this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
134 points (94.7% liked)
Asklemmy
45308 readers
1498 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay fine fine. I'm more of a self-described authoritarian really.
Well for instance, if there was only one singular mega-corporation with no competition, I don't think it would destroy the environment, at least not in a way that would reduce its future profits. My observation is that corporations tend to be more forward-thinking about their own profits than I tend to expect from the way they're structured. But you can get an advantage over other corporations in the short-term if throw environmentalism to the wayside. In other words, the shortest path to profit and the tragedy of the commons are exactly linked.
I don't know what a "self-described authoritarian" is, either. That isn't a political stance.
If there was one singular megacorp, governing all of industry, there would be no competition as you said, and therefore Capitalism would die. The death of Capitalism is inevitable, but reaching such a point would see revolution immediately.
It sounds like you're basically saying competition is the problem. But competition has benefits and downsides; one of the downsides is tragedy of the commons, which I think is bad enough it warrants eliminating capitalism all by itself. You haven't really provided a good argument that tragedy of the commons isn't a real concern.
I don't believe the death of capitalism is inevitable -- that's why we need to work hard to end it. (Edit: I guess we essentially agree, the difference is fatalism?)
I think the biggest issue here is that we aren't really speaking on common ground. I'm a Marxist-Leninist, and can offer theory to show what that means but will put that aside for now.
The "tragedy of the commons" is not what you are using it to mean. You are referring to a lack of regulation as "tragedy of the commons," which is not the correct usage of it.
Secondly, Capitalism erases its own foundations, it naturally centralizes and erases profit and competition, ergo it inevitably produces crisis and its own erasure.
I am correctly using tragedy of the commons. A well-understood solution to the tragedy of the commons is regulation. This is equivalent to saying a lack of regulation can cause the tragedy of the commons.
The tragedy of the commons is about random people misusing public goods, not corporations practicing unsafe dumping.
The tragedy of the commons is a general-purpose game theory concept. It applies any time there is a communal resource exploitable by multiple participants. In the abstract: any time you can do something for personal gain but for the detriment of everyone overall. Admittedly, in the case of unsafe dumping, the resource must be unintuitively defined as the cleanliness of the river or something like that, but the same principle applies as in the more clear-cut (heh) example of foresting.
(Wikipedia claims pollution is a "negative commons"; the theory still applies, but the resource is defined strangely.)
I feel we are getting into the weeds about something that doesn't matter, ultimately, I still don't know what identifying as an "authoritarian" or "totalitarian" even means.
What no reading does to a mf
Yea lol
I don't really use those words tbh. I just think anarchism doesn't account for how to solve the tragedy of the commons, so a global authority is needed.