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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The tragic thing is that there's this idea you have to live life as an austere pioneer hippie to address this. You really don't. A world of mostly-vegetarian people living in modern, timber (for carbon sequestration) flats in mixed-use environments, using renewable electricity to power their heat pumps and AC, traveling primarily via bike, walking, and public transport, and owning less disposable crap would go a long, long way.

That means a reduction of production and consumer spending by 50% or more, and the end of the "no limits progress" which is beyond the pale for modern business interests, and the 10% well off part of the population that does their biding (executives, intellectuals, politicians, media people, and so on).

It's better in today's prevalent culture that the world end in flames (perhaps while waiting for some magic technology to fix it all) than go back on consumption...

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"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism."

I think it is a dire logical error to equate capitalism, which arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans, and the neverending consumer consumption drive epitomized by the global west.

They are not the same thing, and the former does not necessitate the latter. Same goes for all the other ills of our society that people misguidedly invoke under the “capitalism” umbrella, like intellectual property, patents, and regulatory capture.

Military-industrial complex-flavored capitalism is the problem. It sounds like that is part of the problem described in the article, too.

They are exactly the same thing. Capitalism requires endless growth, which requires endless production and consumption. Those in turn require imperialism, to have a supply of desperate workers and consumers. Imperialism is not always overtly military, but it is always a threat of violence in order to assert power.

Read Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", he makes it very easy to understand.

> Capitalism requires endless growth.

This is incorrect. Just the particular way some countries have their capitalist systems and priorities set up requires endless growth.

But even then, if you'd just allow for bankruptcy to weed out the worst performers, forfeiting outstanding debt, you can do without it. Another way is compensating for it with inflation. But instead debt tends to be funneled upwards until governments are left holding the bag with no other option but to grow their way out of it for fear of causing inflation.

All capitalist countries define a lack of economic growth as a recession.

What incentive would there even be for companies to maintain or reduce their profits over time?

> What incentive would there even be for companies to maintain or reduce their profits over time?

Wanting to do something is very different from having to do something.

Well, you kind of have to - otherwise people starve.

There's lot of excesses and pointless elements to economies worldwide, but ultimately, at minimum they have to grow to compensate for population growth, or people will starve. And they really have to grow more than that, because a lot of people live in bad conditions and they justifiably want to earn their way out of it.

Growth is currently needed in the world we live in; trying to eliminate it wholesale is self-destructing. But growth doesn't have to be as environmentally taxing as it is today, and we should strive to fix that.

>There's lot of excesses and pointless elements to economies worldwide, but ultimately, at minimum they have to grow to compensate for population growth, or people will starve.

Several issues with this.

There's no requirement that we need to have "population growth" above replacement rate. In fact we should probably have below for a while - and in many western countries we do. In which case "we need growth because we need to cater for the population growth" is a moot point.

Second, "a lot of people living in bad conditions" does not necessarily means growth is required to get them out. Especially since we have unprecedented inequality and hoarding of resources by tiny elites. More equality / better distribution (and no grabbing from ex-colonial powers of developing world resource) would go a long way.

RE second point, you can shift wealth from the richest to the poorest, but if you equalize everything and now everyone is miserable, you'll still need growth to correct this further.

>I think it is a dire logical error to equate capitalism, which arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans, and the neverending consumer consumption drive epitomized by the global west.

I don't think "really existing capitalism" "arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans".

We should not confuse trade (which always existed) with capitalism, which is a relatively recent development (circa 14-16 century and spread from then), tied to banking, stock market, industrialization, the "protestant work ethic" and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Origins_...

For millennia civilizations had trade but no capitalism.

Plus histories of early capitalism mention how rural populations had to be pushed, by government decrees, unfavorable ad-hoc laws, manufactured famines, and so on to go and become workers.

And of course, modern capitalism, with rampant commercialization of all fields of life, advertising, the stock market, etc is another thing entirely.

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