creating growth only not Investment is better for a country and achieves greater economic equality

[Grassland Blue]

Continuous economic growth is predicated on there being infinite resources.

Therefore infinite growth is impossible because resources are finite.

An MIT research team produced a paper called “The Limits to Growth” focused on five basic factors that they claimed determined, and therefore ultimately limited, growth on Earth: population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production and pollution.

As resources diminish, inequality increases, more people after fewer resources makes those resources more expensive and less affordable which further concentrates resources in the hands of the owners of Capital.

Marx 5 stages of economic development were written as , slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, as we are currently at stage 3 then ultimately you can see what is coming :)

Civil war?

 

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

Continuous economic growth is predicated on there being infinite resources.

Therefore infinite growth is impossible because resources are finite.

An MIT research team produced a paper called “The Limits to Growth” focused on five basic factors that they claimed determined, and therefore ultimately limited, growth on Earth: population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production and pollution.

As resources diminish, inequality increases, more people after fewer resources makes those resources more expensive and less affordable which further concentrates resources in the hands of the owners of Capital.

Marx 5 stages of economic development were written as , slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, as we are currently at stage 3 then ultimately you can see what is coming :)

The most significant problem we face is probably global warming, so am going to focus on that in relation to your point, though this will necessitate writing one of my longer posts. So here goes.

The book depicted below came out a few months ago. Have thought about buying it but to be honest, I actually don't know enough about Marxism. Am intending to put that right by reading Gregory Claeys's Pelican introduction at some point.

Saito is a philosopher, so one might be tempted to immediately dismiss him as someone whose views are not going to be of much relevance outside of academia. But in actual fact, his publications have become bestsellers in Japan.

John Gray predicted that this would be a century of 'resource wars' in Straw Dogs. Have to say that I tend to align more with his pessimism than with what I already know about Saito.

Also, in his older book False Dawn, Gray catalogues in detail the devastation and environmental despoliation unleashed on a vast scale by the Communist experiments in Russia and China. Writing in 1998, he declares that, ‘Russia’s pollution is apocalyptic in its scale and human consequences. In the birthplace of Genghis Khan – Baley, in the Chita region of the Russian Far East – more than 95 per cent of children are mentally deficient, rates of stillbirths are five times higher than the Russian average, rates of child mortality 2.5 times higher and of Downs syndrome four times higher. Births of children with six fingers and six toes, with hare lips, wolves’ mouths, back deformities, huge heads and missing limbs are common. In Baley, radioactive sand from uranium mines which provided material for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb was used to build homes, hospitals, schools and nurseries.’

Gray even goes so far as to assert that environmental political movements that arose in response to the slow handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and which coalesced around opposition to vast dam-building projects in Siberia, were a significant internal catalyst for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

From an ecological perspective, the Marxist inspired denial that China could ever suffer from issues arising from overpopulation meant that natural resources there were overstretched, and the impact on the environment more profound than in Russia. Indeed, as Vaclav Smil has noted in his 1984 study The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China, ‘During the past 40 years, China has lost about a third of its cropland to soil erosion, desertification, energy projects (hydro stations, coal mining) and to industrial and housing construction.’ One example (cited by Gray not Smil) is particularly noteworthy: dams were constructed in China but most quickly collapsed, and when those located in Henan province broke down in 1975, this resulted in the worst damburst in history, one that killed nearly a quarter of a million people.

Set against this historical backdrop, and given that China remains a significant contributor to global warming, what could Saito’s ideas about a form of ‘degrowth communism’ possibly have to offer?

As I mentioned, haven't got his book, but I did do some digging around a while back. Firstly, he is taking inspiration from some unpublished writings of Marx which express a keen interest in the types of society that existed before the rise of capitalism, including a self-governing agricultural commune in Russia and a medieval community in Germany. According to Saito, Marx drew on these examples to forge a vision of a sustainable and egalitarian post-capitalist society, one which Saito refers to as ‘eco-socialism’. Such an outlook is therefore obviously of relevance to the “Anthropocene”, a term that was first deployed in the 1980’s by the biologist Eugene Stoermer to describe the period in which human activity has become a globally significant environmental force, impacting not only the world’s climate and biodiversity but also its basic geological structure.

Essentially, as described by Saito, Marx’s eco-socialism is based on the notion of “commons”, around the shared ownership of resources that are essential for our daily lives, such as water, heating and medical care. Before the advent of capitalism these were, Marx maintains, managed together by a community, and were accessible to everyone. The subsequent appropriation of “commons” for profit-making, with all the inequalities this creates, therefore needs reversing, especially as what accompanies this appropriation are the incessant demands, so characteristic of capitalism, for still further growth, with all its attendant adverse effects on both the environment and the continued availability of those aforementioned resources. Instead, a restoration of the former state is required and democratic systems put in place to ensure a more equitable distribution of them. What Saito seems to have in mind is the establishment of communes that are each reflective of this lifestyle.

What is clear from his analysis is that capitalism cannot achieve a balance between growth and sustainability, and this makes Saito sceptical of ‘Green New Deal‘ policies which seek to do so. For example, when interviewed about this, Saito responded as follows:

‘Consumption of energy and resources keeps increasing as an economy develops. To tackle climate change, we need to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions. But I don’t think we can manage economic growth at the same time. Those of us who live in developed countries, must find a way to slow down to steady-state, sustainable economies. If we produce large quantities of electric vehicles, or solar panels, or wind turbines, we will need to exploit limited resources, like lithium, that are mainly sourced from less developed parts of the world. I am concerned that such a situation could eventually give rise to a new form of imperialism.’

Saito therefore proposes that decarbonisation might be better achieved through shorter working hours and the prioritising of essential, “labour-intensive” work.

The ‘de-growth’ that he advocates has apparently drawn criticism from those who believe that this will necessarily entail that wealthier societies will inevitably have to tolerate much lower standards of living and a poorer quality of life, and it could additionally be argued that, even taking stock of his historical examples, Marx’s notion of “commons” could possibly be the secular equivalent of the Genesis myth, a vision of a paradisiacal society that never existed prior to capitalism and never could exist.

With respect to the former allegation, Saito admits that “People accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo period [1603-1868].” But would this necessarily be a bad thing? During that time Japan practised an isolationist foreign policy, was almost completely closed to foreign trade, and did what Western theories of scientific progress thought was impossible, namely, reversed technological evolution insofar as it reverted from the gun to the katana or samurai sword. In doing so, as the essayist and academic Noel Perrin has observed, the country demonstrated ‘that a no-growth economy is perfectly compatible with prosperity and civilised life.’ Furthermore, in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett note that, ‘If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life – in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship and community life, which really matters.’

From these remarks, it is evident that a form of Marxist eco-socialism might be realizable, even if it may not be possible to ascertain whether Marx’s idyllic “commons”-based community was anything more than a myth. Such an experiment is also very unlikely to repeat the Russian and Chinese catastrophes, that could eventually come to be perceived as having been based on a misreading of Marx. Lastly, it can be argued that if the ongoing debate about capitalist and socialist proposals for addressing climate change has a mythical component, it more plausibly resides with the capitalist insistence that their system can exist in perpetuity without eventually consuming and laying waste to the planet.

So there you go. Not sure whether this is of much interest, and personally, I just cannot see us getting it together as a species to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change. We're probably too selfish to get our act together and too unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices, and I don't exempt myself from that. But here's the cover of the book, anyway:

And here's a link to a recent interview that I haven't yet read myself:

A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis

Author of surprise hit Capital in the Anthropocene has developed his arguments in a new study of Karl Marx’s ecological thinking

www.theguardian.com

 

[TinFoilHat]

The most significant problem we face is probably global warming, so am going to focus on that in relation to your point, though this will necessitate writing one of my longer posts. So here goes.

The book depicted below came out a few months ago. Have thought about buying it but to be honest, I actually don't know enough about Marxism. Am intending to put that right by reading Gregory Claeys's Pelican introduction at some point.

Saito is a philosopher, so one might be tempted to immediately dismiss him as someone whose views are not going to be of much relevance outside of academia. But in actual fact, his publications have become bestsellers in Japan.

John Gray predicted that this would be a century of 'resource wars' in Straw Dogs. Have to say that I tend to align more with his pessimism than with what I already know about Saito.

Also, in his older book False Dawn, Gray catalogues in detail the devastation and environmental despoliation unleashed on a vast scale by the Communist experiments in Russia and China. Writing in 1998, he declares that, ‘Russia’s pollution is apocalyptic in its scale and human consequences. In the birthplace of Genghis Khan – Baley, in the Chita region of the Russian Far East – more than 95 per cent of children are mentally deficient, rates of stillbirths are five times higher than the Russian average, rates of child mortality 2.5 times higher and of Downs syndrome four times higher. Births of children with six fingers and six toes, with hare lips, wolves’ mouths, back deformities, huge heads and missing limbs are common. In Baley, radioactive sand from uranium mines which provided material for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb was used to build homes, hospitals, schools and nurseries.’

Gray even goes so far as to assert that environmental political movements that arose in response to the slow handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and which coalesced around opposition to vast dam-building projects in Siberia, were a significant internal catalyst for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

From an ecological perspective, the Marxist inspired denial that China could ever suffer from issues arising from overpopulation meant that natural resources there were overstretched, and the impact on the environment more profound than in Russia. Indeed, as Vaclav Smil has noted in his 1984 study The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China, ‘During the past 40 years, China has lost about a third of its cropland to soil erosion, desertification, energy projects (hydro stations, coal mining) and to industrial and housing construction.’ One example (cited by Gray not Smil) is particularly noteworthy: dams were constructed in China but most quickly collapsed, and when those located in Henan province broke down in 1975, this resulted in the worst damburst in history, one that killed nearly a quarter of a million people.

Set against this historical backdrop, and given that China remains a significant contributor to global warming, what could Saito’s ideas about a form of ‘degrowth communism’ possibly have to offer?

As I mentioned, haven't got his book, but I did do some digging around a while back. Firstly, he is taking inspiration from some unpublished writings of Marx which express a keen interest in the types of society that existed before the rise of capitalism, including a self-governing agricultural commune in Russia and a medieval community in Germany. According to Saito, Marx drew on these examples to forge a vision of a sustainable and egalitarian post-capitalist society, one which Saito refers to as ‘eco-socialism’. Such an outlook is therefore obviously of relevance to the “Anthropocene”, a term that was first deployed in the 1980’s by the biologist Eugene Stoermer to describe the period in which human activity has become a globally significant environmental force, impacting not only the world’s climate and biodiversity but also its basic geological structure.

Essentially, as described by Saito, Marx’s eco-socialism is based on the notion of “commons”, around the shared ownership of resources that are essential for our daily lives, such as water, heating and medical care. Before the advent of capitalism these were, Marx maintains, managed together by a community, and were accessible to everyone. The subsequent appropriation of “commons” for profit-making, with all the inequalities this creates, therefore needs reversing, especially as what accompanies this appropriation are the incessant demands, so characteristic of capitalism, for still further growth, with all its attendant adverse effects on both the environment and the continued availability of those aforementioned resources. Instead, a restoration of the former state is required and democratic systems put in place to ensure a more equitable distribution of them. What Saito seems to have in mind is the establishment of communes that are each reflective of this lifestyle.

What is clear from his analysis is that capitalism cannot achieve a balance between growth and sustainability, and this makes Saito sceptical of ‘Green New Deal‘ policies which seek to do so. For example, when interviewed about this, Saito responded as follows:

‘Consumption of energy and resources keeps increasing as an economy develops. To tackle climate change, we need to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions. But I don’t think we can manage economic growth at the same time. Those of us who live in developed countries, must find a way to slow down to steady-state, sustainable economies. If we produce large quantities of electric vehicles, or solar panels, or wind turbines, we will need to exploit limited resources, like lithium, that are mainly sourced from less developed parts of the world. I am concerned that such a situation could eventually give rise to a new form of imperialism.’

Saito therefore proposes that decarbonisation might be better achieved through shorter working hours and the prioritising of essential, “labour-intensive” work.

The ‘de-growth’ that he advocates has apparently drawn criticism from those who believe that this will necessarily entail that wealthier societies will inevitably have to tolerate much lower standards of living and a poorer quality of life, and it could additionally be argued that, even taking stock of his historical examples, Marx’s notion of “commons” could possibly be the secular equivalent of the Genesis myth, a vision of a paradisiacal society that never existed prior to capitalism and never could exist.

With respect to the former allegation, Saito admits that “People accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo period [1603-1868].” But would this necessarily be a bad thing? During that time Japan practised an isolationist foreign policy, was almost completely closed to foreign trade, and did what Western theories of scientific progress thought was impossible, namely, reversed technological evolution insofar as it reverted from the gun to the katana or samurai sword. In doing so, as the essayist and academic Noel Perrin has observed, the country demonstrated ‘that a no-growth economy is perfectly compatible with prosperity and civilised life.’ Furthermore, in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett note that, ‘If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life – in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship and community life, which really matters.’

From these remarks, it is evident that a form of Marxist eco-socialism might be realizable, even if it may not be possible to ascertain whether Marx’s idyllic “commons”-based community was anything more than a myth. Such an experiment is also very unlikely to repeat the Russian and Chinese catastrophes, that could eventually come to be perceived as having been based on a misreading of Marx. Lastly, it can be argued that if the ongoing debate about capitalist and socialist proposals for addressing climate change has a mythical component, it more plausibly resides with the capitalist insistence that their system can exist in perpetuity without eventually consuming and laying waste to the planet.

So there you go. Not sure whether this is of much interest, and personally, I just cannot see us getting it together as a species to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change. We're probably too selfish to get our act together and too unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices, and I don't exempt myself from that. But here's the cover of the book, anyway:

And here's a link to a recent interview that I haven't yet read myself:

A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis

Author of surprise hit Capital in the Anthropocene has developed his arguments in a new study of Karl Marx’s ecological thinking

www.theguardian.com

For us thick cunts is he saying were fucked?

 

[Rascal]

The most significant problem we face is probably global warming, so am going to focus on that in relation to your point, though this will necessitate writing one of my longer posts. So here goes.

The book depicted below came out a few months ago. Have thought about buying it but to be honest, I actually don't know enough about Marxism. Am intending to put that right by reading Gregory Claeys's Pelican introduction at some point.

Saito is a philosopher, so one might be tempted to immediately dismiss him as someone whose views are not going to be of much relevance outside of academia. But in actual fact, his publications have become bestsellers in Japan.

John Gray predicted that this would be a century of 'resource wars' in Straw Dogs. Have to say that I tend to align more with his pessimism than with what I already know about Saito.

Also, in his older book False Dawn, Gray catalogues in detail the devastation and environmental despoliation unleashed on a vast scale by the Communist experiments in Russia and China. Writing in 1998, he declares that, ‘Russia’s pollution is apocalyptic in its scale and human consequences. In the birthplace of Genghis Khan – Baley, in the Chita region of the Russian Far East – more than 95 per cent of children are mentally deficient, rates of stillbirths are five times higher than the Russian average, rates of child mortality 2.5 times higher and of Downs syndrome four times higher. Births of children with six fingers and six toes, with hare lips, wolves’ mouths, back deformities, huge heads and missing limbs are common. In Baley, radioactive sand from uranium mines which provided material for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb was used to build homes, hospitals, schools and nurseries.’

Gray even goes so far as to assert that environmental political movements that arose in response to the slow handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and which coalesced around opposition to vast dam-building projects in Siberia, were a significant internal catalyst for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

From an ecological perspective, the Marxist inspired denial that China could ever suffer from issues arising from overpopulation meant that natural resources there were overstretched, and the impact on the environment more profound than in Russia. Indeed, as Vaclav Smil has noted in his 1984 study The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China, ‘During the past 40 years, China has lost about a third of its cropland to soil erosion, desertification, energy projects (hydro stations, coal mining) and to industrial and housing construction.’ One example (cited by Gray not Smil) is particularly noteworthy: dams were constructed in China but most quickly collapsed, and when those located in Henan province broke down in 1975, this resulted in the worst damburst in history, one that killed nearly a quarter of a million people.

Set against this historical backdrop, and given that China remains a significant contributor to global warming, what could Saito’s ideas about a form of ‘degrowth communism’ possibly have to offer?

As I mentioned, haven't got his book, but I did do some digging around a while back. Firstly, he is taking inspiration from some unpublished writings of Marx which express a keen interest in the types of society that existed before the rise of capitalism, including a self-governing agricultural commune in Russia and a medieval community in Germany. According to Saito, Marx drew on these examples to forge a vision of a sustainable and egalitarian post-capitalist society, one which Saito refers to as ‘eco-socialism’. Such an outlook is therefore obviously of relevance to the “Anthropocene”, a term that was first deployed in the 1980’s by the biologist Eugene Stoermer to describe the period in which human activity has become a globally significant environmental force, impacting not only the world’s climate and biodiversity but also its basic geological structure.

Essentially, as described by Saito, Marx’s eco-socialism is based on the notion of “commons”, around the shared ownership of resources that are essential for our daily lives, such as water, heating and medical care. Before the advent of capitalism these were, Marx maintains, managed together by a community, and were accessible to everyone. The subsequent appropriation of “commons” for profit-making, with all the inequalities this creates, therefore needs reversing, especially as what accompanies this appropriation are the incessant demands, so characteristic of capitalism, for still further growth, with all its attendant adverse effects on both the environment and the continued availability of those aforementioned resources. Instead, a restoration of the former state is required and democratic systems put in place to ensure a more equitable distribution of them. What Saito seems to have in mind is the establishment of communes that are each reflective of this lifestyle.

What is clear from his analysis is that capitalism cannot achieve a balance between growth and sustainability, and this makes Saito sceptical of ‘Green New Deal‘ policies which seek to do so. For example, when interviewed about this, Saito responded as follows:

‘Consumption of energy and resources keeps increasing as an economy develops. To tackle climate change, we need to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions. But I don’t think we can manage economic growth at the same time. Those of us who live in developed countries, must find a way to slow down to steady-state, sustainable economies. If we produce large quantities of electric vehicles, or solar panels, or wind turbines, we will need to exploit limited resources, like lithium, that are mainly sourced from less developed parts of the world. I am concerned that such a situation could eventually give rise to a new form of imperialism.’

Saito therefore proposes that decarbonisation might be better achieved through shorter working hours and the prioritising of essential, “labour-intensive” work.

The ‘de-growth’ that he advocates has apparently drawn criticism from those who believe that this will necessarily entail that wealthier societies will inevitably have to tolerate much lower standards of living and a poorer quality of life, and it could additionally be argued that, even taking stock of his historical examples, Marx’s notion of “commons” could possibly be the secular equivalent of the Genesis myth, a vision of a paradisiacal society that never existed prior to capitalism and never could exist.

With respect to the former allegation, Saito admits that “People accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo period [1603-1868].” But would this necessarily be a bad thing? During that time Japan practised an isolationist foreign policy, was almost completely closed to foreign trade, and did what Western theories of scientific progress thought was impossible, namely, reversed technological evolution insofar as it reverted from the gun to the katana or samurai sword. In doing so, as the essayist and academic Noel Perrin has observed, the country demonstrated ‘that a no-growth economy is perfectly compatible with prosperity and civilised life.’ Furthermore, in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett note that, ‘If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life – in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship and community life, which really matters.’

From these remarks, it is evident that a form of Marxist eco-socialism might be realizable, even if it may not be possible to ascertain whether Marx’s idyllic “commons”-based community was anything more than a myth. Such an experiment is also very unlikely to repeat the Russian and Chinese catastrophes, that could eventually come to be perceived as having been based on a misreading of Marx. Lastly, it can be argued that if the ongoing debate about capitalist and socialist proposals for addressing climate change has a mythical component, it more plausibly resides with the capitalist insistence that their system can exist in perpetuity without eventually consuming and laying waste to the planet.

So there you go. Not sure whether this is of much interest, and personally, I just cannot see us getting it together as a species to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change. We're probably too selfish to get our act together and too unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices, and I don't exempt myself from that. But here's the cover of the book, anyway:

And here's a link to a recent interview that I haven't yet read myself:

A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis

Author of surprise hit Capital in the Anthropocene has developed his arguments in a new study of Karl Marx’s ecological thinking

www.theguardian.com

Love your posts mate, you put so much thought and insight into them they teach us all something.