What happened here?

    • WhiskeyOaks [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      53·
      3 days ago

      What would you like to know? Capitalism is just as vile and destructive as any other significant socioeconomic system that we’ve come up with, it most certainly has its fair share of crimes against humanity

      • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        48·
        3 days ago

        just as vile and destructive as any other significant socioeconomic system

        both-sides

        U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway

        https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-anniversary-japan-atomic-bombs

        the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.”

        Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.

        “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

        “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

      • casskaydee [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        401·
        3 days ago

        That’s interesting, I would say it’s several orders of magnitude more vile and destructive than any other significant socioeconomic system that we’ve come up with.

        I guess the answer must lie in the middle - capitalism is only a few orders of magnitude more vile and destructive than any other significant socioeconomic system that we’ve come up with.

        • splinter@lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          2 days ago

          Capitalism is more vile than autocracy? Than dictatorship? Than absolute monarchy?

          • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            31·
            2 days ago

            Capitalism replaces direct, personal exploitation with indirect, impersonal exploitation. It transfers all wrongs into an abstract structural logic. It is at once the most obfuscated and difficult to understand, yet the most efficient at supporting a non working minority class at the expense of everyone else.

            The only way out of this is to organize a society upon non-exploitative relations of production. A non-vile system of government can only result from that real basis, not the other way around.

            • splinter@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              12 hours ago

              I see what you’re getting at, but your logic is unsound. The structure of capitalism cannot simultaneously be obfuscated and efficient. There might be capacity to argue efficacy, but the evidence would suggest otherwise. Autocratic political systems predominated for the majority of modern human history, save the last 300 years or so.

              And then we come to the issue of what “capitalism” really means to you. If societal ownership were equally shared among citizens, that would mean private ownership of the means of production and hence a capitalistic system. And yet this would seem to be a non-exploitative relationship between workers and the product of their labor.

              Or perhaps it doesn’t have so much to do with the label applied to the system of power and exchange as it does to the degree to which that system is used to sustain the existence of of in groups whom the law protects without constraint and out groups whom the law constrains without protection.

              • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
                11·
                7 hours ago

                The structure of capitalism cannot simultaneously be obfuscated and efficient.

                Why not? You make this statement as though it’s self-evident, as though it’s a logical impossibility for a system to be both obfuscated and efficient, but I don’t see those two adjectives as logical opposites. I think it’s very possible for systems to be both obfuscated and efficient and I’m curious as to why you believe otherwise.

                If societal ownership were equally shared among citizens, that would mean private ownership of the means of production and hence a capitalistic system.

                Can you explain what you mean by this? What do you think “public property” is if not property that’s owned in common by the entire society?