Some if the invisible hand is real. It's emergent phenomena. People trade in goods and services and create wealth. The feudal Lord lauded as the "captain of Industry" is the BS part.
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There is so much in the way of tradition, barriers, unfair advantage, privilege, culture, etc, that the hand is anything but invisible.
Portraying it as such is a way to obscure all that, in the same way that organised religion used "God" to obscure their systemic functions.
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You mention the word God. That strikes me as how you use capitalism. To you capitalism is evil. To say "down with evil" and enjoining everyone to eschew it, strikes me as pointless.
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As I say, it's not going anywhere. Much like religion post secularism. It just needs outing in its box, out of harms way.
If I use it like God, it's because I see others using it thusly.
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It just seems to me like a super vague, unweildy, super emotionally charged word.
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Conservatives use "socialism" almost the same way you use "capitalism" to connote everything they see as bad. In reality we have a mix of both.
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I do think all forms of capitalism are bad. Now.
It's a system born of knowledge and culture as it was a few hundred years ago, and is now horrifically outdated, anachronistic, and destructive.
It wasn't always thus. But context is all.
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Isn't this an argument across levels of analysis?
Ted seems to be contending that you are overassociating negative characteristics of social reality with capitalism (I agree), and you that capitalism is a dysfunctional system of governance in need of replacement (I also agree).
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How can one over-associate an ideological label that refers to an economic, cultural, and social hegemony?
It influences everything.
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Extremely easily, in fact.
All it takes is conflating sociopolitical hegemony with biological or technological hegemony.
Does capitalism steer all human impulses, including negative ones? Is it a defining cause of ecological destruction. I say no, not even remotely.
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I think capitalism is a strange attractor for a range of our current material conditions, and therefore easily conflated with those conditions as such.
But I think, in the absence of capitalism, those conditions are still a hard problem.
I feel like capitalism is a roadblock towards addressing that problem, but shouldn't be treated as primary.
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Oh for sure, but I'm focused on the problem at hand now.
We aren't going to fix the underlying flaws of human nature in time to stop climate change. That's just not how cultural evolution works.
I try to work with what we've got.
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I don't think it's reducible. I think it's hegemony in terms of top-down power, in terms of monopoly over shared cultural production, makes it fundamental to everything around us today in a cultural context that is the prime driver of malleability and change.
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I disagree that superstructures or attractors are primary.
Capitalism is not measured in ppm. CO2 is.
Climate systems don't care who or what lights the fire, only that it burns. That capitalism encourages an unnecessary, deleterious amount of fire-starting is a different story.
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