[ryuhhnn]

Not sure why this was downvoted, it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Even ideas as abstract as private property comes into play here, private owners are incentivised to make the most of their investments, and when one of the many main vehicles for wealth is land ownership, one is driven to find ways to maximise the use of that investment which in this case would be drilling oil which in turn gets further refined into plastics (among gasoline, etc.).

If we weren’t forced to live under a system that prioritises private ownership and the maximisation of profits, can we honestly say that we would independently come to the conclusion that our continued use of fossil fuels and their derivatives is okay and should continue?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Yes? A world with no private ownership and no maximization of profits is still going to find that the functional properties of plastics make one of them the best material for a wide variety of use cases. If you need something lightweight, sturdy, and either transparent or easily moldable, there's really no other option.

[ryuhhnn]

Except the decades of materials science research demonstrates that even independently of those economic incentives, scientists understand that although plastics are incredibly valuable in a variety of applications, they’re not perfect (and at worst, actively harmful). This research is being done not because scientists would be sad to think of a world without plastics that provide land owning oil barons their precious return on investment, they’re researching it because science and human progress are what drive us forward. Thus, even in our hypothetical, it’s unclear that plastics (and their ubiquity even in applications where it doesn’t make sense) would win out.

[nearlyepic]

You're missing the point - it's not whether plastic is the best material for a use case, it's about the cost/benefit analysis of using it. Think asbestos - really good at not catching fire, with the slight side effect of royally messing up your lungs.

Plastic is great for all the reasons you describe, but it's really hell on the environment. The thing that offsets that side effect is its cheapness, and that's majorly a function of capitalism/private land ownership/the general way the world is organized right now.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think it's true that plastic is cheap as a function of capitalism, private land ownership, or the general way the world is organized right now. It's cheap because it can be produced quickly and at scale from widely available raw materials. Abolishing capitalism wouldn't change the physics and engineering of natural gas wells, nor of the lumber mills and mining required to make paper and wood.

You mention asbestos, but I'm pretty confident we would not have banned asbestos if we didn't have other comparably effective building insulation materials. (Indeed, it's still used in many poorer countries where people are unable to afford the alternatives.)

[ryuhhnn]

> Abolishing capitalism wouldn't change the physics and engineering of natural gas wells, nor of the lumber mills and mining required to make paper and wood.

Of course it wouldn’t, I don’t think anybody would believe this. Abolishing capitalism would change the incentive for collecting and utilising those natural resources, though. It’s a lot easier to justify the made up idea of private property when you’re sitting on a pile of rocks that you believe will make you a lot of money than it is to justify sitting on a pile of rocks that a few people decided might be processed into something that’s a net positive to all of society. I have to wonder if plastics would be as ubiquitous as they are today if we didn’t have a very strong social and economic incentive to drill for its raw materials.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't see why abolishing capitalism would weaken the social and economic incentives to drill for natural gas either. Would a post-capitalist society no longer require electricity or heating?

[ryuhhnn]

Yes they would require those things, but there would no longer be an incentive to use energy sources that have the marginal benefit of making a few people very rich with the incredible downside of killing our planet.

[yesco]

Exactly! The only solution is bringing back serfdom and hoping the party appointed manor lord does a better job than what us greedy peons could ever hope to accomplish on our own.

[ryuhhnn]

Nobody here brought up serfdom except you and your snarky comment doesn’t provide anything of value or broaden the analysis here. The absence of capitalism doesn’t beget serfdom, it doesn’t even beget socialism or communism, it begets the absence of capitalism. Think bigger, friend.

[yesco]

Oh so what do you consider to be present in the absense of capitalism if not what came before it?

[ryuhhnn]

This is an impossible question to answer, nobody can predict the future. It’s not always a given that we would simply regress to what came before it, that’s the point. You don’t have the ability to predict the future either.

[yesco]

Unless you are suggesting total anarchy, usually criticism of one system would imply you desire some kind of alternative to replace it, or perhaps even some kind of amendment to the current system. It sounds like you don't have one?

But in that case, what now confuses me is your critique on private ownership. State ownership would be the alternative in this case, no?

But under the old systems, the ones that naturally manifested across the world for millennia, the natural flow is that elites in control of the state kick down the ladder and form tiered societies that limit social mobility. Through this they secure their position for generations. To do away with private ownership is to remove the checks that have been put into place to limit the power of elites who would otherwise have exclusive control.

While there have been many historical attempts to prevent this from happening, only the more recent political philosophies prescribed by liberal democracies in the past ~200 years have been effective in, even if only partially, mitigating this core issue of resource consolidation by elites. By focusing on meritocracy to the extreme (relative to before), liberal democracy and "capitalism" make power more fluid, it makes the ladder kicking more challenging (but not impossible). Yet these checks alone have given way to the explosive increase in innovation and quality of life we all now benefit from today.

Can we do better? Absolutely, especially as innovation opens doors to new ideas and capabilities.

But don't get confused by the semantics and abstractions masking the core of it all: Power. If your solution is to just re-centralize power to the group of elites in charge, even if they are elected, then regression is destiny.