How exactly do you get rid of 3M? They make so many chemicals necessary for modern consumer products that they are an irrevocable part of the global economy. There is no substitute for 3M. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually supply Intel, AMD, and other high-tech companies with chemicals necessary for photo-lithography. This is before we even get to what they supply to the military-industrial complex. Even if they don't make the end products I am certain they produce the necessary chemical precursors for so many industries that there would be no way to do anything about whatever crimes they have committed against nature.
It doesn't matter how much people complain about these companies. Their existence is a necessary evil because of how the global economy is structured.
They didn’t say to let the government run it. Make the patents/trade secrets public domain and sell off the physical assets in open auctions. Someone would buy up the profitable manufacturing lines that aren’t known to be as harmful.
except we live in a capitalistic nightmare, the solution proposed is textbook free market and socialism would have not created this nightmare to begin with.
people on HN regularly confuse state capitalism with socialism and I can't wrap my head around on why.
the two systems couldn't be more different and actually the USSR was not socialist, Stalin was not socialist, that's the biggest fabrication in modern human history.
Wanna find what socialism actually looks like? Look at the kibbutzim in Israel.
> their relationship with pollution and their environment
turns out they had a pretty marginal role in it, compared to the grand total, except maybe the first generation of nuclear weapons USSR produced, that were sealed off and very hard, if not impossible, to defuse.
Anyway communism and socialism are not exactly the same thing, you can't put them together in the same basket and can't generalize. Communism in Italy was not the same as communism in Cuba which was not the same as communism in East Germany which was not the same as communism in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Congo etc
> In a capitalist systems at least there are incentives to get businesses to create better systems over time
I would gladly see some proof that one does produce the incentive (and the incentive produces a radical change for the better) while the other doesn't.
My opinion is that socialism does not scale too well when the community becomes too big, but capitalism produces inherently more distortions and inequalities that need to be addressed in a never ending vice cycle of crisis that hit hard the poor and virtually spares the wealthy.
Anyway my comment was more on the line of "socialism is not what people usually think it is or associate it with in the USA (or the west)"
America called it a socialist system because it wanted to defame and demonize socialism. The Soviet Union called their government socialist because that was a popular and celebrated term in Europe, despite totalitarian control having nothing to do with true, democratic socialism (where workers are also the owners and have democratic control over their workplace and government).
As Noam Chomsky pointed out, it was state capitalism run by a fascist regime, fascists that when they ruled non so-caledd socialist countries, the west, but I should more correctly say the USA and the UK, admired because in their view (and the propaganda) they defeated socialism and communism. In truth the people of the Soviet Union had no control over the means of production or control over their lives and were essentially slaves. It would be the same as if Stalin came to power in America, created a fascist police state, used coercive force to protect criminal banks, evicted people unjustly from their homes, suppressed protests and broke up unions, then lavished massive subsidies on big companies, gave tax breaks to the rich, allowed large corporations to pay nothing in taxes while cutting programs to help the poor, rigged all their elections with the aid of corporate media, and then proudly called this a "free-market capitalist and democratic system that represents the will of the people."
In other words, just because politicians often appropriate popular words for their own twisted means, that doesn't make what they say true.
To me, an Italian that looks at the American politics from afar, sounds not dissimilar to Trump's manifesto and some parts not too far from what we associate the USA with here, today.
They had a marginal role compared to the west only in so far as they didn't produce as much as we did in the west.
But relatively compared to the west they were absolute swine and had no accountability towards their population.
The proof is in the very article we are discussing here. This would never happen in north korea or former soviet union.
You are trying to come up with some redefinition of terms. We all know what communism is, we know what socialism is, we know what capitalism is, we even know what social democratic nations look like (Grew up in one) we also know that most western countries are mixed economies.
I am not sure why you are trying to make up some argument there.
But it all boils down to accountability. In a system where the government is in control of the market it has less incentives as there is nothing that punishes them where as in a system where the companies is accountable to their citizens and then citizens are backed by the government there is a much better incentive structure. Furthermore in market driven systems the companies have an incentive in improving their product on all it's axis as that improves not only their bottom line but also their ability to compete with others.
Noan Chomsky lived in academia his whole life and never had to actually be accountable to any of the many wrong things he claimed.
> They had a marginal role compared to the west only in so far as they didn't produce as much as we did in the west
Yep, exactly, they had a marginal role.
> This would never happen in north korea or former soviet union
Those are not socialist countries though, just plain old dictatorships. It would also not happen in Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain or any other fascist dictatorship supported by the US.
> We all know what communism is, we know what socialism is
My point: I don't think most on HN do.
> I am not sure why you are trying to make up some argument there.
Because socialism is not what the first comment was implying it is. And socialism doesn't mean State capitalism USSR style.
What is the role of the Arab countries in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist?
What is the role of the capitalistic countries such as the USA in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist too???
The argument presented is a fallacy, not supported by facts and it does not even present the argument correctly.
To be perfectly clear
> you live in a capitalist society not some socialist nightmare. Giving it to the government would be much much much worse.
That whole sentence is one big straw man.
- The opposite of capitalist society is not "some socialist nightmare"
- a capitalist society is not the opposite of a nightmare
- socialist doesn't mean "giving it to the government"
- giving it to the government is not proven to be worse, it is in fact the opposite, we are specifically commenting on "3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public". Because the public, the government, is the one in charge of not letting these kinds of things happen. This story is proof against the private sector, not the opposite, which, again, is a "No true Scotsman" at this point.
To be even more clear, no government would kill its people to profit and even if they did, sooner or later the people would overthrown it.
But a private company will without doubt do it, using every trick in the book to cover up their responsibilities, because they do not respond to the people.
We have tons of evidence in support of the thesis.
And that's why we have laws to avoid it and agencies devoted to controlling that nothing like that happens.
Unfortunately they can be powerless against corporations with huge budgets and reach.
> Noan Chomsky lived in academia
This is called ad hominem. Noam Chomsky is a highly respected researcher, you should disprove his works, which are public and available to everyone BTW, if you really believe he's wrong, not attack the person.
They had a marginal role because they were less productive. As a percentage of how much they produced it was much higher.
North Korea is communist.
Soviet Union was communist.
Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
Socialism means the government owning the means of production and the more you want the government to control it the more socialist you are so yes it was.
The only strawman is the one you are making. No country is purely capitalist or purely communist but the west is more capitalist than it's not, north korea is more socialist and communist than it's not.
The opposite of a capitalist society is exactly that which is why people often flee from those countries and towards more capitalist countries.
And yes socialist means leaving the means of production to government. The more the government interfere the more socialist. Most people understand this concept.
"To be even more clear, no government would kill its people to profit and even if they did, sooner or later the people would overthrown it."
Ahh yeah you tell that to the Kulags who got killed by Stalin.
No it's called a fact. Noam Chomskys contribution have been to academia nothing else.
> They had a marginal role because they were less productive
This is a straw man.
They were not less productive, they were less pollution intensive.
One does not imply the other.
Iraq is surely less productive than us, the west, and yet they are one of the most polluted countries in the World.
> Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
North Korea is not communists, it claims to be, but it's not. Just like the USA claim to be a democracy of the people but are an oligopoly run but white, wealthy, anglo-saxon men, and technically was born as a republic, not a democracy, the founding fathers abhorred democracy.
Communism means a lot of things, a dictatorship run by the son of the former ruler, called the Prince, by means of dynasty, with absolute and undisputable power, is not communist.
USSR was not communist, they never established the ground rules that define what a communist nation is.
One cannot simply claim to be communist and do nothing of the things that being communist imply.
As two professors of Economics (Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick) at the University of Massachusetts put it
the 20th century's great ideological schism actually pitted the private capitalism of the West against the "state capitalism" of the USSR. "The struggle between communism and capitalism never happened," says Wolff. "The Soviets didn't establish communism. They thought about it, but never did it."
Under a true communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials.
> The opposite of a capitalist society is exactly
a non capitalistic society. that's all we can derive from this sentence. but, as the story teaches us, people have confused free market capitalism (which is not really free market BTW, far from it, it's more like a monopolistic or oligopolistic market) with capitalism and state capitalism (the opposite of the free market) with communism.
We live in impure systems, USA just plainly refuse to even mention the name "socialism" but it doesn't mean they've built a better system, just different, with different warts, that are less evident because they're actually are the ruling country of the World and their propaganda is the strongest one. But if WW2 went differently, Germany could be at the same spot and nobody would notice any difference. Starting from the fact that many prominent nazis went to work for the USA, first and foremost, Wernher von Braun. The man who made a decisive contribution (together with "The Huntsville Germans") to win the space race for the USA.
> And yes socialist means leaving the means of production to government
Nope, it wants the the people (not the government) to own the means of production and nope it does not want the government more involved, it wants the people more involved because everything is fairly and equally shared, including the decisions.
More government and more layers is exactly why scholars say that the USSR was not communist: socialism wanted to abolish social classes, social differences and hierarchical structures of government and power.
> Ahh yeah you tell that to the Kulags who got killed by Stalin.
that's another straw man.
they have been overthrown when they lost support of the people.
the fact that many were killed, doesn't mean that the majority was against it.
USA have caused the death of supposedly (estimates are hard, but usually not far from the truth) tens of millions of people in their modern history (post WW1) and yet people are still with them.
An article from Washington Post "Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests" [1] while according to The Wilson Center "18 million people passed through the work camps. While approximately 1.6 million died, a large number were released and reintegrated into Soviet society." [2]
We used to do this. Companies getting their charters revoked used to be something that wasn't uncommon.
Unless you make the punishments for this an existential threat, it's just a cost of doing business.