To be honest, regulating those violations is difficult in both a free market and a state-controlled one.[/quote]
Whenever I have these discussions in always goes to me wanting a super-state controlling ever aspect of our lives, when it could not be further from the truth.
Believe me, I don’t think our state could handle doing laundry let alone what I am suggesting. Frankly, I think it needs to be scrapped as an irrelevant governing system. No positive change will come though our political system. Besides, with population dynamics the way they are, we have a totalitarian master, it is the earth and what she can provide us per natural laws, processes and the limits of each.
The only thing that matters on this (finite) planet is intelligent management of our resources and of life sustaining systems for obvious reasons…
Our current operation does not achieve either by a long shot.
Put it another way, creating a race to use up resources as fast as possible(for profit) is not the best idea in the world, especially when the vast majority of them wind up in landfills in six months time.
We are an incredible materially inefficient bunch.
Also, nothing grows forever, there is only so much economic activity(which is underpinned by our energy-matter system) that can be achieved due to physical law. We are entirely geared towards growing infinitely — That’s just not rational.
Once we lose the ability to “grow”, which I think is about now, we have major problems. Growth based capitalism is kind of a contradiction. It requires infinite resources to sustain, yet needs scarcity for price point value.
I do now think that Marx was an incredibly astute observer of the system that was growing up around him at that time, and that he is vilified unjustly by folks who lump him in with the likes of Lenin and Stalin, people who didn’t really abide by his ideas at all (they circumvented him entirely by even trying something in Russia, as Marx thought it would need to arise after the inevitable collapse of a capitalist nation)
Interestingly, Marx though he critiqued capitalism, also considered it to be a necessary thing, and even a good thing provided we eventually move beyond it. He viewed it as a stepping stone — which was necessary to develop a “mastery of nature” (part of why he is considered by many to have been lacking in incorporating an environmental aspect) through technology — to his ideal society : the commune oft vilified by those who look at Russian history as its main example. He thought that capitalist nations would have to rise to prominence, then fail according to the inherent flaws in their models (per his critique), before communism — a new social relation — could really take hold. I do believe he objected to starting with undeveloped, non-capitalist countries (such as Russia). Edit: And indeed, the ownership of the means of production by an elite few is capitalism by any other name… it’s still the social relation of the middle-man. Whether those few middle-men be a cabal of government officials (Russia), or private tycoons (in a Randian world), or a mix thereof (like in the U.S.), the social relation of labor (people) as a commodity is the same. You cannot live within the system as we know it, without selling your self (labor) for a wage, which you then use to buy the things to subsist upon. It is a socially acceptable coercion. Which I might add requires massive amounts of propaganda and force.
Stead state will come, one way or another. With the clusterfuck that is the global economy, it looks like we have a bout of adversity to go through.
IMO, this guy is on the right path
Something to keep in mind if things don’t quite pan out the way officialdom is telling us. lol
