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]