this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024

184 points (80.3% liked)

Showerthoughts

32888 readers

1853 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

184

We live in a post information scarcity society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

185 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.

Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem is that while we have infinite information we do not have infinite energy/resources yet. The shift when we get it to remove power from the structures will be larger but reminiscent of the piracy/copyright battles lately

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We absolutely have enough to shower every single person in lavishness. Its just not distributed. We arent post resource, but we are post scarcity.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

we do not have infinite energy/resources yet.

And we never will. At least not in the hands of the general public.

It's FAR to dangerous.

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'd be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn't even define capitalism. I count myself among them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I think the simplest way to put it is "an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't see the problem in that

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem comes in what you define as "capital". Food and housing are the biggest issues for the modern world but there still exists the problem of PEOPLE being considered capital that can be owned by other people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You should be able to own a house. Everyone should be able to own a house. Food of course needs to be owned to be consumed.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (15 replies)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.

load more comments (2 replies)

[+] [email protected] -25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Capitalism: The best system for harnessing the greed inherent in humans for the benefit of others. Capitalism produces the most wealth, and it's spread more evenly, than any other system.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not sure how anyone can sanely argue that Capitalist wealth is spread more evenly than any other system when disparity is rising everywhere it's practiced, even if at slower rates in Social Democracies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In response to the food crisis, communities rallied together, giving rise to social movements and calls for change, as a sense of solidarity developed among the people. These interconnected issues eroded public trust in the government’s ability to fulfill the basic needs of its citizens. It, in turn, fueled public dissatisfaction and ultimately led to widespread calls for political and economic reforms. The downfall of communism in Eastern Europe was, therefore, not solely a consequence of political factors but also deeply rooted in the economic challenges and fundamental survival concerns faced by the population.

https://calxylian.com/food-scarcity-and-the-fall-of-communism-in-eastern-europe/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nobody brought up the USSR, and your linked comment has several issues, even as someone who is a critic of the USSR and does not wish to rebuild the USSR:

None of that fundamentally addresses the fact that Russia had higher rates of disparity both under the Tsarist Regime and under the Russian Federation than under the USSR: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-and-property-russia-1905-2016
The article you linked goes largely without citations, and both articles cited at the bottom of the article state that the USSR improved food production from an initial state of instability through investment in industrialization: "The paper summarises the East European experience with socialist agriculture and notes that while production often failed to meet plan targets (thereby giving the impression of a sector in crisis), there was steady growth based on substantial investments in buildings, machinery, fertilisers and irrigation systems which provided food for the population at affordable prices."
The Marxist-Leninist USSR is absolutely NOT the only form of non-Capitalist economy. Market Socialism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Democratic Socialism, and more all exist and can similarly solve the issues of inequality.

What is the point of your comment?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not to disagree, but what examples are there of a different system being practiced which have a more even distribution of wealth?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Numerous different systems. If you want to look at modern, developed economies, Worker Co-operatives are smaller, Socialist entities that have far more equitable distribution, happier workers, and more stability. If you want a more Libertarian approach, EZLN doesn't seem to have very high disparity, a bulk of the wealth is owned by the Workers, though they reject terms like Socialism. At the risk of being called a tankie (I'm not, I am incredibly critical of more centralized Socialist projects), even the USSR had far lower disparity during it's time than Tsarist Russia or the current Capitalist Russian Federation.

The answer is for Workers to share the Means of Production in a democratic fashion, as opposed to having petite dictators focused on accumulating Capital.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

third person checking in here

load more comments