I think that is the will of the masses.
I've got this fairphone in my pocket that has a replaceable cobalt-free battery and a replaceable OS for a reasonable price. But people by-and-large don't want fairphones, they want iphones.
The third worlders fighting over cobalt don't want peace, they want wealth for themselves.
People don't want niche third parties and alternative stuff, they want to be part of a larger cultural group.
Captialism is based on individual voluntarism, and the problems you describe are not caused by manufactured sentiment but a lack thereof. The problems are caused by the distributed actions of a silent majority, as opposed to some greater rational plan.
They are enabled into fighting by big, huge interests. They ship them weapons and rationales.
Who are the customers in the end? Western nations. They create the abject poverty, they use poor governments to exploit and enslave their own people. There is no "poverty" in the world only exploitation. All poverty is fabricated and sustained.
Why is it that Mali is one of the poorest nations on earth but is also one of the top 10 exporters of gold? How does that work?
Capitalism is not voluntarism. That is the myth of philosophical liberalism.
To say that someone who owns as much wealth as a few million people is equal to those same millions of persons who directly own nothing except credit(debt)? It's a myth.
Voluntarism would only be true if we were on equal economic standing. Therefore voluntarism implies that no one can be coerced or leveraged, its a moot and infantile viewpoint of social dynamics.
The "silent majority" has no real way to speak. You choose candidates based on talking points who can then REALLY do anything they please. That is called "trusting campaigns", not democracy.
In reality what happens in elections is that we are choosing a group of people to enact policies based on the market-demands of a society that cannot control its market/production. There is a huge disconnect. It's not a real influence WE have. It's an influence that is given.
IE. The majority of people dont want to use plastic materials for anything related to their consumption. But plastic is cheap and easy to produce. I'm sure that if given a choice people would rather their society work a bit more, spend a bit more of human-energy if it means we dont have nuts full of microplastics.
It is how we produce that determines what choices we have, and how we produce is determined by market dynamics which are reduced to sustainability of production and profits. It is profits that determines production, not consumers' will.
So tell me: if we dont directly control the options we have, but you say we are making a choice, what is that?
There is another word for that. Coercion, manipulation.
I dont want child soldiers killing for control over resources or kids mining for 12 hours a day, I want a good, cheap phone. It is not the same.
Is there really no other way? I would sure as hell try to have it any other way.
Whoever conflates these is doing so because they profit off of it, not because its the only way.
In capitalism the heads of production and their profits determine the directions of our societies.
Weapons and rationales don't fight wars themselves (yet).
>Why is it that Mali is one of the poorest nations on earth but is also one of the top 10 exporters of gold? How does that work?
Gold is just a shiny rock. No one needs gold to survive and it has few industrial uses. If your only asset is a resource like that, you are going to be stuck digging it out of the ground and trading it for everything else you need (including protection).
The wealthiest nations in the world are industrious. Not those built on top of some natural resource that they are incapable of defending- that's a recipe for instability. Look at taiwan, japan, ukraine, even isreal. These little nations can leverage greater nations to fight on their behalf by using their industrial capability, even when they are surrounded by enemies. The "divide and conquer" principle is not only used by larger nations to control smaller nations, but also by smaller nations in dealing with larger nations.
>Capitalism is not voluntarism. That is the myth of philosophical liberalism.
>To say that someone who owns as much wealth as a few million people is equal to those same millions of persons who directly own nothing except credit(debt)? It's a myth.
You are conflating voluntarism and democracy. Capitalism is voluntaristic, but democratic insofar as wealth is well-distributed.
>The "silent majority" has no real way to speak.
You vote with your dollar. Most people in the USA are not willing to pay for the premium associated with ethical production. Hence, iphones dominate while fairphones lag behind. You see this everywhere you go. At the supermarket, there is a premium associated with organic foods. Actions speak louder than words.
>IE. The majority of people dont want to use plastic materials for anything related to their consumption. But plastic is cheap and easy to produce. I'm sure that if given a choice people would rather their society work a bit more, spend a bit more of human-energy if it means we dont have nuts full of microplastics.
I would make this tradeoff, but I wouldn't be so sure others would, in the large. There are some things that only plastics can do, so it would be a slippery slope of what applications would be allowable.
>It is how we produce that determines what choices we have, and how we produce is determined by market dynamics which are reduced to sustainability of production and profits. It is profits that determines production, not consumers' will
>So tell me: if we dont directly control the options we have, but you say we are making a choice, what is that?
The only way you could directly control the options you have is by producing goods and services yourself. Farm your own food, build your own smartphone. The economies of scale and capital costs are not a result of any specific economic system, they are often the result of the realities of production and logistics. These tradeoffs exist even within communist command economies.
The only difference is that in capitalism, it is voluntaristic enough that you have the ability to choose what you do with your own wealth and time. You can affect change gradually, on a small scale.
>I dont want child soldiers killing for control over resources or kids mining for 12 hours a day, I want a good, cheap phone. It is not the same.
Then buy a fairphone or something. You have some options.
>In capitalism the heads of production and their profits determine the directions of our societies.
If you don't buy their product, then it won't be profitable. Boycotts are an effective political tool. Divide and conquer!
And people dont fight wars without weapons and rationales.
I am specifically saying that a lot of the chaos in the third world is the result of opposing global-capitalists interests in order to sustain poverty and exploitation for the sake of the first worlds' economies.
> Look at taiwan, japan, ukraine, even isreal. These little nations can leverage greater nations to fight on their behalf by using their industrial capability, even when they are surrounded by enemies.
Those are all nations developed during or after the cold war in regions of conflict. They are not independent nations that developed due to "natural" regional history. They are neocolonial experiments.
They are neo-colonies of a global capitalist hegemony centered in the "west". Taiwan developed from Formosa from the aid of western capitalist nations as a base for defense from China. Israel is the same idea in the middle east. Japan essentially the same thing. Ukraine is currently in their neocolonial war for deciding which capitalist block to align with. These are not true independent nations, they are neocolonial experiments of essentially captive economies.
All this to say: Development is not down to a type of industry alone, it is also due to an economic context. Mali does not develop because it is not allowed to develop. This is what colonialism has done in the global south, this is how they prop up western nations. With slavery, misery and exploitation.
Your analysis of the global south is also what racists use to defend racial capacity while completely ignoring history and current economic contexts.
> You are conflating voluntarism and democracy. Capitalism is voluntaristic, but democratic insofar as wealth is well-distributed.
Ok, so competition and corruption in capitalism always makes capitalism undemocratic and exploitative. This is what we see in the leading nations of the world. Working classes who get the illusion of choice in their democratic institutions.
> You vote with your dollar.
This is one of the oldest lies in the book. It's circular reasoning. If someone else's dollar defines the choices; I'm not voting with my dollar. I'm just buying what I can afford.
> I would make this tradeoff, but I wouldn't be so sure others would, in the large. There are some things that only plastics can do[...]
Nobody wants plastic in their nuts. Plastic cannot be eliminated world wide, but maybe we could stop letting producers get away with not dealing with the trash they produce.
Imagine living in a system where you're allowed to innovate and create products and not deal with the consequences. It's almost as if the system is designed by those producers. Should they be allowed to create trash and not deal with it?
Sure, that's more like bourgeois logic, the voluntarist cop-out that is capitalism.
Remember: I buy what I can afford, they make what they can profit off of.
> The economies of scale and capital costs are not a result of any specific economic system, they are often the result of the realities of production and logistics. These tradeoffs exist even within communist command economies.
You are describing why capitalism is inherently flawed and leads to more and more and more exploitation.
And just to add, command economies is the same as a planned economy. Which we have the tech to build right now. No exploitation needed, because no private profits are allowed. We literally have the tech to create an unexploitable system of production right now.
> The only difference is that in capitalism, it is voluntaristic enough that you have the ability to choose what you do with your own wealth and time. You can affect change gradually, on a small scale.
You literally dont. I literally have to create wealth for someone else in order to eat. That is the opposite of "choose what you do with your own wealth and time". And sure I could find another job, or another. But there are hard limits to choosing a job, as well as hard limits to being your own boss. We can't all be capitalists or indefinitely choose jobs. The billions of us can't be capitalists and we'd all die before we find a job with the perfect trade-offs.
The only way to reconcile this contradiction is to be a classist who truly believes that some people are just doomed to be exploited because of their inherent qualities or lack.
Voluntarism is a cop out from inherent capitalist exploitation.
> Then buy a fairphone or something. You have some options.
A person who believes that wanting a good, cheap phone requires child soldiers, child labor and abject poverty should really re-think what they are doing and promoting in the world. Just because it's far away and detached doesn't mean it isn't real. And remember, we're truly all connected.
I don't judge you for thinking this way tho. This is what the capitalists promote. They literally control the airwaves, and while there is no "soviet" style censorship there is still the actual censorship of monopoly platforms deciding what gets amplified and what doesn't.
Oh you like phones? Well our phone companies require us to directly or indirectly create proxy wars in this region in order to acquire the raw materials necessary.
This is the democracy of western nations: policy hidden behind capitalist interests that the people engage with through consumption.
Its democracy for the rich not for the millions of us.
That's why they NEED to manufacture consent, in order to get you on board with murder and fabricated poverty in order to have goods and services.