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It's a system born of knowledge and culture as it was a few hundred years ago, and is now horrifically outdated, anachronistic, and destructive.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.
Conversation
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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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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Well, that's the story I'm focused on, because it's the story that is going to drive what comes next, and a story that desperately needs to be told to counteract the devastating amount of indoctrination that's happened.
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Have you given up "capitalism"? If so how can everyone else do it too?
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Capitalism gave up me lol.
Nothing like being a virulent anti-capitalist under your own name online for a decade to sabotage all employment prospects and remain trapped in poverty.
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All you'd need to have done is to work on your marketing and show 0 actual commitment to any principle you've espoused.
If it works for Russell Brand...