this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
50 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
23099 readers
203 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Modern capitalism exists in a world where the soviet union and the socialist challenge existed. That forced them to devise new and improved methods of suppressing worker movements.
A big difference is the existence of world-historic economic distortions, namely the existence of a world scale chronic exporter (China) and world scale chronic importers (USA), where the capitalist powers have become massively dependant on (and technologically inferior to) a socialist power.
The third difference is that the trends that marx saw appear in the latter half of his life such as joint-stock companies, monopolies, vertical integration and the like have now become the utter norm. Although capitalism had become highly monopolised even as far back as lenin's time.
Capitalism had literally run into its thermodynamic limits. It is a system fueled by fossil fuels and the literal engines of capitalism are literally overheating and running out of fuel. We aren't fully there yet, but we will be sooner rather than latter.
If aliens looked at our planet, the only meaningful thing they can say our civilization produces is more and more CO2 in the atmosphere and more and more farmland for pigs and cows. It looks like total nonsense at a birds eye view
they'd assume it's a messed-up low tech terraforming project to heat up the atmosphere utilizing big farting land mammals, covering large amounts of land in sunlight-absorbing black paste, and literally just setting a bunch of shit on fire
we are paving the way for our descendants, the people of plastic, which will have transcended organic life
Thanks for reminding me to finish Fossil Capital! I gotta get back into reading