908
not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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Well... what the past hundreds of years of capitalism has shown us is that it has many faults in practice and is causing the destruction of the environment, no? You can have the greatest, most amazing idea in the world, but if it sucks in implementation it's not a good idea. You may be on the right track though, I would recommend you watch some videos by the youtube channel Second Thought on socialism
The issue is there's no real reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism. Countless societies over the ages have faced environmental collapse. The Maya were hardly devout capitalists. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea. Prehistoric stateless humans drove most of the planet's megafauna to extinction.
We seem pretty capable of decimating the environment regardless of our economic system. A worker-owned co-op can tear down a rainforest just as well as a regular company can.
There is actually plenty of reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism, given that capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences. The two prehistoric examples you gave don't really make much sense anymore, given that we now possess significantly more knowledge about how our actions affect the environment, as well as the tools to alter the environment in general. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea because they were in need of cotton, but this doesn't really have much to do with what economic system the soviet union used, just that they were a country that made mistakes. Simply put, capitalism actively incentivizes the destruction of the environment while socialism does not. The People's Republic of China is the world leader in renewable energy production, has significantly increased its forest coverage, and its CO2 emissions have already peaked.
A better question for the last example you gave might be, would a worker-owned co-op, with the interests of its workers in mind, want to tear down a rainforest to the same degree as a regular company? Or would they deforest at a more responsible level, planting replacement trees in order to guarantee a stable resource and not destroy the environment the workers live in (assuming the workers are owning a co-op in their own rainforest)?
In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there's no reason that worker-owned co-ops can't also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You're not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that "capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences." But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren't Captain Planet villains; they don't pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I'm sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the 'forests' are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don't mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I'm not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It's Occam's razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that's a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.