this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
42 points (100.0% liked)
Solarpunk BreadTube
1438 readers
1 users here now
A place to post Solarpunk, Leftist, and Anarchist Videos!
Content that glorifies or apologizes for authoritarianism is not allowed.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I enjoy Benn's videos, but it's a bit odd that he doesn't quite see that all of the negative effects he points out throughout the video are naturally caused by the logical end-point of capitalist incentives.
As poVoq points out, he appears to be pretty well off from his music and youtube career, which may be causing him to stop short of the logical conclusion due to ultimately not wanting to 'lose' his accumulated wealth were capitalism to be abolished, sort've a "Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" situation, perhaps, which may explain why he seems to just want return of FDR-style regulated capitalism, without seeming to understand that it justs kicks the can down the road, and we likely don't have time, climate-wise, to have another few decades of slightly more regulated capitalism.
The thing is, we could have capitalism that's extremely regulated.
Imagine antitrust actually enforced so there's 10 competing search engines all better than modern day Google. Or there's ten YouTube sized clones all competing for content creators and not one big winner dictating terms.
Or instead of one crappy windows 11, that's ten competing OSes that have to work together on ISO standardized hardware and drivers that are shared to every OS vendor.
A capitalist democracy could regulate that every single business be required run off renewable energy in ten years and put a huge chunk of tax incentives towards building out that capacity that's spread across tens of thousands of small green energy producers. It could legislate that fossil fuels will become illegal in 10 years with extreme incentives each year leading up to try to speed up the timeline.
Such a democracy could also allow real unions, and since the anti-trust enforcement keeps the companies small, the unions can be small and local as well, reducing administrative bloat.
Instead of three huge pharma companies, there could be thousands of small competitive ones all trying to produce the best medicines, and when they are developed a perpetual license could be bought by the FDA after it passes clinical trials. The FDA could then license that formula to thousands of small drug manufacturers who offer them generically to the American people at a competitive price.
There's such a huge gap between unrelated capitalism and regulated that even moving halfway between what we do now and full state control of all industry would have incredible improvements.
When companies are only a few hundred people at most with a strong union, you won't have CEOs earning 300x the average employee. You won't have companies sucking every worker dry trying to pump up their stock prices. It will chill the stock market significantly because those unions in small companies will demand a fair share of the profits. If the company doesn't play ball they'll quit and either start their own or join one of the dozens of competitors.
We really don't have competitive capitalism right now, everything is owned by a few huge corporations that use their size to squeeze every person in this country to pump higher stock prices.
The issue with the concept of competitive capitalism is that history has shown us that, across all cultures and governments, it does not appear feasible to reign in capitalism permanently. In a society where profit motive and power hierarchies exist, I would put forward that it is inevitable that society will become corrupted in the interests of those at the top of the hierarchies.
This is why I previously said FDR style reforms would only be kicking the can down the road. It may indeed make like more bearable compared to what was happening before, but it does not solve the root cause of why things keep slipping back into corporate oligarchies.
The US was on the verge of a revolution in the late 20's/early 30's due to how much power corporations and the wealthy had been able to obtain over all of society, the exploitation of normal people had reached a point of being unbearable. FDR's reforms was ultimately a way to placate the working class by easing the corporate boot from everyone's necks a bit without eliminating the power hierarchies that were previously in place. Shareholders, the rich, corporations, were all able to continue to profit and build wealth, just a little bit slower since they couldn't murder union members quite so easily then (and believe me, even that slight reduction pissed them off enough to plan a coup).
But because the hierarchy was not removed, because their wealth accumulation and labor exploitation was able to continue, they were able to slowly but surely corrupt almost every public office and get laws changed in their favor to the detriment of us all. That is the fundamental flaw of capitalist democracies, there is virtually no way to permanently prevent that corruption from taking place, as the structure of that society fundamentally encourages the corruption and concentration of power to progress.
Even with a huge reset with the types of reforms you're talking about; it would certainly be an improvement, but it will only be a matter of time before it backslides. And if we bring in climate, the issue remains that capitalism, no matter how regulated, requires infinite growth to continue, and infinite growth, even temporarily regulated, simply isn't compatible with a habitable biosphere.
If we're thinking big like banning fossil fuels, breaking up all corporations into tiny ones, and boosting union support, then I have to ask; Why stop there?
1936 Spain showed us that a totally egalitarian non-hierarchical society is quite possible, and to all but the rich and powerful, massively preferable.
We can have all basic human needs like healthcare, housing, food, and transportation provided to everyone for free. We can abolish corporations and shareholders entirely, and instead have all businesses be worker owned cooperatives. We could even abolish money and instead distribute limited resources like some food banks now do, perhaps combined with a federated computer system taking inspiration from Chile's Cybercyn to assist.
If we structured society that way instead, none of us would have any bosses, none of us would have to spend most of our lives working for the benefit of a few, most of our material worries would be completely eliminated. With all of the automation available with today's technology, we could easily arrange society to where everyone voluntarily contributes maybe 3 months out of the year helping to keep those basic human needs available to everyone, with the rest of the year off to do with as you please; spend time with family, perform research, have fun with friends, write a book, create art, invent things, repair things, explore on a sailboat, etc.
I believe we need to aim far higher than just reforming capitalism again like we did 100 years ago. We have to dismantle the hierarchies that enable our exploitation and societal corruption, and to prevent the destruction of the planet, as capitalism simply does not allow for economic degrowth, nor for humans and the planet to prosper.