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Protestation
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33936586
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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn't even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We've all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn't a reason to never try central planning again.
They absolutely had computers, I have no idea why you would think the second largest economy that produced tremendous technological advances in its time did not have computers.You know Tetris was created by a Soviet programmer, right?
Planned economies are doomed at this point gecause we aren't able to predict distasters and the planned economy cannot respond in an efficient manner when things go wrong. Humans aren't smart enough and we do not have artificial intelligence capable of doing so.
How old are you? Did you go through COVID? Capitalism doesn't do disasters well at all. Every cost is minimized. So emergency supplies go unmaintained. If it doesn't help the stock price annually it doesn't get done.
50, yes and most nations did poorly the reason for America's failures have to do with American healthcare as most market economies handled it much better than the planned ones did. China did much worse but that rarely made China's news.
American healthcare is capitalist. It's insurance companies and for profit hospitals. That's why it's bad. Healthcare is an inelastic demand.
China isn't a Democratic State. I'm not arguing that just having one guy handling all the economic planning is a good idea.
Non market economies are never going to work, because you'll be essentially creating one giant monopoly and leaving people without the possibility of doing things differently
What happens when you don't like the product the state offers?
What if you discover a way of doing things more efficiently?
What about independent artists and creators?
And that's not getting into how unpredictable people are, products that have been predicted to fail end up becoming very successful, and the opposite also happens
They had computers towards the end, of course, but they were extremely primitive. The kinds of disaster predictions you can do on a machine built to run Tetris are nothing compared to what can be done with today's technology.
Also, it's not like markets can actually deal with disasters. Without at least some central planning disaster response and relief is impossible.
Planning for relief disaster and a planned economy are incredibly different things. Planned economies do not handle disasters well at all as they didn't prepare for that disaster in advance (typically because how can you plan for the one in a hundred million chance that x would happen).
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
No, we still have market based economies because they make a few people very very rich.
We needed markets before computers and instant mass communication. Things are different now
What about the fact that market-based responses to COVID were universally worse than centrally planned responses?
Given what you have said in the last comment I replied to I do not wish to continue this conversation
You called me poorly educated. Was I supposed to be nice after that?
They don't disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They're "hard issues" because we don't have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
... I'll admit that's just vibes, though.
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People's Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there's no reason it can't be done for nations.
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn't a federation, it's very centrally planned. It's also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
Are you really this poorly educated in economics that you do not get that for profit businesses and nation states function under completely different realities?
Yes, because it's so great that they're trying to run the nation like a business right now.
They're trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They're not even running like a business, they're running it like VC.
Let's not pretend they're trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
Corporations are run very differently from countries.
What happens when you don't like the product that the state is offering?
What about independent artists and creators?
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
Petition the central planners to offer something else. Central planning can still be democratic.
Well without the need to sell their art they could create whatever they want without fear of it being unmarketable. An artist could just create without needing to sell it to anyone.
Businesses do this all the time! They do market research to find out what people want, they monitor current events and customer demands and social media. There's no reason a central planner can't do the same.
This is a strawman. Centrally planned does not mean immutable, and markets are no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What it does allow is the disregard of the only quantity markets are capable of maximizing, profit.
This is not a strawman. Im not constructing a false point to argue against while ignoring their claims. Im in fact discussing them directly.
Markets don’t need to predict the future as the market responds naturally more quickly than central planning can adjust for errors or unexpected aspects of the plan. one of the major points of failure for central planned economies is the lack of responsiveness. A centally planned economy would not avoid environmental catastrophe as the Soviets were responsible for several with profit motives.
Markets respond only to profit changes, and even then they are far from perfect. It's simply an economist fiction that they are uniquely good at adaptation, one proof being the utter failure of markets to handle the global catastrophe climate change is going to cause.
Markets respond to the needs of the market. Historically speaking this works much faster in market based economies than centrally planned economies because market economies don’t require prestidigitation to function correctly.
No one claims market economies are perfect just that they function better than planned ones at our current technological levels.
Central planned economies have resulted in devastated ecology as well. Industrialized economies are the real cause not the economy running them.
Markets find the need of a market and respond to it only when there is profit. It is completely uninterested in other needs, this is why externalities are a problem.
I don't hold it to the standard of perfect, but markets are simply not effectively dealing with the realities of climate change.
Industrialization is definitely an issue, the larger issue is that with economies exclusively driven by markets, even when every knowledgeable person on the matter is aware of an issue like climate change, markets need to be fought and bent against their very nature to deal with the fact that it's less profitable to take care of the environment.
Externalities exist in all systems. Im not sure why you are mentioning them in this case given they are not unique.
The reality is markets respond much more rapidly and accurately than planned economies can. This might change if AI becomes a reality but right now planned economies will continue to be less efficient.
That is true for planned economies as well.
Not really and again it isn’t as if environmentalism has been the focus of the Marxist states IRL either. The USSR was devastating to their environment.
I bring them up because they demonstrate my point. Externalities need to be taxed because profit is the only need markets respond to, which was my point.
Only using a contorted definition of efficiency that favors markets, namely maximizing GDP. It does not speak to the efficiency of throwing away food, cutting up old clothes, letting people die from curable illness, or to reiterate the point, making the only planet we've ever seen sustain life unsuitable for us because it's simply impossible to convince market economies to seek anything other than profit.
Agreed, the USSR was also going through rapid industrialization. The difference is market economies have an absolute global hegemon, and still cannot meaningfully address the reality of climate change because it would effect profits.
Except all of those things happen in planned economies too the difference is it is incompetent planning behind these and there’s no fix in the planned economy.
Your whole perspective seems to be ignoring all of the faults the planned economy shares with capitalism while only highlighting capitalism as the whole issue when that isn’t the case.
I disagree, but to the more important point you still seem to dance around the fact that market economies have had decades to align with the incredible wealth of science describing the problems we are facing, and failed to do anything more then gesture at solutions.
Like genuinely, what good is all this 'efficiency' if it's killing us and refusing to change?
They are not responsive and they are not adapting anywhere near what is needed because there is no profit in doing so. China is still largely a market economy, but the centrally planned aspects allow it to push much harder towards a de-carbonized economy compared to the west.
Source on the planned aspects being what drove the decarbonization?
I get the sentiment and I wish it were true.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that's given us a very high EROI society (one where there's an abundance of energy for purposes that aren't basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he's by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
I've read Limits to Growth. I understand there are physical limits and that we can't just grow our way through this crisis. Industrial civilization can not continue as it is.
But central planning would allow for us to transition to a lower energy society.
I agree but there's a lot of detail about what activities a lower energy society precludes and my point is that energy intensive "AI" (mostly thinking about LLMs rather than targets applications of ML) probably aren't part of it.
Deepseek showed that these chatbots can be run much more cheaply than they have been and it isn't really necessary to build giga warehouses of servers. It might be possible to run them on even tighter hardware specifications too.
Of course, chatbots aren't AI and the fact that they're trying to use them as AI isn't going to work out anyway lol
Yes its clear that the path of throwing more and more resource at LLMS to improve quality has been a lazy growth focused approach that we could do better if we actually try a design focussed approach.
For me though it comes back to the fact we are facing a polycrisis and most of our resource should be focused on looking for solutions to that and I'm not sure what problem* this technology solves yet alone what problem relating to the polycrisis.
*I realise what they are designed to solve is a capitalist problem. How can we avoid paying staff for service and creative type jobs to increase profit.