Do you think Turkey can again become a great regional player in the near future? Looking at the population projections for the Balkans and surrounding countries like Hungary, things don't look great long term. Also Austria is afraid to make a statue of the polish king who saved Vienna from Ottomans in order to not hurt t the feelings of it's Turkish migrant population.
Ironically you are making his point. Countries that have stronger respect for property rights dump way less or no garbage in the oceans as the countries where there is no such respect.
Who is "us"? Because in capitalism, only people with capital get to decide what has value.
The values of the poor are not reflected. The values of the indigenous are not reflected. The values of the non-capitalist are not reflected. The value of the unborn is not reflected. The value of nature is not reflected.
The glacier doesn't participate in the market and neither does the river. Are they without value?
> As if this never happened before capitalism?
That's correct. Look at the graph I posted above, you'll notice that things weren't always this hot. Before capitalism they sure weren't.
No, every one participates. Ordinary people the most, because the capitalist first and foremost need to provide value to us. I'm not sure what do you mean by rivers, glaciers or others not participating in the market? Isn't it evident people assign great value to natural resources. The world is a bit older then 120 years in your graph. There were a lot of natural disasters that wiped quite a lot of living beings from the planet.
> No, every one participates. Ordinary people the most
That is just straight up not true. The tribal elder in the Amazon, who's forest capitalists are burning down never got asked how he defines value. The child not yet born was never asked if it's atmosphere should be heated up for data centers. Neither was the fish in the river or the river itself for that matter.
> what do you mean by rivers, glaciers or others not participating in the market?
I'm not sure what's unclear. The glacier melts as a result of somebody who's not the glacier deciding "value" on a market. In reality, the market doesn't decide value. Value is not price. The market decides power structures and violence distribution. The glacier has a value completely separate from the market, and not derived from it.
How exactly can you ask an unborn child, a river or a glacier what it wants? Did the Yugoslav dictator ask Kosovars what they want before violently oppressing them?
So which economical system enables us to talk to inanimate objects or unborn babies, since you think this is a fault of capitalism?
You have a deep misunderstanding of markets and capitalism!
Yugoslavia failed spectacularly economically. People had to smuggle bananas, diapers, coffee and jeans among other goods from the neighboring Italy and Austria. Millions of people (Gastarbeiter) migrated to Germany to be able support their families, because there was no opportunity at home. Inflation was horrendous, people exchanged the local currency to german marks on the same day as the payday, otherwise by the next day it was worth half as much. There was a shortage of gasoline and people sometimes waited years to get a car. But yes the dictator and the red nobility lived very well for sure.
First of all, as already acknowledged above Yugoslavia wasn't perfect - I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. As already mentioned, I'm not arguing for copying their entire setup wholesale - I just find the specific bits I pointed out interesting. Democracy comes was both invented and then repopularized by societies of slave holders, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out the baby with the bath water!
Inflation was horrendous in many countries, including lots of very capitalist ones. Think Weimar Germany for a famous example, or the Latin American debt crises of the 80s and 90s for ones contemporaneous with Yugoslavia (note also the IMF involvement here)
In the case of Yugoslavia, there's a good argument to be made that the root cause were western trade barriers as part of the successful plan to push it into IMF loans that could then be used to dismantle the country.
Anyways, why are we even religitating the 20th century? We need to be looking forward and figuring out a solution to the crisis right in front of us instead of going all cold war again. The forest are burning right now. The rivers are running low right now. Yugoslavia, however you may feel about it, ended decades ago.
You brought the failed state of Yugoslavia as model. I don't have a clue why though. Its economic model certainly doesn't solve any of the existing problems and it would exacerbate them. The forest will burn and rivers will run dry as long as this planet will exist. You are acting as if this is not a naturally occurring phenomena.
A country that can't provide basic goods like bananas and coffee, needs to send millions of it's people to another country so they can survive, represses minorities and political dissidents, has Lukasenko type of dictator for life as president and finally bankrupts and violently disintegrates with a genocide is a definition of a failed state. I do ideologicaly oppose to such a system to be revived, it would be criminal to want that.
What are you even talking about? We were talking about approaches to the climate crisis and you responded by denying it even exists and going on long rants about Lukashenko's bananas?
Could you please be a bit more constructive and solutions-oriented?
The rivers are drying out. I'm sure you saw the news. Can we please not derail this to talk about your pet topic? The Cold War is over, move on. We got our own problems in the 21st century.
Do you never have problems with transportation like breakdowns or accidents stopping the traffic for a while or having some sort of emergency where you need to drop everything an take care of it?
Not who you replied to, but I do sometimes have problems like this, and as a result I am sometimes an hour late with no warning. It's bad, but it only happens very rarely. This also sometimes happened when I did use a smartphone, if it ran out of battery (though, in hindsight, why didn't I bring a charger?).
In my experience those are the people who miss the "good" old times, when everything had order and hierarchy. Wikipedia says the communist party in Poland had 3 million member which is about 10% of the population at the time. If you add the family members and close relatives, the number of people living a privileged life was quite big. Red nobility is known phenomenon in former communist countries.
You can look and Google for many polls conducted on the topic, 2014 was the first year more Poles had a negative than a positive opinion on the PRL (46 vs 44%) and that's because as time progresses average voter age goes down.
People that were at least 15 by 1989 (the last year of communism in Poland) had a warm opinion on it.
It's really younger generations that did not live in PRL that hold overwhelmingly negative opinions on it.
In any case, I'm not sure why am I arguing with you? I'm Polish and my family lived those eras, so did my friends and their families.
Simple fact is: during communism people enjoyed fair lives, there was lots of safety, everybody had a job and a roof on their head and could afford one vacation per year. People made friends, sports, had hobbies and they were younger, so they remember the times as okay.
On the other hand, people that did not live them, base their opinions on vibes and their external idea of how it was to live under PRL.
Look, nobody is saying that life isn't better now, of course it is. But don't believe it was that bad. It was called "second" world and not "third" for a reason. It was okay.
Yet in yanks minds we were living some dystopia were everybody lacked everything and was unhappy and their neighbour was gonna report them for anything.
People miss their youth. You can do the same poll anywhere and the results will be similar, whether that place was a communist dictatorship or not. And no it's not a simple fact that people enjoyed their lives. Maybe it was for your family who was either close to power or ideologically agreed with the dictatorship. Communism was good to the the people aligned with the regime, but for anyone who had a dissident idea, it was hell on earth. A lot of things were missing and not available to buy. People had to make do with what they had. And reporting did happen as well, even if you try to brush it off. Poland would be a first world country had it not stay behind the iron curtain.
>> we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it
How? Old people need care. Younger people will need to take care of them. When they die, a lot of knowledge will be lost, because there will not be enough young people to learn all those skills. Less people will also mean overall less economic activity, less creativity, less inventions and so on. I'm not saying the world will stop, but the transition will certainly be painful.
In my country, no socialist is calling for abandoning the market economy. There are like 14 confused teenagers however, who call themselves communists. The various socialists might give different answers about the question of what things are the responsibility for the government, like public transport.
Lots of social democratic parties are united in the Socialist International.
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