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What do you guys think of the reddit alternatives?
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I think you're confusing the profit motive with development. Accumulation of capital is what drives endless expansion and overconsumption. Socialism is necessary to stop that cycle, as rather than profit, suiting the needs of humanity becomes the goal.
You say that shifting from profit to human need stops the cycle of endless expansion, but I think you are underestimating how elastic "human needs" actually are. Under an industrial socialist system, if the state decides that everyone needs an electric car, a modern apartment, and global supply chains for fresh produce year-round, the expansion continues. The motive changes, but the physical extraction stays the same.
To build all that green infrastructure to meet those needs, you still have to mine lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals on a massive scale. Those mines still destroy ecosystems and pollute water, whether the workers or capitalists own them. Profit does not physically dig the holes in the earth. Machines and labor do that. Changing the reason we dig the hole does not stop the hole from destroying the local environment.
The core issue is that you are replacing the profit motive with a productivist motive. You are assuming that as long as we are producing for need instead of profit, we can keep expanding production indefinitely. But the planet has hard physical limits. A truly socialist system has to recognize those limits and intentionally restrict what we consume, not just change who is doing the consuming. If your version of socialism just promises more stuff for everyone, you are still running an infinite growth engine on a finite planet.
Changing from the profit motive to a planned economy dramatically changes how and why human development is steered. Socialism of course will advance production, but it ends consumerism, and having humans over capital means we can decide to have a more harmonious impact on the environment. Profit makes this pretty much impossible, as capital is a control system for accumulation.
I agree that removing the profit motive changes how the economy is steered, but you are assuming the new drivers will automatically choose harmony. You say socialism will advance production while ending consumerism, but those two things contradict each other. If you are advancing production, you have to consume the output or use it to expand further. Otherwise you are just creating massive waste.
The bigger issue is that you keep treating harmony as a decision we can just make once capital is out of the way. Advancing production requires physical extraction. Planning does not magically make lithium mining or cobalt refining clean. A planned economy still has to dig the same holes in the ground and process the same materials to build the green infrastructure you want. You are just doing the destruction on a schedule instead of for a profit margin.
Historically, planned economies did not decide to be harmonious either. They decided to industrialize rapidly to compete with capitalist countries, and the environment suffered greatly for it. If the primary goal remains advancing the productive forces, the physical impact on the planet remains destructive. Changing who holds the steering wheel does not change the fact that the vehicle is still an industrial machine tearing up the ground beneath it. At some point, you actually have to ease off the gas pedal, not just plan a more efficient route.
Developing and advancing does not mean continuing consumerism. The overproduction of cheap plastic goods and planned obsolescence are purely problems of capital, not socialism. We can develop more intelligently, without relying on a system that requires production of endless trinkets at the destruction of the environment. Extraction will not end, sure, but it can be done more intelligently, and it can be minimized.
Historical socialism has faced numerous problems due to lack of development. They didn't simply develop to compete, but because the basis of socialism is in large industry. We cannot freeze history at a communalist level where we are hunter/gatherers, we have to advance to socialism so that we can actually intelligently solve problems leading to climate change and environmental destruction, rather than having capitalism ensure it is destroyed.
Communist ecology is a wide field, and you'd do well to study it.