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.
Conversation
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It's a system born of knowledge and culture as it was a few hundred years ago, and is now horrifically outdated, anachronistic, and destructive.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.
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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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What we've got is kids roaming the streets telling politicians to go get fucked, which is nice.
I'm just assiduously concerned that the last generation to do so this forcefully was, uh, the boomers?
And we got the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
Compared to gen X and Millenials, I'll take it.