#41
Kurdt
Post rating: +
let me talk to her
#42
Post rating: ~
http://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-13-kenyas-e-waste-soldiers-of-ill-fortune
#43
[account deactivated]
#44
Post rating: ~
tane
#45
Post rating: +
Capitalism is a perversion of nature because nature only imposes scarcity when certain material is scarce. It is in capitalism's nature to impose scarcity, whether material is scarce or not.
#46
Post rating: ~
capitalism can't be a perversion of nature, it arose naturally and is part of nature. there's no such possible thing.
#47
Post rating: ~
your romantic view of nature is hella gay.
#48
Post rating: ~
Explain how my view of nature is romantic. I stated that nature creates scarcity when there is lack of certain materials. How the hell is that romantic.

Unless you're just making shit up in your head.
#49
Post rating: ~
Also explain how capitalism occurs in nature. (No humans.)
#50
Post rating: ~
nature is not a thing that imposes scarcity. and like i said before all human things are natural, so separating them out leads to idealization like you are doing capitalism bad unnatural nature good, harmonious.
#51
Post rating: ~
I never said nature was good. That's like saying water is good. I said Capitalism was unnatural.

Nature by itself isn't very good. You can't get very many useful things out of it. You need humans to interact with it to make it productive.
#52
Post rating: ~
The Amazon rainforest didn't just grow out of nowhere u know.
#53
Post rating: ~
i'm confused about how something can be unnatural. if ant hills and bee hives are natural, then cities and capitalism are natural.
#54
Post rating: ~
You know when you throw cardboard in a recycling bin and it has all kinds of plastic tape over it that no one is ever going to peel off, what happens to that stuff?
#55
Post rating: ~
My understanding up capitalism is basically how power concentrates and focuses on a smaller and smaller group of individuals overtime until something gives. That's what I think of when I think of capitalism.

Nature (no humans) will have certain factors of overabundance and scarcity, and boom and bust but never grow as huge as human economies and delusion allow them to.

There have been societies that do interact in a net positive manner with nature but I wouldn't describe them as capitalist.
#56
Post rating: ~

NoFreeWill posted:

i'm confused about how something can be unnatural. if ant hills and bee hives are natural, then cities and capitalism are natural.


I'm confused about how you're confused. Walk a mile in my shoes before you judge, and if you still don't get me, at least you got my shoes.

#57
Post rating: ~
I believe that humans have the capability to erase all sources of scarcity.

I believe that nature, what humans are a part of, yet are capable of separating from themselves from has a lot to teach us. Not the nature of earth. The nature of the universe.

Life, in all it's forms, expresses the laws of the universe more intricately and obviously.
#58
Post rating: +
the whole "humans are part of nature so therefore everything humans do is natural" thing, i don't like it, because sure its technically correct but even if we stipulate to it, it would still be nice to be able to talk about the part of the world not shaped by human agency in an abstract way and we'd probably want a word to refer to it generally. so lets just skip steps 2-5 and use words like natural and artificial in the ways everybody understand them and just trust everyone to keep track of hte fact that human beings are animals that evolved from other animals
#59
Post rating: ~

thirdplace posted:

the whole "humans are part of nature so therefore everything humans do is natural" thing, i don't like it, because sure its technically correct but even if we stipulate to it, it would still be nice to be able to talk about the part of the world not shaped by human agency in an abstract way and we'd probably want a word to refer to it generally. so lets just skip steps 2-5 and use words like natural and artificial in the ways everybody understand them and just trust everyone to keep track of hte fact that human beings are animals that evolved from other animals


i feel like we could do with reminders a lot of the time

#60
Post rating: +

thirdplace posted:

the whole "humans are part of nature so therefore everything humans do is natural" thing, i don't like it, because sure its technically correct but even if we stipulate to it, it would still be nice to be able to talk about the part of the world not shaped by human agency in an abstract way and we'd probably want a word to refer to it generally. so lets just skip steps 2-5 and use words like natural and artificial in the ways everybody understand them and just trust everyone to keep track of hte fact that human beings are animals that evolved from other animals


and the whole class of Oxford linguistic philosophers cheered

#61
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

tsinava posted:

My understanding up capitalism is basically how power concentrates and focuses on a smaller and smaller group of individuals overtime until something gives. That's what I think of when I think of capitalism.

Nature (no humans) will have certain factors of overabundance and scarcity, and boom and bust but never grow as huge as human economies and delusion allow them to.

There have been societies that do interact in a net positive manner with nature but I wouldn't describe them as capitalist.

We generally prefer the Latin here, (no homo)

#62
Post rating: ~
We've had multiple Ice Ages though. Before humans existed. Those take for freakin' ever tho.
#63
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~
wondering what is the long-term climate outlook because of human activity in the current century. like in the next 50,000 years, are things just going to get warmer forever? was there a hotter, even less carbon-sequestered era of planetoid history? let me know surfnturf4breakfast@rhizzone.net
#64
[account deactivated]
#65
Post rating: ~

roseweird posted:

tsinava posted:

Capitalism is a perversion of nature because nature only imposes scarcity when certain material is scarce. It is in capitalism's nature to impose scarcity, whether material is scarce or not.

there are def organisms that artificially impose material scarcities on their environments in order to destroy competitors and dominate available resources


Oops I forgot about alleopathic trees. At least they feed birds and stuff. What life form did you have in mind.

#66
Post rating: ~
I still stand by my original point that our concepts of capitalism are a perversion of nature even though nature is a bunch of stuff that's constantly mutating and adapting.

Our idea that competition makes us stronger or better comes from a misunderstanding of nature.
#67
[account deactivated]
#68
Post rating: ~
.

Edited by wasted ()

#69
Post rating: ~

tsinava posted:

I still stand by my original point that our concepts of capitalism are a perversion of nature even though nature is a bunch of stuff that's constantly mutating and adapting.

Our idea that competition makes us stronger or better comes from a misunderstanding of nature.


for "nature" to be "perverted" you either need some sort of a priori "nature" that is somehow distinct from "the stuff that exists" or you need some kind of teleology for what nature "should" be doing and imo both of those things are dumb. what's wrong with "i think capitalism is real bad, and we can do better because it causes all kinds of unnecessary waste"?

#70
Post rating: ~
I agree with C_man, this isn't simply a pedantic point. To say there is nothing outside of nature is to say there is nothing outside of capitalism, and socialism only arrives from the contradictions within that system. Any attempt to create revolution before capitalism or outside it (agricultural communes, lifestyle anarchism, peasant rebellions, worker cooperatives, etc) always ends up subservient to the laws of capital. Only when capitalism has devoured everything before it and finally itself can revolution emerge as the next stage in history. The ideas in this thread that we can open a farm somewhere and not be subject to the accumulation of surplus value on a world scale derive from this confusion.

Famous Marx knowledge:

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

#71
meet me in st louis
Post rating: ~

NoFreeWill posted:

I dunno anyone have sources/opinions?



ill prob respond w/ something later today. until then

#72
Post rating: ~
I shouldn't say I agree with it necessarily, that kind of historicist Marxism has many problems when applied to reality, but I believe that's c_man's real point, and defining 'nature' as the entire material world that is immanent is an essential concept in dialectic materialism and not just an obnoxious semantic thing (though it can be that too). Dialectics begins the fight against post-modernism and empiricism by acknowledging the existence of an entire nature that encompasses reality outside of our perception but is also not identical to it and not fixed by it.
#73
penitent
Post rating: ~
capitalism isn't human & it isn't natural, it's cosmological with its source in the sun
#74
penitent
Post rating: +
please refer to my series of tweets about chthonic leninism, a desperate geological attempt to stabilise the earth's orbit, caught between solar reaction and the chilly anarchism of the stars
#75
Post rating: ~

tsinava posted:

Capitalism is a perversion of nature because nature only imposes scarcity when certain material is scarce. It is in capitalism's nature to impose scarcity, whether material is scarce or not.



and

#76
Post rating: ~

Doug posted:

tsinava posted:
Capitalism is a perversion of nature because nature only imposes scarcity when certain material is scarce. It is in capitalism's nature to impose scarcity, whether material is scarce or not.


and


#77
Post rating: +

babyhueypnewton posted:

acknowledging the existence of an entire nature that encompasses reality outside of our perception but is also not identical to it and not fixed by it.


this is, imo, why latour is garbage and why people like karen barad are at least a step in a direction that makes sense. googleing "latour homeopathy" is great for postmodern ninnys who congratulate themselves on going to homeopaths and wondering why they use "western medicine" at all while doing their damnedest to avoid even considering that it could work better than something else. the idea that we have to get rid of everything that makes up capitalism and/or is subsumed by modern ideology and once we do that we'll be fine is extremely dumb imo because any other thing could just as easily take its place.

this is also the basic reason why i got into an argument about rights with swampman i guess. even if imperialists are using rights-based arguments, that has much less to do with some sort of "inherent essence" of such positions and much more to do with the fact that it was a type of argument that was around at the time. at the same time, a socialist/ecologically sound government wouldn't benefit from simply throwing away things that were produced under capitalism but would certainly have to work (hard!) to re-purpose the existing ideological or technical mechanisms that exist to produce a "better" living situation. lmao long post again

#78
Post rating: ~
it is our duty to emancipate animals from nature by extracting them from their natural habitat
#79
[account deactivated]
#80
Post rating: +
You don't hate capitalism enough imo.