Embed Notice

@jhavok @vidar @futurebird

I said better, not great. :-)

Marx’s various criticisms of capitalism had factual errors, such as his much-repeated claim that capitalism requires endless growth.

This isn’t a minor mistake, it’s used to justify his theory of history. If capitalism literally requires the impossible, then it’s obviously doomed.

Since at least the days of Marx, communists have been insisting that communism is inevitable and we shouldn’t even try to avoid it. This triumphalism reeks of the Borg’s “You Will Be Assimilated, Resistance Is Futile” intimidation technique.

And yet, each time it’s tried, it fails. It fails hard. Maybe we should take a lesson from this.

One of the stranger strawman arguments applied to me elsewhere in this thread is that I’m denying that capitalism can be replaced.

As I said, we can imagine post-capitalist economies driven by technological innovations we currently lack, such as a post-scarcity world where labor and wealth are disconnected. If anything, ChatGPT has forced us to think about this.

But curiosity about such possibilities is not the same thing as a belief in their inevitability, or even their goodness. I can think of at least two SF stories describing post-scarcity dystopias, for example.