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by TulliusCicero 1409 days ago
> I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism’s Extremes

International trade is not the same thing as capitalism. International trade existed before capitalism, and if capitalism disappeared tomorrow, short of everyone simultaneously adopting anarcho-primitivism, we would still have trade between nations.
2 comments
incompatible 1408 days ago
I think ideally we'd have shared information (open source hardware designs) and distributed manufacturing. This would be a bit more robust, and avoid shipping, while making repair and recycling a lot easier.
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TulliusCicero 1408 days ago
I think that would mitigate some problems, but you'd still have many situations where specialization + transportation is cheaper (and even less energy intensive) than full decentralization.

And in any case, that's mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism is far from the only economic system where people keep secrets.

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zzzeek 1408 days ago
yes this article seemed very obsessed with capitalism more than the movie itself. does the theory of marxism hold that there would be no more container ships, no products shared between nations, no people whose job it is to drive ships, trains and trucks anymore? that's all specific to capitalism? really? like if I wanted a pedometer, someone down the street would be making them ? or we just have no gadgets at all?
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robswc 1408 days ago
>like if I wanted a pedometer, someone down the street would be making them ?

If I wanted to strawman marxists, yes; that is what they believe ;)

To be more real, eh... if you look at how soviets did their planning they really did attempt to have everything "within 15 minutes." While that probably doesn't apply to something as specific as a pedometer... they do tend to extend that philosophy as far as it will go... reasonably or not.

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TulliusCicero 1408 days ago
Do you have a source that talks about Soviets avoiding centralization/specialization?
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robswc 1408 days ago
Well, I wouldn't say specialization was "avoided" more so it was just incredibly difficult due to it being a planned economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ministers_of_the_So...

This may provide some insight. I don't want to claim to be a USSR historian, I've just done some light research on another topic that crossed paths and I fell down a well for awhile lol.

The problem was that they were so centralized, it made innovation incredibly difficult. Simply put, if there were problems, even if people had solutions, it was damn near impossible to get anything implemented.

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