what's worth more?
20 million people die of poverty every year.
We throw away much more resources per year than what it would take to save them all.
The resources are thrown away because it's more efficient in the short term and capital accumulation favours that.
So what's worth more to you? Refusing change simply because you have enough for yourself, or the people you kill for the privilege? Remember, you don't even need to give up resources yourself to save them.
I'm not sure if most individuals even have a choice in the matter. Some can make small changes and some do... Like the employees of grocery stores and other food vendors who rather than throwing out food as they're told, give it to shelters and homeless. There are quite a few places that are only able to feed the poor because of certain local vendors given them food that otherwise would be thrown out.
But to actually solve the issue, we'd have to do this at a much larger scale.
Lets say a government decided to collect all such food and use it to feed the poor. It probably wouldn't solve the issue completely, but they would at least not be hungry.
The issue of homelessness is actually quite similar. There are tons of empty houses and apartments all over the place. Maybe not in every area though. They could simply choose to put the homeless in such places and even employ others to clean and fix them up.
But to do such things, you need some kind of large group of people to do it. Individuals already do similar things but there just aren't enough. There are far more people that just don't give a shit or feel like they aren't responsible or some such than there are people that take responsibility and do little things to help.
We really need government think tanks working to solve these issues.
Sadly, many think that these issues shouldn't even be addressed by governments, as many are very inefficient and wasteful. But we've tried to deal with these issues with small non-profits and it just doesn't work. They simply aren't large enough and they have no teeth.
the fact that you can do so little should probably tell you that you need to focus all your energy on freedom.
the problem is simple actually.
We produce things for profit instead of for need.
We need to eradicate capitalism to solve these problems.
I think that capitalism is definitely the issue here...but I don't think that socialism or communism are the solutions. Mainly because these were concepts created in a very old world. The modern world has unbelievably greater communication tools than during the time that these concepts were created. We need to create new solutions for the new world.
I think even just a simple jobs program leveraging the new communications tools at our disposal would be immeasurably more effective than in previous generations. We could more effectively make use of people's skills by putting them in jobs that require them, increasing production to an incredible degree.
If we were to create some sort of system to track people's wants and needs and effectively place them into jobs that fit their wants and skills, it might not even be necessary to get rid of capitalism. We could still use a monetary system of some type to deal with control of limited resources, but I'm not certain it's even required necessarily when you combine it with a system of credit that's accurately run based on skill.
Basically you just put people in jobs that they do well in and will enjoy and give them whatever they need, as well as many things they want, and they would be naturally inclined to continue working, to ensure they get the things they want, without being so overworked they can't use them, as they often are these days.
"I think even just a simple jobs program leveraging the new communications tools at our disposal would be immeasurably more effective than in previous generations. We could more effectively make use of people's skills by putting them in jobs that require them, increasing production to an incredible degree."
You mean like project cybersyn in socialist chile?
first things first. Can you define socialism or communism? I have a feeling you can't
"Basically you just put people in jobs that they do well in and will enjoy and give them whatever they need, as well as many things they want, and they would be naturally inclined to continue working, to ensure they get the things they want, without being so overworked they can't use them, as they often are these days."
That sounds exactly like the idea behind communism. Let me give you a hint, lenin and stalin were class traitors and communism and anarchism have a much deeper history than just the ussr
The difference in my example would be in implementation...and that it's basically just a jobs program. Really, it's not even that necessarily. My example could be implemented as an app of sorts, where it just finds you jobs, like if you were a temp worker kinda.
In the previous implementations of communism, you would be assigned a job, and not necessarily have much of a choice.
I was just talking about using technology to determine the optimal job for individuals, which would naturally decrease the number of individuals who are underemployed and therefore increase production.
alright first of all
Who do you think supports getting assigned a job without any choice. That's one of the major flaws we point out in capitalism . That is neo-liberal propaganda all the way through
"ndividuals who are underemployed and therefore increase production."
we have enough labor for everyone. We use violence to stop people from doing work through systems like capitalism
"If we were to create some sort of system to track people's wants and needs and effectively place them into jobs that fit their wants and skills, it might not even be necessary to get rid of capitalism. We could still use a monetary system of some type to deal with control of limited resources, but I'm not certain it's even required necessarily when you combine it with a system of credit that's accurately run based on skill."
Capitalism is not money. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Market socialism has money, but no capitalism. Even as far left wing as collectivist anarchism has some monetary system.
"communism is bad, so let's instead have socialism until we have communism but I didn't say the names so it doesn't count"
Communism has never been implemented, so we have no idea if it's really bad. We only know that fascism/nationalism sucks.
that is most definitely neo-liberal propaganda.
In many situations throughout history anarchism/communism were literally the only viable option.
If communism didn't work then why does the US have to invade and disrupt every communist movement, even in other countries?
Here is a link on just some of the situations it has worked, in the form of a book explaining each aspect individually.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
Also what you said at the end was basically the goal of communism. Communism is simply worker control of the means of production, nothing more to it. That situation can only happen if the workers control the means of production and use it for their own needs.
if the government benefited by solving the problem they would have already done it.
Same for capitalists.
Individuals cannot change anything because they bow to the will of those two groups and do nothing themselves. You do not need money to use those empty houses, you simply must work together with other workers to subvert the power of money and the government.
Capitalism is inherently the economics of sacrifice. Anyone who supports it is a murderer as far as I am concerned.
What is really perverse about this is that our police is working together with these companies to make sure the waste is not salvaged.
Companies of course do not want that because they want to sell their new products, but society has to take care of disposing the waste while not using the remaining potential in it.
capitalism cannot exist without the state. The more dependant the workers are on the rulings of capitalists the more profit they make. Companies as a whole do want it, the massive ones at least.
a whole lot more are going to die should climate change get as bad as expected. We're talking about potentially hundreds of millions of migrants fleeing flooded coasts, severe drought, catastrophic storms and societal collapse.
and the alt-right profits off of denying it. Look at how disgusting capitalism is