Well argued and cogent! And a good as it gets compulsive argument for a change of direction?

That direction can improve the average lot without killing the very thing that made capitalism work; individual incentives and entrepreneurial innovation!

And here I'm referring to cooperative capitalism as the essential model and something as simple as simply destroying poverty in all its forms a guises, wherever we find it!

And taking every opportunity to recycle whatever can be recycled?

Thus in human terms, we replace volume with margins, where inherently better off folk, replace the sheer volume of misery that used to be the economy, and where absolutely essential recycling becomes the most successful way to get rich!

Simply put, in a world deliberately created where nobody needs to be poor to make the world go round, nobody is poor!

And where the bottom rung in the socioeconomic ladder is empty, all those immediately above have no other choice than step up!

I mean trickle down has been a dismal failure that has just widened the gap, put more and more of our finite resources in fewer and fewer hands, with disastrous consequences!

So why not try a bit of force up geyser economics!?

Take a thousand people who earn a dollar a day, and their total daily spending power is just a thousand dollars!

However if they earn ten dollars a day, their daily spending power is a power to ten, ten thousand dollars.

It's an absolute absurdity to believe making ordinary folk less well off by the application of truly asinine policy, is a road to riches for some; but is a self defeating nonsense!

Eventually even the most privileged in this trickle down model will run out of folk to fleece or the resources that enable that and the ever downward spiral to the lowest common denominator to continue, and a close run thing as to which will come first!?
Rhrosty.

For your homework, study notes 1-10.

Is this really a goal you want to achieve: "10. An eco-socialist economy would be characterized by a strong emphasis on the local and the regional, and it would strongly restrict long-distance trade.2 It would be characterized by a much higher use of labor-intensive technologies (today's high labor productivity is essentially the result of undesirably high resource consumption in capital-intensive technologies)3, a much lower level of division of labor,4 and a high degree of self-sufficiency."

So, you want to take us back to the dark-ages then?

Bruno, until you have
a) understood, and
b) refuted
the economic calculation argument, you have nothing. You are simply spouting slogans and gibberish, and have no understanding of the issues.

To translate it into the moron level that even a socialist can understand, it means the only results you can get from the system you contend for, can only be worse from the standpoint of your own definition of a successful outcome.

Moron.

Got that refutation of the economic calculation argument there yet, feller?

It's idiotic rants like this article that give ecological sustainability a bad name. Indeed they also give socialism a bad name, though they're far from unique in that.

I'm not going to point out every error; that would take too long. But I will mention a few of the most glaring:

1. There is no insurmountable barrier. Most of our planet's resources are extremely abundant, and substitutes exist for the ones that aren't. Although in any case it's possible to have economic growth with out any growth in resource use, which makes the whole argument moot.

2. Unless we have achieved absolute perfection (which we clearly haven't) there are things worth doing that haven't been done yet. So while there are people unemployed, there is much unexploited growth potential yet that could be exploited.

3. We are a very very very very long way from the limits. Do you have any idea how much energy our planet receives from the sun every day?

And the claim that "In all technologies, potential for efficiency increase is limited and subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns" is extremely dubious. Diminishing marginal returns normally occur when something else becomes the limiting factor, but there's no suggestion as to what this new limiting factor would be.

Where dense energy is required, energy dense compounds can be synthesised. This requires lots of energy, but the sun supplies us with lots of energy.

I also note a failure to even consider nuclear energy despite its very high density.

If we really face a choice between “Eco-socialism or barbarism”, and this article describes eco-socialism, I think I’ll opt for barbarism.

Dr Kern
As I share many of your ideals, I hesitate to put a dampener on your enthusiasm; but your Green version is the latest in utopias stretching back for thousands of years, all of which have failed at the first hurdle- “concrete exit strategies”. Your analysis of capitalism (including the potentially catastrophic “continuous capital accumulation”) is substantial, but you dismiss Marx too readily. Capital is beyond economists, but you might useful his critique of Utopian Socialists

Bruno is just another in a long line of misguided fools, with too much book & not enough practical learning, who want to force others to live by their ideas.

We have democracy, with all it's faults, to protect us from these fools.

I remember in the 70's, the hippies postulating alternative economic models to capitalism. Many of them lived the dream: many of those that didn't die from drug overdoses, or from the effects of communicable diseases, actually became wealthy by doing nothing more than biding their time. In the end they became model capitalists, profiting from the sale of the scarce resource called land!

The largest plunder of the capitalists is awaiting. The poor! This course is yet to run. Welfare makes up about a third of government expenditure, if the pin was pulled on all welfare payments overnight, what would be the result? A lot of noise, and nobody to listen! Until Coles complained of course. But the markets could also be manipulated overnight, making all resources triple in price.
This would create a new poor class to be exploited. This would also be extremely lucrative, since the new poor would predominate in home ownership. These homes could be claimed as recompense to defaulted mortgages, and resold to a new wealthy elite from China!

No...capitalism is self perpetuating!

Hi Leslie,

A year or so ago, I had another look at Marx's 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' and for the life of me, I couldn't see how, with a bit of tweaking, his notion of Socialism-in-Practice in the twentieth century couldn't avoid his criticisms of Utopian versions.

With 150 years of bitter experience since then, give or take, in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, etc., etc., perhaps totalling many hundreds of years of 'Scientific Socialism', we can now see that ANY blueprint for 'The Good Society' is bound to turn fascist, or at least authoritarian, since any dissenters - and there would be a constant stream of them - have to be 'subtracted' in order to keep the blueprint pure.

And yet, from the very outset of every 'socialist' revolution, the 'unchangeable' blueprint is constantly changed, although nobody is allowed to say so. The group which seizes power - let's, for argument's sake, laughingly call it a 'Communist Party' - must rule with an iron fist from the outset, with absolutely no tolerance for dissent, i.e., dissent from the tenets of the 'Good Society'. Ever. Even though reality inevitably becomes, as everybody experiencing it knows, a travesty of 'the good society'.

No wonder early commentators, Sorel, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, etc., could praise both Mussolini's fascism AND Lenin's Bolshevism in the same breath: they were two sides of the same coin. The Utopian notion of a Magic Blueprint, beloved of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini and the Nazis, was dreadfully flawed from the beginning. Genuine social change to improve the lives of the masses of ordinary people will never work that way. There's not cutting of Gordian knots in the long haul.

Rhosty,

When you write,

"It's an absolute absurdity to believe making ordinary folk less well off by the application of truly asinine policy, is a road to riches for some; but is a self defeating nonsense!"

are you having a go at Shorten, the AWU and Cleanevent ? Good on you !

Cheers,

Joe

@thinkabit

You consider that theses 10 takes us back to the dark ages. Have a look at the idea of the Circular Economy - a number of the larger corporations are pursuing that idea precisely for the sort of reasons advocated in this article. Corporate players like Lever and Toyota are in it for the long haul; they recognize that the current model will not enable them to secure their long term future.

@ Aidan - in 1972 the club or Rome produced the limits of Growth. The CSIRO had a look at their predictions a few years ago - it seems from their analysis that we are reaching the limits as predicted.

@Rhian -no need to opt for barbarism it is already here witness the middle east.

Are we running out of resources ?

1. A massive field of natural gas, thirty trillion cubic metres of it, has been found off the coast of Egypt. This has miffed the Israelis with their recent find of almost as much just of THEIR coast. Of c0ourse, the Israeli find miffed the Saudis. It would be roughly as big as the Canning Basin deposits found in recent years in Western Australia. The project to develop similar fields off WA's north coast have been shelved with the cancellation of any development of on-shore James Point processing facility.

2. BHP's Olympic Dam project has mostly been shelved; it would have been by far the largest copper etc. mine in the world.

3. Iron ore projects in WA are coming on stream, but others are being put on hold for the time being: there are vast deposits found but yet to be developed.

4. Like them or not, there ARE vast deposits of coal in eastern Australia.

So what resources are we running out of ? Fish, yes. Water, perhaps. But capitalism - for its own selfish purposes - drives technological innovation, and grain production has perhaps doubled across the world in the last forty years; maybe more ? Somebody surely knows better than I do.

And vast areas of the planet have barely been developed: what sort of production could be achieved if Africa had the infrastructure of, say, Australia ?

As for some sort of back-to-nature socialism, or indeed any form of socialism (by the way, it was uncanny, Bruno, how some of your thought bubbles mimicked the last decades of the Soviet Union), why do people think that their 'brilliant' 'new' ideas haven't been tried before ? Again and again ?

{TBC]

[continued]

It's appropriate to think of Communist Parties as Mafia organisations, similar organisational structures, attitudes to morality, brutality and inherent fascism. I don't mean that they get around in fedoras, speak Sicilian and say 'Forgedaboudit' or 'badabing' a lot.

But in their practices they are indeed similar, since both forms of organisation are based on patron-client systems from top to bottom, on cliques who get to the top by violence, temporary alliances with other cliques, the super-exploitation of the people in their thrall, the ready recourse to hit-men (if on very different scales: the Mafia was small beer compared to Stalin or Mao), the easy attitude to notions of right and wrong, the utter opportunism of their actions.

There were some brilliant articles on communist parties as patronage machines written in the eighties, if one is interested.

No, capitalism is what we are stuck with. Cruel, grasping, unequal and very imperfect as it may be, like democracy, its uneasy mate, it's probably the best economic system around. I wouldn't be surprised if even Marx would concede that, if he could come back for a day.

Even if natural resources do not end, it is a wonderful dream to live a simpler life in a small-scale caring society.

But rather than praising the quality of such life, the author has chosen to use the stick over the carrot, that of dwindling resources - and is correctly being criticised for his errors in estimating our available resources.

Smaller and simpler societies can work and entice participation when they share common spiritual goals - materialistic goals on the other hand, which both capitalism and conventional-socialism embrace, call for a larger-scale industrialised and complicated society.

Due to today's lack of common spiritual goals, the ideal of smaller and simpler societies must remain just a dream. Some, the author among them, are (understandably) so desperate that they pray for the forces of nature, including resource-scarcity, to hasten the collapse of the existing large-scale industrial society, but that's not on the cards for a while yet, in fact for thousands of years to come as we currently live in the dark age of Kali-Yuga. Rather than using scare-tactics for trying to change others, the proper, positive and honourable way to live this dream, is to shed one's body and die now, then be reborn thousands of years hence in a different age when this dream-lifestyle is the norm.