> Any reform of capital needs to answer this challenge. How capital
> would not lead to imperialism and how communism would not lead to
> low or no growth. The solution is one of finding just distribution
> without leading to stagnation in growth.
Marvin wrote:
> And all of these years I have thought that socialism was for an
> expansion of the productive forces, for a society of material
> abundance - that it indicted capitalism as a decaying mode of
> production which had exhausted its capacity for growth and
> improvements to the standard of living, which is why people would
> necessarily replace it with socialism.
Capitalism can be indicted on many grounds, but having exhausted its capacity for growth isn't one of them.
The problem of capitalism is that it doesn't allow you to improve the quality of life unless you make capital grow, no matter what the consequences of unplanned and unchecked growth to workers and the environment. Some say that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable, but the truth is that ecology is capitalistically unsustainable.
In a socialist society, in contrast, constant growth isn't a do-or- die imperative, unless its population keeps growing, which shouldn't -- even under a capitalist society, the birth rate falls dramatically as soon as women get generally educated and even the population can begin decline eventually, as Japan's began to last year (which is a problem under capitalism but shouldn't be under socialism). People can then concentrate on improving their quality of life, translating gains in productivity into products of better quality (rather than simply more and more products, quite often of inferior manufacture) and, more importantly, more, more, and more leisure, which is the highest form of social wealth.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>