But nothing will come to fruit without educating the mass of people who do not have a computer or only use a computer for entertainment; It is imperative to start a grass root movement of people from all classes of society willing and determined to change, because any number of pampered middle class academics just talking to the converted on the internet will never go far.
The mass of people who are mostly suffering now and would benefit from the changes that you are proposing have no computers and probably have no money to buy your books and educate themselves to the realities of the present situation.
They will blindly follow the Establishment’s Media as they have done so far; they will not help you, they will let their masters’ bloodhounds to destroying you.
Regards and good luck.

I’ve argued over and over, whether you agree with the approach or not, that redistribution comes from reclaiming the commons either through trusts or rent on land. It would have the effect of a complete redistribution by limiting the privitization of nature.

On the other hand Max you’ve argued against the redistribution of wealth which is going to be needed in order to transform Capitalist production and to put into balance resource allocation which is current production system puts out of balance.

I think you also confuse the word “production”. As long as there are human being there is going to be production the questions are what are of the kinds of production needed in order to maintain a balanced economy, society, and environment. You have a tendency to frame production as solely the current form of wasteful Capitalist production and make your arguments against Socialism from that frame.

For example increasing the number of nurses, teachers, artists, homemakers, caregivers, etc will increase production yet at the same time be less damaging to than the current capitalist mode of production which requires comsumerism as Shabnam described.

Yes as long as your profit system is limited to what we’ve got and what far too many others in the world look to mimic.

The question to ask is not whether poor nations look to mimic the rich ones but that the rich ones FORCES and LEAVES no other options to poorer nation lest they run the risk of “regime change”. In other words the U.S. and the West uses their “wealth” and military to force Capitalism down the throats of the poor. Your tendency is to frame the issue AS IF the world has democratically chosen Capitalism. Your framing is why you tend to neglect DEMOCRACY as a cornerstone of Socialism.

dan e writes …

It is now becoming much less important as a site of surplus extraction/profit realization, if you are careful not to equate Money Capital with Real Capital. The USA is even becoming less important as a base for the global capitalist State, as the US DOD runs up against the limits of the willingness of lowerclass US residents to offer themselves as cannonfodder.

What is “Real Capital”? The U.S. has a lot of real capital with a working population of over 200 million people. The U.S. elites has chosen to exploit that real capital (PEOPLE) into the form of money and monopoly Capitalism. An economy of 300 million people means that you have that much interaction among people a vast pool of productive potential.

The possession of Money equates power due to Capitalism’s laws and enforcement of those laws. In other words the Capitalist states still function to serve the needs of Capitalism. This is why the bankers were bailed out by the states and the workers are left to suffer.

What I think the tendency is is to omit from the discussion the power of the Capitalist state and its coersive role. Most of the discussion of ecomomic theory assumes all actors are free of the coersion of the state.

It IS important to distinguish between Money Capital and real Capital, which is the power to command the labor of others, whether to extract/harvest primary resources or to convert resources into saleable commodities.

Marx understood this, but alas it seems most “Marxists” do not, having become entranced by discussions of “economic” phenomena.

Most of the time in a society based on the Capitalist Mode of Production, possession of Money automatically equals possession of Power. But there is a point at which this runs into its limit. Especially if your Money is denominated as US dollars and people expect the value, that is the Power, of US dollars to decline significantly in the near future.
BTW, residents of the EU countries enjoy a higher standard of consumption than residents of the USA at present. “Americans” are constantly told that theirs is “the richest country in the world” but such has not been the case for at least a couple of decades.
US consumption has been maintained by increasing easy access to credit, but that mechanism has run up against its limit.
You have to view Capitalism globally, as a Totality. The place and role of the USA within the Totality has been different at different times and stages. It is now becoming much less important as a site of surplus extraction/profit realization, if you are careful not to equate Money Capital with Real Capital. The USA is even becoming less important as a base for the global capitalist State, as the US DOD runs up against the limits of the willingness of lowerclass US residents to offer themselves as cannonfodder.

The notion of a steady-state economy that finds we can reduce needs such as family as 2 to 4 cars, is what’s called for. Anything other than that is uneconomical. Power and policy is certainly at the center of sustaining the unsustainable, but the choices among far too many is to put the whole issue on the individual (which is insane given the gavity of the PROBLEM) or modeling US consumption behaviors as a model of prosperity. That is the dominant economic paradigm at work in the world at large.

Poor nations trying to be “rich” because they feel that the US has taken more than its fair share (while the latter is definitely true) does not solve the PROBLEM. As a species we have tended to overuse resources by creating needless stuff in quantities that require more.

Absolutely the system is built to produce more, to consume more and mostly of stuff that is non-reusable or even recycleable. Is there profit in this? Yes as long as your profit system is limited to what we’ve got and what far too many others in the world look to mimic.

I totally agree. The profit motive has exacerbates war and Capitalism creates tremendous INEQUALITY. Inequality needs racism and other tactics in order to maintain the exploitation of people and the planet.

There has been a tendency on the so-called Left to drive a wedge between Marxism and to diminished Socialism as a democratic system. In a democratic system people can decide how they want to arrange production. Socialism is not based on “industrialization” as some on the Left especially Chomskyites would have people believe. Socialism is based on meeting the needs of people and on DEMOCRACY.

Also I agree, the tendency on the Left is to view issues from the perspective of the United States. Half of the world’s population lives on less than a US dollar per day therefore the problem is UNDER-consumption and CAPITALIST production. Therefore much of the worlds resources — PEOPLE — are being wasted and severely EXPLOITED. The world resources will never be in balanced until the EXPLOITATION of PEOPLE ceases.

There is a tendency by so-called “environmentalist” and especially neo-Malthusian to preserve Capitalism by blaming the victims — people or solely display their concern for natural resources while ignoring or disminishing Capitalist exploitation upon people.

As this crisis continue you will see commentary that is designed to confused people about Capitalism and like the Left misdirection about confronting Zionism you will see the same tactic regarding Capitalism in order to weaken and to diffuse solidarity and mobilization towards a movement to end this awful system.

War was not created by Capitalism.

If you look at the numbers, the USA is the center of the consuming world, collectively and per capita. That is an irrefuteable fact.

Acknowledging this is not arrogant, to the contrary. It could even be considered arrogant to deny it, as many in the US do in various ways.

Policy, power, and the institutionalization of our PROBLEM is our greatest enemy, if by enemy we mean the greatest danger to all humans regardless of where they live, worship or not, languages they speak, etc.

This is larger than all tsnamis combined. It is clearly a PROBLEM which exceeds individual solutions (plant a tree, visit a park, recycle, etc.). The PROBLEM is so massive that one can honestly contemplate that is just too late to solve this, and THIS is the ability to continue life on the planet as we’ve come to know it.

We piss and kill, and destroy as if WE are the reason for this planet’s existence. The planet feeds us and allows us to exist, but if and when we make the fundamental changes to both ends of consumptions – extraction of inputs from the earth, and a consumer based economy that knows only endless unforgiving consumption…WE ARE DOOMED WITHOUT EXCEPTION!!

We can label this Capitalism, but flayling at Capitalism does not provide answers. A socialism based on Production is just as toxic as Capitalism. We need to have an economy of relationships, and reduction of energy intensive needs satifaction. Don’t do that and again DOOM, and you can call it SocialCapitalism for all I care.

So Greco presents us with a history lesson and speculation on its results and then drifts off to La-La Land via the Book of Revelations, throws in some nonsense about our collective consciousness and, just for good measure, offers up some crap about our evolutionary program telling us to stop. (Is this guy channeling Nancy Reagan with her Just Say No program?)

Here’s a little ditty for Mr. Greco to ponder:

“…the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p.88

The notion of workers’ cooperatives also merits work arrangement consideration that mitigates class and embraces a democratically run work place.

But underlying this is the PROBLEM. The problem should not be isolated to our little back and forth about class, and neoliberalism and the such. This, with all due respect, is small talk, and small thinking.

The PROBLEM is not corrected by any of these considerations, though they are apart of the potential solution. The foremost PROBLEM is consumption, and more specifically the efficiency of consumption. As long as production, and its efficiency is the basis of any economics the PROBLEM is exaserbated. Understanding this through a process of systems thinking makes apparent the ways in which we talk around the PROBLEM. The fundamentals of what’s called the “modern age”, it’s ever increasing use of non-renewable energy resources, and it’s efficiencies brought about through ever increasing consumption that undermines any efficiencies in production such that more and more of less and less of what we need to exist on the planet is available.

This is the big fat elephant in the room. It is regularly ignored because the conversation is always framed within ideological terms that bounce around the PROBLEM.

As simple, why do we have economies? question would be a good starting place.

Government debt, meanwhile, doesn’t come from money or even the Rockefellers. It comes from the capitalist class, which opposes both progressive taxation and full, publicly-guided employment.

The struggle is to make this whole planet an intentional community, not to drop out and pretend that banana money wouldn’t eventually lead to exactly the same outcome as fiat currency, given enough time.

Business owners are in it to get rich and powerful. Look around.