Edmond Dantesk

Maybe if everyone had access to roughly the same wealth, market economy could be a good method of balancing economy ?

Not sure I agree with everything, let me rephrase this.

The way I see it, capitalism is a way of organizing an economic system that is based on accumulation of wealth (capital). Instead of sitting idle, capital is injected back into the economy through investment, with the promise of a juicy return on investment (and also, it gives power to those who own capital for they decide who gets investment).

For this juicy ROI to be possible, economic growth is a necessity - you can’t give back more to your lenders if what you did with the investment didn’t generate more value than the investment itself. So economic growth is at the very heart of capitalism.

When the market comes to a saturation point, growth starts to slow down. So you have two options:

1. open new markets, expanding the economic sphere (either geographically or in new segments of life)
2. make disposable products, through engineering (planned obsolescence) or advertisement (you need the new iPhone, believe me)

In the end, I don’t see consumerism as an ideal for a society, but rather the logical consequence of an economic system reified as an ideal. It doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t exist in another economic model, but I don’t think it can be separated from capitalism.

You are describing market economy, not capitalism.

How would you envision capitalism without consumerism ? I fail to see how capitalism would work without mass consumption.

This is wrong on so many levels … Leaving aside the trollish sociopathic nature of the comment, the billion who will die does not pollute much, so it won’t make much difference for those who survive and keep on gulping fossils and materials.

Maybe we should, but I’m not sure we can - because one (nuclear + desalination) acts as a disincentive to the other (actually chaning practice).

Also, building a nuclear reactor takes a lot of time (do we have it ?), changing agricultural practices can start right now and scale progressively.

… or maybe switch to a less water intensive form of agriculture ?

Edit : I mean, how sustaining a wasteful practice with a huge wasteful infrastructure is progress ?

Just to be sure this is sarcasm, right ?

That could be an approach, but as a leftist I would argue that leftist ideologies are not necessarily ecology-friendly. For example the soviet economy was not capitalist but very extractivist and destructive nonetheless.

I like the notion of conviviality as defined by Ivan Illich. A technique is convivial if it serves humankind and not a small elite. It is convivial if I can choose to live without it …

Hey there. New member, freshly registered.

I would say that the biggest threat to a solarpunk community like this one is greenwashing. More specifically, I’m thinking about techno-solutionism - a devious form of magical thinking that lets us think that tech is going to solve everything.

It is okay to share news about the latest technological advancement, to marvel at the ever lowering price of solar energy. But if it leads people to think that we can just replace fossil with another energy source and keep our societies and economic structures as is, this is toxic.

And I get that if you get enthusiastic about some tech and post it here, but then someone starts raining on your parade in the comment section, that person could easily be disqualified as a doomer.

How can we foster a sane debate about technology in this community ? Honestly I don’t know, but I’m eager to try!

All the best,