We will not have an economic if we keep 'transitioning’ away fossil fuels to renewable energy which is simply unaffordable; subsidies alone cost is $3.4 billion annually, to say nothing of the gouging of AGL and the like.

“Postcapitalism” can only mean communism; so, talking about “building on existing movements” is nonsense

//We have the beginnings of a radically democratised new socioeconomic framework that enables increased capacity for innovation and resilience that prefigures new ecosystems for sustainable communities with solidarity that can be prototyped and defended politically at local and transnational scales.//

//It's about prefiguring, as much as is conceivable, the lives we want in the here and about maximising progressive utilisation of both ancient and modern, physical and non-physical, human and non-human potentialities.//

New ecosystems for sustainable communities with solidarity that can be prototyped? Maximising progressive utilisation of non-physical potentialities?

Dear gods.

Don't bother, folks. It's not an essay, it's a word salad.

Post-capitalism, post-carbon is the only economy that'll survive beyond the 21st century. And will be both digitized and massively automated. And necessarily, recycle everything. Even human waste will be tasked with producing methane which when scrubbed will power the domiciles that created it and forever and a day. Current insane exploitative extreme capitalism will be replaced by the extreme logic of cooperative capitalism, as opposed to simply selling or offshoring everything. Almost as if these were the last days and the future and the next generations didn't matter. Recycling will prove to be the most profitable of enterprises, especially if operated by government facilitated and funded co-ops. And give the great unwashed productive tasks they cans till do, as opposed to paying 90% of the great unwashed unemployment benefits as far into the future as the eye can see. Or just waiting until widespread revolt and rebellion turn the joint into forty thousand ungoverned tribes from what once was a robust and functional civilisation. All competing for what is left of a functional society? If we continue down the present path, everything we own or value will be traded away along with our economic sovereignty for the modern equivalent of forty pieces of silver and a few jobs and possible kickbacks? The green strategy of replacing manufacturing with tourism has resulted in once affordable places being priced beyond the means of joe average and simply can't continue! TBC. Alan B.

We can have a better future that leaves nobody behind or begging for their very survival. Or as seen elsewhere, being forced into a lifetime of crime for the same reason. And as long as politicians, good or bad are quarantined from the consequences of their decisions, good or bad. Then outcomes they alone engender will continue to serve nobody. Or foreign interlopers who would see us as tenants in our own country, with a little help from their highly placed friends. Warm and comfortable, says the frog in water being ever so slowly brought to the boil. Only to discover with the dying breath, it's far to late to jump and survive! Our future has to be a largely carbon-free one and with underpinning energy cheap enough to make recycling everything, economically viable. And therefore needs to be nuclear. Not current nuclear, but MSR and thorium. Why? Because one unit of thorium contains as much dispatchable energy a one million hydrocarbon units. I mean, just eight grams costing around a hundred dollars to both mine and refine, could conceivably power your house and car for a century as well as providing your manufactured or processed needs. And I've laid out chapter and verse, in dozens of earlier posts, how we'd earn enough money burning other folks nuclear waste very safely to pay for all of it! Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago! Won't is alive and well and working strenuously against us and the nation's best interests! Alan B.

Karun Cowper suggests, perhaps without quite realising it, a reinvention of socialism with a green tinge. Fortunately, this time around Karun does not suggest eliminating price signals or private property - only that these high-tech renewable energy powered communes will emerge of their own accord. Certainly technology has opened up a lot of areas to competition and crowd rule, with the emergence of the likes of Wikipedia. But just how these green powered communes might be of use in activities such as iron ore mining, building bridges or washing powder making - to name just a few economic activities that go on every day - is not explained. However, as Karun does not seem to be suggesting any policy changes he can be left to wait for his expected revolution. The rest of us will move on.

Cowper's ideas might work very well, if applied to a Solomon Island village of no more than 30 people. Once the population exceeds that you have just too many takers & not enough producers & the whole thing ends in starvation, as so often proved.