this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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The soviet union wasn't exactly great environmental stewards either. Perhaps the problem is a technological gap between industrilization and sustainability.
ITT: "God I'm sick of getting stabbed in the spleen".
"You should try unlimited free blowjobs instead!"
"I don't know, the last seven buildings I went into with 'unlimited free blowjobs' signs also stabbed me in the spleen"
"OH, those weren't real unlimited free blowjobs. No real unlimited free blowjobs has ever existed. You need to watch more porn."
Maybe I'm too stupid but I don't get the analogy. 💀
Unlimited free blowjobs = communism
Watch porn = read theory
China also pollutes significantly more than India, even if the Chinese per person emission is lower than some other developed nations.
Plus, Capitalists invented the newer green power used by China and instead China invented bigger coal power plants.
India remains heavily underdeveloped domestically. And the cultural gap - most remarkably, India's enormous vegetarian community - plays a bigger role than it's economic model in curbing gross emissions.
It should also be noted that India has had and continues to have one of the largest active Communist Parties in history. In fact, the 34 years of the Left Front rule in West Bengal is the longest-serving democratically elected communist-led government in the world.
So you can't really use India as a pure capitalist counterexample, unless you only want to discuss the corners of the county under decisive BJP rule (itself a relatively new political turn for India).
Many developing nations like India, Vietnam and Ethiopia are going to leapfrog the fossil fuel detour and go straight to renewables which will also help.
https://youtu.be/qoNr6hjy7aE
fingers crossed
Idk if they're leapfrogging it so much as showing up late to a dry riverbed. There simply isn't enough petroleum left to do in India / the Pacific Rim or Africa in the 2020s what China, Europe, and the US went through in the 1980s. But I guess the US and Europe are helping out by retarding their technological progress long enough for these other countries to catch up and move ahead.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing!
I think that's a bit reductive. Firstly, I wouldn't describe China as non-capatalist. Secondly, China has a nuanced relationship with environmentalism and green energy as one would expect from a nation that large.
The problem is there are a lot of Tankies on the Fediverse who consider China to be one of the ONLY non-Capitalist nations, so what I stated needed to be said just to counteract any potential Tankie disinformation attempting to make China look good.
Fair enough, I think I was also premptivly reacting fediverse to tankies and maybe read your comment as more agressive than it was. Sorry about that.
China is the manufacturing hub of the entire world. Of course it's going to pollute significantly more than India, its energy consumption is 5 times of what India consumes.
And I don't get this insinuation that China invests in coal power. China invests the most into renewable energy than anyone else in the world, almost 40% of global renewable investments come from China. And last I checked almost half of the energy China produces comes from renewables.
And the reason China had use fossil fuels in the first place is because renewable tech didn't exist when they needed the energy. Why didn't it exist? Because capitalists refused to invest into green energy even though the oil companies did the research and knew that fossil fuels are a dead end (that research was done back in the 70s and Exxon decided to bury it instead of acting on it). We see in Africa that countries are skipping fossil fuels and are going straight to renewable because the tech exists, so it's reasonable assume the same would've happened in China had the tech existed.
If you want to shit on China, there are legitimate points to criticize. Renewable energy is not one of those points.
So all is forgiveable in the name of more industry? Including Chinese slave labour?
China produces a lot of cheap plastic shit and textiles nobody asked for, but they only recently became competitive in high tech after stealing from other nations like Taiwan and Korea.
Is one country supposed to bear the burden of blame because every other western country moved their manufacturing there? If the rest of the world didn't turn China into a manufacturing hub they wouldn't be polluting that much now would they?
Now that is something you can criticize.
China produces a lot of cheap plastic shit because there's a lot of international demand for it. The shit that ends up on Temu is the outcome of overproduction to meet the estimated demands of the foreign markets. If you want to blame anyone for China producing a lot of cheap shit, blame America who is their biggest importer of cheap shit.
And that's another thing you can criticize. As far as I know they've (allegedly) stolen DRAM technology and to that my answer is fuck the DRAM cartel. If stealing their tech is necessary to break their stranglehold on the memory production then I'm all for it. The reason we're currently in the middle of a memory crisis is specifically because the 3 biggest memory manufacturers somehow magically all end up with similar RAM prices to a point where one of them deliberately shut down one of its fabs because RAM prices were getting too cheap.
i'm amazed this whole post didn't get brigaded by ml's and actually has a sensible top response
it almost like there's no point being federated with them any more
ML and Today because last time I checked Today is still federated with Hexbear. But I haven't checked in a while.
Why you bring that up
Sort of a famous counter-example.
A seventy year long break from capitalist economic practices over half of Europe and most of Asia seems like it should have produced a noticeably different set of ecological outcomes.
But industrialization appears to take the same ecological toll from Beijing to Belgrade.
when will that 70 year long break happen
It already happened, in the early 90s, when Yeltsin rode a tank up to the Moscow Parliament and started shelling it.
The USSR latest from 1922 to 1991, give or take a few years depending on how you want to count it.
Dengism, in China, kicked off in earnest at about the same time (Tianamen Square was largely a Maoist reaction to capitalist land reforms).
both have no motives or actions towards anything else than the same pyramid scheme, albeit with different lingo
Both? We're taking about billions of people.
yes, both ussr and china, had and has billions of people under the global pyramid scheme
Because I believe ecological sustainability is achivable under any economic system!
Capitalism requires continuous and unlimited economic growth. Economic growth requires accelerated resource extraction. Capitalism is not ecologically sustainable in nature.
edit: replaced "by design" with "in nature"
Capitalism, like socialism, means many things to many different people. At it's core capitalism is simply a philosophy built around the idea of the free exchange of goods and services between individuals. I don't think most people would that infinite growth is an essential part of that equation as there are real examples of capitalistic economys that shrink every year.
Where are those capitalist "economies" that don't require growth? Are they decoupled, and not relying on the growth of the global economy? Does their pension system not explode if economic growth would come to a halt? If so, what makes them capitalist?
I think government pension is probably one the least capitalist ideas out there. There's no such thing as a pure capitalist society, just like how there's never been a true socialist society. Only ones that subscribe more to their respective ideas more than their peers. To me, what makes a society capitalist is a foundations belief in a free markets and the voluntary trade of goods and services, and a socialist society is one where the means of production are pushed towards collective ownership.
The underlying mechanism of government pensions in their current state requires there to be more people paying in than being paid out, so growth is needed.
yes, and pensions are not needed for capitalism to function
I don't know a lot of government pensions that pay out enough for the recipients to even stay afloat, they rely heavily on there being additional private pension funds (401k/BVG), which by themselves presuppose that the economy grows, it doesn't work otherwise. I guess you are right that we have different assumptions on what capitalism even is, you link it a lot to free trade but not to the fact that it is about investment and accumulation (letting the money 'work for itself'), which is kinda the core principle of it. Trade and money has existed before capitalism, exchanging commodities and services is not what makes a system capitalist in itself. I am also not necessarily arguing in favor of socialism, I don't know why you keep bringing that up. Economic systems are more complex than a dichotomy of capitalism/socialism. What I want to convey is that there can be no ecological sustainability withing the capitalist growth imperative. It can be your opinion that capitalism works without growth, but I'd like to see how that works and how we get there. If we can get there, I'd argue that such a system is no longer capitalist.
So you brought up a part of the current system with it failing?
Capitalisms faiilures on multiple cornerstones, in addition to ecology, are broadly documented. You're allowed to update a belief with knowledge
I think our ecological failures are often misattributed to economic philosophy. Collectivist societies have also caused irreparable ecological harm in the past, so the issue can't be capitalism exclusive.
It's not exclusive and no one said it was. Just that capitalism as we have it now has no room for ecological considerations.