I know you are referring to China, and that’s true, but there’s more to it than that. We have this concept of developmental/climate justice when discussing our policies to save the environment. Western capitalists/imperialists have made use of fossil fuels for a long time now to develop their economies then use that economic might to subjugate the rest of the world and keep them underdeveloped. It is only fair that those who have benefited most from burning carbon take on more of the burden of transitioning away from it. Asking developing nations to shoulder that burden is telling them to deny themselves the benefits of the modern economy.
Ideally, the historically biggest polluters would use the wealth they’ve accumulated to help this transition. Even if it means some economic pain, they can relatively afford it compared to those other countries. In the mean time, those developing nations could make use of fossil fuels to catch up their economy to some reasonable standard before transitioning, potentially with the help of those developed nations, to renewables.
The trouble is, under capitalism, the people who hold power are the same people who have been made wealthy from exploiting fossil fuels and they have an entrenched interest in maintaining the market for those fuels so they can stay wealthy. Even if the social benefit of a green transition is evident, the threat to their profits is enough to have them fight against it. In this way, at a point in time when we ought to have already begun a transition away from fossil fuels, we have been routinely blocked by those entrenched interests.
China is a case for why socialism is better positioned to tackle this issue. When modern China was founded, it was an agrarian society previously under the thumb of both feudalism and western colonialism. Meanwhile Western countries had been industrializing off of coal and then later oil for a considerable time before this. So they made use of fossil fuels to develop their country into the modern industrialized country we see today. (Also remember that a lot of their industry was aimed at exporting to western consumers, so their development and the resulting carbon footprint can’t be entirely disentangled from western capital.) But what have they been doing with that development? China has been using it’s ability to set economic priorities and divert capital where needed to make great strides in things like solar panels, electric vehicles, and mass transit. Because at least some capital is controlled by interests who aren’t directly beholden to the profit incentive, they are able to do what needs to be done for the good of society and the world instead of allowing for markets to eternally doom them to short term priorities.
The US has an economy developed enough to take care of everyone and still develop new technology if they chose to do so for quite some time now and we’ve known about climate change for decades. We needed to start a massive project on the level of the New Deal, industrializing for WWII, or the space race decades ago, but we have failed to do that because of who controls the resources and political power in our society. The meager attempts at environmental regulation have done little to slow down climate change. It’s only gotten worse over time and at an accelerating rate that will only get worse as we experience more feedback loops.
Despite all of this, what is the capitalist class doing? They’re pushing to get rid of the few regulations we have. They’re building data centers to spend even more energy on a project that arguably won’t even benefit most people. They’re continuing to incite wars over resources. They’re building bunkers so they can hide away from the consequences of their actions. Capitalism is killing us. We might not agree with everything that China is doing, but they are showing what a government can do when it is motivated by interests other than capital.
Are the capitalists building out wind farms in California, Oklahoma and Texas good or bad? How about all the solar farms in the desert? Is Slate Auto good or bad as it’s partially funded by Bezos? How many data centers is china building? (hint: lots) Your obsession with capitalism seems to ignore the vast variation of human nature…
I mean, of course it’s good if we get those things on a scale that will fix the problem. However, the critique socialists have of capitalism isn’t based on human nature or some moral judgement of individual capitalists. It’s based on an understanding of capitalism as a system and what forces drive it to produce the results we observe.
There is of course the labor issue, but let’s focus on the market aspect and how it relates to environmental issues for now. In a market economy, the pursuit of profit and growth combined with the laws of supply and demand create pressures that make some companies successful and others fail. This can be looked at like an evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest. Capitalists aren’t bad because they are bad people, it’s that only bad people become successful capitalists. Companies that are unwilling to engage in maximum profit seeking behavior over the long run get filtered out.
Then there is the financial aspect of this. Investors generally speaking don’t make money off of steady profits. They make money when the price of the stock increases above what they bought it for so that they can sell it for a profit. This dynamic demands continual growth. A company that is not growing is one that will be abandoned by investors or pressured to do so through ownership voting. This growth is necessary to outcompete other companies who can also seek to reinvest or acquire more capital to expand further.
These phenomena aren’t really in dispute. A pro-capitalist economist would say that this decentralized system of economic pressures creates incentives for growth and innovation. These incentives ultimately result in an optimized economy that has efficiently allocated it’s resources in the way that meets people’s needs. There is some degree of truth to this, but ultimately the claim that this form of economy produces desirable results for society demands evidence of these outcomes. It also depends on what you value. Was capitalist industrialization good for the workers who died in unsafe factories? Was it good for those in other countries which we violently exploited for profit? Was it good for managing our environment and natural resources in a sustainable way?
There is plenty of evidence that despite the progress made under capitalism, it has failed to produce desirable results in many respects as well. And once again, capitalist economists have analyses of these failures. For example, the damage to the environment is a problem referred to as “the tragedy of the commons.” While we all benefit from having a habitable environment, the pressures of the economy are such that no one person or corporation has enough of an incentive to take on the costs of pursuing that benefit on their own. And again, this isn’t merely a matter of preference for greed. Companies that choose to take on this additional cost for a relatively small return risk losing to companies that do not do so.
It is also evidently true that market competition is not always sufficient to keep companies in check. For all sorts of reasons, various industries have consolidated into monopolies or near monopolies. The basic assumptions of the market model are no longer satisfied. (Many buyers and sellers such that none have the ability to act as price setters.)
On top of the mainstream capitalist economic analysis of capitalism, there are of course additional critiques by Marxist economists, but this is already getting long enough.
Lastly, the typical liberal response is to say “ok, capitalism has these problems on it’s own, but we can just regulate it.” This sounds like a nice solution, but the problem is that these capitalists are able to convert their economic power into political power through campaign donations, media ownership, etc. We keep trying to regulate corporations, but these efforts ultimately fail or prove insufficient because the government which would pass and enforce these laws owes it’s political power to the very corporations it would be regulating. Fundamentally, the problem with capitalism is that it’s antidemocratic. A government can’t be of, by, and for the people if it depends on the wealth of a handful of capitalists more than it does the votes of the general public.
People often misunderstand what socialism is. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just “the government does stuff.” There are two core components of it: 1) You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly. 2) That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.
The goal in this is to have the means by which we can collectively make decisions that we believe will benefit from society. That doesn’t mean we’ll get everything right, but at least we had that choice and we can learn from our mistakes and move on. Capitalism at it’s most theoretical is a system with nobody at the wheel. “The invisible hand” of the market guides priorities for society, not any particular conscious choice by people. More realistically, capitalism is a system in which wealthy capitalists make decisions for the rest of us. In either case, if the incentives aren’t aligned to be in favor of public good, then we don’t get public good.
Also, before you go “but China” again: I already said that I don’t agree with literally everything China, or any particular government, does. Doing so would be dogmatism. It would fail the first principle of socialist philosophy to analyze the world scientifically. I can look at their successes and failures and use that knowledge to make future decisions. Even for their successes, it isn’t automatically the case that we should copy their successes. Different times, places, and people create different conditions which need to factor into your analysis. What worked for them may not work for us, but it at least tells us something.
Holy wall of text, batman. It would be hilariously ironic if it’s AI generated, but I am too lazy to check. But to the point: what is the “working class” in modern society?
You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly.
Capitalism is quite good at that.
That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.
It is in America and many other western nations. The main problem is life is too easy and no one votes. Where big S socialism has been tried on a large scale, that power disappears quite quickly…
I know you are referring to China, and that’s true, but there’s more to it than that. We have this concept of developmental/climate justice when discussing our policies to save the environment. Western capitalists/imperialists have made use of fossil fuels for a long time now to develop their economies then use that economic might to subjugate the rest of the world and keep them underdeveloped. It is only fair that those who have benefited most from burning carbon take on more of the burden of transitioning away from it. Asking developing nations to shoulder that burden is telling them to deny themselves the benefits of the modern economy.
Ideally, the historically biggest polluters would use the wealth they’ve accumulated to help this transition. Even if it means some economic pain, they can relatively afford it compared to those other countries. In the mean time, those developing nations could make use of fossil fuels to catch up their economy to some reasonable standard before transitioning, potentially with the help of those developed nations, to renewables.
The trouble is, under capitalism, the people who hold power are the same people who have been made wealthy from exploiting fossil fuels and they have an entrenched interest in maintaining the market for those fuels so they can stay wealthy. Even if the social benefit of a green transition is evident, the threat to their profits is enough to have them fight against it. In this way, at a point in time when we ought to have already begun a transition away from fossil fuels, we have been routinely blocked by those entrenched interests.
China is a case for why socialism is better positioned to tackle this issue. When modern China was founded, it was an agrarian society previously under the thumb of both feudalism and western colonialism. Meanwhile Western countries had been industrializing off of coal and then later oil for a considerable time before this. So they made use of fossil fuels to develop their country into the modern industrialized country we see today. (Also remember that a lot of their industry was aimed at exporting to western consumers, so their development and the resulting carbon footprint can’t be entirely disentangled from western capital.) But what have they been doing with that development? China has been using it’s ability to set economic priorities and divert capital where needed to make great strides in things like solar panels, electric vehicles, and mass transit. Because at least some capital is controlled by interests who aren’t directly beholden to the profit incentive, they are able to do what needs to be done for the good of society and the world instead of allowing for markets to eternally doom them to short term priorities.
The US has an economy developed enough to take care of everyone and still develop new technology if they chose to do so for quite some time now and we’ve known about climate change for decades. We needed to start a massive project on the level of the New Deal, industrializing for WWII, or the space race decades ago, but we have failed to do that because of who controls the resources and political power in our society. The meager attempts at environmental regulation have done little to slow down climate change. It’s only gotten worse over time and at an accelerating rate that will only get worse as we experience more feedback loops.
Despite all of this, what is the capitalist class doing? They’re pushing to get rid of the few regulations we have. They’re building data centers to spend even more energy on a project that arguably won’t even benefit most people. They’re continuing to incite wars over resources. They’re building bunkers so they can hide away from the consequences of their actions. Capitalism is killing us. We might not agree with everything that China is doing, but they are showing what a government can do when it is motivated by interests other than capital.
Are the capitalists building out wind farms in California, Oklahoma and Texas good or bad? How about all the solar farms in the desert? Is Slate Auto good or bad as it’s partially funded by Bezos? How many data centers is china building? (hint: lots) Your obsession with capitalism seems to ignore the vast variation of human nature…
I mean, of course it’s good if we get those things on a scale that will fix the problem. However, the critique socialists have of capitalism isn’t based on human nature or some moral judgement of individual capitalists. It’s based on an understanding of capitalism as a system and what forces drive it to produce the results we observe.
There is of course the labor issue, but let’s focus on the market aspect and how it relates to environmental issues for now. In a market economy, the pursuit of profit and growth combined with the laws of supply and demand create pressures that make some companies successful and others fail. This can be looked at like an evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest. Capitalists aren’t bad because they are bad people, it’s that only bad people become successful capitalists. Companies that are unwilling to engage in maximum profit seeking behavior over the long run get filtered out.
Then there is the financial aspect of this. Investors generally speaking don’t make money off of steady profits. They make money when the price of the stock increases above what they bought it for so that they can sell it for a profit. This dynamic demands continual growth. A company that is not growing is one that will be abandoned by investors or pressured to do so through ownership voting. This growth is necessary to outcompete other companies who can also seek to reinvest or acquire more capital to expand further.
These phenomena aren’t really in dispute. A pro-capitalist economist would say that this decentralized system of economic pressures creates incentives for growth and innovation. These incentives ultimately result in an optimized economy that has efficiently allocated it’s resources in the way that meets people’s needs. There is some degree of truth to this, but ultimately the claim that this form of economy produces desirable results for society demands evidence of these outcomes. It also depends on what you value. Was capitalist industrialization good for the workers who died in unsafe factories? Was it good for those in other countries which we violently exploited for profit? Was it good for managing our environment and natural resources in a sustainable way?
There is plenty of evidence that despite the progress made under capitalism, it has failed to produce desirable results in many respects as well. And once again, capitalist economists have analyses of these failures. For example, the damage to the environment is a problem referred to as “the tragedy of the commons.” While we all benefit from having a habitable environment, the pressures of the economy are such that no one person or corporation has enough of an incentive to take on the costs of pursuing that benefit on their own. And again, this isn’t merely a matter of preference for greed. Companies that choose to take on this additional cost for a relatively small return risk losing to companies that do not do so.
It is also evidently true that market competition is not always sufficient to keep companies in check. For all sorts of reasons, various industries have consolidated into monopolies or near monopolies. The basic assumptions of the market model are no longer satisfied. (Many buyers and sellers such that none have the ability to act as price setters.)
On top of the mainstream capitalist economic analysis of capitalism, there are of course additional critiques by Marxist economists, but this is already getting long enough.
Lastly, the typical liberal response is to say “ok, capitalism has these problems on it’s own, but we can just regulate it.” This sounds like a nice solution, but the problem is that these capitalists are able to convert their economic power into political power through campaign donations, media ownership, etc. We keep trying to regulate corporations, but these efforts ultimately fail or prove insufficient because the government which would pass and enforce these laws owes it’s political power to the very corporations it would be regulating. Fundamentally, the problem with capitalism is that it’s antidemocratic. A government can’t be of, by, and for the people if it depends on the wealth of a handful of capitalists more than it does the votes of the general public.
People often misunderstand what socialism is. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just “the government does stuff.” There are two core components of it: 1) You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly. 2) That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.
The goal in this is to have the means by which we can collectively make decisions that we believe will benefit from society. That doesn’t mean we’ll get everything right, but at least we had that choice and we can learn from our mistakes and move on. Capitalism at it’s most theoretical is a system with nobody at the wheel. “The invisible hand” of the market guides priorities for society, not any particular conscious choice by people. More realistically, capitalism is a system in which wealthy capitalists make decisions for the rest of us. In either case, if the incentives aren’t aligned to be in favor of public good, then we don’t get public good.
Also, before you go “but China” again: I already said that I don’t agree with literally everything China, or any particular government, does. Doing so would be dogmatism. It would fail the first principle of socialist philosophy to analyze the world scientifically. I can look at their successes and failures and use that knowledge to make future decisions. Even for their successes, it isn’t automatically the case that we should copy their successes. Different times, places, and people create different conditions which need to factor into your analysis. What worked for them may not work for us, but it at least tells us something.
Holy wall of text, batman. It would be hilariously ironic if it’s AI generated, but I am too lazy to check. But to the point: what is the “working class” in modern society?
You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly.
Capitalism is quite good at that.
That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.
It is in America and many other western nations. The main problem is life is too easy and no one votes. Where big S socialism has been tried on a large scale, that power disappears quite quickly…