Microblog Memes

Is there any evidence socialism can actually work at scale? What if capitalism is the best we got?

Where did this meme of "capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it's impossible and bad" come from? Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.

I have never really understood this meme at all, it just seems like a cynical nothing-burger cry. No substance.

Capitalism isn't really based on theoretically infinite growth. Maybe the idea is that monopoly is assumed, in capitalist ideology, to not exist, in the same way that people talk with ancaps, and they (ancaps) wish away monopolization with dogmatism to an unenforceable liberal brainrot NAP? I don't think any serious capitalist ideology discards monopoly. Not any worth engaging with, anyways. Oil barons know that the resource they peddle is finite, and everyone generally knows that every resource is theoretically a finite thing, and so is every market, and thus, all markets in sum. That's like, your basic supply and demand curve. It doesn't just go up and down linearly like the ones they use to explain to brainlets, actual supply and demand curves look fucked up because the market is weird, and they all totally plateau at either extreme end. If you charge a billion dollars for a single orange, you maybe will only get a buyer if you name the orange "X" and the buyer is [redacted]. Maybe the idea is that if you market a product enough, even if it's bullshit, then you could just charge a gazillion dollars for it and have it be over the natural or necessary amount, and I'd agree with that being capitalism but I don't really think that's like. limitless growth, that's just marketing, that's just bullshit.

Capitalists often use this assumed finity to price gouge, maximize profit, that's why you dump oranges in the desert to keep up the prices of oranges or whatever. Maybe that's like, oh, they're assuming the oranges to be infinite, but that's because oranges are recyclable. You can grow more oranges, and if we scaled back orange production massively, making it more efficient, we'd still have enough oranges for everyone (Degrowth, I guess? It can be even more efficient if you grow local flora instead of oranges but ech). Maybe you can't have infinite oranges if some other sector of the economy is dumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but for like, 10,000 years of human history, you can grow more oranges, and you can grow more oranges until the sun expands and burns the earth in like 2 billion years.

If I read this meme in a different way, the fucked up thing about this meme is that it's not real. We're not like, at the end of civilization just by some natural factor of luck, or something, or you know, suddenly all the human creativity has petered out. That would almost be better, in a way. The human creativity is actively being suppressed, underfunded, bought out and scraped for parts, because it's easier to sell people actual bullshit year over year, in a cartel that you basically control all of, than introduce something new.

At my least graceful reading of this post, it kind of almost becomes malthusian, or something. Limitless growth! Grow the market limitlessly! Of course that means we must have a limitless population! And if someone's getting mad at that fake bullshit, then what they probably really believe is that there will be/there is too many people. But then that's all instance number 700 of getting mad at a spook.

But it's also like, how are you tracking growth? Cause if growth is just entropy, I think it probably is limitless.