Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:
> > Generically, the main problem I see in this focus is that it seems to
> > imply that the whole production under socialism must be, at best, of the
> > same order that under capitalism.
>
> How so?
>
> > From here, one deduces that the only goal is redistribution, making the
> > standards of living of some "families" to fall down.
>
> Redistribution is one goal, and a very important one. Some families should
> have their standards of living reduced and reduced dramatically.
>
> > With the marxist "language", it seems a difficult task to proof that
> > socialism would be in fact more productive that capitalism. For
> > instance, is very difficult to show that destruction of capital is
> > actually a legitimate source of income for capitalists.
>
> This will have to be clarified and explained.
Ok, let me then to raise then the black flag, as the "other" theory is
needed
for this, so lets invoke Proudhon' spirit and point out that Ownership
is the key of capitalism system. A capitalist gets its benefit by
trading
ownership rights through a bartering process. Such process contains
random
and structural components. A capitalist is aware of such random
components
and manages them to maximize benefit. Sometimes this implies to increase
production to sell more products. Other times this is done by exercising
*his right* to destroy production then increasing price.
With Marxist vocabulary (surpluses, etc.) it is very difficultous to
study
the process of capital destruction. Even worse, such destruction is
rarely physical; sometimes it takes the form of resource deallocation or
so, usually the owners purposefully avoid to produce the maximum
quantity of
product they could make from the available resources.
But even a bad axiomatic systems gets results if the thinker proceeds
adequately,
and so Marx was able to see how such destruction was needed in order
to equilibrate the capitalist system. But he claimed that it was a
weakness
of the system, postulated that the destruction process would drive to
a succession of "crisis" which would drive to the final destruction
of capitalism, etc...
Actually, capital retention (destruction if needed, or simply avoiding
production increases) can be done in a quasi continuous form; and even
if a "crisis" happens, the mechanism corrects capitalism and surviving
capitalists get benefit from it.
> Andy
It is to be noticed thats that common preach contain a lot of
conditionals:
For if the doomsayers are right, and continued growth is
unsustainable,
threatening the integrity of the biosphere on which all life
depends, and if
resource limits are insurmountable, then what IS the alternative to
capitalism? What OTHER way from the impasse but the relentless
Other common error is malthusianism and its derivations:
First of all, it is capitalist science and technology, capitalist
rapacity,
and the vast overgrowth of surplus population ('the most general
law of
capitalism', as Marx called it) in the form of a colossal reserve
army of
labour, which has created the world we now live in. It was
precisely the
capitalist Green Revolution which triggered a second population
explosion among the dispossessed of the world, in just the same way
that the population of the first industrial countries exploded, as
peasants
were made landless and forced into the cities.
Malthusianism was initially claimed as an excuse for the existence of
poor
people and an argument to displace charity and redistribution efforts
in favour other social tasks.
The oldest version was "people will expand always to saturate existing
resources". This was sophisticated to a pseudocientifical claim:
"resources
grow polinomically while population grows exponentially".
Now, it is clear that resource harvesting is related to the number of
people
available to do such task, thus resources harvested grow exponentially
if
population do. This is so until we reach the *physical* limit of
resources,
which probably have not happened yet; such physical limit would be
surely related to Sun energy and Earth albedo (the capacity of earth to
radiate heat out of the planet), if we agree to reject earth-based
nuclear sources and/or perhaps controlled oil burning.