Degrowth is coming whether or not anybody wants it. The specific criticisms of capitalism are in fact criticisms of humans Limited cognitive capacity driven by selection pressure. Our planning time Horizon is 50 to 100 years maximum. Unfortunately all the problems of today were hundreds of years in the making and will require hundreds or thousands of years to resolve. What we have today is more accurately called short form capitalism that reflects the limited time planning Horizon of humans. What you need is long form capitalism which fully accounts for the consequence Loop. Society will move much slower innovation will be incremental. That's the trade off. And that has be a conscious decision from every person on the planet that we are not going to go head first into the maximum power principle.
What troubles me about the claim that finance reform is the necessary first step toward degrowth or post-growth is that it seems to concede quite a lot at the outset. It treats finance as a legitimate base layer of social coordination, and assumes the task is to redirect it toward better outcomes. I understand the practical appeal of that, because it provides handles that existing institutions can easily grasp, but I am not sure it fully captures what finance is doing socially. Describing finance as a way of converting liquidity into investment may explain an operational function, yet it leaves out the extent to which finance also organizes enforceable claims over the future. Finance structures access, allocates risk, disciplines behavior, and concentrates decision-making power in institutions built on abstraction. If that is part of its core role, then preserving finance as the starting point risks preserving the grammar of domination itself.
So the logic feels inverted to me. A politics that claims to move beyond growth should be careful about beginning with the reaffirmation of institutions that made abstract accumulation and hierarchical allocation possible in the first place. Reforming finance may soften some harms, but it can also leave intact the machinery through which social life ismade legible to power. In that sense, it will likely end up treating specific choke points as inevitable, and then proposing to regulate it more ethically. That may be an improvement, but it is not necessarily transformation.
We also have ample historical precedent showing that complex human societies have coordinated provisioning, obligation, and long-term stewardship through commons, reciprocity, customary systems, mutual aid, guilds, communal storage, and federated forms of cooperation without finance acting as the sovereign layer. These arrangements were imperfect, but they demonstrate that monetized and financialized coordination is not a civilizational necessity. So the functional layer of finance isn't actually necessary unless we are deliberately including the very institutions that have led us to requiring change.
And our modern technological capacities make the old justification even weaker. Distributed communication, real-time data sharing, participatory planning tools, ecological monitoring, and networked logistics give us a massive ability to coordinate more directly than most past societies ever had. If earlier communities could organize life without finance under much tighter informational constraints, then surely we should at least be willing to ask whether finance needs to remain central at all.
So my objection is not simply that finance reform is inadequate. It is that it may begin from the wrong premise. Rather than assuming finance must remain the first step, I think a serious post-growth politics should ask how dependence on finance can be reduced from the outset, and what forms of coordination could begin to make it less necessary.
Beautiful visioning, but we no longer live on that planet. We will become acquainted with the notion of local food and water sovereignty, but our acquaintance with Mother Earth will go far deeper than any illusions of human sovereignty.
We have damaged the body of Mother Earth such that the Holocene is swiftly passing away. Our bioregions will no longer be stable nor will seasons be reliable.
E. O. Wilson called this era we are entering into the Eremozoic Era. This is an Age of Loneliness, where most of the species on the planet are dying off already.
Degrowth is a wonderful dream to pursue, but meanwhile the actual levers of power are held by malignant predators who accelerate human violence against the living biosphere and all creatures within it.
Would we do better if the leaders of degrowth spoke honestly about how our agency is actually reduced to creating tiny neighborhoods of mutual aid and care within the context of increasing human violence and ecological collapse?
Individual death and human extinction are both certain. We don’t know the timing, but we understand the odds pretty well.
I am convinced that beloved community is both the way and the destination.
This is not so much in conflict with the dreams of degrowth, but takes the vision further and deeper. There is no human “we” in charge of our own destiny here. There are many of us humans who want to live in a loving way for as long as we are able to do so.
Sounds good. I'd like to add to the right to repair; functional transparency. How are we suppose to socialize if we don't share maps and indexes? And functional is key - I am transparent but my notes are atrocious! Have fun finding structure without me. Patents and Intellectual property needs an overhaul. Even economists against it say it didn't make sense to apply those laws but it doesn't make sense to take them away...well that's where the games begin. The cost of protecting some IP or patent is overwhelming. Most public discourse is totally abstract with no structural reference - so let the games begin -call anything anything you want and provide no structure. Issac Newton's said something like : " if I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" speaks volumes.
I think functional transparency is core and foundational to any social organization development.
And that requires some form of acceptance. Like an emphasis on context. The high school debate sophistry only works when subjects dont understand the structure.
And honestly as someone who is quite against the surveillance state that we are becoming.. the idea is not to be dismissed. It sells because there are aspects people like. I see it as backwards though. And this related to functional transparency; public decision making could be surveilled. Ultimately the point is to track agency and decision making within public resources domains so to have actual accountability.
It is tricky, as we humans might have to make measures to improve memetic contagion, scapegoating, and the moralizing - especially when applying rules for another that are not apply to self and tribe.
This brings to mind the adage about getting a stubborn mule to move, where first you have to get its attention. The two-by-four to hit humanity with is the reality of overshoot. Then we'd all be working on implementing the sort of new ways to do things we're talking about here.
While we're lifting heavy things--we have to cut the US military down to size. The other heavy lifts require radical change in who has power. We can make no changes, even to avert our own extinction, as long as the malignant predators, to use Gary Hoover's words, have all the power. They use the US military to prevent other states from being sovereign, from using their resources to benefit their own people, and from working cooperatively across borders to solve problems, including the environmental crises. Meanwhile the military is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution it itself; and it's an enormous waste of resources that could be going toward some kind of positive development. Thus, its virtual elimination is necessary to making the kinds of transitions we need (and yes, other nations' militaries are also problematic but the Pentagon is by far the worst and its growth spurs the growth of others; its shrinking would allow the shrinking of others). So cutting down the US military is both a necessary precondition to making the changes we need, and will only be possible once we have made those changes. It all comes down to whether the billionaires and the corporations, equally soulless machinelike entities, keep a grip on power. We've gone along, as they accumulate more and more of the wealth and power in their own dead hands, getting by on the leftovers and trying to mitigate the worst damages. But now we've reached a human population, and per capita impact (though only on the part of the richest half or so) that is increasingly beyond sustainability, which means it will soon stop--we're at the breaking point, at the bottleneck. The people in power are now reaching for extreme measures like an AI-guided police state, an end to even the pretense of democracy, and space-based weapons, to ensure the power stays in their hands and the luxuries continue to surround them, as things crumble and mass death begins. I don't think measures such as Hickel and Varoufakis suggest can change that outcome, but I think collapse can, if it comes soon enough. Basically what they suggest and you ask for additions to is an exercise in hypothetical reasoning--what kind of policy changes could save us, if we didn't have these sociopaths in firm control, determined to hang onto that control and ready to use however much violence it takes to succeed.
An interesting exercise but perhaps more useful would be discussions about how we can navigate collapse so as to 1) bring it on sooner, before so much damage is done that ecosystems can't recover 2) navigate to bring our own areas through it with minimal death and damage 3) save as much as possible of species and habitat, and of those technologies that make the most difference to quality of life and can be maintained without today's overly complex economy and 4) prepare to guide our communities in the aftermath toward healthier, sustainable, cooperative arrangements.
Degrowth is coming whether or not anybody wants it. The specific criticisms of capitalism are in fact criticisms of humans Limited cognitive capacity driven by selection pressure. Our planning time Horizon is 50 to 100 years maximum. Unfortunately all the problems of today were hundreds of years in the making and will require hundreds or thousands of years to resolve. What we have today is more accurately called short form capitalism that reflects the limited time planning Horizon of humans. What you need is long form capitalism which fully accounts for the consequence Loop. Society will move much slower innovation will be incremental. That's the trade off. And that has be a conscious decision from every person on the planet that we are not going to go head first into the maximum power principle.
What troubles me about the claim that finance reform is the necessary first step toward degrowth or post-growth is that it seems to concede quite a lot at the outset. It treats finance as a legitimate base layer of social coordination, and assumes the task is to redirect it toward better outcomes. I understand the practical appeal of that, because it provides handles that existing institutions can easily grasp, but I am not sure it fully captures what finance is doing socially. Describing finance as a way of converting liquidity into investment may explain an operational function, yet it leaves out the extent to which finance also organizes enforceable claims over the future. Finance structures access, allocates risk, disciplines behavior, and concentrates decision-making power in institutions built on abstraction. If that is part of its core role, then preserving finance as the starting point risks preserving the grammar of domination itself.
So the logic feels inverted to me. A politics that claims to move beyond growth should be careful about beginning with the reaffirmation of institutions that made abstract accumulation and hierarchical allocation possible in the first place. Reforming finance may soften some harms, but it can also leave intact the machinery through which social life ismade legible to power. In that sense, it will likely end up treating specific choke points as inevitable, and then proposing to regulate it more ethically. That may be an improvement, but it is not necessarily transformation.
We also have ample historical precedent showing that complex human societies have coordinated provisioning, obligation, and long-term stewardship through commons, reciprocity, customary systems, mutual aid, guilds, communal storage, and federated forms of cooperation without finance acting as the sovereign layer. These arrangements were imperfect, but they demonstrate that monetized and financialized coordination is not a civilizational necessity. So the functional layer of finance isn't actually necessary unless we are deliberately including the very institutions that have led us to requiring change.
And our modern technological capacities make the old justification even weaker. Distributed communication, real-time data sharing, participatory planning tools, ecological monitoring, and networked logistics give us a massive ability to coordinate more directly than most past societies ever had. If earlier communities could organize life without finance under much tighter informational constraints, then surely we should at least be willing to ask whether finance needs to remain central at all.
So my objection is not simply that finance reform is inadequate. It is that it may begin from the wrong premise. Rather than assuming finance must remain the first step, I think a serious post-growth politics should ask how dependence on finance can be reduced from the outset, and what forms of coordination could begin to make it less necessary.
Beautiful visioning, but we no longer live on that planet. We will become acquainted with the notion of local food and water sovereignty, but our acquaintance with Mother Earth will go far deeper than any illusions of human sovereignty.
We have damaged the body of Mother Earth such that the Holocene is swiftly passing away. Our bioregions will no longer be stable nor will seasons be reliable.
E. O. Wilson called this era we are entering into the Eremozoic Era. This is an Age of Loneliness, where most of the species on the planet are dying off already.
Degrowth is a wonderful dream to pursue, but meanwhile the actual levers of power are held by malignant predators who accelerate human violence against the living biosphere and all creatures within it.
Would we do better if the leaders of degrowth spoke honestly about how our agency is actually reduced to creating tiny neighborhoods of mutual aid and care within the context of increasing human violence and ecological collapse?
Individual death and human extinction are both certain. We don’t know the timing, but we understand the odds pretty well.
I am convinced that beloved community is both the way and the destination.
This is not so much in conflict with the dreams of degrowth, but takes the vision further and deeper. There is no human “we” in charge of our own destiny here. There are many of us humans who want to live in a loving way for as long as we are able to do so.
Sounds good. I'd like to add to the right to repair; functional transparency. How are we suppose to socialize if we don't share maps and indexes? And functional is key - I am transparent but my notes are atrocious! Have fun finding structure without me. Patents and Intellectual property needs an overhaul. Even economists against it say it didn't make sense to apply those laws but it doesn't make sense to take them away...well that's where the games begin. The cost of protecting some IP or patent is overwhelming. Most public discourse is totally abstract with no structural reference - so let the games begin -call anything anything you want and provide no structure. Issac Newton's said something like : " if I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" speaks volumes.
I think functional transparency is core and foundational to any social organization development.
And that requires some form of acceptance. Like an emphasis on context. The high school debate sophistry only works when subjects dont understand the structure.
And honestly as someone who is quite against the surveillance state that we are becoming.. the idea is not to be dismissed. It sells because there are aspects people like. I see it as backwards though. And this related to functional transparency; public decision making could be surveilled. Ultimately the point is to track agency and decision making within public resources domains so to have actual accountability.
It is tricky, as we humans might have to make measures to improve memetic contagion, scapegoating, and the moralizing - especially when applying rules for another that are not apply to self and tribe.
This brings to mind the adage about getting a stubborn mule to move, where first you have to get its attention. The two-by-four to hit humanity with is the reality of overshoot. Then we'd all be working on implementing the sort of new ways to do things we're talking about here.
https://www.thevenusproject.com/
While we're lifting heavy things--we have to cut the US military down to size. The other heavy lifts require radical change in who has power. We can make no changes, even to avert our own extinction, as long as the malignant predators, to use Gary Hoover's words, have all the power. They use the US military to prevent other states from being sovereign, from using their resources to benefit their own people, and from working cooperatively across borders to solve problems, including the environmental crises. Meanwhile the military is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution it itself; and it's an enormous waste of resources that could be going toward some kind of positive development. Thus, its virtual elimination is necessary to making the kinds of transitions we need (and yes, other nations' militaries are also problematic but the Pentagon is by far the worst and its growth spurs the growth of others; its shrinking would allow the shrinking of others). So cutting down the US military is both a necessary precondition to making the changes we need, and will only be possible once we have made those changes. It all comes down to whether the billionaires and the corporations, equally soulless machinelike entities, keep a grip on power. We've gone along, as they accumulate more and more of the wealth and power in their own dead hands, getting by on the leftovers and trying to mitigate the worst damages. But now we've reached a human population, and per capita impact (though only on the part of the richest half or so) that is increasingly beyond sustainability, which means it will soon stop--we're at the breaking point, at the bottleneck. The people in power are now reaching for extreme measures like an AI-guided police state, an end to even the pretense of democracy, and space-based weapons, to ensure the power stays in their hands and the luxuries continue to surround them, as things crumble and mass death begins. I don't think measures such as Hickel and Varoufakis suggest can change that outcome, but I think collapse can, if it comes soon enough. Basically what they suggest and you ask for additions to is an exercise in hypothetical reasoning--what kind of policy changes could save us, if we didn't have these sociopaths in firm control, determined to hang onto that control and ready to use however much violence it takes to succeed.
An interesting exercise but perhaps more useful would be discussions about how we can navigate collapse so as to 1) bring it on sooner, before so much damage is done that ecosystems can't recover 2) navigate to bring our own areas through it with minimal death and damage 3) save as much as possible of species and habitat, and of those technologies that make the most difference to quality of life and can be maintained without today's overly complex economy and 4) prepare to guide our communities in the aftermath toward healthier, sustainable, cooperative arrangements.