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> The first part of the statement only makes sense if you take the second part; people are lifted out of poverty not because more stuff is being made, but becau
by darawk 8y ago
> The first part of the statement only makes sense if you take the second part; people are lifted out of poverty not because more stuff is being made, but because with more stuff being made, more people can afford it. I'm not talking about eliminating growth, I'm saying that the way society operates at the moment (which I view as through exploitation and coercion) has given us such a vast product, but the issue isn't of needing to "grow" at the rate we currently are to solve issues such as hunger, it's to allocate resources according to who needs them rather than the profit that can be made from them.
Right, but if you refer back to my prior comment, I did that calculation for you. Is that enough? It's an empirical question. When is it enough.
> Nobody, not even Marx himself, would doubt the quantitative number of people that capitalism has brought out of poverty, but neither would anyone really doubt how many then-slaves in the Roman Empire were rescued from wretched conditions of not even being able to get by. The question is not whether capitalism is "good" or not, it's whether we can acheive the same or better advances in other systems which come without various negative qualitative aspects for society, culture and ecology.
Right, but let's make that a bit more rigorous. What do we mean by "same or better advances without various negative qualitative aspects"? You seem to still place some value on the traditional notion of 'growth' (e.g. more stuff, cheaper stuff, better stuff). So, presumably you'd like some social organization that produces growth and 'qualitative' benefits in some pareto-optimal configuration. I suppose essentially everyone agrees broadly with that.
I think where we diverge is that I think a system that is broadly capitalist with some regulation and externality pricing is likely to be most able to achieve a pareto-optimal balance of all of those things. Non-market coordination mechanisms don't seem like they work very well at the scale of modern civilizations.
> Again, the issue isn't that some people have big pie slices and others have small ones, it's that some people are deprived of access to social means of production, and with that they are reduced to a relation that depends on someone else to provide them with access. This social relation still persists regardless of the pie slices, because we're talking about one person who owns raspberry pie and the other a horrible pear pie.
That's not actually true though. They're not deprived of access to the natural world. They're deprived of access to the fruits of others labor, which seems quite a bit more fair.
> I don't think externality pricing would work very well in the long term where such large sums of money can be amassed that the tax won't matter very much (so damage continues)
Well, you'd set the externality at the price that'd balance the harm. If it costs $10 to counter an ounce of carbon released into the atmosphere, you price it at $10, or $10 + epsilon to account for imperfect enforcement, etc.
> and I doubt that sufficiently large taxes could come about in a democracy controlled by capital rather than "the people" - a people who still prefer the luxuries (i.e perhaps even false needs from Establishment ideology) so would be unwilling to restrict their supply.
I agree that that's a tricky problem, but once you get into the issue of "how private incentives and public governance interact" you're down a rabbit hole that doesn't turn out too well for other modes of organization either :-).
- claudiawerner 8y ago>I did that calculation for you. Is that enough? It's an empirical question. When is it enough. I don't know, I feel as though I don't understand the question, and I'm confused as to why there has to be "enough" at some point - in the optimal situation, we'd stop producing bread once everyone who wants bread has the amount they want (barring people who want to horde it). >You seem to still place some value on the traditional notion of 'growth' (e.g. more stuff, cheaper stuff, better stuff). The notion of growth in terms of what we can use rather than growth in terms of what is profitable is important, and I think capitalism only has the ability to chase what is profitable, in the sense that houses will be produced for assets rather than living in, and this trend only continues to get worse thanks to the nature of the commodity, a contradiction of use value and exchange value. It's true that everyone agrees with it, but only few would say that the qualitative issues are rooted in the production process of capital itself, something I believe to be the case. We either have a free society, or a society dominated by capital. I have to admit on this point I'm a little lost myself - as to what society without capital would look like in terms of the distribution of resources, to what extent this is mathematically possible (given the information, and going beyond the ECP) and to what extent the criticism of capitalism is addressed afterwards. Whether or not market Socialism is even a Socialism at all is up for question, as is whether schemes like those imagined by Cockshott et al. are feasible in the Marxian critique. >They're not deprived of access to the natural world. They're deprived of access to the fruits of others labor, which seems quite a bit more fair. Everyone has access to the natural world, but this is the realm of Right, which liberal society insists to be the same for bourgeois and proletarian - all imbued with the same "natural rights", but it wasn't long before Rawls et al. put the question of what use is a right if you can't take advantage of it? The working class is deprived of its labour, and all workers are doubly free: free from general social means of production (the right to use society's productive capacity) and free from the products of their own labour made with these means of production (to take what you made is declared theft, due to the mystification of means of production as provided by the capitalist rather than provided by labour). The capitalist (a personification of capital), on the other hand, is free to access the fruits of others' labour, and on the scale of the whole of society, makes sure of this fact - surrender your labour, or rely on the charity of the state, a degrading form of administered living. But even if we consider the case that everyone is free to produce things themselves on whatever land they can afford, who would want to live in such a society? Should the alternative to selling one's labour be highly individualised and impractical for the great majority, and only possibly providing the bare means for sustenance for a person and her family? >If it costs $10 to counter an ounce of carbon released into the atmosphere, you price it at $10, or $10 + epsilon to account for imperfect enforcement, etc. How does this take into account the fact that some people, usually the ones with the most emmissions, can pay their way out of it rather comfortably? Isn't it rather perverse that the company is paying money which it gained off the backs of its employees to "offset" its ecological damage? And the notion that one can simply pay a fine for damage is questionable, and we don't seem to do it with anything else in society. If I break your window (which is either extremely difficult to repair or even impossible to), I'm rightfully punished for it; I don't simply pay a fine and walk off.