> I would argue for the identity of quality & quantity here. Growth (of
> any kind) is core to capitalism, within which one encounters an
> indentity of stagnation and stability. The projection of growth/progress
> as a good-in-itself into socialist thinking (as Doug and Marvin urge)
> would ensure the continuation of this identity in a socialist order.
> Thoreau was wrong in many ways, but he was not an idiot.
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I think that whether we describe ourselves as reformists or revolutionaries
or otherwise, our purpose should be to encourage economic mechanisms which
vastly expand and improve the existing stock of goods and services together
with political mechanisms which promote their safe and equitable
distribution. There's nothing inherent in an appreciation of economic
growth to assume an inattention to issues of quality or equality or the
environment. It's a matter of how and to what end growth is pursued. The
suggestion of growth as an end in itself is a canard.
On the other hand, a "zero growth" solution or a thinly-disguised one which rejects the existing capital stock as 99.99% "unnecessary" is a critique not of a specific mode of production, of its relations of production, but of production itself, in which growth and abundance are seen as contradicting rather than contributing to a better quality of life on the planet. It's a philosophy which has more in common with religious asceticism or aesthetic Romanticism whose anticaptialist ethos in each case has exerted a powerful pull on intellectuals and artists - by no means "idiots" -alienated by the "vulgar" (that is to say, popular) pursuit of material wealth, a pull which has not always been to the left.