Great read. I’m bookmarking this. Thanks.

I read it. I’m really not sure what I’m meant to be talking from it. I think a lot of Marxists don’t understand what capitalism is.

“Its very structure, therefore, deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.”

Capitalism is entirely based on the the free hand of the market not on votes. People effectively vote with money. If people want more pears instead of apples, then more pears are planted than apples. The free hand of the market works without votes and infact is a lot lot more efficient than voting on everything or on trying to control these choices from a central government. Its fundamentally why (among other reasons) capitalism is so much more efficient than anything else.

Something that seems horribly missed by certain people that don’t understand capitalism is externalities. Most economists want these corrections made to prices. They want ways to fix the tragedy of the commons, they don’t want factories everywhere polluting they want the best use of capital, land and labour.

People get to vote on the limit of business. They can choose to have green spaces around cities and there is absoultely nothing a business can do about it. All the wealth made from capitalism that wouldn’t exist without it is taxed by the government and the government can use that money to better effect. Lots of countries and cities have green spaces and high environmental protection. Capitalist want the government to pay for education and the government wants to pay for education because it gets more money back from taxes.

If I have missed something please let me know. But I’m getting tired of people on this site no understanding basic economics so I’m not sure how long this conversation will continue.

Oh ok, so you acknowledge that humanity’s footprint needs to be systematically drastically reduced for the next several generations until we reach a number this planet can sustainably support, and we need to push to end the capitalist global economy that requires infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world with finite resources immediately, in favor of an economic model that revolves around homeostasis/equilibrium, which will require necessary draconian lifestyle changes on all of our parts, right?

For the record, I’m more than willing to. I’m hilariously outnumbered though.

Now go ahead and talk about “baby steps” in the face of accelerating temperature increases. Baby steps are steps that could have made an impact that reverberated into today’s consequences half a century ago when we knew about climate change but largely pretended we didn’t.

You call it doomerism, but I just don’t believe in self-deception to feel better.

The standard deviation is not negative, that data was just that many standard deviations below the mean. Think “this data point is below the mean by 0.5 standard deviations” not “the standard deviation is 0.5”. They are using standard deviation as a unit rather than, say, degrees Celsius.