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While I think the space billionaires have gotten their timelines way out of order and I say that we must fix climate & sustainability before even looking to the stars, I do want future generations to get there eventually.
Earth is limited even with perfect care because
Yeah, yeah, even with the stars our destination, spacetime itself is limited. But when youâre in a little room and youâre working on something good, you might need a bigger room.
Some refer to Star Trekâtype post-scarcity fiction as fantasies about accumulating capital forever.
I know the ten char string âcapitalismâ can mean a couple of different things but sometimes I wanna make a distinction between private ownership concentration of resources & means-of-production vs communal, shared stewardship of them. Economics and ecology have the same root: learning about how to take care of the big old household called Earth, and if we learn to share we can make it better.
As you know, market capitalism has a memory leak bug where what seems like resources is actually stealing from the future. That is not an inherent quality of all investment. If I tend to a garden Iâm spending effort now to make things better in the future. Itâs not the same.
Ideas like these is why I still more often say âsustainableâ than âdegrowthâ. People email me pointing out very specific definitions of âdegrowthâ formulated such that I can certainly get behind and advocate for them. A detanglement from unregulated market capitalismâs inherent dependence on reckless illusory âgrowthâ. Yes please and yesterday!
But if âdegrowthâ is a synonym for neglect and decay, then not so much.
To get to post-scarcity we need to improve societyâs awareness of whatâs truly scarce. Thatâs what market capitalism doesnât do; it treats whatâs limited as if it were endless and whatâs endless as if it were limited.
Renewable doesnât mean infinite
I donât think we have a substantial disagreement here, but I do want to justify my terminology.
Iâm not trying to take away your definition from you; you were the original speaker in the thread and you knew what you meant; language is just a map and the real territory is the ideas. If you wanna have a thread where, in that particular thread, âcapitalismâ as a word applies to communally owned stewardship of shared resources, thatâs not something I wanna try to stop or argue against since Iâve taken a life vow to not argue semantics.
All I can do is argue for the idea itself, the idea of communally owned stewardship of shared resources.
Capital is wealth in a form to amplify or accelerate the production of wealth.
Right. Itâs means-of-production, like a field or a tree or a machine.
The most relevant reason here why I like that framing is that Iâve long been concerned with overproduction and waste as central problems. [...] Long story short, real scarcity hasnât been our main problem for a long time, but artificial scarcity has.
Here is where I want more nuance. Here are a couple of categories I donât wanna do without in my mental model of the situation:
We have artificial scarcity like copyright or artificially sterile crop seeds.
We have wasteful resource distribution where some are without the resources they need whereas others have more than they can use and they stockpile it and a lot of stuff ends up destroyed or spoiled or in landfills.
There are some overlapping subcategories of that: mismanagement, skewed incentives, system problems (âbugsâ, market failures), and outright greed.
We also do have some real scarcity namely eco system limits. Weâve run up against one of those limits: how much CO2e we can dump into the atmosphere. (The whole delusional âpeak oilâ BS was such a horrorshow since what ended up being the limit wasnât what was the ground, it was what could go into the sky and the oceans.)
MĂ©szĂĄrosâs formulation fits with John Bellamy Fosterâs discussions of capitalism as a metabolic rift.
I realize that this might be a minor point but I just wanna be clear that I do not agree with this view.
I like a view of market capitalism that zooms out a little and donât just look at âoh, ownership of means-of-production is concentrating and the wealth gaps are increasingâ and the consequences of that, I also wanna look at the entire network of processes and incentives that cause that.
Reworking how ownership of means-of-production works is a way to foundationally and radically disperse these concentrations.
In one situation, one flower in the meadow has all the bees. It is overstarved whereas all other flowers are underserved.
In the other situation the flowers in the meadow have a shared access to pollination.
Ecosystems are often described as cycles; capital accumulation is fundamentally opposed to them.
Here I want to disagree in the strongest terms I can.
Itâs because of cycles that market capitalism (privately owned means of production and resources distributed by a quid-pro-quo market) is so broken. Market capitalism contains several very strong feedback loops; it focuses in on exploitable loopholes and digs digs digs. Thatâs what messing up everything.
Life itself isnât always designed to be a most homeostatic paradise. Sometimes systems are like a plague of locusts sucking the fields dry.
Sustainable management of collectively owned means-of-production also needs cycles.
The only term that makes me think of ending cycles, thatâs degrowth. Thatâs what we want when it comes to capitalismâs vicious exploitation loops, as you agree here:
Second, a lot of the transformative work we need to do to survive will involve literally dismantling things.
Yes, both processes and physical objects.
But I donât then want humanity to just rot on the vine after that. Managing cycles and increasing awareness of cycles and protocols is what I want.
So anyway, of course sustainability, properly understood, should be the goal.
I do appreciate you saying that explicitly.
I feel talking about degrowth directly counters the assumption that we need to keep accumulating capital.
I understood. And I wanted to disagree with that specifically since further refinement and improvement of means of production is something I donât oppose; I even advocate for it. With better meta-awareness of protocol and ecosystems (although I think youâll agree on this: a lot of the time, âproducing with awareness for ecosystemsâ means getting out of the way and letting nature do nature things without micromanaging it to death like diking out peatlands and stuff).
A corollary: growth is talked about constantly, as a goal in all sorts of circumstances, even when it makes no sense.
Right, and I have criticized that many times. But here was an instance of arguing against something good just because it could be defined as âgrowthâ and the justification for it being bad came across as âbecause all things that could be called âgrowthâ are badâ.
A carrot grows in the garden and thatâs not bad. It becomes bad when we deplete the soil with monocrops and it becomes worse when we then try to compensate for that depletion with nitrogen fertilizers.
Third, âsustainableâ is a word used extensively in greenwashing campaigns.
Yes. As is green and ecological and recycle and reduce and reuse and plant-based and many other good things.
Greenwashing is one of the biggest challenges weâre facing, actually. Itâs so shockingly evil to me that it can happen, and that it can happen to the extent that it does, and thatâs why we need to change our economics away from this market system that rewards evil acts.
Fighting over language (rather than even concepts, let alone material reality) is a mugâs game
Youâre right. For the most part I do align myself with the degrowth crowd and their slogans as opposed to trying to insist on âsustainableâ; but this very discussion is one case where you seemed to have taken the ideas conveyed by âdegrowthâ very literally.
There is a liâl bit of if-by-whiskey risk here:
âWe need degrowth and by degrowth I mean all these bad things!â
âWhoah, hold on, some of those bad things sound pretty bad!â
âNo, I only said degrowth and as everyone knows, degrowth only means these specific good things!â
We were talking about some specific ideas and concepts from âfully automated space communismâ and other forms of Star Trekâstyle fiction. Thatâs what you were criticizing and I was defending.
Fourth, a lot of liberal policies folds âsustainableâ technologies into a general campaign for growth. In particular, several administrations have specifically focused on renewable energy sources in addition to burning hydrocarbons.
You are right. I oppose that:
When the EU wanted to crank up solar
Finally, Iâve increasingly questioned stagism, which I see as rooted in an idea that once we reach some level of production, that we will then have overcome scarcity.
I certainly see some obstacles that we need to solve before doing other things. In the short term, weâre hindered by:
I disagree with the idea that we should build a world such that life can never leave Earth. Thatâs not what I want. I wanna send out some silver seeds into that starry night. Not now. After global warming is in check.
Not all systems that evolve âin stagesâ are automatically good; but donât affirm the consequent either; pretty much all systems evolve in stages. I donât think we can solve this by going backwards. I donât wanna Make Anarchoprimitivism Great Again; I wanna increase understanding and awareness about systems, processes and protocols, and making humanity better at thinking and meta-thinking. Letâs take care of this liâl blue marble in a thought-through wayâ„ïž