Lensman’s recent guest blog Towards the aetiology of paedophobia explored some fundamental aspects of society and where modern living has gone badly wrong, in terms both of its sustainability and its desirability, not least for children. A very lively and far-reaching debate ensued. Here, now, is his promised follow-up, which sets out how things could be better in future if we are bold enough to embark on a radically environmentalist, or Deep Green, course.
Introduction
In part one of this essay, I made the claim that capitalism is inherently paedophobic. The predominance of the nuclear family combined with the community’s merely vestigial role in their lives results in children being isolated in relationships which, because of the incest taboo, can only thrive if those children are considered as asexual and “innocent”.
The emergence of a form of capitalism focused disproportionately on satisfying fabricated wants rather than needs has created further tensions. Consumerism requires children to be educated into the consumer mind-set (note that people need no persuading of their needs – hunger, thirst, cold, fear, loneliness etc. serve that function) and this has created a variety of phenomena which contribute to the perception by many parents that their children are being “taken away” or “sexualised” against their (the parents) will, and that society offers children a “toxic childhood”. This conflict between the “consumer child” and the “innocent child” generates considerable anxiety which, arguably, is most easily directed towards the symbolic figure of the paedophile.
That economic factors cause paedophobia may not be immediately apparent as their effects are manifested through social and cultural phenomena. We naturally discern visible agents before we do deep causes: a rat in a medical-research lab will (one may imagine) blame the individual who administers the tests for its suffering, but the wider causes of its suffering are invisible to it: the pharmaceuticals industry, the disease the scientists are trying to cure, and the conditions giving rise to the disease.
A social system that would open up the nuclear family, reintroduce children into the community, and eliminate consumerism is one that would favour a reduction of intergenerational apartheid, the acceptance of child sexuality and, consequently (but inadvertently), a reduction in paedophobia. Such a society would be one based on green principles and policies.
Principles
Undoubtedly the most pressing priority for a green society is to address the impending environmental disaster resulting from an economic system that is at war with the planet, the biosphere and, ultimately, human life, and which serves corporations and multinationals to the detriment of all else.
Averting disaster will require an economy that stops chasing economic growth, instead finding prosperity through sustainable alternatives. This will be a low-energy economy, based on conservation and renewable resources. A redistribution of wealth is required, towards greater equality. Instead of encouraging people to possess lots of things they do not need, the emphasis would be on personal growth and respect for the gentler, nurturing side of human nature.
Two policies that find strong support among green thinkers have particular implications for child sexuality and paedophilia: the Citizen’s Income, and Decentralisation.
Citizen’s Income
The Citizen’s Income (CI) is a means of creating a prosperous, growth-free economy and subverting unexamined thinking on income, security, creativity and quality of life. The CI combines the communal solidarity of socialism and the free enterprise of capitalism.
Every citizen receives a regular, unconditional, tax-free sum, which is calculated to cover the necessities of life (food, fuel, heating, clothing, accommodation). Everyone receives it whether they work or not, or need it or not. To discourage large families, there would be a tapering amount for each child after the first.
The CI would replace existing benefits and be easy to administer. It would cost about the same as the current UK benefits system[i] and would be financed through taxation, including anti-pollution and luxury taxes.
At a stroke, the CI would redistribute wealth in favour of the poor[ii], ending poverty and poverty-related crime. It would eliminate the welfare trap associated with means-tested benefits, which would be abolished. It would provide a universal financial safety net, so that people could be enterprising without fear of suffering total ruin. The job market would be more flexible as there would be no need for a minimum wage.
CI would tend to weaken consumerism by destigmatising low-consumption life-styles; it would put stagnant wealth back into circulation, thereby reducing the social significance of conspicuous consumption; a sense of security would no longer be bound up in the rat race.
Work would no longer just mean paid employment but would include the activities of carers, students, researchers, artists, inventors and volunteers working for charities and the community. The worth of an activity would not depend on the amount of profit it generates but on its social value.
The CI would make job-sharing attractive, encouraging more people to work but for fewer hours. Those who are happy to live a basic low-consumption life can choose not to work. Such a choice would not be stigmatised as it is now.
A green economy would be “time-rich”. Owning more would no longer be a satisfactory answer to the question of how we live and what we live for. Leisure, education, creativity and community work would be of equal value to paid work.
Decentralisation
In a green society decision-making would, as far as possible, remain at the individual and local level and be less bureaucratic. A green society would also aim at the greatest self-sufficiency of communities in energy, food, water and other resources and products. There would however be a democratic national administration whose remit would be the administration of supra-communal concerns (e.g. security, infrastructure, Citizen’s Income, taxation, etc.).
Communities would aim at self-reliance in food through labour-intensive sustainable agriculture, which would need a work force four or five times bigger than for industrial agriculture. Much of this labour would be voluntarily supplied by the community when needed, especially at crucial times in the calendar, such as harvest time. People would also keep gardens and allotments. Children would participate in these activities (an interesting example is the School Harvest Camps during WWII).
Effects of Green Policy
The nuclear family is the result of capitalism’s need for a very mobile workforce. In a green economy parents will no longer have to chase work, and families will become deeply implanted in their geographic community. A network of households, including those of aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends and neighbours will take over many, or most, of the functions now fulfilled by the nuclear family. Indeed there will be little distinction between “family” and “community”. Biological parents will play less of a part in their children’s lives as their children gain independence younger and form bonds outside the nuclear family.
It used to be thought that a woman’s place is in the home. Nowadays, the home is the child’s place. Capitalism has drastically reduced the presence of children in the community, and widened the gap separating the world of children and of adults. A green economy would mitigate or eliminate these factors.
The nuclear family has miniaturised and privatised resources that used to be communally shared. Televisions, cars, washing machines, gardens, sound systems and private book collections are all miniaturised, privatised versions of (respectively) cinemas, buses and trains, launderettes, parks, concerts and libraries. The price of such goods would now reflect their true cost, factoring in the damage their production and distribution causes.
The reduced availability of these luxuries in a green society is hard for minds shaped by consumerism to contemplate. However, this loss has to be balanced against the improvements in quality of life and the environment they would entail. Home- and screen-based living has seen increased isolation and psychological problems, and caused an epidemic of childhood obesity in the West. In a green future, children will return to living active out-of-doors lives, rich in real-life experiences and interactions. They will develop independence at much earlier age than is the norm nowadays.
Children (and adults) will be less vulnerable to consumerism, which thrives on insecurity, isolation, status anxiety, and dissatisfaction. Advertising, as the link between mass production and mass consumption, will be curbed through taxation. Deep involvement in the community will teach children that happiness comes not from what one owns but from relationships, and engagement with the community and nature.
Polluting technologies and industries will be taxed. Cars will be more expensive to buy and run. Moreover, in a green economy work will mostly be in the community. Public transport will replace most private motor vehicles and be either free or so cheap as to make running a car seem perverse. Shops and other resources will be local-scale and situated at the heart of the communities they serve – again reducing the need for cars.
Suburban gardens will be increasingly put to use for food production. However, this reclamation of streets and public spaces from cars, and the re-wilding of the countryside (as a result of the demise of industrial farming, out of town shopping malls, etc.) will provide children with places to play, learn, explore and be away from adults.
In such a time-rich society education should no longer be the exclusive prerogative of the young and will be available to people of all ages. Schools will become multi-generational. Their purpose will be less that of producing workers and consumers than one of nurturing creativity, developing skills, promoting citizenship, and strengthening the community through fostering links between diverse groups of people. Grown-ups and seven-year-olds will pursue their studies and interests in adjacent classrooms; shared learning and creativity between generations will be seen as normal.
Decentralisation and a return to sustainable technologies will make much work more labour-intensive. The increased flexibility of the job market, children’s greater freedom, the legitimation of informal and casual work and reduced competition for jobs will result in the idea of “work” broadening out to include many of the activities open to children, bringing them into the job market. This will contribute to the dissolution of the distinction between “child” and “adult” (a signifier of “adulthood” being participation in the world of work).
Jobs such as light horticultural work, paper-rounds, shop work, car washing, serving in a café, stable work, and certain domestic jobs will become more and more the prerogative of enterprising children. Children will no longer be entirely economically dependent on their parents.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly much of what I have outlined above will, at first, seem utopian: one of late capitalism’s triumphs has been to make us assume that it represents the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution, thus disabling our capacity to imagine better worlds, or that altruism could drive a society.
But my hypothesis is not entirely speculative: in the first part of this essay I mentioned the Growing-up Sexually archive and the observations of various anthropologists and explorers, all of which describe highly communal societies which were tolerant, or approving, of child-sexuality and child-adult intimacy.
Closer to home are the alternative communes, often inspired by ideals of free love, which flourished in the 1960s, where the community played a greater role in its children’s lives than the family. It is no coincidence that these communes now make the headlines mainly through accusations of “child abuse”. Behind these headlines we can maybe perceive how these communes were more accepting of child sexuality and surrounded it with less anxiety and taboo, thus often leading to guilt-free intimacy between its children and adults.
Can paedophobia somehow disappear whilst everything else about contemporary capitalism remains unchanged? Undoubtedly not. To believe so is like believing that by grafting gills into one’s cheeks one can breathe underwater. The paradigm shift required for the acceptance of paedophilia is too radical for this to happen without society and people’s consciousness changing first.
That children and adults can licitly share and express feelings of love and desire for one another should not, of course, be the criterion by which we evaluate a society’s desirability: its ecological sustainability and the quality of life it offers all its citizens are what matter. However, the most humane societies have always been those that treated their children with the most respect. For all but the super-rich such a society is the best hope for the present as well as for future.
Moreover, if climate science is correct it is almost certain that mankind will eventually adopt such policies. Whether mankind adopts them in time is another question.
Notes
[i] “Analysing figures from the 2012-13 financial year, the cost of such a scheme is projected at around £276bn per year – just £1bn more than the annual welfare budget that year – making the implementation of a Citizen’s Income close to revenue and cost neutral.”
[ii] Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level, have shown that unequal societies have a higher degree of sickness, crime and family dysfunction. Where there is little shared experience, the cohesion of society is gravely weakened. Physical and mental health are undermined and relationships are placed under strain if people have insufficient money to maintain modest security and partake in the activities which enable us to have a common lived experience.
in non-WEIRD countries incest is tolerated more than sex offences commited outside family:
The Russian translation: http://samlib.ru/g/galaburda_k_e/lensman.shtml
money = symbolic of amount of energy used in the past = illusion of power at present = unnatural power currency within community = fluctuation of human honesty = a human game of winners and losers manifested by the ego = greed = devious impulse to alter a community = ability to control everyone unfairly over time = corruption of government = regulation of community services = limitation of convenient and natural services = unnatural quality of life = damaged human spirit = unhappiness
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Reblogged this on Consenting Adults Humans and commented:
This essay, published on Tom O’Carroll’s excellent Heretic TOC blog, is the second part to the earlier essay “Towards the aetiology of paedophobia”.
That essay proposed that paedophobia is an unintended consequence of social structures and systems necessary to the functioning of capitalism, and particularly consumer capitalism.
This essay takes those findings and envisages the nature of a society that wouldn’t be paedophobic.
Thinking about this some more…I had an interesting conversation once with someone who maintained that the more conservative a government is, the more what she called “the sorting function of education” is emphasised: pigeonholing people early on into their future roles under capitalism. While early specialisation is great for people who know from the age of five that they want to be a vet or what have you, that isn’t most of us. I knew a lovely boy who at eight seemed to spend most of his time building things with K’nex and doing sums in his head. Everyone was proudly convinced he was going to be an engineer. He ended up taking a completely different route, failing some important exams along the way. He turned out happy and well-adjusted and good company and a great help to his family, but the things people said! Everyone and his cat started coming out with stuff about having to struggle hard to get ahead in today’s global economy. Likewise, when someone else I knew decided to read English literature at a prestigious university, there was much talk about what a useless degree it was and having to struggle hard, etc. What was he supposed to do? He was poor at mathematics and he liked literature! I found it all very depressing. Not that that is any sort of cogent analysis…
I suspect that the increase in the number of jobs for which you (supposedly) need a degree is part of a plan to keep the unemployment statistics down by keeping young people out of competition for jobs for a while longer. It makes much more sense to me, who admittedly am no economist, to have a lot of people working part-time rather than some working crushing hours and some unemployed. I think we’d all be a lot happier that way. Mind you, when I was working sixty and more hours a week at a physically tiring menial job, I wasn’t actually unhappy. I quite quickly got into an oxlike mental state where all I was interested in doing was working and sleeping. I could have gone on like that for much longer than I actually did, though eventually it would have started to screw up my joints, young and fit though I was — those are no jobs for older people and it breaks my heart to see older people still working them. I felt OK. I just was doing precisely nothing worthwhile with my time.
The United States carries the university obsession, as many other things, to the height of ridiculousness. You Must Go To College is hammered into everyone’s head by frankly rather stupid school guidance counsellors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 68.3% of students who graduated high school in 2011 were enrolled in college. About 43% of those were in community colleges. (For community college, think “polytechnic” and “a rather less blistering amount of student loan debt”, foreign readers.) 58% of those who go to college finish their degrees within six years, and 40% within four years. An awful lot drop out, because they didn’t really want to go to college in the first place, or weren’t suited to it. The “sorting function of education” woman also darkly informed me that the whole of the US is floating on a sea of debt and that it’s capitalism gone mad. I have met lawyers in their fifties who were still paying down their student loan debt and did not regard this as remarkable. And some of the best advice I ever heard went like this: when you start earning more, for heaven’s sake don’t start buying more. You don’t actually need all that stuff. That’s how they get you. You end up with no more disposable income, hence no more freedom, for all that your salary’s gone up.
While many families probably would become deeply rooted in their communities if a Citizens’ Income meant they didn’t have to move for work, I know what I’d do if someone granted us all a Citizens’ Income tomorrow (I wish!): live off it, do some extra work on the side and take the money from that to go budget travelling. I don’t see anything wrong with people who have kids doing that, either, at least when the kids are younger, because obviously when they get older staying with one friendship group and in one school becomes much more important, and also the younger they are the better they pick up languages. In any case, these days you often have to travel to see family, because the grandparents are in India or wherever the case may be. But again, this is nothing so new or radical: several centuries ago, tradesmen along the French-Flemish border were swapping their kids in a language-exchange programme.
>several centuries ago, tradesmen along the French-Flemish border were swapping their kids in a language-exchange programme.
Really? Fascinating! And news to me, I confess.
This’ll require much chewing over, but at first glance I like a lot of what you propose, some of which isn’t even that radical when I think about it. In the 1970s it was not uncommon for 9-year-olds to have paper-rounds, for instance. I very much agree with you on the importance of adult education. I’m told that in Iceland they’re pretty good on that. Compulsory schooling runs from 6 to 16, then there’s optional high school at age 16-19 and then optional university, and they’re good about letting people leave at 16, work for some years and then come back. A French maths teacher friend once told me that he thinks this is just what is needed in France: rather than 16- and 17-year-olds sitting bored in classrooms doing stuff they can’t see the point of, they should be allowed to leave school and work for a while, then come back if and when they can see the point. And at the other end of the scale I feel strongly that kids should not be starting formal education at 3 or 4, but rather at 6 or 7. Give them time to play! Of course children who teach themselves to read at 4 and are mad keen should be encouraged, rather than held back as is done in e.g. Steiner schools (for loopy reincarnation reasons). Everyone develops at a different rate.
I mentioned somewhere else that when reading Sandfort’s Boys on their Contacts with Men I noticed that most of the boy-man couples seemed to have gotten together not through structured activities such as sports coaching but through happenstance: a mutual friend introduced them, they found each other when out and about, etc. Apart from the long arm of the law, I feel the biggest barrier these days to children and adults getting together is children’s lack of freedom to roam. Many adults today can remember being sent off on their bikes with a packed lunch and staying out all day from the age of perhaps 9 or so. That would be unthinkable now. And more freedom to roam would likely help to reduce obesity rates. It’d probably make parenting more fun, too. Instead of being stressed out by the supposed necessity of providing stimulating activities to occupy every moment of a child’s time, parents would be able to send their 7-year-olds out to play so they, the parents, could have some time to themselves, or allow their stroppy 14-year-old to spend a couple of weeks of the summer holiday vacationing with a responsible adult friend. I must mention Iceland again. I don’t know the culture at all well, but when visiting a friend there I was very struck by two things: children as young as 6 or 7 seemed to have considerable freedom to wander round by themselves, with any passing adult keeping an eye on them but not calling Social Services; and there were lots and lots of men looking after their young children.
[…] market capitalism – Lensman’s recent articles here on the aetiology of paedophobia, and our Deep Green future have added to what is becoming a vast […]
As I promised to “tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet” and said that “future is red, not green”, Lensman challenged me about the environmental legacy of “communist” regimes in the USSR and its East European satellites, China and N. Korea. Opposing Stalinist regimes to anyone proposing red socialism is a typical “ad Stalinem” argument used since a long time by right-wingers who have always claimed that capitalism is the apotheosis of human civilization.
These regimes were corrupted and criminal in the same way as Jimmy Hoffa (leader of IBT trade union in the USA) was. Stalinist bureaucrats robbed and muzzled their workers, and internationally stabbed and betrayed the labour movement on every occasion (China 1927-36, Germany 1933, Spain 1936-39, Vietnam 1945, Greece 1944-45, etc. etc.) Finally they decided that they would rob their workers better by becoming oligarchic capitalists themselves. You can discuss whether Stalinist regimes represented “communism”, in the same way as discussing whether Hoffa’s IBT was a real labour union. Turning to your personal interests, one could also discuss whether child rape or child prostitution are “paedophilia”. Anyway, it is clear to me that these corrupted practices, organizations and individuals do not represent “future”.
Among the criminal Stalinist regimes, Lensman omits the worst of them: “Democratic Kampuchea” of the “Khmers Rouges”. In fact, by destroying technology, emptying towns and brutally throwing back population into the early Middle Ages, this regime achieved very low rates of carbon dioxide and chemical pollution, that is very “green” perhaps?
The first 10 years of the USSR witnessed a real interest in ecology, with natural reserves for wildlife. This stopped in 1928, with Stalin’s brutal drive towards forced collectivization and frenzied industrialization (I have an article in French about it).
Lensman is in such a hurry that he does not want to wait for my examples of “green” crimes against the poor and science, he lists various “pseudo-green” ones, none of which was on my mind. I’ll now give my “green” examples:
(1) DDT is a cheap, patent-free and long-lasting insecticide that is practically harmless to humans. Spraying it 2g/m² indoors on house walls (or bednets) will protect a home for 6 months against insects that carry deadly diseases such as malaria, dengue, leishmaniasis, etc. You can even spray it on your clothes and your hair to protect you against fleas, lice and acarians that transmit bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, Lyme disease, etc. Indoor insecticide spraying allowed the eradication of malaria in industrialized countries and was at the basis of the WHO anti-malaria program of the 50’s and early 60’s. But because of the bad practices of Western agriculture, where farmers massively sprayed DDT in open fields, the food chain was polluted and strains of resistant insects appeared. Following the demagogic book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, “environmentalists” campaigned for a total ban of DDT, not only for agriculture, but also for indoor spraying in malaria-endemic countries. In 1972 the USA’s EPA implemented such a total ban, and the USAID used its pressure to impose it on poorer countries of the South: in order to receive US aid, they would have to abandon all uses of DDT, including for indoor spraying to fight malaria and other insect-borne diseases. This policy was supported by the WWF and GreenPeace, who like USAID resorted to various pseudo-scientific arguments to justify it. Combined with the relative inefficiency of chloroquine and quinine, and the disinterest of pharmaceutical trusts in developing new drugs for diseases of the poor, this led to a surge in malaria deaths. In 2008 the WHO had to stop this policy and rehabilitate indoor spraying of insecticides. Nevertheless, the WWF and GreenPeace continued to campaign for a worldwide total ban of DDT and for the closing of factories producing DDT in poorer countries. I estimate the cost of this ban of DDT indoor spraying at around 30 million deaths by malaria. I have some documentation on this topic (but the best summaries I know are in French). Ecology of the rich against the health and lives of the poor!
(2) GMOs. Under the pretext that trusts like Monsanto use GM seeds to enslave farmers, “greens” of all stripes have demonized in principle all forms of GMOs, including those studied by public laboratories. In this they were followed by some “red” fools who espouse any pseudo-radical fashion (e.g., some in the French NPA). In particular GreenPeace has spent millions to campaign against golden rice, a transgenic rice that produces its own beta-carotene (a precursor of vitamin A); this rice is offered free of rights to farmers in poor countries, and should alleviate vitamin A deficiency, which is endemic among poor populations whose diet consists mainly of rice. GreeenPeace claimed that it is “inefficient”, then that it is “dangerous for health”, finally argued that it is better to eat vegetables and fruits (tell that to the urban poor who have neither the money to buy them nor the soil to grow them). GreenPeace activists pretending to be local people destroyed golden rice fields. In Europe, you have various “green” activists, such as the French José Bové, vandalizing public research laboratories that investigate GMOs for a useful public purposes (such as vines resisting without pesticides to endemic parasitic diseases), destroying experimental fields and menacing research workers. See the article “Destruction of public and governmental experiments of GMO in Europe” by Marcel Kuntz (https://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/gmcrops/article/21231/). In debates, they use hysteria to silence their contradictors. The language used by these activists (such as “contamination”) reminds me that used by Nazi racial purity theorists, and their violent fanatical behaviour also reminds me that of fascist (or islamist) activists.
I have some studies showing how in some circumstances GMOs can be beneficial to the environment (e.g., BT cotton, avoiding the use of BT as insecticide).
(3) Any kind of fashionable anti-technology nonsense finds supporters in the “green” milieu, where they get training as lobbyists for an absurd cause, and finally succeed in having courts or legislators validating their claims. For instance the “health danger” of portable phone waves or WiFi (now banned in French kindergarten schools). You get “electrosensitive” people, scientist found out that they cannot distinguish whether WiFi is on or off. Or people who were aching because of a phone antenna and felt bettter when it was removed; however this antenna was always switched off and never emitted a single wave. Never mind that the Eiffel Tower was used as a radio antenna for decades, and nobody complained. The only known effect of microwaves is internal heating, but the energy level of the phone waves and WiFi is so much lower than that of a microwave oven, the effect is thus negligible.
I could also discuss the inaccurate health claims of organic farming, or the demonization of nuclear power by German “greens”, which led to closing nuclear power plants and reopening the old East German electricity plants powered by burning lignite, a very dirty form of coal, which is mined in open air there. And the demonization of Javel water and any form of chemical treatment of water (leading to cholera deaths in Haiti).
The “green” ideology stands to environment in the same position as the “RadFem” ideology to women’s rights or Stalinism to the working class: using a real issue to offer a false doctrine.
“In fact, by destroying technology, emptying towns and brutally throwing back population into the early Middle Ages, this regime achieved very low rates of carbon dioxide and chemical pollution, that is very “green” perhaps?”
I think the main issues with that are that:
1) This was not done with the intention of environmental preservation.
2) That regime otherwise damaged the Cambodian environment with poorly done resource extraction and waste disposal.
On a more No True Scotsman note, you could argue that no policy which is detrimental to human flourishing is “really” “green”, but I’m skeptical of that to say the least.
“I have an article in French about it”
Is it linkable or would that compromise your anonymity?
“in order to receive US aid, they would have to abandon all uses of DDT”
Wow. That actually explains quite a bit. My local government sprays DDT everywhere (which has dramatically cut our Dengue Fever infection rate) but I was once informed that, officially, this wasn’t happening. I found that to be quite strange before.
My local situation also just goes to show that you should never underestimate the ability of us poors to take your money while still looking out for our own :p
“golden rice, a transgenic rice that produces its own beta-carotene (a precursor of vitamin A)”
All hail Golden Rice! It’s my top example of ways science has helped the poor, after the Haber Process and vaccines.
“the “health danger” of portable phone waves or WiFi”
“Electrosensitivity” is caused by a nocebo effect. However, I’m not sure how this harms the poor.
I would have said more about nuclear power, but good show regardless. Now for Lensman’s response….
Jasmine: The paragraph about Cambodia was only a jest to mock the “green” dogma of necessary limitations on technology and energy consumption.
After the WHO rehabilitated indoor spraying of insecticides, the US administration (under G.W. Bush) finally abandonned its policy of conditioning aid on banning DDT… probably one of the very few good decisions made by Bush Jr. Now officially DDT is banned only for agricultural use, but allowed for indoor spraying to combat disease transmission.
My exemple (3) is one of “horrible things against science” only, but not specifically “against the poors”, although I think that obscurantism harms the poor in the long term. On the other hand (1) and (2) are directly against both “science” and “the poor”.
I will find that article about early Soviet ecology, it is at my office. But before posting a link to it, I wait until I get all requests for my sources, so I can post all links together.
“Now officially DDT is banned only for agricultural use, but allowed for indoor spraying to combat disease transmission.”
Our program doesn’t spray indoors, though. The two parts are:
1) Overturning all stagnant water exposed to the open air on public or private property.
2) Spraying DDT outside in residential areas.
I have no idea if farmers are allowed to use it on their crops, though. My family never has. I should ask my dad about the legality….
“I will find that article about early Soviet ecology, it is at my office. But before posting a link to it, I wait until I get all requests for my sources, so I can post all links together.”
Great. Thanks!
Here are the links, as promised.
Early Soviet ecology:
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/xxs_0294-1759_1992_num_35_1_2562
Malaria and DDT: first from a pro-science French site (from which I got also information on GMO’s, golden rice and the phone waves/WiFi panic):
http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/spip.php?article2271
http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/spip.php?article497
http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/spip.php?article1207
An article in a “red” site, partially inspired by the above, where I found several scientific references:
http://groupemarxiste.info/?p=1923
Some scientifically informed opinion:
http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidinthenews/articles/nr_051401.html
http://www.malaria.org/DDT_open.html
Some scientific articles:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid0303.970305
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60034-8
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)02516-2
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)02497-1
NB. The last 3 are from The Lancet, an Elsevier journal, thus the text is available only to subscribers.
Other remarks:
To Lensman: There are at least two “communist party” in the UK, the Communist Party of Britain and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), it is the latter that calls for the abolition of the age of consent. An organization well-know for its defense of NAMBLA (and Michael Jackson) and its opposition to any age of consent and to any repression of drug use, porn and prostitution, is the International Communist League (the so-called “Spartacists”); beware, they have bizarre positions on the Middle East and China.
I will not continue here the debate about my disagreements with Lensman (on everything) or with Dissident (on “state capitalism”), this would take thousands of words, far exceeding the size limit; anyway I don’t want to transform Tom’s blog into a forum for Marxist red/green debates.
But I just had fun with Lensman’s “On the other hand you have failed to offer one communist country you are happy to hold up as an example.” Indeed, “socialism in a single country” equals Stalinism; true socialism can only be “worldwide socialism”.
> I don’t want to transform Tom’s blog into a forum for Marxist red/green debates.
Thanks for your concern, Christian. I have been interested in these exchanges and very glad Lensman did the blog. Some readers may feel it has all been wildly off-topic but that depends on how deep one feels the topic goes. I reckon the red/green aspect has been given a pretty good outing for the moment. We’ll come back to it, no doubt, but soon it’ll be time to move on.
Christian: ”As I promised to “tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet” and said that “future is red, not green”, Lensman challenged me about the environmental legacy of “communist” regimes in the USSR and its East European satellites, China and N. Korea. Opposing Stalinist regimes to anyone proposing red socialism is a typical “ad Stalinem” argument used since a long time by right-wingers who have always claimed that capitalism is the apotheosis of human civilization.”
Thank you Christian for that list of “the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet”.
Let me wearily prolong this exchange by saying that merely labeling a set of arguments with an “ad ****” does absolutely nothing to neutralise those arguments. Are arguments critical of Nazi Death Camps nullified by describing them as ‘argumenta ad Hitlerum’? Are all the failings and the crimes of the Soviet Union excused by an accusation of ‘argumentum ad Stalinem’? I don’t doubt that Stalin himself would have employed that particular ploy very brutally and very effectively.
If communism has been unable to supply the world with shining examples then maybe the fault is not the world’s but communism’s. It saddens me to write that: I’ve been a Marxist since I was old enough to think about politics, and I admire Marx both for his ideas and as a person. I believe that if Marx had been aware of the environmental threats we face today he would have been a green. After all environmental degradation and disasters always hit the poor the worst.
In fact all through Marx’s writings he expresses sentiments and thoughts in tune with modern ecological thinking.
Christian: ”These regimes were corrupted and criminal in the same way as Jimmy Hoffa [ … ] organizations and individuals do not represent “future”
Your ‘Jimmy Hoffa’ analogy is very clever because what you’ve left me with is an empty set from which to draw examples of communism’s poor environmental legacy: Soviet Union? Not Communist. China? Not Communist. North Korea? Not communist. Eastern European satellites? Not communist &c &c &c – it seems that everything that calls itself ‘communist’ has been disqualified from consideration.
I’m left feeling like the boxer who turns up for a bout and finds that his opponent has not only failed to turn up but, in his absence, has declared himself the winner too!
Well, is there any point my clogging up Tom’s blog with my 11-page list of environmental depredations by “so-called communist countries”? Is there any point me mentioning the draining of the Caspian and the Aral seas? the rendering of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and Lake Baikal more or less lifeless? the Vistula and Oder rivers in Poland, which were left ecologically dead by the communist administration? That over 70 percent of the surface water in the Soviet Union was polluted? That established health standards for air pollution were exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in the Soviet Union in 1988? How the air pollution in Eastern Europe caused a rapid growth in lung cancer, forest die-back, and damage to buildings and cultural heritages. How 60% of agricultural land of the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging? The dumping of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan, the Arctic Ocean? How economies of the Eastern Bloc had an energy intensity between twice and three times higher as economies of the West? What about China, now the biggest polluter on Earth? The multiple environmental catastrophes provoked by China’s Dam building program? What about Mao’s “Kill a Sparrow Campaign” – where, in an act of tragi-comic hubris, he had peasants out banging pots and pans to scare the birds till they dropped dead from exhaustion, and which led to plagues of locusts and compounded the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. All of which are credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which at least 20 million people died of starvation.
Ohh, I could go on and on and on and on and on with pages of this, but since all this can be so casually and easily dismissed with just the magic two words ‘ad stalinem’ or ‘ad Maoem’, or with a version of the ‘No True Scotsman’ defense (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophisme_du_vrai_%C3%89cossais ) – it hardly seems worth the trouble.
As to the ‘paedophile parallel’ you mention, the difference is that for every so called ‘paedophile’ who makes the news because of rape, I know that I can point out 100s who are decent, caring and loving, and, if we were allowed to be visible, I’m sure I could point out tens of thousands for every one child rapist. On the other hand you have failed to offer one communist country you are happy to hold up as an example.
part 2
Christian: “Among the criminal Stalinist regimes, Lensman omits the worst of them: “Democratic Kampuchea” of the “Khmers Rouges”. In fact, by destroying technology, emptying towns and brutally throwing back population into the early Middle Ages, this regime achieved very low rates of carbon dioxide and chemical pollution, that is very “green” perhaps?”
So first of all you imply that green policy is “destroying technology, emptying towns and brutally throwing back population into the early Middle Ages”. Then the example you offer up is a communist regime! Why not continue this practice and just simply categorise all the items in my list of communist environmental depredations as having been carried out by ‘greens’ since it seems that the two are interchangeable. A double whammy – you exonerate communism of all its evils whilst placing them all on the shoulders of the greens!
I could equally (and arbitrarily) associate some criminal action with a political philosophy, then give an example of that criminal action, and then hold up the perpetrator of that crime as being an paragon of that political philosophy:
‘Impaling people is the policy of the Communist party. Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia is know for having impaled people. Therefore Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, was a communist’. QED! Using this technique I’m sure you could convince yourself that the crucifixion of Jesus and the extinction of the dinosaurs were the doings of the greens.
I get the sense that you’re not so much ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ with your feeble list, as, having scraped through the bottom, your sifting through the raw sewage flowing beneath it. If this is the sort of rigour you’re applying to your thinking on this matter then the rest is going to be like some hallucinogen-addled trip on a ghost train.
And, yes, I was right! Whilst the examples in my list of depredations of communist countries are not debatable as to their having occurred or as to their evil (unless you maybe have a pathological hatred of sparrows), the three so-called examples of green actions against the poor are very peculiar and unconvincing.
It strikes me WRT DDT you should take up your argument about these issues with the government scientists who investigate these phenomena and the administrations that legislated on them (and have persisted in maintaining the ban) – none of which were ‘Green’ (the USA admin in 1972 which banned DDT was headed by Nixon, not notorious for his green credentials).
But for anyone reading-in on this who might get the impression from you comment that DDT is as harmful as a bowlful of sugar (that was what the manufacturers claimed – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP3ZLNSJu5g . Is this the video where you got your facts from?) they can verify the science here for themselves – http://www.pan-uk.org/pestnews/Actives/ddt.htm
(BTW the Soviet Union banned DDT in 1970. I guess that Brezhnev must have come under undue pressure from those pesky soviet ‘Green’ dissidents languishing in their prison cells).
Re GM crops – the only one of your list of 3 examples that isn’t either a flat-out straw man or just plain weird (the Eiffel tower!?) – I’ll state that I am against them, but I will refrain from stating my reasons since to do so would only trigger a prolonged dispute over the science and the politics of a topic that has nothing to do with the subject of this post or of Tom’s blog. However if you really want it I guess we can have this discussion over at your blog, Christian.
Am I right? Is your last point is about WiFi!? And this is the best you could come up with as your third best attempt at discrediting green thinking? What would your fourth point have been – that you once saw a man dressed in green giving bread that was past its sell-by date to the ducks in the park? This is the feeblest ‘straw man’ I’ve come across for a long time – I suspect that it has arisen from you’re confusing ‘Health & Safety’, risk evaluation and New-Age Bull-shitism with ecologism.
You’ve literally me left textless with amazement!
“the USA admin in 1972 which banned DDT was headed by Nixon, not notorious for his green credentials”
Huh? The guy who started the EPA, passed the Clean Air Act, halted waste dumping in the great lakes, and implemented a $10 billion clean water program was “not notorious for his green credentials”? I would think he’d be in the top quartile of green presidents and certainly far exceeding the GOP average!
“I suspect that it has arisen from you’re confusing ‘Health & Safety’, risk evaluation and New-Age Bull-shitism with ecologism.”
Unfortunately, there’s a fair bit of overlap. It’s easy to miss the idiots in your movement when you only hang around the people who talk sense. Many of my feminist friends were shocked (shocked!) to learn that there are anti-prostitution feminists. Fortunately, we have a word for members of a movement that make the rest of the movement look stupid by association: weak men.
Christian and Lensman: The bottom line in this discussion is this: The former Soviet Union and its system of “state capitalism” was NOT a Marxist system. Nothing it did on any level was a legitimate example of “Marxism in action.” Referring to itself as “socialism” or “communism” no more made it resemble what Marx and Engels proposed than the media referring to a situational child molester as a “pedophile” makes the former resemble a genuine pedophile in regards to typical actions or feelings. In both cases, we have sheer propaganda misusing language for self-serving purposes.
Marx and Engels promoted a system based on the establishment of a classless, stateless, moneyless society, and the Leninist/Stalinist system of the former Soviet Union and its various 20th century offshoots (e.g., Trotskyism, Maoism) most definitely didn’t share those three central points!
My response to Christian was a face-off of straw men triggered by his intention to “tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet”.
If I chose to interpret ‘communism’ in the worst possible light it was because – as his own post demonstrated – he was intent to portray green thinking in a light that went beyond the bounds of even caricature. How can I put it? – ‘setting fire to other’s straw men is a dangerous business when you are yourself largely made of straw’.
But, yes, the tone of those comments don’t reflect my real stance on the ideal of ‘communism’ – though I will stand by all my criticisms of the environmental and human rights record of pseudo-communist regimes.
However one country that I’m hoping to get the chance to read up on and educate myself about is Cuba – largely as an unintended consequence of the America’s blockade Cuba has an (apparently) outstanding environmental record and seems to have been very successful with its health system and education.
I’m interested that the British Communist Party has ‘the abolition of the age of consent’ as a policy. Despite the current hysterical climate it hasn’t removed it from its draft programme, though I get the impression it rather ‘buried’ for the last elections (it used to be under the rubric of ‘Immediate Demands’ but the web site has been recently revamped and today it no longer comes under that rubric) – the older cached version is here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xa82ff7pE3EJ:www.cpgb.org.uk/home/about-the-cpgb/draft-programme/3.-immediate-demands+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk):
“Abolish age-of-consent laws. We recognise the right of
individuals to enter into the sexual relations they choose,
provided this does not conflict with the rights of others.
Alternative legislation to protect children from sexual
abuse”
The BCP’s support of abolition raises a few questions:
What definition of ‘sexual abuse’ are they using? Is it ‘coercive, manipulative, non-consensual interactions’ or the conventional definition i.e. any sexual or sensual interaction between an adult and a prepubescent?
How is this policy viewed by the BCP’s membership? Are rank-and-file British communists more than averagely paedo-sympathetic?
Is it only the BCP that has this as a policy? do the communist parties of other countries?
Did Marx, or other Marxist thinkers, touch on this subject? and if so what do they say?
In those states that attempted communism – how was the age of consent and child sexuality viewed?
Don’t worry – I’m not asking you to answer these questions Dissident! But I think they’re interesting and useful questions to be thinking about.
But one question I would like to ask of you is ‘would your vision of a communist society be paedo-sympathetic?’
And if so, would it be so as a side effect (as it would be in a truly green society, or at least as far as I can see it) or would it be something brought about through legislative change (as it seems the BCP would have it)?
First off, the term “pseudo-communist” actually works well enough as a descriptor for the former Soviet system, as do others like “state capitalism.” As for your questions:
But one question I would like to ask of you is ‘would your vision of a communist society be paedo-sympathetic?’
A truly classless and stateless economic system would have an industrial-based system of government that included everyone, not a politically-based government that includes a handful of elected representatives who make all of the major decisions over and above the will of the majority after being elected (as is the case now). A system without money would leave little to no opportunity for any individual or small group to seize economic power and use it to exploit other people; there would be no way to bribe anyone, push them into debt, or hire individuals to act as your personal soldiers/police.
Since an industrial government would be primarily concerned with “the administration of things, rather than the administration of people” (as the Socialist Labor Party has put it), there would really be no apparatus in place to force younger people out of voting, the policy of social ownership, community involvement on all levels, or the labor system. If they wanted to be recognized–and I believe they would–they would have to be recognized. Once youths firmly established themselves in such a system on all levels, and were able to routinely prove their merits, then the paedo hysteria would quickly lose its purpose. A system that did not have to literally force order on a disenfranchised majority for the benefit of a minority would have no need to create boogeymen and initiate moral panics to control the populace.
Also, since our social institutions tend to mimic the forms of our economic institutions, it’s very unlikely that the strict, exclusive nuclear family units we see today would continue to prevail over a more communal way of living in an economic system based on social ownership and production to meet collective human needs rather than creating profit for the few. Parents would remain an important part of their children’s lives, but would now lack the power to hold them in economic independence, prevent them from accessing certain information, or forcibly prevent them from interacting with the greater community or world around them. Family structures would by necessity become more egalitarian, with more mutual respect between the age groups than the enforced authority we see today.
And if so, would it be so as a side effect (as it would be in a truly green society, or at least as far as I can see it) or would it be something brought about through legislative change (as it seems the BCP would have it)?
As I see it, such a thing would be very much a beneficial side effect of the way the economic system operated. The lack of a state as we know it today would mean that there would be no need for official legislation to end an age of consent, because there would be no need for a professional police force to enforce order, or to carry out the commands of a handful of politicians. In fact, politicians and a police force as we know them today would be totally obsolete and non-existent in a system where everyone was free from material want, and thus have no real motivation to commit crimes. Since everyone would be guaranteed work in a vocation in which they had a natural talent and interest, and wouldn’t have to work nearly as much as they do in today’s 40-hour work week to acquire the full fruit of their labor, serious psychological issues that lead to depression and violent tendencies would become far less pronounced and widespread. A citizen’s security force could readily handle any incidental problem that did arise.
“a police force as we know them today would be totally obsolete and non-existent in a system where everyone was free from material want, and thus have no real motivation to commit crimes.”
I questioned this point (crime primarily due to want) in another discussion with Lensman but this seems to be making an even more extraordinary claim: Without scarcity, there’d be no crimes of passion? Really? How?
I wasn’t actually referring to crimes of passion, but making it clear that crimes against property are the most common types of crimes in a capitalist society. In fact, the current U.S. prison system has the bulk of its prisoners incarcerated for crimes that would be effectively pointless to commit in a classless and moneyless society: burglary, robbery, gang activity, murders related to exchanges of contraband gone wrong, etc.
Now let me get to crimes of passion specifically. I do not believe that these types of crimes would occur with as great a regularity as they do in a capitalist society, and when they did occur in a socialist society, it would most often not be as severe as murder.
In a capitalist society, where so many are involuntarily unemployed, and people who are employed are so often greatly overworked, and also most often employed in jobs they hate or are not suited for talent, temperament, or goal-wise. Many are crushed under huge amounts of credit card and/or higher education debt.This takes a huge psychological toll on people. This is also likely the reason in many (though certainly not all) cases that personal relationships do not work out in the first place. A wife leaves a husband because he unexpectedly loses a good job, and he comes off like a “deadbeat” if he finds himself “frozen out” of the job market for an extended period of time; justified disputes with employers or corporations going unresolved due to inability of the aggrieved to hire adequate legal aid; people are frequently in need of “escape” from a life they hate, and turn to drug or alcohol abuse as a result, or succumb to depression or various other neuroses; people finding it financially (note that word!) impossible or very difficult to move away from an area and start anew elsewhere if their personal situation is really bad in a certain locale; they are unable to afford proper medical and/or therapeutic treatment that may help them, or find themselves improperly helped because the treatment is compromised by a system that compels MHP’s to put politics and “values” before science and the best interests of their individual patients.
I’m not saying these things are the direct blame for all crimes of passion, but I would strongly argue that the facts of life in a capitalist society filled with ruthless competition, poverty, rampant greed, a dog-eat-dog attitude, involuntary unemployment and frequent layoff’s, etc., contributes either directly or indirectly to the types of neuroses that lead to many crimes of passion, and likely to the majority of the worst ones. I do not believe that most people who engage in severe or frequent crimes of passion (including stalking, assault, or murder) were mentally healthy or fully happy until they lost a spouse, significant other, custody of their children, etc.
Now, let me make note of something important for everyone to consider, but you in particular, Jasmine, since I know that you seem to prefer thorough coverage of a topic: It’s difficult to cover every single base of an argument or point when by necessity we need to strive for brevity. Brevity in a post is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, it saves bandwidth, keeps overly lengthy posts from being a burden on Tom as the sole moderator, and makes it more likely for a reader to have a time to consume the entire post and not simply skim through it or pass it by altogether (and I’m glad you never do, Jasmine, don’t get me wrong). But on the other hand, it often leaves the commentator with no choice but to leave out or give short shrift to certain points that could be mentioned, and probably would have been in a full-fledged easy or study. This is the reason I didn’t go into crimes of passion in an already long post to Lensman dealing with property-oriented issues, and why I mentioned that much more could be said about this topic, but I was only going to cover the most directly relevant. It’s not necessarily an attempt on the part of the commentator to be vague or evasive on certain components of a topic.This is why being as thorough as posters like me prefer to be has both negative and positive consequences, but I prefer to try my best to lean towards brevity here (not my strong point, but I try!).
First of all, thank you for the second part of this essay, Lensman. I read it with interest. I will try to make my response as short as possible, both for the sake of readers and for Tom and his time, but I fear brevity will not be fully possible this time (to which I apologize to all readers and Tom ahead of time). Needless to say, please know that I didn’t end up saying even half the things I wanted to say, or could have said on this topic, so I think I did succeed in some measure of restraint 😛
As noted before, I believe a green economy would be preferable to the type of unbridled, growth-obsessed capitalism we have today, just as I believe the highly liberal version of capitalism popular in Europe and Australia, and to some extent Canada – which often masquerades as “socialism,” but is sometimes called social democracy – is preferable to the comparatively heavily unregulated form of capitalism we have in the U.S. today, let alone the fully unregulated form of capitalism that is the dreadful wet dream of anarcho-capitalists and libertarians. Moreover, I think green policy would be better even then liberal capitalism, i.e., ‘social democracy,’ which still participates in the consumerist, expand-at-all-costs system of global capitalism now in effect.
That being said, I will not support green policy over that of Marxian socialism, i.e., a classless, moneyless, and stateless system based upon global social ownership of the industries and services. I still strongly believe that any type of system that retains money, barter, and class divisions – to any degree – in a world with modern productive and technological capacity is neither logical, beneficial, nor desirable.
A system with no money or barter would eliminate the need for competition between workers, and between those who privately own the companies, and would instead free us all to work in entirely cooperative fashion. It would eliminate poverty and class divisions in a way that any scheme or attempt to “humanize” or “rein in” capitalism never could. I see green policy as yet another attempt to do that, while sustaining the hope that an admittedly altruistic form of ideology will keep people on the straight and narrow. The economic nature of the system, however, must operate in accord with the lofty ideology behind it, or the material reality will quickly overcome any good intentions. A system that requires competition and accepts private ownership has long proven incapable of accomplishing this.
That is why I support eliminating this type of system altogether, rather than any further attempt to tinker with it, modify it, restore it to a previous era’s form, etc. I think a genuine socialist system would accomplish all the lofty goals I commend you for supporting, but sans any form of compromises with “free enterprise,” and without giving up any benefits of modern technology.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like many of your stated ideas and goals, and I support them fully. This includes a communally based life, the sharing of resources and work load, superior forms of public transportation that would greatly eliminate the need for dangerous automobiles, producing food on a local basis rather than relying so heavily on exports from across the globe, and the end to a growth-oriented system that is not environmentally sustainable. However, I believe that a truly moneyless economy would accomplish these things much better than any “kinder and gentler” variation of capitalism ever could, and there would be no need whatsoever for tax policies.
Further, the end of planned obsolescence that a profit-oriented system requires would end the need for overproduction of goods that is a major cause of waste in contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, I applaud the extension of the cinema system you propose, but I see no need to try to “force” people to do this by heavily taxing those who prefer to own a Blu-ray player, DVR, or download films digitally and watch them at home. Private time is just as important as time spent with others, and the needs and preferences of each will always vary from one person to another. We should never, IMO, expect all people to embrace a specific lifestyle, but rather try to make room for all.
I also would say, lot’s of luck ending a wasteful and environmentally unfriendly policy like planned obsolescence in a system that continues to produce on the basis of profit, and still requires such profits to remain in operation. That will inevitably lead to the most successful businesses lobbying with and influencing the equivalent of politicians to reduce taxation on them, disproportionally place those taxes on the laborers, and insist upon cost-cutting in favor of “jobs over the environment.” Money is a problem, not a component of the current system that should be retained to any extent in a new, more socially and environmentally sustainable system.
This is why I support a system where continued production for profit, existence of money (and thus taxes and all types of fiscal-based concerns), and private ownership of the industries and services is eliminated rather than “limited.” Otherwise, we will inevitably end up right back in the situation we’re in today. I know you told me before that you believe it’s necessary to retain the existence of money to enjoy certain benefits of a modern industrial society, but nothing I have read or personally seen anywhere has come remotely close to convincing me of that.
Bottom line: We are in accord on many things, my friend. Hence, it’s an honor to work with you towards establishing a better world, not just for MAPs and children, but for everyone else. I look forward to working with you on this and many more things in the future. I consider your thinking considerably more enlightened than the great majority of people I know, and I think your concern for the world and everyone living in it is genuine and commendable. Nevertheless, though I think green policy as it currently stands is heaps better than anything offered by the present system, or even by the more people-friendly social democrats, I do not support it per se, and will continue to promote the economic democracy of Marxian socialism as the preferred system to work for. I will also, of course, continue hoping that the Greens of today, along with the mainstream dedicated liberals, will one day completely excise continued support for any retention of money and profit in their agendas for change.
“the comparatively heavily unregulated form of capitalism we have in the U.S. today”
In some ways, I think the US regulates too heavily. There are regulations to keep new businesses out of fields dominated by a few companies (especially in transportation). There are regulations to make it extremely difficult for professionals to be licensed to practice (in some cities, even hairdressers and florists!). There are regulations that take a few cents out of everyone’s pocket to give massive amounts of free money to a few special interests (eg: farm and oil subsidies). There are regulations that keep out foreign products even when they’re better for consumers (like the sugar quota that forces American products to use copious amounts of high fructose corn syrup). There are regulations that make it hard to distribute certain types of media (don’t even get me started on software patents…). There are regulations that make it too expensive for poor people to find homes (some cities require that every family rent a bedroom per every two people (ie: Heartbeat Laws) which makes group homes impossible, while others have massive amounts of red tape for building new housing). There are some regulations that are just stupid, blatant rent-seeking like taxi medallions!
As much as it’s important to create new, smart regulations that help people; about half of all the existing regulations are too damn stupid to walk upright and burning them down would be a great service to humanity.
Or, y’know, hoist the red flag and burn it all down to be reforged into a Socialist vision…
“the comparatively heavily unregulated form of capitalism we have in the U.S. today”
In some ways, I think the US regulates too heavily.
This I disagree with, and I’ll tell you why as I proceed here point by point.
There are regulations to keep new businesses out of fields dominated by a few companies (especially in transportation).
This is a legitimate complaint, no doubt, but it’s not due to government regulation. Rather, it’s the result of corporations seeking monopoly control. To that end, they often lobby with Congress to receive beneficial regulations of this sort. In actuality, the U.S. government has anti-trust laws that are supposed to prohibit monopolies from forming. The government doesn’t always do it’s job due to the money thrown at it by lobbyists, of course, but in a fully unregulated system, this problem would escalate to the nth degree, because that ideology insists that businesses should have the “freedom” to run as rampant as they want.
There are regulations to make it extremely difficult for professionals to be licensed to practice (in some cities, even hairdressers and florists!).
I would have to see those regulations myself to give an opinion on the matter, but I know that I want to be sure that any professional I approach for business to have received the proper training and knowledge. Look at all the problems that arise, for instance, from plastic surgeons who practice despite not having received the proper training due to lax regulations. The same goes with bounty hunters in any given state.
There are regulations that take a few cents out of everyone’s pocket to give massive amounts of free money to a few special interests (eg: farm and oil subsidies).
Another problem I fully agree with, but again, this is corporate subsidies, i.e., corporate welfare, that is again the result of business lobbying more than anything else. Again, this problem would escalate with zero restraint should the U.S. become fully unregulated. This just provides an example of how poorly the government in the U.S. lives up to its policies to regulate businesses in the interests of the common good, not that it regulates too much.
There are regulations that keep out foreign products even when they’re better for consumers (like the sugar quota that forces American products to use copious amounts of high fructose corn syrup). There are regulations that make it hard to distribute certain types of media (don’t even get me started on software patents…). There are regulations that make it too expensive for poor people to find homes (some cities require that every family rent a bedroom per every two people (ie: Heartbeat Laws) which makes group homes impossible, while others have massive amounts of red tape for building new housing). There are some regulations that are just stupid, blatant rent-seeking like taxi medallions!
Once again, this I fully agree with. But it’s not so much the result of government regulations as it is a case of the government responding to the demands of businesses. These are all pro-business laws, that allow private owners to receive maximum amounts of profit at the expense of consumers, including prospective home owners. Further, these are examples of a government not doing its job to support the common good, but instead being under the blatant control of those who pay the politicians’ hefty campaign expenses before they even get into office. In a heavily regulated system where the government does its job, rent control and subsidized housing would be the norm.
As much as it’s important to create new, smart regulations that help people; about half of all the existing regulations are too damn stupid to walk upright and burning them down would be a great service to humanity.
I think we can agree on this: Policies (not so much regulations) that are pro-business to a huge extent, and which are against consumers, should be torn down for the common good. Anarcho-capitalists, however, are against just about any restraint on what the super-monied can and cannot do.
Or, y’know, hoist the red flag and burn it all down to be reforged into a Socialist vision…
That’s an idea! 😀 Of course, the color red was never associated with socialism per se, but with that awful Stalinist system (i.e., state capitalism) posing at it (ugh!).
“it’s not due to government regulation” and ” they often lobby with Congress to receive beneficial regulations of this sort” contradict each other. The fact of the matter is that it’s a regulation. Regulations don’t have an inherent property of goodness that makes bad regulations like the above not real regulations.
You can be in favour of good regulations without supporting bad regulations or No True Scotsmanning them. My complaint about this regulation does not indicate that I want all regulations to go away. There isn’t a binary opposition where you can only be pro-regulation or anti-regulation. The only proper response to being asked if you’re pro- or anti-regulation is an incredulous stare because regulation isn’t homogeneous enough for those to be meaningful or sane positions.
“I know that I want to be sure that any professional I approach for business to have received the proper training and knowledge.”
Licenses create barriers to entry and the benefit of any license must be weighed against that. An unlicensed florist isn’t going to kill anyone. Requiring licenses for professions where there’s no safety risk simply protects established businesses from competition while allowing the state to extract rents.
“regulations that take a few cents out of everyone’s pocket to give massive amounts of free money to a few special interests”
“that is again the result of business lobbying more than anything else. Again, this problem would escalate with zero restraint should the U.S. become fully unregulated.”
Although I am not in favour of rampant deregulation, I still find this to be quite incredulous. Taking away the government’s ability to hand money to corporations will cause the government to hand more money to corporations? How does that even work?
“These are all pro-business laws, that allow private owners to receive maximum amounts of profit at the expense of consumers”
Which is, of course, a type of regulation. Just fess up: it’s not regulation per se you’re in favour of, just pro-consumer/citizen regulation. Pro-business regulation has been around for centuries and used to be the more common, default form of regulation. Governments tended to side with corporate interests over labour and consumers and still do to some extent. Pro-business regulation are not some bastardised kind of non-regulation and libertarians are as much in favour of ending it as the other kind. I don’t want to get rid of good regulations but these have got to go.
“it’s not due to government regulation” and ” they often lobby with Congress to receive beneficial regulations of this sort” contradict each other. The fact of the matter is that it’s a regulation. Regulations don’t have an inherent property of goodness that makes bad regulations like the above not real regulations.
I believe I should perhaps clarify what I meant, and I apologize for not doing so clearly before. What I meant to say is that government regulations, which I would prefer to call policies in this instance (I would more define a regulation as something the government limits certain legislation), that are inimical to the working class 99% are the result of corporatist lobbying. They are not examples of the government passing bag policies because government is inherently pre-disposed to do this without the direct influence of the small handful of people/interests that supply it with the most funds. I hope I was more clear this time.
You can be in favour of good regulations without supporting bad regulations or No True Scotsmanning them. My complaint about this regulation does not indicate that I want all regulations to go away. There isn’t a binary opposition where you can only be pro-regulation or anti-regulation. The only proper response to being asked if you’re pro- or anti-regulation is an incredulous stare because regulation isn’t homogeneous enough for those to be meaningful or sane positions.
So noted, but in this case, I’m talking about the type of regulations that limit corporate excess being removed. I’m not talking about government policies that are related to laws outside the realm of business and private property relations.
“I know that I want to be sure that any professional I approach for business to have received the proper training and knowledge.”
Licenses create barriers to entry and the benefit of any license must be weighed against that.
And I would not want a genuinely unqualified person, let alone a group of them, entering a profession that I want to feel confident coming to for required services. That’s all I’m saying here.
An unlicensed florist isn’t going to kill anyone.
Granted, they cannot. But their ability to know and understand the service they are providing should be a requisite for them to provide the service they are being paid my hard-earned money for.
Requiring licenses for professions where there’s no safety risk simply protects established businesses from competition while allowing the state to extract rents.
I can agree with you to the extent that the licenses may be too stringent. I would have to look at each one and what requirements they demand to be awarded before weighing in an opinion.
“regulations that take a few cents out of everyone’s pocket to give massive amounts of free money to a few special interests”
“that is again the result of business lobbying more than anything else. Again, this problem would escalate with zero restraint should the U.S. become fully unregulated.”
Although I am not in favour of rampant deregulation, I still find this to be quite incredulous. Taking away the government’s ability to hand money to corporations will cause the government to hand more money to corporations? How does that even work?
I don’t believe I said that at all, Jasmine. Seriously. I said, plain and simple, that business lobbying encourages the government to use taxpayer money to give massive hand-outs to corporations via subsidies and bail-outs. Then I said that taking away government regulations would enable all of the problems created by production for profits to escalate with zero restraint. Was I more clear this time?
“These are all pro-business laws, that allow private owners to receive maximum amounts of profit at the expense of consumers”
Which is, of course, a type of regulation. Just fess up: it’s not regulation per se you’re in favour of, just pro-consumer/citizen regulation.
I will “fess up” to what I said up above, in an attempt to make my points more clear: for as long as capitalism continues to exist, I am against the retraction of government regulations that limit the excesses that corporations and private ownership can go to in the pursuit of profits.
Pro-business regulation has been around for centuries and used to be the more common, default form of regulation. Governments tended to side with corporate interests over labour and consumers and still do to some extent. Pro-business regulation are not some bastardised kind of non-regulation and libertarians are as much in favour of ending it as the other kind. I don’t want to get rid of good regulations but these have got to go.
There was clearly a disconnect between what I was trying to say, and what you thought I was trying to say. I blame it partially on my failure to elucidate my points clearly enough. I hope my stance is more clear this time, though.
“I hope my stance is more clear this time, though.”
Yes. Definitely.
However:
“I would not want a genuinely unqualified person, let alone a group of them, entering a profession that I want to feel confident coming to for required services.”
When information can be distributed easily, this is solved through reviews. Reviews by consumers are usually a much more efficient way of aggregating quality information than government inspectors. Governments tend to be less-than-ideal assessors of quality and other factors which are hard to judge objectively. As such, I’d only trust the government to bar people who threaten health.
I agree with much of what you say here, Dissident – and really, I suspect that our two visions are closer than either of us realise: a green society would have a lot of elements of a socialist society: class distinctions would certainly be diminished, maybe it could also be a money-less society, certainly when it comes to essential goods – produced locally by the community and shared amongst the community (this would apply to food, water, energy and, possibly, housing and clothing).
I suspect we’re looking at the same basic ideal but from two differing view points and therein lie our diferences. Regardless – know that capitalism hates environmentalism with the same vengeance it once hated socialism. That the petro-chemical industry pays billions of dollars per year to front-organisations paid to create obfuscation round climate change shows how terrified they are by the implications of climate change. They are right in one thing – if the assertion of 99% of climate scientists are correct then capitalism is, in one way or another, doomed – but the capitalists can’t let go of their profits and power and would rather take the planet with them than do so.
Let me also reassure you and other readers that there would be nothing low-tech about a green society – at least I think the internet and other communications technologies would be an important and integral part of creating the complex participative democracy that such a society would have to be.
As to Marxism, well, Marx was thinking and writing at a time when environmental problems were seen as local problems. Despite this Marx was a proto-environmentalist (much like Ruskin):
“Man lives on nature–means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844)
“It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital.” (Grundrisse)
“Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. “ (Das Capital)
“all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility…Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the laborer.” (ibid)
“Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias” (ibid)
I like to think that if Karl had been born in a society cognisant of the dangers of global environmental pillage he’d have been an environmentalist – ‘environmentalism’ is really just ‘socialism’ but motivated by a different goal.
I agree with much of what you say here, Dissident – and really, I suspect that our two visions are closer than either of us realise: a green society would have a lot of elements of a socialist society: class distinctions would certainly be diminished, maybe it could also be a money-less society, certainly when it comes to essential goods – produced locally by the community and shared amongst the community (this would apply to food, water, energy and, possibly, housing and clothing).
I think making all the most important necessities free from the production for profit system is a step in the right direction, and a big one at that, but I would never become content and settle for that. Any continued production for profit would be pointless in a post-industrial society, and would continue to result in competition, the establishment of class divisions, the continued requirement for some to be losers in order for others to become winners, continued class divisions, and the continued encouragement of materialistic and acquisitive attitudes. This would certainly result in people working more hours than would be necessary simply to acquire enough “funds” to purchase certain items, which will infringe upon the greater leisure and peace of mind a more socially advanced system promises to provide. And then there is the matter of continued production for profit encouraging the continuation of the advertising industry to convince people they “need” to spend as much funds as possible on the latest swatches or multi-colored Cuisinarts. Finally, continued production for profit would heavily discourage the ending of planned obsolescence, and that would continue the practice of wasteful production that wouldn’t do the environment any favors.
I suspect we’re looking at the same basic ideal but from two differing view points and therein lie our diferences. Regardless – know that capitalism hates environmentalism with the same vengeance it once hated socialism. That the petro-chemical industry pays billions of dollars per year to front-organisations paid to create obfuscation round climate change shows how terrified they are by the implications of climate change. They are right in one thing – if the assertion of 99% of climate scientists are correct then capitalism is, in one way or another, doomed – but the capitalists can’t let go of their profits and power and would rather take the planet with them than do so.
Fully agree. Which is why we, the concerned 99%, need to let our loyalty to production for profit go completely, lest the same problem remain. This is a major problem among contemporary liberals and progressives, and I’m holding a lot of home that both they and your fellow Greens completely expiate it from each of the platforms you support in the future.
Let me also reassure you and other readers that there would be nothing low-tech about a green society – at least I think the internet and other communications technologies would be an important and integral part of creating the complex participative democracy that such a society would have to be.
I’m going to quote you on this 🙂 Because like other Marxists, I’m a strong proponent of the contention that we do not need to give up the benefits of industrial production in order to create a human civilization that operates in harmony with nature and the biosphere; for the most part, we simply have to change the economic rules under which production takes place, i.e., shift entirely from private and/or state ownership of the industries to collective social/common ownership. This would eliminate the ruthless competition, wasteful production, and need for unrestricted growth and expansion of a system that puts profits over the needs of all humanity and the biosphere itself.
As to Marxism, well, Marx was thinking and writing at a time when environmental problems were seen as local problems. Despite this Marx was a proto-environmentalist (much like Ruskin):
[snip!]
In many ways, Marxists are true environmentalists. The need to preserve the welfare of the biosphere as being integral to the welfare of all humanity is well-established in Marxist thinking, and one of the many benefits we believe social ownership sans the competitive production for individual profit would provide.
I like to think that if Karl had been born in a society cognisant of the dangers of global environmental pillage he’d have been an environmentalist – ‘environmentalism’ is really just ‘socialism’ but motivated by a different goal.
As noted above, the preservation and health of the environment is an important component of the Marxist/socialist platform. The latter is a very essential materialist need for every human being on the planet, not to mention every other life form. We simply do not focus on environmentalist issues alone, as do typical environmentalists who limit most of their activism to this single important issue only.
“Decentralisation and a return to sustainable technologies will make much work more labour-intensive. The increased flexibility of the job market, children’s greater freedom, the legitimation of informal and casual work and reduced competition for jobs will result in the idea of “work” broadening out to include many of the activities open to children, bringing them into the job market. This will contribute to the dissolution of the distinction between “child” and “adult” (a signifier of “adulthood” being participation in the world of work).
Jobs such as light horticultural work, paper-rounds, shop work, car washing, serving in a café, stable work, and certain domestic jobs will become more and more the prerogative of enterprising children. Children will no longer be entirely economically dependent on their parents.”
It would be better if technology completely took over these jobs so people wouldn’t have to work them. It would free people and make coercion into these jobs through poverty unnecessary. What keeps people economically dependent is their need to work in order to obtain goods. If people no longer need to work because technology can produce enough abundance without their labor then they would be even more free. Rather than wash cars or serve in a cafe, they could study the stars or make art or engage in other more self-fulfilling intellectual pursuits. We could live in a moneyless society instead where there is no need to compete in a job market. We should be trying to build technology and let machines do all the work and free the people.
What truly changes society are not revolutions or people theorizing about social justice – it’s the advancement of technology. The invention of automobiles has changed society way more than any revolution has. Think about how much the internet has changed society or the invention of phones or the machines that gave us the ability to mass produce. What brought us where we are today is the advancement of technology and what’s going to continue to move us forward is the advancement of technology. . And it’s going to keep moving forward and one day the way we live now will be left in the dust and we’ll be thought of as an ancient people.
Lensman: > “Decentralisation and a return to sustainable technologies will make much work more labour-intensive. The increased flexibility of the job market, children’s greater freedom, the legitimation of informal and casual work and reduced competition for jobs will result in the idea of “work” broadening out to include many of the activities open to children, bringing them into the job market. This will contribute to the dissolution of the distinction between “child” and “adult” (a signifier of “adulthood” being participation in the world of work). Jobs such as light horticultural work, paper-rounds, shop work, car washing, serving in a café, stable work, and certain domestic jobs will become more and more the prerogative of enterprising children. Children will no longer be entirely economically dependent on their parents.” “It would be better if technology completely took over these jobs so people wouldn’t have to work them. It would free people and make coercion into these jobs through poverty unnecessary. “<
I agree – with what you write, Josh. This is exactly what the CI would enable: those who wish to work to work in traditional jobs and make money to do so and those who don’t can choose not to, though these latter would have to accept to a greater or lesser extent a low-impact life-style.
Josh: > “What truly changes society are not revolutions or people theorizing about social justice – it’s the advancement of technology.”What brought us where we are today is the advancement of technology and what’s going to continue to move us forward is the advancement of technology<
Lensman: Unfortunately 'where we are today' is not a very good place to be – the sinking Titanic provides us with an extended metaphor – some of us in 'first class' have the champagne, diamonds and orchestras, but if the ship that is going down, they count for less than a grubby life-jacket.
Which is certainly not to say that a green society would not make best use of technology – but that that technology would have to be such that it doesn't metaphorically 'puncture the hull of the ship'.
A good example is in agriculture: a local, community-supported and sustainable agriculture would eschew the latest technology developed and promoted by multi-nationals such as Monsanto (GM crops, chemical pesticides and fertilizers…), would be small scale (i.e. to support the community rather than for sale or export) and would be, intermittently, labour intensive – especially at harvest time.
This would be a technological step backwards – but the rewards would out-do the costs – cheaper (using recycled materials – manure and compost); safer and better quality food, improved landscape, self-reliant food production, and foster both a stronger connection of the community to their 'place' and to each other through shared work.
Man has stepped back from technology before, when that technology has been judged dangerous – think biological weapons, eugenics research and warfare based on weather modification.
Ironically the last on this list is exactly what capitalism is (inadvertently?) enacting at the moment, albeit not for 'war' but for 'profit'.
(The “U.N. Environmental Modification Convention” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Modification_Convention) bans the use of weather modification techniques for the purposes of inducing damage or destruction. Now what capitalism is doing is not “for the purposes of” but rather 'with willful negligence'. However that does not mitigate the gravity of the situation or of the crime.)
So your optimism about technology should be tempered with the requirement that we use technology wisely and reject (or control) those technologies which will, or could, prove harmful.
“a local, community-supported and sustainable agriculture would eschew the latest technology developed and promoted by multi-nationals such as Monsanto (GM crops, chemical pesticides and fertilizers…), would be small scale (i.e. to support the community rather than for sale or export)”
Hey! You can’t tar GM crops, chemical pesticides and fertilisers by association with cringe-worthy groups like Monsanto! What’s wrong with GMOs, when their genes are free and open source? What’s wrong with minimally-toxic pesticides? How could we possibly not have our global carrying capacity collapse (worse than global warming would cause) if we abolished artificial fertilisers? The Haber Process feeds over a billion people!
Worse yet, localising agriculture means abolishing gains from trade! In agriculture of all places! Besides starving the cities (which’ll happen regardless if we can’t use fertilisers), it means we can’t consume anything we can’t grow nearby. That means no more mangoes up north by you, while I can never eat another apple down south by me. Crops which grow poorly over here, like oranges and wheat, will become expensive luxury items. That alone will roll back some of the nutritional advancements we’ve made so far – especially in the poorest countries.
One problem underlying Lensman’s “green” ideology is the arbitrary distinction between “fabricated / artificial wants” and “needs” (this was alredy at the basis of his concept of the “turn to consumer capitalism” in the previous article). Why would you need concrete, plaster, steel and glass for a house, while attaching a few wooden poles together and covering them with buffalo skins will do it? Why do you want a motorized car to transport you with your luggage, since you can drag it in a sledge? You don’t need DVDs to stimulate your imagination, chewing halucinogenic mushrooms is efficient. You can have news without radio, thanks to gossip. And asking old people to tell stories by a campfire can spare the printing of novels. No need of Internet for international discussions, you can once in your life walk during several weeks (and cross a sea in a barge) to join others in a celebration of the summer solstice at a famous solar temple. All modern “unnecessary” things have as function to make our lives more comfortable, and to allow us to spend less time fighting for survival, hence giving us the possibility to spend a lot of time on more creative pursuits. They also allow a higher population on the planet (paleolithic lifestyle is OK as long as you limit population to 1 person per 10 square kilometers; you can achieve that thanks to infanticide). What is to be connsidered as a “need” is not a timeless absolute, it depends on the level and the culture of society.
Modern “artificial” technology allows us also to obtain information in a very efficient way. In the 50’s, to find a paper or a book you had to go to a library, if it was not available in the local one, you had to travel to a big national library, there you would give a slip to the clerk, and when he had collected enough slips, he would give them to his colleague in the basement who would then fetch the books. You would get yours after half an hour, and then you would copy by hand the information you needed. In the 70’s, things progressed, you could photocopy the relevant pages.
The Malthusian framework of “green” thought transpires through the article, for instance in the suggestion of “low-energy economy”. There is a huge amount of energy in sunlight, geothermy, seawaves, winds, etc., we just have to learn to use it efficiently. It is a delusion to think that pre-industrial “low-energy” societies were “ecological”. Australian aborigenes transformed their continent from a tropical forest into a desert. In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, phreatic water was polluted and rivers were depleted of fish. Soil erosion through deforestation was known to scientist before the industrial reevolution. Ecological balance depends not only on natural resources and level of population, but also on technology and social organization; it is on the latter two that one must act.
Another silly Malthusian idea is to limit population growth by financially sanctioning large families. It is known that high living standards and the education of girls are the best ways to prevent large families. When women have opportunities of career and know that in their old age they will a have retirement pension and will not depend on their children, they will lead a life that is not devoted to raising kids.
I have been long enough, on another occasion I will tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet. (Future is red, not green.)
One problem underlying Lensman’s “green” ideology is the arbitrary distinction between “fabricated / artificial wants” and “needs”
You have touched on a fundamental issue in green thinking. There is a distinction between ‘needs’, which are permanent, and the ‘means of satisfying those needs’, which are, to varying extents, temporary. ‘Hunger’ is an ever-recurring and inescapable fact of life. An individual custard pie isn’t. Moreover one may choose to satisfy that hunger with a cabbage, or with lobsters garnished with truffles, and durian fruit, all liberally sprinkled with gold leaf and imported from the remotest parts of the world.
But, surprisingly enough the question of having to distinguish ‘needs’ from ‘wants’ doesn’t arise in a green society.
In a green society people will still be able to buy what they want. But certain things will change:
1/ The price will reflect the true cost of producing and shipping the item – which includes the damage its production and transportation does to our common wealth – the planet and the environment. Why, when little people have to (rightly) pay for council waste disposal services, should petro-chemical industries and multi-nationals dump billions of tons of waste into our atmosphere, ground and water and effectively not have to pay for that? (the Carbon Trading System agreed at Kyoto, put in place in lieu of simply taxing carbon emissions at source, is the farce it was clearly intended to be and has done nothing to halt the increase in greenhouse gases being pumped into our atmosphere) This will, of course, affect an item’s availability.
2/ The change in income distribution brought about by CI – the rich will be poorer and the poor richer. The less income you have the greater part of that income will be spent on essentials rather than luxuries.
3/ Taxation, or other disincentives, to curb advertising and marketing. Granted people need to know what products are out there – but do I need a girl with big tits to tell me that ‘Heinz make Beans’? No, but a cute little girl can persuade me to buy Cheesy Wotsits. ‘Information’ should be fine but not ‘persuasion’.
4/ Built in Obsolescence: one of the fuels of the ‘luxury’ market. Essentials (other than housing) have in-built life-spans – food being the clearest example. Consumerism has had to face the problem of goods that don’t have a natural life-span, or one that is very long – how much of the market for electronic goods is down to obsolescence – I don’t know – but everytime I’ve bought a new phone, computer, tv, radio, car – it’s been because the last one broke down, not because I wanted some ‘upgrade’ or supposedly better model.
This isn’t something I’ve read of in the green literature but would it make sense to have a law obliging manufacturers to clearly state the expected life-span of a product – with penalities when those goods fail to attain that life-time (with, of course, exemptions made for damage from misuse or accidents)?
These would create a self-regulating and self-adjusting system within the parameters set by these policies. More important they, combined with other green policy would bring about a paradigm change in which people evaluated their worth less by what they owned.
As to your vision of a green society being some return to a palaeolithic existence…
”The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we* would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s” (Naomi Klein “This Changes Everything” pp 91)
(*by ‘we’ she means the West.)
Now I lived in through the 70s and they weren’t some kind of dark age – children were SO much freer than they are today – at the age of 7 I could roam the streets for hours, talking to, yes, strangers and feel safe. And there was little of the current hysteria round child sexuality – this was a time when PIE could exist and even catch the ear of the Home secretary, when ‘Pretty Baby’ could be made, when (am I correct ins saying this?) child erotica was not yet criminalised as ‘porn’ (not until the 1978 Protection of Children Act anyway), when intellectuals could come out in favour of child-adult intimacy…
(Note that in writing this I don’t mean that a green society would be literally a ‘return to the 70s’ – flared trousers, glam-rock and sideburns would not, I can categorically state, be made compulsory.)
”Another silly Malthusian idea is to limit population growth by financially sanctioning large families.
Isn’t it even more silly to encourage population growth by providing incentives for having large families? To have a non-tapering CI for children born after the first (but only until they reached majority) would effectively make having more children economically advantageous to parents since the cost of bringing up a child diminishes according to how many siblings it already has. (“Families with three or more children spend 22 percent less per child than families with two children – http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2011/06/0241.xml&contentidonly=true)
It is known that high living standards and the education of girls are the best ways to prevent large families. When women have opportunities of career and know that in their old age they will a have retirement pension and will not depend on their children, they will lead a life that is not devoted to raising kids.
Absolutely agree with everything you say here, Christian. Education, security and enhanced reproductive rights for women are the most effective means of population control. A ‘CI taper’ can be set to create a ‘level playing field’ or to discourage excessive child-birth if the above measures are not effective.
The Malthusian framework of “green” thought transpires through the article, for instance in the suggestion of “low-energy economy”. There is a huge amount of energy in sunlight, geothermy, seawaves, winds, etc., we just have to learn to use it efficiently.
I pretty much agree – existing renewable energy technologies are sufficient to supply us with our energy needs, but only if we scale back those needs significantly.
It is a delusion to think that pre-industrial “low-energy” societies were “ecological”.
Not all were – yes, Easter Island is a good example of one that made the same mistake as we are making nowadays – realising too late that a finite system can not support endless growth. However many, most, societies that have a close link with the environment that sustains them are actually pretty good at identifying that their self-interest lies in stewarding and respecting nature. It’s a case of ‘not shitting on your own doorstep’ – you have to care enough about your doorstep first. We don’t.
The Easter Islanders seem to have imported a culture of resource-use from much larger Polynesian islands, which was ill-adapted to the island’s small size.
Western pre-industrial society was infected by christian (sorry) thinking that asserts that the earth, its animals and plants were given to man to do as he wants with. Modern green thinking started – like so many good things – with John Ruskin, who was probably the first to notice and care about the damage industrialisation was doing to the environment.
I have been long enough, on another occasion I will tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet. (Future is red, not green.)
Ok, Christian, I tell you what – let’s compare lists: you draw up a list of the environmental damages caused by green administrations and I’ll do one for the environmental damage caused by communist administrations (such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe*) and we’ll see which has the worse record.
*An interesting exception to this ‘list of shame’ being Cuba. Because of America’s oil embargo it’s probably the greenest country on the planet – not coincidentally it’s health system and education system are both first rate (UNESCO rates Cuba as the best education system in Latin America and it has an excellent health care system for all its citizens).
>Modern green thinking started – like so many good things – with John Ruskin
And he was a MAP!
Seriously, Tom??!! I had no idea!
Well, check out his relationship with Rose la Touche, whom he met when she was nine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_La_Touche
His marriage to his wife Effie had founded on his wedding-night inability to perform. He didn’t like pubic hair.
Ruskin’s autobiography ‘Praeterita’ is a wonderful, if occasionally (and uncharacteristically) difficult read. Whilst it’s no paedo-fun-romp, I can only describe his accounts of interactions with little girls as ‘luminous’, written with joy, precision and profundity of sentiment:
this is his account of first meeting Rose la Touche:
“…presently the drawing room door opened, and Rosie came in, quietly taking stock of me with her blue eyes as she walked across the room; gave me her hand, as a good dog gives its paw, and then stood a little back. Nine years old, on 3 January 1858, thus now rising towards ten; neither tall nor short for her age; a little stiff in her way of standing. The eyes rather deep blue at that time, and fuller and softer than afterwards. Lips perfectly lovely in profile;–a little too wide, and hard in edge, seen in front; the rest of the features what a fair, well-bred Irish girl’s usually are; the hair, perhaps, more graceful in short curl around the forehead, and softer than one sees often, in the close-bound tresses above the neck”
Would anyone other than a paedophile give a little girl such close attention?
His account of his interactions with the Liddell girls (they seem to have been the centre of many paedos’ interests) are also charming.
The usual explanation for the failure of Ruskin’s marriage to Effie has been challenged in a new book: Marriage of Inconvenience, by Robert Brownell. He claims that Ruskin was disgusted because he realized that Effie married him only to suck his money. There are reviews in The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/26/marriage-inconvenience-robert-brownell-review
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/29/ruskin-effie-marriage-inconvenience-brownell
A longer quote from Ruskin’s account of his meeting with Rose La Touche is given in:
http://www.francois-lemonnier.fr/416778970
NB. My answer to Lensman’s “ad Stalinem” criticism will be next week…
Reply to Christian:
> “NB. My answer to Lensman’s “ad Stalinem” criticism will be next week…”<
You imply that my suggested 'List Off' (me – “let’s compare lists: you draw up a list of the environmental damages caused by green administrations and I’ll do one for the environmental damage caused by communist administrations) contains an implied 'argumentum ad Stalinem'.
Presumably your defense is that none (or maybe 'not all') of the states that have described themselves as 'communist' were actually Communist. I think that this is a reasonable, yet infinitely debatable, point to make.
I'll be interested in reading your list of “horrible things done by “greens” against […] the poor of the planet”. I'm glad you put speech marks round the word "greens" because I suspect that the 'ad stalinem' form of defense you imply may be your defense of communism will apply equally well to my defense of “greens”.
If I were to compile a list of “horrible things done by “greens” against […] the poor of the planet” it would consist of such things as:
– the terrible consequences of Carbon Trading Schemes;
– the logging and evictions of indigenous people's in order to grow bio-fuels;
– massive renewable infrastructure projects such as dam-building in China;
– proposed geo-engineering projects such as Solar Radiation Management schemes that propose using pollution as a solution to global warming and which involve 'writing off' whole populations of 3rd world countries…
None of these are green policies. These are 'Green-Wash' proposed, promoted and funded by capitalists for the simple reason that all of them allow 'business as usual', will change nothing, require no changes to the system and make certain people very rich.
They are all worse than infective – all are massively damaging to the environment whilst at the same time giving the impression that 'something is being done', thus defusing any movement towards the only effective solution to the problem of climate change – radical changes in the way we consume energy, which would spell the end of Capitalism.
The above so-called 'green' measures are, in fact, obfuscatory weapons used by capitalism against those seeking to really address the problem.
“The price will reflect the true cost of producing and shipping the item”
Basically, internalising externalities. That’s actually the recommendation of a subset of capitalist/libertarian thought – that creating negative externalities and sticking someone else with the bill is a non-consensual use of force against them and that they deserve to be compensated. I know a libertarian who maintains that taxes on land and externalities are the only legitimate taxes which may exist in a free society. Maybe Greens can find some unlikely allies on the other side of the isle?
“‘Information’ should be fine but not ‘persuasion’.”
This is one of those things that’s waaaaaay easier said than done. How do you draw the line? Anywhere you draw the line you’re going to outlaw some ‘information’ or permit some ‘persuasion’ or both because the distinction isn’t inherently clear. There does not exist in nature some basic, objective distinction between the two. Also: How are you going to tax persuasion out of existence without trampling freedom of speech?
“have a law obliging manufacturers to clearly state the expected life-span of a product – with penalities when those goods fail to attain that life-time (with, of course, exemptions made for damage from misuse or accidents)”
….You have heard of manufacturer warranties before, right? You just described a warranty to the T. They do have those in the UK, right? I’m pretty sure they exist in (at least) all the Common Law jurisdictions – it just isn’t mandatory to provide one.
“To have a non-tapering CI for children born after the first (but only until they reached majority)”
That brings up another question of mine. If, say, the CI allowance for a second child is 85% of that for the first, as they age and gradually have more of the money routed to them, will they end up with less than big sib? If not, wouldn’t this still subsidise the family in question for having more kids? BTW: It costs a bit less to feed and clothe a 5 year old than a 15 year old. Does the CI for the child increase with their age?
“Easter Island is a good example of one that made the same mistake as we are making nowadays – realising too late that a finite system can not support endless growth. However many, most, societies that have a close link with the environment that sustains them are actually pretty good at identifying that their self-interest lies in stewarding and respecting nature.”
I hope you realise than in pre-birth control times limiting growth meant infanticide and war, right? Over here in Latin America, we got even more creative and started sacrificing people to the goddamn sun! Can you name a few pre-industrial societies who really did try to protect their environment? Please don’t say the Native Americans because the Western myth of how “natural” the Native Americans were is willfully ignorant of the way they slashed and burnt the forests to the south while hunting the buffalo to near extinction in the north. The Maya went into ecological collapse after over-cultivating the jungle and had to fight and sacrifice each other into cultural extinction. The Aztecs were heading in that direction too before Hernán Cortés showed up. The natives didn’t destroy their environment simply because there weren’t enough of them to do so.
“you draw up a list of the environmental damages caused by green administrations and I’ll do one for the environmental damage caused by communist administrations”
That’s monstrously unfair because Christian never challenged you on those terms. The complaint was against injustices against the poor and scientific denialism. I’m not very well versed on the second point, but if Christian wants any help with a list of ways environmentalists have been detrimental to the poor of the Third World, I’d be happy to help. I just can’t promise my analysis of the situation will be particularly Red….
PS: On your last point, you’re in agreement with the consensus over in Latin America & The Caribbean. We all agree that Cuba is fucking magic.
This is one of those things that’s waaaaaay easier said than done.
I don’t doubt that you’re right – and I’m happy to say that it’s not my role to draft the details of policy. I’m the man in the crow’s nest who, spotting a new land, shouts ‘Land ahoy!’, not the surveyor whose job it is to account for the geology, biology, topography and and botany of every square meter of that land.
There does not exist in nature some basic, objective distinction between the two.
At what point on a grey scale does white become black?
….You have heard of manufacturer warranties before, right? You just described a warranty to the T. They do have those in the UK, right? I’m pretty sure they exist in (at least) all the Common Law jurisdictions – it just isn’t mandatory to provide one.
This is exactly what I thought when I first started thinking round this issue.
The difference between such a law and warranties is:
1/ they are not mandatory,
2/ that any but the minimum cover has to be purchased over and above the price of the item (extended warranty),
3/ the ‘penalty’ is only the production value of the object i.e. replacement, which will generally be a great deal less than the shop price, a law would be able to impose punitive penalties for inaccurate claims,
4/ that there is no obligation for the warranty period to reflect the expected life-span (the shorter the warranty a manufacturer can get away with the better),
5/ it only applies to those consumers who can be bothered to follow through on claiming on the warranty – which is always a small % of purchasers,
6/ the statistics on warranty claims for a product remain the private information of the manufacturers – a government administered scheme would allow statistics relating to obsolescence and the accuracy of the manufacturer’s claim for its product’s life-span to be publicly monitored and evaluated.
That brings up another question of mine. If, say, the CI allowance for a second child is 85% of that for the first, as they age and gradually have more of the money routed to them, will they end up with less than big sib?
You’re again asking me to go into more detail than should be expected of a humble crow’s-nest man should, but let me have a stab at that question with my trusty cutlass…
My answer would be ‘no’ – I think a fair way of doing it is that all children from, say, the age of 6 start receiving a part of their CI directly – this would be the same for all 6 year olds regardless of the order of their birth. The amount they receive will rise at each birthday.
Now let’s assume the age of majority is 16. On this birthday they will receive the full CI, which will be the same as every able-bodied citizen in the state receives. This makes for 10 increments (6-15). Let’s assume for convenience that the full CI is $110. I’d suggest something along the lines of the 6 year old receiving $10 and then the CI going up by (say) $6 each year (so at 15 they receive $64) rather than simply dividing the child’s CI (which will vary according to the order of its birth) into 10 increments.
This would mean all children would receive the same allocation according to age, regardless of their order of birth – it’s only what is left over to the parents that will vary according to each child. It also acknowledges that parents have the ultimate financial responsibility for looking after their children right up to the age of majority.
Can you name a few pre-industrial societies who really did try to protect their environment?
How about various tribes of amazonian indians fighting to stop logging, cattle ranching, drilling for oil and mining in the territories where they live.
http://www.survivalinternational.org/material/22
http://amazonwatch.org/news/2014/0407-in-the-amazon-indigenous-people-fight-to-preserve-way-of-life-amid-intrusive-construction
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/06/brazil
http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/sep/09/amazon-tribes-fight-for-their-trees-in-pictures
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/12334/Fight-for-Amazonia—The-Internet-Indians
That’s monstrously unfair because Christian never challenged you on those terms.
Why should Christian be the only one who determines the terms by which green and red societies are compared?
“there is no obligation for the warranty period to reflect the expected life-span (the shorter the warranty a manufacturer can get away with the better)”
How could you not incentivise them to give the shortest possible estimate given that over estimates are sanctioned?
“How about various tribes of amazonian indians fighting to stop logging, cattle ranching, drilling for oil and mining in the territories where they live.”
Modern tribes that are in resource competition with Western societies/companies aren’t a particularly good example. Their primary motive is protecting their existing lifestyle and homes. Self-preservation and genuine environmental concern aren’t quite the same thing. The environmentalist rhetoric they use is, of course, for the benefit of their Western allies. It’s politics – and smart politics at that.
“Why should Christian be the only one who determines the terms by which green and red societies are compared?”
He isn’t but shifting the playing field straight from one place to the next is dodging the problem. It’s like if I told you I didn’t like your tie and you protested that this was nonsense because you have a lovely house. You may be telling the truth but it isn’t engaging with the objection. What would be fair is if you made a list of environmental catastrophes caused by Socialist regimes (*cough Aral Sea *cough*) and Christian makes a list of injustices to the poor caused by environmentalists. Thus, everyone can stand on their strongest platform.
How could you not incentivise them to give the shortest possible estimate given that over estimates are sanctioned?
by comparing their estimates with the statistics for actual life-span and penalising any dishonest shortening.
Modern tribes that are in resource competition with Western societies/companies aren’t a particularly good example. Their primary motive is protecting their existing lifestyle and homes. Self-preservation and genuine environmental concern aren’t quite the same thing.
That is SO wrong, Jasmine – they are absolutely one and the same thing. And because of this the Modern tribes are an excellent example.
Looking after the environment, in whatever way, is always ultimately about survival and is an act of profound self-interest. That is why it makes so much sense, whether your a depression-era farmer who has exhausted the soil on his land, or whether you’re talking about indigenous people protecting the forests for their self interest or a climate protester wanting emissions to be reduced because they don’t want their descendants to live in neo-Triassic climate conditions.
There’s nothing airy-fairy about protecting the environment – it’s about hard inescapable facts and self interest and (maybe the only airy fairy aspect) concern for future generations.
“by comparing their estimates with the statistics for actual life-span and penalising any dishonest shortening.”
I’m pretty sure this will lead to cringe-inducingly complicated results and incentives but I’ll let this lie for now.
“Looking after the environment, in whatever way, is always ultimately about survival and is an act of profound self-interest.”
So, you don’t believe that preservation of nature is inherently valuable, rather than a means to the end of human-preservation? Hmm. I suspect that’s an unusual position among the greens. Does that mean you would be OK with damaging or reforming parts of nature which are detrimental or incidental to human flourishing?
Reply to Jasmine
>”I’m pretty sure this will lead to cringe-inducingly complicated results and incentives but I’ll let this lie for now.””So, you don’t believe that preservation of nature is inherently valuable, rather than a means to the end of human-preservation? Hmm. I suspect that’s an unusual position among the greens. “Does that mean you would be OK with damaging or reforming parts of nature which are detrimental or incidental to human flourishing?”<
Well, yes, actually.
But I think that the damage or reforming has to be done in such a way and to such an extent that it does not exceed nature's capacity to heal itself.
Even organic, small scale agriculture 'damages' nature to some extent – worms are cut by the plow, minerals in the soil used up, a wild area at some point has had to be cleared to make room for the field etc etc. A cultivated field is an intrusion on nature – but if done correctly the damage remains local to the field, and is such that it can be absorbed and corrected by nature.
This is what is meant by the word 'sustainable' – it acknowledges that man takes from and uses nature – but that it should be done in such a way, or to such an extent, that nature isn't permanently (or long-term) harmed by it.
On this basis extraction and use of resources such as oil and coal would continue in a green society but on a much reduced level – a level that would be within nature's capacity to clean up any mess or damage those activities create.
Well, I’m a bit more radical in that I’m fine with permanently destroying certain things like diseases, a few mosquito species, etc. Anyway, I’m glad to see you take such a Consequentialist position.
How are you going to tax persuasion out of existence without trampling freedom of speech?
I feel that I was unfairly dismissive of you observation, and up in my lonely nest, with only the crows to talk to, I have plenty of time to mull things over…
As someone who has my freedom of speech, and, by extension, my freedom of thought, curtailed every day – this is an issue that I feel strongly about. However I also recognise that in this messy, complicated world, no freedom is absolute.
Can the captain of a crowded ocean cruiser exercise his right to free speech by telling his helmsman ‘head full speed for that that iceberg’?
If the predictions of 99% of climate scientists, and tthose of Big Carbon, are correct (they project available reserves of oil, gas and coal which exceed by five or six times the quantity of green-house gasses required to produce 2° global warming – resulting in temperatures rising by over 6 or 7°) then we, if you’ll pardon my vernacular, are ‘fucked’ – and I’m talking about all 9/10 available holes ‘fucked’, not just the usual 2 or 3.
The world should rightly be in a state of emergency – and in states of emergency certain freedoms are curtailed. I’d argue that the right of advertisers to promote planet-destroying economic and consumer habits should be one of those rights that is curtailed.
To which might be countered that doing so is a ‘slippery slope’ – tax advertising now, tomorrow you’ll be suppressing the speech of sexual minorities and dissidents.
But the question is not “whether we step onto a slippery slope or not?” but rather “which slippery slope do we choose to slide step onto?”. Disastrous climate change or a curtailment of the freedom of speech of powerful interests?
As to the logistics of such a law – well, it doesn’t strike me as that difficult – conventional bill-board and tv advertising should be easy enough (the BBC and various communities manage this fine – http://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban). The internet would be trickier.
However we must not forget that advertising is not by its nature anonymous – if some virus on your computer makes it so that every time you type the word ‘food’ up comes a pop-up saying “Bill Miggins’ freshly baked pies made my penis grow an inch – come buy them at Bill’s pie shop, Penge High Street’”– you’ll have a pretty good idea of who may be responsible.
“The world should rightly be in a state of emergency – and in states of emergency certain freedoms are curtailed. I’d argue that the right of advertisers to promote planet-destroying economic and consumer habits should be one of those rights that is curtailed.”
If the main issue isn’t advertising in general but the promotion of products which are detrimental to the environment, one need only tax those products to the point where they can’t compete with green alternatives. There’s no need to ban advertising of a product too expensive to succeed on the market at all.
To be honest, I feel queasy about any form of taxation that’s being used to regulate production but far less so than curtailment of free speech. If, instead of trying to tax them out of existence, the taxes simply forced manufacturers to pay for the damage they cause, I’d go right from queasy to supportive. Pigouvian Taxes are one of my top economic causes 🙂
“then we, if you’ll pardon my vernacular, are ‘fucked’ – and I’m talking about all 9/10 available holes ‘fucked’, not just the usual 2 or 3.”
‘”Bill Miggins’ freshly baked pies made my penis grow an inch – come buy them at Bill’s pie shop, Penge High Street”‘
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! I’m rolling on the floor. I’m dying. You’ve slain me.
Reply to Jasmine
> “That’s monstrously unfair because Christian never challenged you on those terms. The complaint was against injustices against the poor and scientific denialism. I’m not very well versed on the second point, but if Christian wants any help with a list of ways environmentalists have been detrimental to the poor of the Third World, I’d be happy to help. I just can’t promise my analysis of the situation will be particularly Red….””on another occasion I will tell the horrible things done by “greens” against science and the poors of the planet”<
Environmental destruction and deterioration are an injustice done to the poor.
Environmental disasters and deterioration hit the poor much much harder than they hit the rich, for the following reasons:
– the poor are less mobile thus less able to escape environmtal disasters or deterioration
– the poor are less able to take measures to protect themselves and their property
– the poor are less able to recover
– the poor tend to live in denser communities so are more affected by localised disasters
– there are more of the poor than the rich
– they have less influence over policies that could affect their environmental well-being.
So when I suggested narrowing down the inquiry to just environmental factors I was actually helping Christian out – if my list were to contain BOTH environmental injustices and non-environmental injustices committed by ostensibly ‘communist’ countries against the poor – believe me that that list would be a lot, lot longer than one listing only ‘environmental’ injustices!
TOC writes: “Humber Hubert”, who saw a draft of Lensman’s blog, commented as follows:
Interesting article, and one that has acquainted me with potential societal developments of which I had heretofore been unaware. But, while I share many of your frustrations concerning capitalism, the vision you present in this essay smacks too much of Utopian thinking for my liking. Probably resulting from a lack of imagination and vision on my part, I am too painfully aware of the deficiencies of human nature to imagine that the elevated society you envisage could ever be a reality. All socialist utopias, of whatever stripe, make the mistake of bestowing upon mankind inherent qualities of ‘goodness’, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ that one finds difficult to reconcile with the world of our experience. Indeed, the philosophy of rational self-interest at the heart of the capitalist economic model seems, prima facie, to be much more in harmony with human nature. Of course, these two divergent political philosophies have antecedents in the Hobbesian notion of society being a necessary evil which serves to mitigate the “short, nasty and brutish” life resulting from man’s inherent selfish nature, as contrasted with the “noble savage” philosophy of Rousseau, much favoured amongst socialist/liberal thinkers.
My own view is that science, technology, and the media have conspired to create a view of the world that is profoundly materialistic, competitive, and commodified, with Capitalism being the natural extension of these principles into the realm of commerce, trade and economics. This is why I consider it important to challenge the materialistc assumptions that have infected our modern world-view. We’re told to believe that life is nothing more than molecules in motion, that we’re nothing more than a lucky chimp in a hostile universe governed by impersonal, purposeless and irrational forces; such a view lends itself quite readily to an economic system that privileges competition, acquisitiveness, commodification and selfishness. Why should we hunger for something more than the values and practices of a commodified existence? In the world presented to us by scientific-materialism such a hunger is misplaced, delusional. There is nothing more. The result of such a vision (lack of), as far as I can see, is a growing superficiality and banal-ization of society. The existential emptiness at the heart of the individual is obscured by a preoccupation with the self (the “selfie” culture being symptomatic of such a preoccupation); and the yearning for something more ‘real’ is subsumed within a culture awash with artificial wants, desires and needs. The call for something more meaningful, profound and substantive is met with the reply, “Shut up and buy!”, or “Shut up and watch!”, or “Shut up and text!”
But, as well as my frustrations with capitalism, I also harbor great ambivalence too. After all, capitalism has afforded contemporary culture with heretofore unheard of affluence, and liberal capitalist societies do provide a greater variety of ways of life than did societies of the past or the more authoritarian societies we see in the world today. And, while I acknowledge that the capitalist marketplace, for the greater part, consists in selling us things we don’t really need, enslaving us to work routines that invariably restrict our personal creativity, I also have to concede that it does provide us with many things that we do actually want. But maybe that’s the problem. The great workers revolt, so anticipated by Marx, never really got going (fortunately, as far as I’m concerned); and I think this is due in no small part to the ability of modern technology to create greater human satisfaction (albeit superficial in many ways); also, with the introduction of welfare-state capitalism and the attempts to promote equality of opportunity through economic redistribution, a much needed dose of social justice was introduced (though, at present, British society seems less egalitarian and more oligarchic than it has been for some time). Why is this a problem? Well, from a Marxist point of view, a content, secure working class are not likely to revolt anytime soon.
I suppose, not unlike democracy, capitalism is the best bad system we’ve got. At least I’m unaware of any viable alternative at this current time, and I have to admit I’m skeptical of the deep green solution you proffer (but I’m happy to be convinced otherwise). This seeming lack of an alternative probably explains why people buy so readily into capitalistic solutions to current economic problems. But, I think the major success of capitalism is its appeal to self-interest; by creating artificial desires, selling us things we don’t really need, capitalism ensnares us in a web of glossy advertising images that tap into our deepest desires for freedom, happiness and fulfillment. We’ve been sold a lie; the myth that a hedonistic lifestyle centered on acquisitions is the highest that life has to offer. But, as economist Hayek maintained, self-interest doesn’t necessarily have to be acquainted with selfishness. Therein lies my optimism. I believe that the hunger for something more will eventually prevail. I also believe that the materialistic paradigm that presently has such a strangle hold on science will eventually slacken. When realms of experience other than those prescribed for us by reductionistic materialists are eventually acknowledged, a whole new set of aspirations which heretofore had been condemned as misguided will gain legitimacy (the psychedelic movement has much to offer in this regard). That is my hope anyway.
“Why should we hunger for something more than the values and practices of a commodified existence? In the world presented to us by scientific-materialism such a hunger is misplaced, delusional. There is nothing more. The result of such a vision (lack of), as far as I can see, is a growing superficiality and banal-ization of society. The existential emptiness at the heart of the individual is obscured by a preoccupation with the self (the “selfie” culture being symptomatic of such a preoccupation); and the yearning for something more ‘real’ is subsumed within a culture awash with artificial wants, desires and needs. The call for something more meaningful, profound and substantive is met with the reply, “Shut up and buy!”, or “Shut up and watch!”, or “Shut up and text!””
Scientific Materialist (AKA ‘Naturalist’) here. To quote my favourite novel:
“There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!”
To be honest, I’ve never understood why anyone would accuse Naturalism of being empty or meaningless. It seems to be the exact opposite to me. I don’t see any particular reason why there needs to be some cosmic force or power or purpose or meaning beyond us. The universe doesn’t have to care because we, the inhabitants, do.
I much prefer living in a world where there are no supernatural entities playing inscrutable games with my life or vast cosmic purposes being foist onto me. It’s this openness, this freedom, that gives life meaning. We aren’t merely atoms because there’s nothing mere about atoms. The fact that something can be explained, understood, or composed of parts doesn’t make it any less wonderful. It’s failing to see wonder in mere reality which I find to be dark and empty.
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
~Richard P Feynman
PS: There’s nothing wrong with selfies. A selfie is just an image and images of oneself are no worse than written records of oneself. I hardly ever hear adults criticise diaries even though they are exactly analogous in every way. People make art all the time. People record themselves all the time. There’s nothing inherently selfish about self-observation. Taking selfies doesn’t detract from ones ability to pay attention to things that aren’t oneself.
The only thing going on is that one group of (young) people are doing something which another group finds odd and difficult to empathise with It looks like it could conceivably be pattern-matched to self-interest, and those who don’t like it look no deeper. If they were honest about being set against anything which could conceivably fall within the same self-interest pattern, they’d be opposed to diaries, mirrors, makeup, and singing in the shower. In other words, they’d be disdainful of humanity in general.
I, personally, am uncomfortable with any and all pictures of myself because of my dysphoria and, if I lacked dysphoria, I still doubt I’d find selfies appealing. However, one thing you learn from growing up with autism is that even though everyone around you is going to do insane things that make no sense like parties and sporting events, it’s usually not because they’re bad – just very, very different and probably aliens. You learn to withhold judgement on weirdness when that weirdness isn’t actually causing harm.
This is what I have to say in response to, well, this.
It seems that capitalist propaganda has convinced a huge number of us, including many people far smarter than I can ever hope to be, that any type of major improvement for the way we operate human civilization is “too Utopic.” The “Utopia” or “pie in the sky” dismissal is, IMO, a firm component of the defeatist or acquiescent thinking that is imposed upon us by the media, the government, the academics who run every level of our “education” system, and all the rest of capitalism’s dominant think tanks and modes of influence. Thank the gods for heretics like Tom and Lensman! And all who follow the legacy of Marx and Engels!
Capitalism has at least given us a degree of unprecedented affluence, it was once again said here. The system has, no doubt, provided us with the Industrial Revolution, and thus many things that people of previous eras couldn’t even dream of. Yet this world of plenty is distributed on a very unequal basis, and just a tiny handful of people across the globe own and control its vast production and distribution apparatus. Many areas of the world continue to have the vast majority of its residents having close to nothing, and continue to exist in abject poverty and want. We in the First World nations have a lot more compared to them, certainly, but still not nearly as much as we should in comparison to the super-wealthy few. Further, we in the West still exist in a continued state of financial insecurity and crushing debt where we’re grossly overworked. Not only that, but the environment and biosphere have been dealt serious blows because of production for profit and its demands for ever-continuing growth, demands for rampant consumption by the citizens, and perpetual wars that kill or maim numerous innocent people for the benefit of competing ruling classes.
Yes, social democracy has produced a better type of capitalism, but all of these problems continue to exist there for the majority of their populations; and what benefits the people there do enjoy are constantly under attack by their governments, who consider the U.S. model as the most ideal for them.
And he thinks capitalism is the “best bad system” we have, and is unfamiliar with any viable alternatives? Didn’t he just read Lensman’s essay on green policy? Has he never read the continued essays and books written on Marxian socialism, especially with shameless loud-mouths like me around? Or has he done all that, and dismissed all of them as “too Utopian”? This, I think, reveals the extent that capitalist propaganda and ideology has weakened our resolve and belief in ourselves as a species, and used as an excuse to accept defeat without a struggle. Not to mention used for rationalizing a bad and archaic global system as “admittedly imperfect, but hey, it’s not like we can do any better, right?”
“And he thinks capitalism is the “best bad system” we have, and is unfamiliar with any viable alternatives? Didn’t he just read Lensman’s essay on green policy? Has he never read the continued essays and books written on Marxian socialism, especially with shameless loud-mouths like me around? Or has he done all that, and dismissed all of them as “too Utopian”?”
I doubt it’s ignorance or dismissal so much as lack of trust. These proposals haven’t been tried and history is littered with smart, well-intentioned proposals that became catastrophes in their implementation. Where is the empirical, observable evidence that any of these proposals will do better in the real world?*
*Not just fatalism; actual question. I always like seeing new real-world case-studies of weird politics.
“And he thinks capitalism is the “best bad system” we have, and is unfamiliar with any viable alternatives? Didn’t he just read Lensman’s essay on green policy? Has he never read the continued essays and books written on Marxian socialism, especially with shameless loud-mouths like me around? Or has he done all that, and dismissed all of them as “too Utopian”?”
I doubt it’s ignorance or dismissal so much as lack of trust. These proposals haven’t been tried and history is littered with smart, well-intentioned proposals that became catastrophes in their implementation. Where is the empirical, observable evidence that any of these proposals will do better in the real world?*
*Not just fatalism; actual question. I always like seeing new real-world case-studies of weird politics.
See, here’s the thing with that, Jasmine. For whatever degree that lack of trust may be involved in this, I still think the main problem is fear of change and stubborn preference for what we’re accustomed to, along with a hefty dose of anti-Marxist cultural indoctrination (you can clearly see them repeating the talking points of capitalist pundits in paint-by-the-numbers fashion) and learned helplessness, i.e., a cynical form of belief that humanity simply cannot do any better than what we have now (a major part of this indoctrination). Why? Because such individuals insist upon supporting a system that is known to have failed and is clearly not designed to work for the vast majority. It has failed over and over again no matter what type of variation of it has been tried during the course of the 20th century to the present, and voter turnout and Congressional decisions alike are rife with supporting policies that repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Granted, socialism has yet to be tried, so one may argue that transitioning to it may result in something “worse” than the “devil we know”. But sometimes change is necessary, including fundamental change. What you said about good intentions are true, but how often, I must ask, have these good intentions embraced actual change so much as yet another variation of the way things are now (i.e., the “illusion of change” rather than actual change)? This is common in American politics when you hear many voters insisting that “change” constitutes the replacing of a failed Democratic candidate in the Oval Office with a Republican; and then switching to the former again after the latter invariably screws up. It’s been proven over and over again that Democrats and Republicans do not differ in any major way when it comes to pro-capitalist policies, yet they are continually “trusted” to make some sort of “change.” This is a classic example of misplaced trust bred by loyalty to the familiar over and above anything else, and I think it can be argued that the end result is worse than the careful consideration and proper tactical transition to something truly (as opposed to just superficially) different.
Thomas Jefferson noted and critiqued this psychological and political phenomenon himself in the Declaration of Independence when he said,
The first American Revolution was all about major change, and Jefferson made it clear that fear and mistrust of it held back progress in favor of retaining the previous system (feudalism and monarchical rule) much longer than was necessary, to the benefit of the feudal ruling class but to the detriment of the common good. At the time of the Revolution, capitalism was the most advanced and progressive system possible at that era’s level of technological development. It has since outlived its historic usefulness, and it’s now time to shed it and do precisely as Jefferson instructed in the above excerpt. That excerpt also made it clear that the Founders of America never intended capitalism to be eternal, but only to be supported for as long as it remained progressive, which it ceased to be once it led to the Industrial Revolution, which made it technologically possible for the first time in recorded human history to produce an abundance for all. This effectively rendered barter, money, and production for private property obsolete and regressive. Making such a revolution legal and possible for the common people was precisely why Article V was later placed in the Constitution.
“I still think the main problem is fear of change and stubborn preference for what we’re accustomed to”
Status Quo Bias is neither unusual nor uncommon. The problem is figuring out to what extent it is the cause of a decision relative to other, more rational factors.
“a system that is known to have failed”
Define “failed”. Failure must be relative to a system’s goals. If the goal is improving human living conditions relative to Feudalism, Capitalism hasn’t failed. It’s quite possible that the standard you hold Capitalism to when you refer to it as “failed” is different to that of the people who consider it successful.
“but how often, I must ask, have these good intentions embraced actual change so much as yet another variation of the way things are now”
“Actual change” is relative. It depends on how much change you require. The Fascists, the Marxist-Leninists, and the Maoists tried to implement visions of change just as drastic as your own. They had intentions as bright and beautiful as your own. Yet some how they all managed to impose a great deal of suffering on the populace. It isn’t particularly surprising that people might shy away from your radical proposals given the history there.
“The first American Revolution was all about major change”
That seems to indicate that your standards for major change aren’t as high as you implied before. Other than moving the centre of political power from London to the colonies, officially enshrining British Whig doctrines (with some liberal French influence), and reopening westward expansion; the American Revolution doesn’t seem to have done much in itself. Major change came afterward and was influenced by it but I still wouldn’t call the Revolution the primary cause of such change.
“fear and mistrust of it held back progress in favor of retaining the previous system (feudalism and monarchical rule) much longer than was necessary”
Yes to preventing the change over. More sceptical on the other points. For one thing, the Revolution wasn’t very necessary for capitalism, which was already the dominant mode of production in both the colonies and the motherland. It certainly dominated New York and Boston. The main change there was that the prohibitive tariffs on trade with French and Spanish colonies were reduced while new tariffs on trade with the British Empire were introduced. As for benefiting the common good, the African Americans who would have been freed far earlier and without civil war had Britain remained in charge may have disagreed with you on that point.
Thanks, Humber Hubert, for your response, and thanks again (this time publicly) for all the help you gave me in working on this essay. I won’t address the issue of Utopian thinking other than to say that the dreams of ordinary people should be the ones that fuel the future. When bread-and-circuses capitalism teaches them/(us) to dismiss their dreams and hopes for a better world, and if we abandon the field of play, we leave the Future an open goal for the dreams and hopes of rapacious multi-nationals, the powerful and the rich.
”All socialist utopias, of whatever stripe, make the mistake of bestowing upon mankind inherent qualities of ‘goodness’, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ that one finds difficult to reconcile with the world of our experience.”
As always I’m months behind in my radio-listening but yesterday I got round to the April 13th edition of Radio 4’s ‘Start The Week’ – on the subject of ‘Altruism’ – and David Sloan Wilson’s contribution seemed to be a very good counterbalance to your pessimism about human nature.
3 quotes especially stand out for me:
“The mechanism of altruism in social insects has only evolved a dozen or so times but so successfully that social insects form half of the bio-mass of insects. “
“Groups of altruists do very well compared to groups without altruism”
“I think that many of the problems that we all confront in large scale societies is that what is really hard is to establish altruism at large scales. If you look at small groups you find that altruism and solid citizenry of all kinds is pretty easy to establish but it’s at large group that we have these problems.”
The last quote touches on the subject of the nature of society. Capitalism produces, for all the reasons I outlined in the first essay and more (Towards the Aetiology of Paedophobia), weak communities and isolation, and individuals and families often found themselves located within huge masses of humans (towns, cities). It is also a system based on comptetion rather than cooperation (i.e. the criteria for economic success is to ‘have more’ than other people, that is ‘become rich’). Capitalism is hardly a good context within which social and communal altruism to flourish – yet, despite this, altruism does still occur.
A green society would be a system which creates conditions much more favourable to altruism: small communities implanted communities which work together, less generational apartheid (free interaction with children should encourage altruism), the reduction of the gap between rich and poor, the Citizens’ Income, the encouragement of low-consumption living and a society whose most fundamental principle is one of ‘caring’, all these should create a society where altruism can flourish.
‘Human nature’ is multi-faceted – and what facets come to the fore depend to a great extent on which facets are encouraged and which are discouraged by the context. A society whose functioning depends on greed will, unsurprisingly, make people act selfishly – and against their better nature (I have little doubt that those who exploit workers, dodge taxes and pillage the environment are probably decent human beings when you get to know them – they are just trapped in roles and ideals that oblige them to act in such ways).
My own view is that science, technology, and the media have conspired to create a view of the world that is profoundly materialistic, competitive, and commodified, with Capitalism being the natural extension of these principles into the realm of commerce, trade and economics. This is why I consider it important to challenge the materialistc assumptions that have infected our modern world-view.
First you suggest that Capitalism reifies harmful ‘profoundly materialistic’ attitudes. Then you say that you ‘consider it important to challenge’ these attitudes; then in the final paragraph you meekly roll over and and invite Capitalism to tickle your belly with with a capitalism is the best bad system we’ve got.
Good luck changing those ‘materialistic, competitive, and commodified’ values whilst maintaining the system that promotes them, Hummie!
Is a system that has created the global existential threat of climate change even eligible to enter the ‘Best System Beauty Contest’!?
Isn’t that a bit like allowing Herod to enter the 0001 AD ‘Father of the Year’ competition?
“a prosperous, growth-free economy”
That line made my brain reboot. After remounting the drivers and unpacking all the applications, it’s still not making any sense. It’s like saying “dark light” or “blazing ice”. In fact, it’s even weirder than that. What’s this even supposed to mean? Prosperity is a condition where net wealth is increasing. Growth is a condition where net wealth is increasing. “A prosperous, growth-free economy” basically asserts ‘P = ~P’. It’s not just a violation of common sense – it’s a violation of mathematics!
That isn’t even getting into the question of who would want to live in a growth-free economy. Why would we willingly live a life with no new/different goods or services ever produced? Not to mention the complete absence of any and all public goods such as music. I can’t even imagine the lengths one would have to go to just to prevent people from ever making anything new. Innovation exists wherever humans exist.
Then I have to wonder how a Citizen’s Income could produce a growth-free economy. Prosperous? Maybe. Economically stagnant? I doubt it.
“ending poverty and poverty-related crime”
I’m not sure which wiki tag works best here so I’ll use both [Citation Needed] & [Dubious – Discuss].
My first objection is that one can’t “end poverty” so long as poverty is being treated as a relative term (which, in most countries, it is). The poor of today are definitely richer than the petite bourgeois of the late 19th century, yet I doubt we’d consider the later “poor”, per se. If you could define what constitutes being “poor” in some objective manner, I’d definitely appreciate it. (Although, I doubt it could be constructed in such a way as to include all of the UK’s poor while simultaneously excluding my country’s top 5%. As far as I can tell, the two groups are about equally wealthy.)
Secondly, I doubt all “poverty-related crime” is caused by lack of money. If it were, I’d expect the petite bourgeous of yesteryear to be engaged in such crimes to a far greater degree than the poor of today. While crime has been falling over the centuries, I doubt the fall has been quite that extreme. If poverty-related crime is more the result of correlation than causation (which is my suspicion), attacking it at the monetary end wont make it go away completely.
“people could be enterprising without fear of suffering total ruin”
“put stagnant wealth back into circulation”
“The worth of an activity would not depend on […] its social value”
“labour-intensive sustainable agriculture”
….I give up. Where is the “growth-free” part? All of these look like they’re producing value. This is clearly an economy which involves wealth-creation.
“Home- and screen-based living has seen increased isolation and psychological problems, and caused an epidemic of childhood obesity in the West.”
[Citation Needed] Preferably individual citations on isolation, psychological problems, and childhood obesity which each demonstrate a causal link to “Home- and screen-based living”.
Nit pick on The Spirit Level: It makes it’s arguments using a lot of scatter-plots that chart a bunch of social problems vs income inequality. This isn’t inherently bad. The problem is that this simply sets up a correlation and the correlation is largely driven by two facts: Nordic countries are simultaneously very equal and Better Than Every Country At Everything while Anglophone countries (especially the USA) are simultaneously very unequal and Worse Than Every Country At Everything. All the other countries analysed float around in the middle of the graphs and add very little predictive power.
This seems at first to support the same inequality vs social problems link until you notice that inequality isn’t the only relevant way that Scandinavia differs from the Anglophone countries. You could equally argue that [insert social problem here] is what’s driving both income inequality and all the other social problems. Or, if you want to get really creative, just note that the Nordic countries (and Japan) are very ethnically homogeneous while Anglophone countries are not. Then you just need to change the “income inequality” axis on all their scatter plots to “ethnic homogeneity” and suddenly this flagship of Liberalism becomes The White Nationalist Manifesto and manages to support every UKIP policy proposal ever.
Moral: Beware statistical summaries when it’s someone else arranging the data.
(Sorry for being so critical of literally everything. It’s exam time at college and it’s frustrating. The above is probably at least partly due to my bad mood – although I doubt it’s false.)
Very entertaining, Jasmine (though Lensman could be forgiven for a different view!), and surely worth a good ponder. Good luck with the exams, though I doubt you’ll need it.
One thing, though: I’ve been trying to get hold of you today but not one of your three email addresses is functional: every message bounced back. Could you please contact me on tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk ?
I emailed you on the same day the parent of this comment was posted and haven’t received a reply. Did you get my email?
Yes, I did, thanks, and I replied on the same day. I have just re-sent my message. Please confirm its arrival or tell me if there is nothing.
That’s odd. I don’t see it in my inbox or spam. This is quite peculiar because that’s my normal email address which works for pretty much everything.
Maybe you should try slightly altering the title/body of the email? That’s gotten me through spam filters before :p
I replied again yesterday (1 June) from different email address. Did you get it?
Jasmine, are you being a little obtuse re. growth-free prosperity? Growth means more than just “producing stuff”. It means producing more stuff this year than last. Hence the lack of any contradiction in the phrase “growth-free prosperity”.
Sure, capitalism produces wonderful innovations, but it also generates a lot of futile churn, with an inbuilt bias towards items ever more disposable because the sooner you throw it way the sooner you’ll buy a new one, driving more growth! Is the churn necessary for the innovation? Greens presumably either think not, or are prepared to sacrifice the latter, finding the cost too great, both in terms of the personal alienation needed to keep the churn going, and the cost to the world’s finite resources.
You may disagree, or think it is an ideal born of Western luxury, or that the time is not yet, but you must surely admit that their case is not nonsensical? I don’t think Greens insist on permanent shrinkage, just the abandonment of economic growth as an end in itself.
“Jasmine, are you being a little obtuse re. growth-free prosperity? Growth means more than just “producing stuff”. It means producing more stuff this year than last. Hence the lack of any contradiction in the phrase “growth-free prosperity”.”
According to the The Dictionary of Economics:
“Economic growth is the increase in a country’s standard of living over time.”
Which is to say, an increase in the country’s wealth. My economics textbooks (which would be more difficult to link) seem to concur. I’ll be sure to write the authors immediately to inform them of how obtuse they are.
Another definition sometimes given for the same term is an increase in a country’s productive capacity – ie: it’s ability to make goods over time. This isn’t quite the same as the first definition (increase in material standard of living) and I’ve been going with the first one because it’s the one I see most commonly referenced in my textbooks and the papers I read online.
However, thinking about it more, I realise that Lensman may have been using this second definition. If so, we were simply using different vocabulary and I withdraw the statement that growth = prosperity for that definition of growth. Regardless, I maintain my objection that a CI wouldn’t cause Growth or the Productive Potential Frontier to decrease.
“you must surely admit that their case is not nonsensical?”
It was the odd vocabulary choices I found nonsensical. I withhold judgement on whether the vision is inherently nonsensical.
But, but, but… your dictionary agrees with me, not you, doesn’t it? Increase = more. Prosperity and growth have a relationship analogous to velocity and acceleration.
I know capitalist commentators tend to regard constant prosperity (=zero growth) as ‘stagnant’ and undesirable, and they may be right, but it is not nonsensical to disagree with them.
Growth is defined there as an increase in standard of living. So, in the analogy with physics, standard of living is position and growth is velocity – not acceleration.
The dictionary I linked to doesn’t define prosperous but when I was referring to a prosperous country I meant one where the quality of life of it’s citizens increased over time. Would you consider a country with some fixed average quality of life to be prosperous? I will admit that such a thought did not occur to me.
Thanks, Jasmine. That’s much clearer!
I hadn’t really considered the idea that prosperity necessarily implied increasing wealth. Its absence from your dictionary suggests it’s not a formal economic concept, so its meaning may be vaguer than I thought. But at least one need not interpret it in a way that makes “growth-free prosperity” a contradiction. Something very alien to capitalism, perhaps something that could never work, but something that can at least be sensibly considered.
Assuming prosperity and growth are defined differently, yes, it isn’t illogical. I was perplexed because I used the same definition for both so “growth-free prosperity” parsed as the logical equivalent of “P and not-P are both true!”
Just noticed I’d skimmed too fast and missed the fact that the misunderstanding arises from your odd definition of prosperity. What does your dictionary say on that? We agree on the definition of growth.
Thanks for your comments, Jasmine. You certainly raise a lot points!
“Prosperity is a condition where net wealth is increasing. Growth is a condition where net wealth is increasing. “A prosperous, growth-free economy” basically asserts ‘P = ~P’. It’s not just a violation of common sense – it’s a violation of mathematics!”
Since all my similes have, for some reason, been animal-based ones, I won’t break this pattern:
Which is the more ‘prosperous’? A pampered poodle with a diamond-encrusted collar, its own secluded private garden, as many, and more, dog snacks (containing gold leaf) as it can consume and daily hair-do, manicure and blow-dry; or a mongrel who gets taken twice daily for a walk in the park, who chases squirrels, rolls in the mud, retrieves an old stick and gets to sniff other dogs’ arses?
If our current idea of prosperity is causing the pillaging and destruction of our planet, leading to obese, isolated children with high rates of childhood mental illness, increased disparity between the rich and the poor &c &c then maybe we should change our idea of what kind of ‘prosperity’ we should be aiming for.
Your definition of prosperity, which basically boils down to ‘having more stuff’ is more likely to have been written by a banker than a Buddhist Monk!
Peter Herman in his comment below (or could it be above?) shows us that your conception of ‘prosperity’ need not be considered as written in stone (though I’m sure the capitalists would like it to be):
Perhaps one way to begin is for societies to adopt a form of Bhutan’s concept of a Gross National Happiness Index (http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Short-GNH-Index-edited.pdf) as opposed to one that mistakenly equates material consumption with personal satisfaction.
This index evaluates the following criteria: Psychological Wellbeing, Health, Education, Culture, Time Use, Good Governance, Community Vitality, Ecological Diversity and Resilience, Living Standards.
These seem to be better criteria for evaluating prosperity than simply ‘having more’.
“Why would we willingly live a life with no new/different goods or services ever produced? Not to mention the complete absence of any and all public goods such as music. I can’t even imagine the lengths one would have to go to just to prevent people from ever making anything new. Innovation exists wherever humans exist.”
Your conception of a growth-free economy is really very odd. But first of all let me clarify that ‘growth-free’ isn’t really the best way to describe such an economy – I should have used the term ‘sustainable growth’.
Whilst this is most definitely NOT about returning to some primitive past state I’ll take the risk of reminding you that nearly all of mankind’s history has occurred within sustainable growth limits. It’s only really since the invention of Watt’s steam engine (patented 1775) that growth has outstripped the planet’s capacity to heal itself or absorb man’s waste. Whilst I wouldn’t hold up all aspects of pre-industrial society as ideal you must admit that they did ok on the music-front – Bach wrote his St Matthew’s Passion in a green sustainable-growth economy.
Then I have to wonder how a Citizen’s Income could produce a growth-free economy. Prosperous? Maybe. Economically stagnant? I doubt it.
Growth would be ok provided it was ‘sustainable’. However the CI would allow a paradigm shift to occur – it may happen suddenly or possibly over several generations – the option of a low-consumption life-style, in a society that placed an increased value on that life style and catered for it through increased and permanent access to education, and an increased value given to non-wealth creating activities (study, research community work, caring, creative and cultural production, environmental work, teaching, activities contributing to health and welfare &c &c) would fuel this paradigm shift. I myself would opt for this low-consumption life-style, and nearly all my friends and colleagues (Ireland for a while provided Income Support without the stipulation that the recipient should be seeking employment to all artists, musician and writers). This would be a strong and long-term incentive against unnecessary consumption. Moreover in a localised and self-reliant community much of the essentials, including much food water treatment, energy,, would be produced by the community and considered as part of the community’s wealth and would not be part of a financial transaction, removing many essentials from the consumer loop.
And when you say ‘Economically stagnant? I doubt it’ you are right.
A society based on the CI would in fact be a highly creative and enterprising one, as has been consistently demonstrated by those societies and communities that have implemented variations of it (see my comment in reply to Josh) – the CI would provide a source of investment; it would provide the security of a ‘safety net’ allowing people to take more risks; it would remove the need for a lot of employment law and allow for much more flexible work contracts (no need for a minimum wage, enabling of casual work patterns, the legitimisation of activities now in the grey or informal economy, the facilitation of job sharing). The redistributive nature of the CI would also put more money into circulation (for the question of inflation see my reply to Josh) – which is always good for promoting entrepreneurship and investment, with the constraint that the enterprise should be environmentally sustainable. So whilst the option (the one that I, as an artist, would definitely choose) of living a very environmentally low-impact life on just the CI (maybe supplemented by a few hours work here and there) will be hopefully tempting to many people it will also be much easier for people to set up businesses – and, importantly, they will also be less penalised if they fail.
Such an economy would be far from stagnant: because a pond stays the same size doesn’t necessarily mean that it is ‘stagnant’.
My first objection is that one can’t “end poverty” so long as poverty is being treated as a relative term (which, in most countries, it is). The poor of today are definitely richer than the petite bourgeois of the late 19th century, yet I doubt we’d consider the later “poor”, per se. If you could define what constitutes being “poor” in some objective manner, I’d definitely appreciate it.
I absolutely agree with the point you’re making about relative and absolute poverty – the word is virtually meaningless without a qualifying adjective.
First of all the green movement is an internationalist movement (I hear cries of ‘utopian’! But isn’t capitalism an international phenomenon (think WTO)? If so then why shouldn’t Ecologism be international?) – it’s ideal is a redistribution of wealth globally. After all the wealth of capitalist countries has been consistently built on the exploitation and pillage of weaker countries.
But both concepts of poverty are useful, but in different contexts: if you pinned me down and forced me to define poverty in the absolute sense I’d venture something along the lines of ‘the medium to long-term condition of a person, family or community being unable (for whatever reasons) to wholly meet their basic needs’. To which I don’t doubt you will object ‘how does one determine what those ‘basic needs’ are?’ Well, there’s the nub – but ‘Food, Water, Shelter, clothing’ is a pretty good baseline to start from.
I’d expect the petite bourgeous of yesteryear to be engaged in such crimes to a far greater degree than the poor of today.
Funnily enough court records reveal that 14th Century Oxford had a murder rate of 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year.
Mid-20th-century London has fewer than one homicide per 100,000 I people per year.
It’s not ‘absolute poverty’ that causes poverty-related crime – it’s ‘relative poverty’ i.e. the perception of an unfair distribution of wealth, combined with a attitudes that place a (too?) high value on property and wealth. Muggers, robbers, burglars, financial criminals, tax-dodgers etc are just money-avid business men who want to short-cut the legitimate means of acquiring wealth. They’re motivated by the perception that they ‘are not wealthy enough’ in comparison to some ideal held out to them by society.
I’ll have to break off now Jasmine as this comment is getting too long. I’ll return to the rest of your points later.
“Your definition of prosperity, which basically boils down to ‘having more stuff’ is more likely to have been written by a banker than a Buddhist Monk!”
Not necessarily “having more stuff”. Material wealth is based on the extent to which you value what you have. A book you read over and over, being mentally stimulated each time, has more value to you than a book you breeze through once, throw away, and can’t remember next week. If you own fewer books but of a higher quality such that you derive more value from them, you are economically wealthier – even if you don’t have “more stuff”.
Cost =/= value. Money =/= wealth. One is supposed to track the other and attempt to measure it but there are many types of goods where this becomes difficult or impossible. Books are an unusually good example here because information goods can’t have their value assessed before they’re consumed. Regardless, the difference between the measurement and the thing itself is true throughout economics.
BTW: If you want to talk about something other than what’s commonly called “economic prosperity”, could you please define your terms? I think making sure we’re all talking about the same things could help immensely. I feel like a Java compiler trying to juggle variables that no one bothered defining.
“This index evaluates the following criteria: Psychological Wellbeing, Health, Education, Culture, Time Use, Good Governance, Community Vitality, Ecological Diversity and Resilience, Living Standards.”
I read that paper yesterday and would like to point out that within “Psychological Wellbeing” there was a subsection for “Spiritual Wellbeing”. They actually had a limit for how many times you had to recite Buddhist prayers and reflect on the karma, below which you would not be classified as sufficiently “happy”. As a Utilitarian, I am extremely excited by any attempts to quantify happiness (it’s our whole shtick) but, as an atheist and a Naturalist, that part made me nauseous.
“I should have used the term ‘sustainable growth’”
That works really well. I can understand that. Thanks. Still a little hard to pin down and define, though…
“nearly all of mankind’s history has occurred within sustainable growth limits.”
…I think your history of the world looks a lot nicer than mine. Mine looks more like populations moving to new areas and expanding until they can’t find new ways to feed themselves. At that point, population stabilises because just the right number of people starve to death each year. This wasn’t particularly ecologically friendly either. As Christian pointed out above, there are lots of historical examples of humans wrecking the environment around them. Extreme pollution of rivers; scorched earth military tactics; the demographic collapse on Easter Island (and several lesser-known demographic collapses); slash-and-burn agriculture, which predominated in Latin America and the Caribbean before the Europeans arrived, along with smaller-scale instances of this technique in Africa and Asia. We also managed to drive thousands of species to extinction long before it was cool. Really, the only reason we didn’t completely wreck the planet five millennia ago is because we didn’t know how to destroy the world efficiently.
“the option of a low-consumption life-style”
But that option already exists to anyone who wants to work part time or qualifies for the dole. I think the desire to spend goes beyond that. I personally can’t speculate on what it is because I (and most of my maternal family, plus my dad) lack the spending urge I see in many other people around me – including people with little or no stable income. When I ask my friends why other people have a spending urge when I don’t, they usually say “you’re Jewish so you wouldn’t understand”. This is going on my Top Ten List of Least Helpful Answers.
“A society based on the CI would in fact be a highly creative and enterprising one”
Which, sustainability aside, is pretty much the same as saying a “high growth society”.
“for the question of inflation see my reply to Josh”
I did and I must say I’m intrigued. Do you know of any papers that examine this phenomenon and explain why, empirically, inflation didn’t increase?
“After all the wealth of capitalist countries has been consistently built on the exploitation and pillage of weaker countries.”
As a citizen of one of those weaker countries, I kind of dispute this. Not so much to say “you’re completely wrong” as to say “it’s way more complicated than that and summarising it that way is not particularly helpful but unpacking all the issues would make this comment twice as long”. Maybe we should discuss that point separately?
“Well, there’s the nub – but ‘Food, Water, Shelter, clothing’ is a pretty good baseline to start from.”
Next we have to start defining the necessary quality of each. Stale bread or caviar? 😛
“Funnily enough court records reveal that 14th Century Oxford had a murder rate of 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year. Mid-20th-century London has fewer than one homicide per 100,000 I people per year.”
Yep. Crime has dropped quite dramatically. Only problems with the above are:
1) the 14th Century was pre-industrial and social classes as we currently conceive of them didn’t exist back then so it’s difficult to draw a direct comparison.
2) I was thinking more of petty theft and burglary – things that are immediately associated with poverty. Unfortunately, homicide is the only crime that’s easy to define and track consistently across time – there’s a body or there isn’t.
However, at least in industrial times, the murder rate has tracked the rate of almost every other crime – and even non-crimes like teenage pregnancy! This, in itself, points to some General Factor of Criminality rather than certain crimes being caused by poverty when others aren’t. The thing these crimes seem to have in common is that they’re the types of things you’re most likely to do if you have poor impulse control. Fraud doesn’t track murder – it tracks progress in information security. Maybe what’s actually happening is that something is changing to make people less impulsive? I have a few guesses as to why…
Anyway, thank you for responding so calmly to my (not particularly nice) original comment.
part 2 of reply to Jasmine.
“people could be enterprising without fear of suffering total ruin”
“put stagnant wealth back into circulation”
“The worth of an activity would not depend on […] its social value”
“labour-intensive sustainable agriculture”
….I give up. Where is the “growth-free” part? All of these look like they’re producing value. This is clearly an economy which involves wealth-creation.
Don’t give up Jasmine…
All these are possible in sustainable-growth economies and even growth-free economies. Organic agriculture is an example of this – the inputs are very low, consisting of recycled material (compost, manure), natural processes (light, water, minerals, the use of natural methods for pest control) and labour. There is a product with ‘added value’ on the inputs – however no extra inputs were required (other than labour) all the inputs were either what nature provided or, in effect, recycled, and there are fewer undesirable outputs also (pollution). It’s a win-win situation – you produce added value without the many negative effects inherent to industrial agriculture based on extractivism.
Remember agriculture (and most other things!) was invented many 1000s of years before the growth-model of economics became the orthodoxy.
re- ‘The Spirit Level’ – you may be a step ahead of me here as I haven’t actually read the book – I know about it from extracts, summaries and its reputation.
But referring to a link published by the ‘Policy Exchange’ (Michael Gove – chairman!) is a bit like going to the NSPCC for a review of Tom’s web-site, or the ‘Heartland foundation’ for a review of ‘Limits to Growth’ – how do you expect David Cameron’s second favourite right-wing think-tank to respond to a set of ideas so subversive of capitalism!?
I have no faith in the integrity of their motives.
OK, mea culpa! That’s an appalling ad hominem on my part and certainly not an argument against the points you or they make – but if I’m to read 125 pages of something I would rather read the first 125 pages of the Spirit Level than Policy Exchange’s review of it.
Anyway – in lieu of a proper defense of ‘The Spirit Level’ I’ve popped a copy of it in my shopping basket and will make a tentative promise to read it some time over the next few months – then I’ll read the Policy Exchange’s criticism of it.
Are you ready to do the same and resume this discussion afterwards?
”Sorry for being so critical of literally everything. It’s exam time at college and it’s frustrating. The above is probably at least partly due to my bad mood – although I doubt it’s false.”
Don’t apologise, Jasmine – I actually relish having my ideas challenged – the only problem is finding time to properly address the points that arise. I hope your exams are going well and that your mood has lightened and is now all blue birds, bubble-gum elephants and candy-floss clouds.
“But referring to a link published by the ‘Policy Exchange’ (Michael Gove – chairman!) is a bit like going to the NSPCC for a review of Tom’s web-site, or the ‘Heartland foundation’ for a review of ‘Limits to Growth’ – how do you expect David Cameron’s second favourite right-wing think-tank to respond to a set of ideas so subversive of capitalism!?”
I only followed up on criticisms of it after I’d read positive reviews of it. (I couldn’t get the actual thing because money and relative international poverty and stuff.) However, I’d totally go to the Heartland Foundation to see what they think of Limits to Growth. Likewise, I’d want to know what The New York Times has to say about The Bell Curve. Right or left – once I hear about an idea from it”s supporters, I want to see its detractors attack it. Only after that do I take a position on it. I think The Spirit Level can be taken as evidence in favour of income inequality have poor social effects but it’s only weak evidence on its own. It’s weaker than it’d want you to believe. However, so is every political treatise – a fact you only learn by breaking bread with its enemies.
“Don’t apologise, Jasmine – I actually relish having my ideas challenged – the only problem is finding time to properly address the points that arise.”
Be careful what you wish for :p
“I hope your exams are going well and that your mood has lightened and is now all blue birds, bubble-gum elephants and candy-floss clouds.”
Aw, thanks. You’re too sweet* <3
*Note: This expression may be used differently in the UK….
In trying to respond to Lensman’s essay, I feel as paralyzed as the boy in the short story The German Lesson (Deutschestunde — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Lesson)
The adolescent in question who is in a juvenile prison is assigned an essay on the “Joy of Duty” but seemingly refuses to do the task in the assigned hour of his German writing class. When, as punishment for this refusal, he is locked into his cell until he finishes the assignment, an outpouring of writing ensues with the boy asking for ever more writing paper. His initial refusal had been caused by the immensity of the theme which he could not address in a mere hour.
In the same way, I feel the immensity of Lensman’s proposal, but am not ready (or even capable) of addressing it in the fullness that it requires.
But here nevertheless are a few remarks. I have long thought of the advisability of a universal stipend regardless of personal conditions. The productive capacity of a society belongs to all its members, and each member should have a right to a reasonable portion of that productive capacity. The businessman who believes he is the sole cause of his success is a fool. If he is successful, it is in good part because of the environment and stability his society provides. As Obama once pointed out, “You did not build that bridge, you did not build that road…” I would add, “You did not alone create the social institutions that allow you to be successful.”
Yes, Lensman’s proposal is Utopian. People live in social ecosystems that are almost impossible to change according to an artificial plan. Communism, for example, was a great idea. But it is said of it and of Christianity that the only problem with them is that neither has ever actually been tried. In order for a social construct to take hold it needs the right environment in the same way that organisms thrive best in the right niche.
Many Utopian experiments have been tried in the past and failed. This does not mean that new ones should not be attempted. Those that succeed may then be transplanted into other receptive soils.
Perhaps one way to begin is for societies to adopt a form of Bhutan’s concept of a Gross National Happiness Index (http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Short-GNH-Index-edited.pdf) as opposed to one that mistakenly equates material consumption with personal satisfaction.
BTW, I highly recommend the reading of Lenz’ The German Lesson and its examination of the value of duty to the State that made so many pre WWII Germans capable of losing their humanity.
Thanks for your comment, Peter.
I’d like to use your interesting comment as a springboard for a ‘rantette’ defending Utopian thinking (I feel from your comment that you too see the necessity of dreams and the imagination in politics).
Marx’s vision is now considered as Utopian, and people will point to the failure of a real socialist or communist country to establish itself as evidence. But there is (arguably) another legacy of his thinking – strong trade unions and an international workers movement, improved work conditions, reduced working hours, universal access to education, state health care, social services, anti-pollution legislation, state pension etc etc etc. Many European countries are, in a sense, socially socialist if not economically. One only has to look at the condition of ordinary working people in the 19th century to see the immense changes Marxist and Socialist thinking has wrought on the fabric of our lives. If Marxism didn’t get us to heaven it at least got us as far as the stars.
In fact utopian thinking is endemic amongst paedophiles: any paedophile who hopes for a world where his/her desire might be accepted is being utopian. In fact the most utopian are those who believe that the square peg of paedophilia could somehow be hammered into the fear-shaped hole that capitalism has allocated it, those who, wanting a bark but having only a cat, pin all their hopes on tiddles being somehow persuaded to say ‘woof’.
Moreover capitalism has so deprived us of our capacity to envisage better worlds that we are meekly accepting that there is no alternative to capitalism’s headlong rush towards the destruction of the ecosystem on which everything we care about depends. In the light of this it is those who refuse to build dreams who are the real ‘utopians’.
Interestingly enough there was a period recently where utopian thinking flourished under capitalism – the 60s and 70s, but this wasn’t because capitalism somehow ‘allowed’ it – but rather that people sensed that capitalism was weak, was, maybe, about to self-destruct. This allowed people to start envisaging again new and better societies. This allowed courageous thinking on child sexuality and paedophilia – we see this in the intellectuals who voice sympathetic opinions, in the activism of PIE and the positive responses of people like Roy Jenkins to PIE’s age of consent proposals. But, under Reagan and Thatcher, Capitalism regrouped and adapted itself and the dreams flickered and went out.
‘Utopia’ has become a word whose nuance ensures that dreams never have a chance of becoming more than dreams. And our hopes never stray beyond those authorised by capitalism.
And funnily enough whilst we ‘little people’ are taught that our dreams must remain dreams, and have them strangled at birth – the utopian dreams of the petro-chemical industry and the multi-nationals seem to be eminently realisable. So why when Big Petrol dreams of a deregulated world and gets the ‘World Trade Agreement’, and when it dreams of drilling in areas which global warming has made accessible Obama gives them the nod – why shouldn’t we have the courage to dream too?
Dreams do change the world – the question is WHOSE dreams?
Agreed… But if we think of the dream as the seed, the seed needs the right soil (i.e. social environment). The growing seed also needs a gardener (i.e. a leader or leaders who can help bring the dream to fruition). The U.S. meanwhile has acted as the purveyor of herbicide killing all plants not to its liking even in societies (i.e the soil) where the dream (i.e. the seed) would flourish.
Oh, goodness. Lensman uses copious animal metaphors. You use plant metaphors. Tom! You have to discuss mushrooms and how they need the right rotting logs. Every Kingdom of life must be fairly represented!
May the Meta Force be with you! 🙂
Tom completely breaks the mold and uses puns instead of metaphors! But it was a pun about metaphors! That’s some meta level humour….
….But the joke itself referenced this meta-ness. Can our mortal minds even comprehend the depths of his recursion!?
I will have to comment on economics and “green” society, but now I first discuss the roots of p-phobia, elaborating on a comment I made to the previous article.
Bourgeois society has made sexuality a fundamental aspect of identity. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, there was no notion of sexual orientation, there were just men who had different degrees of interest in sex, attracted to anyone beautiful, whether boy or girl (but they were not very interested in discussing women’s desires). In the Middle Ages, homosexual behaviour was a sin, as were theft, blasphemy, heresy and rebellion, but it was not considered as an identity. Then bourgeois society divided people into categories of nation, race, gender and sexual orientation, which were part of their “identity”. While the feudal nobility justified itself by its ancestry and its “blood”, the bourgeoisie justified itself by its vigour and productivity, including in the sexual domain.
Sexuality has become a fetish embodying features of social relations, such as power, prestige and economic productivity. I repeat an important quote attributed to Michael C. Baurmann:
Indeed, if you watch straight porn, it does not looks like people enjoying themselves, but rather like chain-work in a production line, where the maximum number of distinct sex acts is “extracted” in a shortest time.
Personal relations become increasingly sexualized. In the past, men could hug, kiss and walk hand in hand, but now they don’t do it anymore, because they are afraid that people will consider it as homosexual behaviour. Unrelated people will avoid touching each other. Child nudity, formerly a symbol of innocence, is now considered as “sexual”, and a man hugging a child is now suspect. In a porn society, childhood becomes the last refuge for dreams of innocence, as women have ceased to be pure annd chaste.
Another aspect is the prevalence of sex panic since the 13th century. At that time homophobia arose in conjunction with islamophobia, as Muslims were accused of being gays; Greeks and other oriental Christians were seen as “effeminate”, only Western crusaders were “real men”. Then in the 15th century, facing the collapse of feudal social organization, one invented a conspiracy of witches spreading diseases, destroying crops, but also provoking miscarriage of pregnant women and impotence of husbands (or even making their penis disappear). The article “Disaster and Sexuality” by Gilbert & Barkun, Journal of Sex Research, Aug. 1981, Vol. 17 Issue 3, pages 288–299, discusses sex panic in modern Great Britain, it arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, seen as disasters. In 1797, facing a war with revolutionary France and mutinies of sailors, the Royal Navy launched a furious repression of homosexuality, even a ship commander was hanged for “sodomy”. The panic peaked in 1810, at the time of Napoleonic wars. (BTW the French revolution decriminalized homosexuality.) Afterwards came the long masturbation scare, directed mainly towards children and adolescents. In the 1880s, with the international migration of working women, came the “sex trafficking” or “white slave trade” panic, leading to an increasing repression of prostitution and also restrictions on immigration (and in the UK: raising the age of consent and criminalizing again homosexual behaviour, thus Oscar Wilde was jailed). In the USA, this took a blatantly anti-Chinese racist turn (see https://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/4/old-anti-trafficking-propaganda-same-new-anti-trafficking-propaganda, notice the “American manhood against Asiatic cooleism” on a book cover). The present CSA moral panic started in the late 70’s together with the economic crisis and AIDS pandemy. Also Nathan & Snedeker pointed out that the fact that women left home to work fueled the “satanic ritual abuse in child-care” panic.
Thus the problem is deeper than just the turn from “industrial” to “consumer” or “post-industrial” capitalism (in fact, a flight into increasing financial speculation).
Granted, this is a utopian view, but we can dream, yes?
“Every citizen receives a regular, unconditional, tax-free sum, which is calculated to cover the necessities of life (food, fuel, heating, clothing, accommodation). Everyone receives it whether they work or not, or need it or not. To discourage large families, there would be a tapering amount for each child after the first.”
How would it be fair to the children for you to taper the amount? The child didn’t ask to be born. Why would you punish the child for something the parent caused? I understand you want to discourage large families but certainly there must be a better way than taking money away from a child.
“At a stroke, the CI would redistribute wealth in favour of the poor[ii], ending poverty and poverty-related crime. It would eliminate the welfare trap associated with means-tested benefits, which would be abolished. It would provide a universal financial safety net, so that people could be enterprising without fear of suffering total ruin. The job market would be more flexible as there would be no need for a minimum wage”
I don’t see how throwing more money into the system is really going to help matters that much. You’re still going to have relative poverty and economic inequality. What are you going to do about inflation?
“CI would tend to weaken consumerism by destigmatising low-consumption life-styles; it would put stagnant wealth back into circulation, thereby reducing the social significance of conspicuous consumption; a sense of security would no longer be bound up in the rat race.”
How? How would that stop corporations from wanting to sell more of their products and make greater profits? I’m not following. Corporations are still going to put money into advertisements that push the consumerist lifestyle if it creates greater profit for them, right? The incentive for this is still going to be there. Later in your article you claim advertisements will be curbed through taxation but you never really explain how that will work.
“Work would no longer just mean paid employment but would include the activities of carers, students, researchers, artists, inventors and volunteers working for charities and the community. The worth of an activity would not depend on the amount of profit it generates but on its social value.”
But profit would still be a major factor. How is this different from what we already have?
“A green economy would be “time-rich”. Owning more would no longer be a satisfactory answer to the question of how we live and what we live for. Leisure, education, creativity and community work would be of equal value to paid work.”
You never explain how or why this would be. If I can make more money as an actor than as a fast food worker than being an actor will have more value. If I make money working for a corporation but not by community work than it’s not equal value. The only way to achieve this would be by completely ridding the monetary reward from the equation.
Thanks Josh for your comment and the opportunity it gives me to go into more details on certain aspects. You raise several interesting points which, to avoid gigantism, I will address in separate comments rather than in one single one:
How would it be fair to the children for you to taper the amount? The child didn’t ask to be born. Why would you punish the child for something the parent caused? I understand you want to discourage large families but certainly there must be a better way than taking money away from a child.
‘Fairness’ is certainly one of the most important principles of the CI.
But the CI is not a single invariable concept but an infinitely variable tool. Like any other fiscal measure, it can be tailored to fulfill certain social goals and this means that different communities can tailor the CI according to those goals. Ensuring the population remains at a sustainable level is one of those goals. Moreover remember that the CI covers all the essential costs of living. As a family grows there are reduced costs for each new child – the first child requiring the greatest financial investment, subsequent children less so. Paying full CI for every baby born would both be excessive and could risk encouraging irresponsible parents to have children for the CI they bring in.
The payment will be made entirely to the parents for a certain number of years after the child’s birth. The question of at what age a child starts to receive directly part, or all, of their CI is one I haven’t considered but is an interesting one: a gradual increase seems an interesting idea – starting with a small amount at (say) six and increasing into adolescence but never attaining the full amount until the child becomes independent of their parents or comes of age. This way the child will be allowed some financial independence from their parents and be able to develop the skills and responsibilities necessary for this independence. But this is to go into more speculation and detail than I think is necessary at this stage.
I don’t see how throwing more money into the system is really going to help matters that much. You’re still going to have relative poverty and economic inequality. What are you going to do about inflation?
This isn’t throwing more money into the system – this is redistribution. The money already exists but is stagnating in the bank accounts of the super-rich. Money in the hands of average citizens is active money and will cycle in the community through consumption (note: not ‘consumerism’!), investment, taxation and wages. The CI is highly redistributive since it is funded by the rich.
Redistribution is often accused of being inflationary, though in practice it isn’t.
The evidence from places where CI, or partial CI schemes, are implemented (Alaska, Kuwait, parts of India, communities in Namibia and, more tangentially, Brasil under the ‘Bolsa Familia’ program) is that CI actually is more effective at keeping inflation in check than the alternative.
In 1982, Alaska began a partial CI funded out of oil revenues. Until the first dividend, Alaska had a higher rate of inflation than the rest of the United States. But ever since the dividend was introduced, Alaska has had a lower rate of inflation than the rest of the United States. The same happened in Kuwait recently, when every citizen was given $4,000. Fears of increasing inflation were rampant, since Kuwait already had high inflation. Instead of inflation getting worse, it actually got better, decreasing from record highs to under 4 percent.
The reason for this is that there is a difference between how this extra money is spent with respect to essentials and non-essentials. It seems that with CI essential goods are not subject to inflationary pressure – other than (presumably) under conditions of scarcity where hoarding would drive up prices.
Food is a good example to consider:
if you have an extra pound when you go to the baker you don’t usually buy an extra loaf of bread ‘just in case’. But the same doesn’t apply to non-essential goods and luxuries. I know this from personal experience: when I’m buying books I invariably spend to (and beyond!) the money limit I have set myself, whereas when I’m shopping for food I always try to buy ‘best quality at lowest prices’ rather than ‘spend as much as I’ve got’.
Surplus money spent on food tends to be spent on increased quality rather than increased quantity. People will choose to eat healthier with the extra rather than eat more. The same applies to other essentials – if you know the supply is secure and you know that you will be regularly provided with the wherewithal to obtain these goods (i.e. the Citizens’ Income) and there is a competitive market for those goods it will remain in the interest of the seller to keep prices low and to maximise your spending through improvements in quality rather than in price. Security reduces consumption rather than increases it.
This is actually quite a good situation ecologically – the essentials maintain a steady price whilst the inessentials increase in price – industries producing inessentials which aren’t ecologically damaging (e.g. books made from sustainable,local or recycled sources) would be favoured by not being subject to pollution taxes and maybe even favoured by tax breaks.
Rising rents are a particular worry with CI- however a green society would be one which would favour a return to community housing – which would would act keep the level of private rents low.