information out there is good information - a lot of it is misinformation (i.e. propaganda, etc.)...
And even that discounts the fact that for many people, they don't have the tools/capability to access the information, or simply can't access the information full stop (I.e. due to censorship, etc.).
view more: next ›