Arraya, I find your positions interesting but contradictory.
There are so many points, that I don’t know we to begin.
If I understand you well, you’re saying that the “limits of the natural world” ensure that our capitalist system is unsustainable. Perhaps you’re right. [/quote]
Can these divisions on the left be overcome in the next five to ten years? I am not sure. But if they are not, I do not believe the world left can win the battle of the next twenty to forty years over what kind of successor system we shall have as the capitalist system collapses definitively.
Keep in mind capitalist growth is not the same as development. Though, development will usually fall under the umbrella of growth
[quote=briansd1]But, surely, if you believe that we have reached the limits of the natural world, you couldn’t be concerned with something as insignificant as the money and debts that humans created?[/quote]
The are both interrelated. The human abstraction drives the physical world. Limits to energy, specifically oil, restrict growth and hence make the mountain of debt unpayable – the basis of all work is energy. This is not to say there are not other ways to create energy – but the market-system will never push a transition. It will just make things worse.
Also, limits to the natural world does not necessarily imply “not enough”. It means the the parabolic increase in production of critical natural resources will stop or has in many cases. Though, there is a school of thought pushing the old Malthusian overpopulation thesis. Though, that is not even close to what is transpiring.
[quote=briansd1]Money just a way of trading that we conjured up. Can’t some kind of modified system be conjured up that will keep trade and industry moving?[/quote]
Sure – though society would operate under much different rules and have different, as Marx would put it, social relations.
Sadly, people can easily imagine the “end of the world” but not the end of capitalism
