One thing I’ve come across in researching for my book that fascinates me: for anthropologists and archaeologists - the benchmark for the birth of “civilization” is not the size of the villages - it’s the appearance of public architecture and emergence of social classes. At some point a regional group makes the jump from a clump of “egalitarian” villages, where everyone has more or less the same status - to stratified social roles - as exemplified by “elite” vs. “commoner” burials.
That’s their definition of civilization. It’s only sprang up in relative isolation 6 times - Peru, Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley, China, Sumeria and Egypt.
I wonder if elitism is endemic to civilization, and always will be. Like the only egalitarian solution involves smallish villages with way less than the current population of earth, and I guess not many technological distractions? Like forget about movies, iphones, etc. But I’m completely convinced we’d be happier w/o those things as long as our neighbors didn’t have them.
These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package , provided the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, and greater property ownership.
For whatever reason, today’s Wikipedia omits slavery… although I guess that’s included under “greater property ownership”. This just didn’t “just happen”, and things getting larger is a consequence, not a cause. The cause was the ability to store (and hoard) food.
As for your musings: violent suppression of woman is a constant both before and after the Neolithic Revolution. There’s a clear history in the bones. So men beating woman is much more a part of “human nature” (100000+ years), than the hierarchies that arose with the Neolithic Revolution (7000 to 10000 years).
So… if we go to a no wife beating society we’re going to have to say goodbye to our cell phones too? That doesn’t make any sense. Slavery was a constant from day #1 of the Neolithic revolution… what are we missing out on when that was largely eliminated.
Coupled with the need. Regular agriculture predated civilization by about 5000 years iirc. It was in some more marginal areas that civilisations got started.
“Against the Grain” by James C. Scott is very good imo and about the origin of agriculture and civilisation.
Wheat is for statists. Potatoes are for horizontals. (See also “The Art of Not Being Governed” by the same author)
Other than the patriarchy, hierarchy was pretty much worthless before the Neolithic Revolution. It’s easier to hunt & gather yourself than to enslave someone to hunt & gather for you.
Life expectance declined, height declined, evidence of disease increased etc/etc as a result of the Neolithic Resolution. Slaves are disposable. It took like 1000 years to get back to where things were at.
Just because cotton was grown by slaves for generations, doesn’t mean it can’t also be grown by horizontals. Hierarchy is never necessary and always pernicious. How folks are organized != what they do, or can do.
Inertia is what they call what the kind of thing that the spinning of large turbines in conventional power plants supplies for the grid stability and one of the things that renewables lack. Tesla has built the biggest lithium-ion battery pack in the world, it has recently been completed and it will supply 50% of the inertia in South Australia.
And you’re assuming we could get to some perfect utopia on blind faith. If we win elections and craft good policies, it can be regulated in a sustainable manner.
Well, if you are just chatting about your own internal mental states, and sometimes you experience an “idealism” feeling, and sometimes you not so much, that’s all good.
LOL no. That was @ Chris V saying that crap, not me. Talk to him about that nonsense.
But, what I assume, or not, is completely irrelevant. Once again, IDK what I can say to get youz guyz off of this “both sides” fixation. What we know, the premise to you, not “my” premise as I didn’t make it up, is that capitalism isn’t sustainable. That’s a stand alone Q.
I’ll try again… let’s say some fool says they can flap their arms and fly to the moon. Some dude calls him on it. That dude doesn’t need to specify some alternate means of transportation to the moon. IT’S THE SAME DAMN THING.
That’s a premise too, not “your” premise because you didn’t make it up.
Do you care to defend it? Or are you just expecting everyone else to take it on faith?
I didn’t make this shit up, and everyone else except the liberals are saying the same exact thing. This has nothing to do with personalities on a tiny website of ex-poker players. WTF are you even thinking?
"Is capitalism sustainable?" is a stand alone Q. We haven’t even began to discuss the truth value of this Q, one way or another, ITT. We don’t seem to be able to even get that chat started.
Instead we gotta hear about ACism & utopias & other just plain gibberish, and “where’s the proposals”, and trolling like you just did, and of course “both sides”, and etc/etc/etc.
No we don’t know, that’s why it’s a premise and a question. If it were known it would be a fact. All we agree on about this is that runaway unregulated capitalism is not sustainable.
What I do know is that if we all flap our wings and try to drive from California to France in a car, I’m going to leap from a moving vehicle to stop hearing your bad analogies.
I’ve already defended it. You don’t have the best arguments here so you repeat the same ones, mischaracterize other positions, and try to conflate the whole argument with absurd analogies.
Forget climate change for a second. Is capitalism sustainable as an economic system?
Yes, but it must be separated from political power (campaign finance reform), forced to pay living wages (higher minimum wage), and forced to pay for a reasonable safety net (single payer).
That makes it sustainable. Of course that’s a mixed economy, not pure capitalism. But we already don’t have pure capitalism. We may soon with this SCOTUS, though.
Now circle back to climate change. If we’ve separated capital from having outsized political power we can regulate to protect the environment and prevent/reverse climate change.
Whether we can do all of that in time is an open question. I have serious doubts. But I think we can do it way faster than we can do anything else to address the problem, so it’s our best shot.
Regulating capitalism to the point of sustainability would almost certainly create a system that could no longer be accurately described as capitalism. There are also lots of very intelligent economists and related thinkers who speculate about and at times have even predicted the emergence of a post-capitalist economy. This isn’t far fringe stuff.
I’ve make exactly one “argument”, so to speak, ITT. That was six days ago. So far it’s gotten -zero- clicks ( this feature BTW). So one thing I most certainly haven’t done has been repeating myself.
Can a healthy environment for all social groups be delivered through capitalism via market mechanisms? Or is it the capitalist system, itself, that has been at the root of the environmental and social crises we now face? …
there is an apparent propensity for capitalist processes to exacerbate, rather than reduce, environmental problems and inequities though the pursuit of relentless economic growth and profit accumulation. Therefore, we should perhaps let go of efforts to resolve environmental injustice within the constraints of capitalism…
Zero clicks, but a solid week of ACism, utopias, and “both siding” everything in sight. Seems par for the course.
You linked to someone’s academic article without summarizing it, explaining your views that were drawn from it, etc. So I’m not surprised it got zero clicks.
It’s been running since 2017, they increased the capacity recently. It was built after a state-wide blackout earlier that year when an interconnector from Victoria failed. At the time the Murdoch press blamed South Australia’s pursuit of renewable energy. SA is now at 50% renewable electricity and targeting 100% before the end of the decade. (The leading Australian state is Tasmania at 95% renewable thanks to hydroelectric capacity and a small population).
None of this is going to matter if we keep digging up coal and selling it to China.
