Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by makomk 849 days ago
Pretty much every article lamenting the seeming inevitability of capitalism and the lack of coherent alternatives is going to misdiagnose the problem and have no concrete solutions, because the fundamental problem is that the problems people care about are not simply consequences of capitalism and cannot be eliminated just by getting rid of it.

For example, no amount of monkeying with the economic system will make it possible to fight global warming simply by cutting off fossil fuel supplies and destroying fossil fuel company profits without huge impacts on the demand side that affect ordinary people - that'd require consuming fuel that was never produced. This effect on ordinary voters would make it horrendously unattractive to politicans even if they didn't have to care what corporations thought at all. Similarly, here in the UK there's huge public anger over sewage in our rivers and seas but no amount of nationalisation can change the fact that rebuilding the sewage system not to do that would take huge amounts of resources from other things that people care about and cause lots of unpopular disruption from the work required.

Because the things that people care about and want fixed aren't actually caused by capitalism, the most politically effective anti-capitalist ideas are populist lies that promise false solutions to those problems which cannot actually work. This also means that any leader or would-be leader with any sense isn't willing to go along with those ideas because they're creating a whip for their own back when they fail to live up to that. Any concrete, achievable anti-capitalism also has to fall so short of the populist version to be entirely unattractive.