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Capitalism won't overthrow itself.
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
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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.
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So you're saying that everyone has sufficient and easy access to information? How does that relate to capitalism?
Some people say that if we lived in a post-scarcity society we would move on from capitalism. I am pointing that out as not true since there is an aspect of our lives that is already post-scarcity yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
Also post-scarcity doesn't mean everyone has sufficient and easy access it means that everything can be produced in great abundance.
Edit: would to wouldn't; Most to Some
Edit 2: Rephrased some words so that my meaning comes across better.
We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don't create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
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Markets aren't Capitalism. You can have non-Capitalist markets, such as ones made up of Worker Co-ops.
You can have a market-based economy without exploitation a la Capitalism.
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
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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.
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.
Yeah I was confused by this. The world is pretty far off post-scarcity! Might need more context here
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.
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.
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.
Communism is just that, same with Anarchism (though Anarcho-Communism skips Socialism). You're correct, but that is for after Socialism.
Shhhhh, im trying to lead them to that conclusion without the big scary C word.
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Hopefully earth finds harmony after humans.
I like this view of parallel structures
Yeah I totally agree. I'm trying my best to integrate these things into my life today.
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.
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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.
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Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
Fascism is the violent reaction to the fall of Capitalism, just as fascism is on the rise, so is Socialism. The fight against fascism is critical, as that which replaces Capitalism will be either Socialism or fascism.
It is up to the Socialists to beat the fascists.
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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.
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ITT : People who want to argue about dictionary definitions and ignore the topic of the post.
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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.
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I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.
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Can we stop posting about communism every single day?
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.).
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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