by Atlas667 | 2025-06-24 00:33:32+00:00
> Weapons and rationales don't fight wars themselves (yet).

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.