We just haven’t as a species made the best decisions, barreling towards making the planet inhospitable through our actions as we speak. It’s not personal.
I’m sure you have an explanation why it doesn’t work “at scale”, unlike literally every other basic asshole I’ve heard say that who had absolutely no way to back it up. They just say the word “scale” and that’s enough. I’m sure your explanation would fly right over my stupid dumb moron head.
Do you mean when I said that it’d be interesting to see the system at scale? I didn’t say it wouldn’t work, I said it’d be interesting to see because one workplace is one thing but a whole society or a country running on a voluntary system would be something different and pose new challenges. And I don’t think we’ve really seen such societies in modern times, so would be something new.
Okay, I’m sorry, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today apparently and also left my reading comprehension behind. I’ll try again to answer in good faith. I appreciate you not hitting back in the same way, even though you might’ve been justified in doing so. Sorry this is a long comment, I don’t quite have the energy to edit it down.
My issue with saying people are morons is that we as a group haven’t been the ones making the decisions that are destroying the planet. It’s the way our society is designed to let a handful of dominators make the decisions instead of us. It’s not that we can’t be allowed to run our own shit, it’s that we aren’t allowed to. The solution to this is horizontal power structures, that are structured to prevent hierarchies from developing. I don’t think representatives, no matter how well-run the elections are, can ever do this job properly.
And the “at scale” thing set me off because I keep hearing people talk about “at scale” literally as a way of dismissing any kind of horizontalist organising. Two good examples of societies that operate this way, on the scale of moderate-sized countries (ie: millions of people), are the EZLN in Mexico and Rojava in Syria. They are both horizontally-organised power structures that have weathered enormous abuse from state actors and still flourished. A lot of people thought Rojava would be gone by now after being left to the wolves by the US and being steadily attacked by Turkish and Syrian forces, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting in fighting ISIS at the same time.
I know less about the EZLN, but they have been consistently attacked and pressured by the Mexican government. Neither region is officially recognised by international organisations.
As for the productivity thing, well, we already create far more than we need and destroy something like half of everything. I think we could stand to reduce productivity in general, especially if we got rid of things like planned obsolescence, which forces us to keep producing and consuming and wasting, and it robs us of being able to find good quality products in general. Plus without globalisation of production we could for instance produce clothes domestically rather than ship them internationally, and then a huge amount of carbon-producing global shipping would be eliminated. Apply that logic across all the industries - obviously excluding anything that genuinely cannot be produced locally, which is a vanishingly small number of low-volume and nonessential items - and a huge carbon source would just be removed.
The only reason we get things like that produced overseas is because the labour is cheaper, which is a situation that was engineered by capitalist imperialism and maintained through brutal neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which are themselves backed by the threat of military action. Oh yeah, another thing that has a massive carbon footprint is war, so getting rid of the structures that cause forever wars is also a really good idea.
We just haven’t as a species made the best decisions, barreling towards making the planet inhospitable through our actions as we speak. It’s not personal.
Do you mean when I said that it’d be interesting to see the system at scale? I didn’t say it wouldn’t work, I said it’d be interesting to see because one workplace is one thing but a whole society or a country running on a voluntary system would be something different and pose new challenges. And I don’t think we’ve really seen such societies in modern times, so would be something new.
Okay, I’m sorry, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today apparently and also left my reading comprehension behind. I’ll try again to answer in good faith. I appreciate you not hitting back in the same way, even though you might’ve been justified in doing so. Sorry this is a long comment, I don’t quite have the energy to edit it down.
My issue with saying people are morons is that we as a group haven’t been the ones making the decisions that are destroying the planet. It’s the way our society is designed to let a handful of dominators make the decisions instead of us. It’s not that we can’t be allowed to run our own shit, it’s that we aren’t allowed to. The solution to this is horizontal power structures, that are structured to prevent hierarchies from developing. I don’t think representatives, no matter how well-run the elections are, can ever do this job properly.
And the “at scale” thing set me off because I keep hearing people talk about “at scale” literally as a way of dismissing any kind of horizontalist organising. Two good examples of societies that operate this way, on the scale of moderate-sized countries (ie: millions of people), are the EZLN in Mexico and Rojava in Syria. They are both horizontally-organised power structures that have weathered enormous abuse from state actors and still flourished. A lot of people thought Rojava would be gone by now after being left to the wolves by the US and being steadily attacked by Turkish and Syrian forces, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting in fighting ISIS at the same time.
I know less about the EZLN, but they have been consistently attacked and pressured by the Mexican government. Neither region is officially recognised by international organisations.
As for the productivity thing, well, we already create far more than we need and destroy something like half of everything. I think we could stand to reduce productivity in general, especially if we got rid of things like planned obsolescence, which forces us to keep producing and consuming and wasting, and it robs us of being able to find good quality products in general. Plus without globalisation of production we could for instance produce clothes domestically rather than ship them internationally, and then a huge amount of carbon-producing global shipping would be eliminated. Apply that logic across all the industries - obviously excluding anything that genuinely cannot be produced locally, which is a vanishingly small number of low-volume and nonessential items - and a huge carbon source would just be removed.
The only reason we get things like that produced overseas is because the labour is cheaper, which is a situation that was engineered by capitalist imperialism and maintained through brutal neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which are themselves backed by the threat of military action. Oh yeah, another thing that has a massive carbon footprint is war, so getting rid of the structures that cause forever wars is also a really good idea.