Why do I feel like I’m the only one here optimistic about the future. After all Marx said that history is linear and that socialism is on the horizon and their is no alternative. Isn’t pessimism kinda reactionary because it assumes that the past will be better than the future.
Optimism
Lucas Hughes
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Brayden Brooks
Critical support to optimism. History goes in big dialectical spirals you know. I like to read Zig Forums and see those lunatics try to grasp, vainly, at forces far beyond their control.
Lincoln Bell
Ultimately yes that's the goal but for the near future it looks pretty bleak
Nicholas Roberts
The Earth itself is going through a mass extinction event, and it is likely that we are too far gone to reverse the damage we have done. Enjoy your lack of oxygen once we suffocate ourselves.
Nathaniel Sanders
But with genetic engineering and geoenginering technologies it’s unlikely that this will stop the march of modernity and linear history.
Jonathan Bell
...
Ryan Jackson
Lol people think they know what the planets up to and don't even own their own airports and private recon planes to check on the earth
Austin Ward
Geoengineering faces geopolitical constraints. The Global South obviously will want a temperature closer to the pre-industrial baseline so they don't all die, but the Global North can survive and thrive with a much greater degree of warming and instead want a Goldilocks temperature where they get to grow crops in the tundra and keep the Northern Passage open for trade and access natural resources beneath the Arctic. I don't see any way for this to be resolved without world war.
James Cruz
Humans are biologically wired to see threats. Seeing positive things has little value in evolution.
Oliver Lewis
Yeah, I think there's reason to be optimistic. Our modern world was created in the wake of the destruction of most communist states, seemingly de-legitimizing the ideology. Liberalism was in this place once, after the final defeat of Napoleon. Similarly to the left of our time, the left of that time(liberals) retreated from power, and into private lives and culture.
However, they slowly began to reassert themselves over the following decades, leading to their eventual global dominance. The resurgence of left wing moments, as flawed as their first tentative steps have been(as was the case with liberal revolutionaries), is a good reason to be optimistic for the coming decades.
Joseph Myers
Well, it's becoming less of science fiction and more of scientific reality as we approach the future..
Angel Bell
You mistake pessimism for understanding the gravity of the situation we are now in.
There's no guarantee that we will progress to socialism, just that that our survival depends on it.
"Socialism or Barbarism"
Liam Jones
I worry the populist anti-liberal sentiments will be hijacked by far right grifters. People are discontent with the current system but too many are falling into these pseudo populist nationalist traps as we've seen with Trump, Bolsonaro, etc
Caleb Baker
Shut up retard
Hudson Wood
Tbh I think it goes the other way: right wing populism tends to win first but when they inevitably sell out to capital we can gain them. Hungary is a pretty decent example of this, where there is a verge of massive industrial action that could lead further.
Joseph White
It is, Chyna is even beginning to export renewables using OBOR
Nathaniel Harris
dezeen.com
Same could be said for Patagonia and Antartica which is claimed by multiple nations in the global south.
You don’t need global warming for this, just use heat generators to build a canal across the Arctic.
You don’t need warmer temperatures for this, only more advanced mining technology.
Even if their was disagreementabout how much tempratures should be lowered, it won’t result in conflict because all the major nations on the geopolitical scale are in the Global North. China, Russia, EU, and America are all in the North. India and Brazil aren’t but they aren’t major geoploitical competitors yet.
The North also wants the South to not be decertified, we saw how they reacted to a few hundred thousand refugees, they wouldn’t be able to handle the refugees from desertification from the South, as such it’s in their interest to prevent it.
Liam Brooks
Care to name the film whence this Lenin-Pixar exists?
Nathan Smith
Every moron ITT should feel ashamed that OP could post this anticommunist caricature of Marxism and it could go unchallenged after so many replies.
Leo Clark
nobody wants to touch poop with their bare hands
Easton Kelly
It’s what he said though.
Jaxson Myers
Fall of Eagles
Nicholas Reyes
we chose hell
Cameron Nelson
Trotsky himself told in the transitional program that "the conditions of socialism were rotting". It is one thing, I think to have an optimistic propaganda (absolutely necessary) and to have a pessimistic theory.
There is an alternative. Dialectical materialism means either you move forward, either backwards (Middle Ages is a period of reflux of production). What is reactionary is fighting for that future, not thinking it's a possibility.
Adam Smith
first of all this pic is wrong. serfdom predates slavery.
second of all societies can regress just as likely as they can progress. all Marx said is that communism is brought by historical necessity + class consciousness, and capitalist societies have found ways to severely undermine the latter.
Henry Jackson
The ideology of the far-right outside of America and former Soviet bloc countries is basically either nazbol that cares more about culture than economics, or socdem but only for white people. So they at least aren't American conservative neolibs.
The concept of "slave societies" is probably the worst part of Marx's historiography, it's certainly the part that irritates me the most.
Andrew Campbell
We already have the technology to stop climate change and habitat destruction and aren't using it, you fucking retard.
Ethan Clark
Could it be that slavery or serfdom were both dependent on circumstances, where the economic exploitation was needed?
Serfs are better suited for agricultural production, when they can easily be bound to land and trade is minimal.
The Marxian Economic book that I read specifically mentions that in medieval Bohemia around years 900-1200 or at the same time period in Novgorod Rus, there was a working slave trade, which we were never told in History classes that it existed, that slavery was only a thing in Greece and Middle East.
So even Slaves and Serfs existed in both same time and place.
Where does being a tenant farmer fit into this? As in like the Joads from Grapes of Wrath, but 1000 years earlier. Yeomen free farmers falling into debt trap are of course a step towards either serfdom or slavery.
Josiah Nelson
Ohhh you're dumb, got it.
Julian Thompson
Ethan Adams
because that's how class society first manifested itself. you needed to have law before you could have slavery, because slavery itself is a legal obligation enforced across multiple civilizations.
Hudson Moore
Ok, thanks for that contribution Dennis Prager. Why don't you tell me more about how 99% of scientists are wrong.
Aiden Morris
Are you retarted? The Roman Empire which was slave based need to collapse in order for Serfdom to become the dominate economic system.
Nathaniel Murphy
...
Ethan Sanders
I'm optimistic that there will be roughly 1000 breeding pairs left alive in the (thawed) arctic, from which humanity will eventually recover along with the planet over the course of 50-100,000 years
Humanity by then will be unrecognizable to us, and I don't know how we're going to pass the time (hopefully not killing each other), but we'll probably still retain language, writing, and agriculture
Hunter Hall
What do you think is at the end? What's the final stage of the tech tree?
Jackson James
didn't even invent slavery, and serfdom existed before Rome. build a conception of history before you spew such dishonesty.
Gabriel Bell
>>>/90s/
If we can’t beat entropy, maybe in a few hundred quadrillion years history will end from heat death of the universe, but that ain’t happing soon, for all practical purposes history has no end.
Was the main form of production for much of it’s history
It didn’t. Also if serfdom came before slavery than why did modern Europe jump form serfdom to capitalism without slavery? Stuff in the colonies doesn’t count?
Ayden Price
No it can't. Antarctica will still be far too cold to grow anything for quite a long time. Meanwhile, Patagonia warming only benefits Argentina. The rest of the Global South won't get to partake.
Global warming does this for free.
Global warming does this for free too.
China is in the Global South and will be severely impacted by climate change. It will certainly be brought into conflict. Also, India and Brazil shouldn't be dismissed. They're growing faster than climate change is coming, and by the time we cross the 2C threshold will be significant regional powers in their own rights.
They're just going to genocide them dude.
Michael Hernandez
hope punks fuck off
prophecies only work when they're fulfilled by their believers
luxury trans space diaper anarchism isn't going to just materialize because you're optimistic and like the idea
Jason Long
And to do it artificially would cost 0.001% of the damages caused by global warming.
And to do it artificially would cost 0.1% of the damages caused by global warming.
No they aren’t, they are the same latitude as Burgerland.
The country who’s foreign minister thinks Climate Change is “A Marxist Plot”
If this happens than the global north won’t risk war with them over them using geoenginering. If these countries have Nuclear ICBS, well they won’t go to war with the North because nuclear powers don’t go to war with each other. And if they don’t they aren’t great powers in the modern sense.
That will be impossible to pull off. The Global North is outnumber seven to one.
Luke Fisher
Damages for who? The damages are mostly concentrated in the South - climate change exports the costs. It also makes that genocide I mentioned much easier to pull off.
UK is the same latitude as Canada, but the climate is totally different. It has to do with ocean circulation currents and atmospheric patterns and shit, and while these may change unrecognizably due to climate change most models predict that things are going to be pretty bad for China.
But let's say you're right - then there is literally NO ONE that wants geoengineering and has the power to make it happen. All the countries that benefit are too poor and militarily weak to matter, and will be ignored as the seas swallow their cities and superstorms kill them by the millions.
The rising tide of fascism is another complication in the geopolitics of climate change and geoengineering.
Nuclear powers don't go to war under ordinary circumstances. During crisis, though, the normal rules of engagement might go out the window. MAD only works when destruction isn't already assured.
Henry Edwards
Like?
Anyway, you missed the point of my post, conventional nuclear and renewables could already replace fossil fuels but they won't because of our failed economic/political system. So why would having fusion really help (not to mention research on it has horribly stalled and doesn't seem to have progressed in decades)?
Brody Jackson
Im a natural born pessimist. I read Candide as a child and Voltaire pretty much decimated all the "this is the best of all possible worlds" steven pinker optimist cucks centuries ago.
And then i read Schopenhauer as a teenager and it was pretty much over lmao.
Think of the scientific law of entropy. Science itself justifies being a pessimist. You dont even have to think about the sun exploding. Or the heat death of the universe. The natural resources will be depleted soon enough.
Everything in this universe tends towards nothingness.
All life is a meaningless absurdity. All suffering is derived from desire.
And existence is impermanent
Josiah Long
Aiden Carter
The Destabilization of the Global South isn’t good for the capitalist class of the global North because it cuts out the cheep labor pool.
You don’t have to be a great power to do geoenginering. Releasing Sulfate Particles to dim the sun only costs a few million bucks.
Their haven been crisis between nuclear powers that didn’t result in war. Such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fusion would be so cheep every oil well would be put out of business.
Adrian Diaz
I'm so glad you asked! I've been putting a lot of thought into this lately. Broadly speaking, the rate of technological progress is proportional to two factors: The number of people working on progressing technology, and the overall efficiency/quality of their work. Any measure that increases one or both of those factors will have a positive effect on the rate of technological progress. As an example of a measure that would improve the first factor, increased research funding would increase the number of working scientists. Lord knows there's no shortage of spare PhDs running around at the moment. For the second factor, reforming research funding away from the grant-based model and toward an institute-based model has the potential to double research productivity. Under the grant-based model, 50% or more of a working scientist's time is spent writing grants. On top of that, funding interruptions force experienced lab technicians to seek other employment, which leads to inefficient work from incoming researchers. These are a couple of basic examples, the entire system of R&D is full of inefficiencies of similar magnitude (ask me about scientific publishing!). While some of these inefficiencies are likely inherent to a profit-based system, many more are (and have historically been) quite soluble even under capitalism.
As a bonus, lots of these measures wouldn't be subject to the kind of ideological deadlock that characterizes most of the impotent Left's never-to-be-fulfilled demands. For example, increased funding for fusion research could be passed through even the most thoroughly reactionary congress if it was pitched as a handout to the MIC via DARPA. After all, the important thing is that the change in material conditions is deployed. Who deployed it would very quickly become irrelevant.
The adoption rate of both of these technologies is actually perfectly commensurate with their current utility. The EROEI of renewable power is abysmal at this point in time. A mass rollout with current renewable tech would be insane - it would all be completely obsolete within a decade. It is improving exponentially, especially with solar power, but we're still firmly in the early flat part of the logistic curve that characterizes the adoption of a new technology. No, renewables are proceeding at a rate quite commensurate with their current utility. We need to see lots of progress in efficiency and storage tech before a mass rollout makes any sense. Getting that done quicker will require the praxis I'm arguing for above.
Regarding nuclear - the current generation of nuclear reactors is a dead end. If you're a smart person who wants nuke power going forward, you're going to have to find a way to fast-track R&D on Generation IV+ reactors. Between the oil lobbyists and the filthy fucking hippies a fail-safe, waste-free reactor is the only way nuke power's getting off the ground. Fortunately we have lots of ideas about how to build reactors that fulfill those criteria. Unfortunately the research required to deploy them isn't complete yet. Once again, you're going to have to find a way to increase the rate of tech. progress if you want that to happen quicker.
Large-scale changes in material conditions have always been commensurate with large-scale changes in social relations. Settled civilization would have been impossible without agriculture. Industrial capitalism would have been impossible without fossil fuel energy. Fusion power, with EROEI 10 times greater than oil in the 1900s, would necessitate similarly large-scale changes to social relations. Not to mention the fact a fusion reactor is basically equivalent to a fusion spaceship engine, and would make the entire solar system's material resources as accessible as the Earth's. Post-scarcity isn't remotely as sci-fi as some idiots would have you think.
Progress in fusion research has slowed because funding has slowed. Fusion research is yet another victim of the "You aren't making any progress? Better cut your funding! Why aren't you making any progress?" vicious cycle. There are plenty of outfits today who have promising reactor designs, but can't build a prototype for lack of funding. They're not looking for ITER-level amounts, either. They're lacking for chump change - $15 - $200 million.
Ryder Carter
Destabilization is generally the goal of imperialism. Keeps the third world proles from organizing against superexploitation. Or do you think all those sanctions, coups, and wars were actually for stability?
You have to in order to defy the great powers who tell you not to.
Imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis, but add several degrees C of warming. Now imagine instead of only two nuclear powers, it's a dozen.
[x] doubt
Jack Gomez
History is a Eurocentric idea
Julian Martin
Not it isn’t. Destabilization is an unwanted consequence of Imperialism. Porky doesn’t like his factory getting looted or blown up. The Right Wing Coups are a reaction to destabilization in an effort by the Capitalist class to restore stability. Civil Wars in the third world are usually started by Communist Guerrillas or tribalist feudal reactionaries who Porky obviously doesn’t like.
The Great Powers will likely fund geoenginering, and if they don’t they won’t prevent a third world nation from doing it on their won. Climate change doesn’t benefit the first world.
You STILL won’t get nuclear war, not then, not now, not ever. MAD will never stop applying.
Coal put burning wood for energy out of business. It’s the same shit. Technology is a material condition. Change the amount of tech, and you change the material conditions which changes everything.
Zachary Thomas
Detabliztion is an unwanted side effect of Imperialism. Porky doesn’t like his factory getting looted or blown up.
Most right wing coups are done as a reaction to an unstable government that is unable to enforce the wishes of capital, so Porky gets some military generals to create a new one that ca enforce the wishes of capital.
Most wars in the third world as socialist gurillas trying to topple bourgeois governments, it should be obvious to all that Porky doesn’t like that.
They won’t tell you not to because what you are doing will help them. With the exception of Russia and Canada. No country will benefit from Global Warming.
Nuclear war won’t happen. MAD will never stop applying.
Technology is a material condition. Change the tech levels, and you change the material conditions. Change the material conditions and you change everything.
Jeremiah Barnes
Hey dogfuckers, there's some piping hot new praxis in these posts. Why are you spending your time whining about useless/failed shit like idpol, succdem, and the USSR when you could go out today and do something that will actually lead to revolution?
Eli Lopez
Why the fuck isn't there anyone in those cars?
Xavier Watson
They are driverless.
Isaiah Mitchell
Because imageboards are for social outcast losers who have no friends.
It makes the world seem bleak, even if you know communism is the inevitable future.
I'll probably still be an outcast loser in the future communist society.
Jace Rogers
Marx was not a prophet and though he never went back on it explicitly towards the end of his life he just worked on analysis and economics and didnt talk about any future inevitabilities. As far as I'm concerned Marx was right that capitalism inevitably falls into crisis and contradiction, he was wrong that those crises and contradictions would inevitably bring about socialism, unless we abstract communism to 'the movement that abolishes the present state of things."
Charles Flores
Marx denies this at some point insisting that it does require agency but I couldn't remember where, I just grabbed the Engels quote instead
Noah Martin
Now that's a spook, kiddo
Charles Foster
Be careful user. There was another autist that became obsessed with Schopenhauer and went crazy.
Jayden Taylor
It's like how they wanted to replace bees with for-profit replacements, after all the commuters die off from climate starvation they'll send empty cars around to sustain demand for petrol.
Adam Ross
Because climatologists learned about the whole temperature rise thing, and it turns out that preventing societal collapse within a few centuries is politically unthinkable.
Honestly, it makes you consider becoming right wing just to embrace how fucked society is. We're all going to hell, so why not enjoy the trip?
Luis Rodriguez
That's not really right wing though, it's generic neoliberal
Cooper Lopez
thank you for the effort post comrade
friendly sage for off-topic
Logan Carter
We live in too much of a Hellworld for anything good to happen
David Nelson
idk how anyone with a soul can watch this and not see how flawed capitalism is
the bourgeois propaganda runs DEEP
Jace Martinez
we need to stay cautiously optimistic bitch
despite our idols being dead and our enemies being in power
Samuel Morris