kenneal - lagger wrote:JavaScriptDonkey wrote:I'm not arguing that modern industrial society is a picnic but you seem to be lumping all the blame on capitalism whereas in fact socialist societies have industrialised just as fast as capitalist ones.
In fact industrialised socialist societies have been dirtier than capitalist ones. Just look at the USSSR and China. Then there's N Korea of course....
We may end up back at the plough but it'll be a high carbon steel affair turning sod for genetically modified seed.
High carbon steel is a possibility as even a basic blacksmith's forge could produce this but not in large quantities.
GM seed requires sophisticated industrial bases for their manufacture so is unlikely to be commonly found in a more simple, low tech future.
I'm not suggesting that socialist industrial societies were paragons of virtue in terms of their industrial practices. Far from it. Indeed, the industrial technologies they used were extremely "inefficient" and, on occasion, environmentally polluting. However, it is precisely
because they were "inefficient" in their production compared to capitalist societies that is the reason that capitalist societies have, in the end, done far more damage because they
are so efficient at production and distribution. In any event, capitalist use of technologies has been no less polluting. It's just that the pollution, in recent decades, has often been off-shored to countries far, far away full of brown-skinned people and so we have tended not to notice its effects.
To take one example of how capitalism knackers the environment precisely because it is so "effective" at production; take a look at the soils of those countries in Europe that were, until recently, part of the Soviet block of socialist countries and then compare them to the soils of those countries that have been capitalist during the same time period. The fact is their soils are often far healthier. The reason is because they employed "inefficient" farming technologies.
Capitalism, in conjunction with fractional reserve banking, has proved to be
the most effective system for the turning of raw materials into products the world has ever known. Consequently, it has taken the entire world to the brink of political, economic and environmental catastrophe in less than a couple of hundred years. Don't misunderstand me here;
all civilisation-sized systems of organisation are, in the end, unsustainable. However, capitalism, aided and abetted by FRB, happens to be
particularly unsustainable.
