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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The rules aren’t intended to limit negative effects, for the most part. Instead, as you know, the rules are focused on transactions and contracts and making sure property rights are prioritized over all other rights. My objection was to your characterization of the system as ‘capitalism without rules’, and that somehow ‘Capitalism is meant to have rules to make it fair and prevent anarchy’. Meant by whom? Certainly not by the neoliberal ideologists. Certainly not by the oligarchs ruining the planet. The era of ‘fair capitalism’, what has been labeled the ‘fordist era’, the New Deal era in the USA and the social democratic era of the european democracies, that is now long past.

    However, even under social democratic reform, capitalism requires perpetual growth, it is a system of accumulation that rewards growth and growth alone. A system that is sustainable, that is not dependent on growth, that allows human civilization to exist in harmony with its environment, such a system would not be capitalism.






  • The current wave of enshittification is driven also by the fact that much of the current system is ‘built out’. How do you grow profits when you can’t expand your consumers? You enshittify. It helps if you are an effective monopoly, but isn’t required. If the consumers aren’t growing all the competing producers are highly motivated to enshittify together, and they do. Of course it also helps if the same huge investment funds are major stakeholders in the producers.