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Serving fellow man? By creating a sixth mass extinction and runaway climate change? There are two major correlates with civilisational collapse: inequality and environmental degradation. Yeah. Exactly. Fuck capitalism. It's an existential risk to humanity.
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Capitalism is the telos of exploitation, looting, plundering, and enslavement. It built colonial and neocolonial empires. The slave trade. Mass ecocide driving the planet to ruin. All so a few people could own the means of production and steal everyone's surplus labour value.
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No, I'm saying capitalism pillaged and plundered and exploited *as well* as systems before it did. He's saying it transcended those things. It didn't. It just made them global, industrialised, more efficient, and existentially threatening.
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Here is a question: If we kill the ability to accumulate vast, billionaire fortunes, clearly there will be less inequality - given the tremendous work those shits put into hoarding. But would our species-level rapacity stop? Would overconsumption halt? War? My feeling is no.
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If anything, capitalism grew *from* those structures & processes... it's a dysfunctional c&c system, but it is just that - it isn't a root cause. If you take your point about feudalism, capitalism is more like a dysfunctional sovereign than a system unto itself, I think.
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All of these polluting megacorps, exploitative billionaires and so on are bootstrapped on top of industrial technologies that lack any historical precedent, unless you're a biblical literalist or something. There is no telling how bad we could make alternative control systems.
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So my feeling is, until we get really serious about how to solve a 10 billion plus population boom, or our ludicrous destructive capabilities vs. our very limited species-level coordination, or the staggering inefficiency of our tech, capitalism remains an academic issue.
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