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capitalism is killing the planet
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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That's an easy thing to say, but not really accurate. Even without capitalism, we've wiped out entire animal populations. We're just doing it a lot faster now. Even if we were fully socialist, and there was no profit being made for anyone, our own humanity would be destroying the ecosystem; strip mining would still happen under perfect communism (e.g., not authoritarian states).
Capitalism and communism both need to same resources, they're just distributed different.
I'm really not convinced by this. I'm not going to try and make an argument for communism. But the idea the amount of consumption under capitalism would be the same as under alternative economic systems is just absurd. The amount of waste created by planned obsolescence, fashion (fast and otherwise), consumption from status anxiety, the things people buy to cope with long working weeks and commutes. In addition to this the extra damage caused by the billionaires and mega rich.
We would still need access to the same types of resources under alternative economic systems. But there is so much waste created by things which are exclusive to capitalism.
I like you critical thinking going on. To me it is simply the number of people, pure and simple. If there was 10 people on the planet it would be a lot harder for any long term consequences to show up. Unfortunately all the modern systems support an ever expanding population base (for stupid reasons imho). We need a system that doesn't have this feature. Despite capitalism's benefits, it's tied to exhaustion. Problem I see, how could the breeding ever be overcome within the system? I've got nothing. I'm sure natural processes will take the system off line if it doesn't line up with some fundamentals.