The problem is not simply that capitalism produces too much, but that it produces the wrong stuff: SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence instead of public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare. It overuses resources and still fails to meet even basic needs.
In this respect it is a wildly inefficient system. This is the sort of irrationality you get when production is organized around the interests of corporate profit and elite accumulation, rather than around human well-being and ecology.
The antidote to this madness is economic democracy. Right now decisions about what to produce and how to use resources are made mostly by the 1%. So, democratize production. Under democratic conditions people choose to focus production more around social and ecological goals.
@jasonhickel Hold on a moment. You seem to be implying that the capital owning classes are making arbitrary decisions about what to produce in some sort of vacuum. They are not. 100% of the goods and services produced are to fill demand, whether real or perceived, and the fact is that the majority of comsumer goods are bought by people who are middle and lower class. All of us willingly spend our money, our capital, on an astonishing array of things that are, frankly, purely luxuries. It would be tedious to point to the upteen billions of dollars spent by people in developed nations on so many things that are completely unnecessary (just alcohol and cigarettes alone is astonishing and those are literal poisons!) And if you think that all that spending is just from the "upper class" then perhaps you should look into those stats a bit more. People could chose to spend their extra resources on helping their fellow men, and some do, but most would rather go shopping (or better yet shop on amazon!). The reason Musk and Bezos have billions while unicef struggles is not some conspiracy, its because we all vote with our dollars and turns out, we voted for them.
@Clementulus @jasonhickel people don't spend in a vacuum though. We have advertising, sponsorship, product placement, control of media and narratives. We are seeped in "capitalism is right" bs from the moment we are read our first fairy story.
@DrAli @jasonhickel True we are learning machines and we learn from our environment but does that not just reinforce my point? We already do have democratic control over our economy and the current aggregate of individuals want what we have; they might be making their choices with a large degree of ignorance and misinformation but they are still the ones making the choices. The way I see it there are two possible solutions: full authoritarianism, where we just decide to put all the resources into the hands of a few "moral individuals" and hope that they distribute them equitably (because that has worked out so well in the past). Or we work on educating the people who are spending money (all of us). The main thing IMO would be to simply help people understand that consumption does not equal happiness. Once the majority realize that a whole bunch of these useless companies will shrivel up overnight.
The status quo, from the vantage point of having the majority of the resources and power, *always* have the advantage.
It is never a case of "simply" anything. I wish it were.
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@DrAli @jasonhickel Simple does not mean easy. And it is not the advertisements and media that create these desires in people, they only cater to them. The desire for more is an expression of our survival instinct and is inherent to everyone. The abundance of media that to cater to this is not motivated by the companies' wanting to change the attitude of their clients to be more comsumeristic, but rather that they know how much people are already that way and they have no expectation that people will change their nature. So far, they are right for the most part. But we can change, there are plenty of people who are examples of it. That's what we nees to keep reminding people, that changing themselves, while difficult, is dependent on their own actions, and it matters not how many millions of dollars are spend by large companies on ads and other media. That is the empowering message. Telling people that they got no hope until governments or corporations start to behave diffirently is a good way to convince them to keep doing what they are doing, since change is hopeless; and the status quo is preserved.
@Clementulus @jasonhickel
"simply help people understand that consumption does not equal happiness"
that.... is not how capitalism works. we already have vast swathes of media (from children's books to the news, and of course plain advertising) set up to promote capitalism, you will be fighting that from a position of relative weakness in that you will not have the resources to compete with that dominant narrative.
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