Edmond Dantesk
Money is not inheritly bad, just think of it as a tool to make accounting easier
Is it though ? Not saying it is inherently bad, but in itself it forces a market value on everything - which is a rather limited proxy to usage value. In that sense money in itself is not neutral, not “just a tool”, as it shapes how exchanges are made in a society.
We shouldn’t be so angry that we think something as broad/simple as a marketplace has no use, and should not even be attempted, in creating a sustainable society worth living in.
It looks like you are conflating market economy and capitalism. These are two different concepts, and the first one predates the second by a few millenia.
So in the end the question was about capitalism but you argued in favor of market economy.
Ministry for the future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Of course I’m making this shit up, that’s the whole point. Because I don’t know what tomorrow is made of. And I’m just pointing out that OP doesn’t know either.
He is pontificating about how things cannot change, how he got everything figured out, but in the end he is just a random guy on the internet talking out of his ass, like all of us.
Yes, and here you are also assuming “people” is a homogenous group, that the western culture you are from (aren’t you ?) is hegemonic.
But looking at how geopolitics are evolving lately, the world is increasingly multipolar, with multiple models of civilization competing. I don’t know, maybe India will wake the fuck up before us and thrive, while Europe rots and USA goes down the toilet drain?
You are passing a lot of assumptions as facts here.
But the problem is: the world won’t stop polluting, won’t stop growing its economies, won’t stop expanding.
Unless you are a time traveler, this is a belief, not a fact.
Even if the US and Europe cut their emissions and slow down, the developing world, India and China and Nigeria and Kenya, and so on, won’t. They see the standard of living in the West, they think their people deserve to live just as well, and they see we got there through unchecked resource consumption within a capitalist economic system, and how the hell do we have the right to tell those countries to stay poor for the sake of the environment when we got rich by fucking the environment?
Here you are assuming a lot about how those countries / populations might analyze the situation. Also, that the path we followed to develop is the only one, and that they are bound to follow our example. That’s quite a colonialist point of view.
So the only things that will save the world are globally organized, probably UN coordinated, technological solutions to mitigate the damage done by unchecked capitalist expansion, because we can’t stop capitalism.
If you start from the premise that there is no alternative to capitalism, that this rather young form of social organization is the end of human history, I can understand why you reach that conclusion. But don’t assume that your line of reasoning is the only logical conclusion one can reach.
True. But there has been experiments, especially around melting currencies (is that the correct English name ?).
A recent example (in French, but I guess automatic translators are good enough now ?) : https://monnaie-libre.fr/
Hey.
Most degrowth advocates I’ve seen or read in France are not talking about lifestyle changes for individuals - or at least, not without radical changes in the organization of society.
I agree that blaming poor people for driving shitty cars and living in poorly insulated buildings is stupid and counter-productive. But that’s how ecology is concieved by the ruling political class, not degrowth advocates.