Matthias Wasser wrote:
>
> To be pointlessly utopian:
>
> I don't see any problem with very large cooperatives. In fact the
> optimal structure would probably be to leave everything that isn't a
> public good, natural monopoly, &c. to cooperatives and let the market
> decide what firm sizes are most efficient. (Use antitrust as
> necessary.) Let everyone have equal rights to the share of capital and
> the right to form cooperatives that they think will use the capital
> most efficiently. Let the central bank, possibly automated by public
> referenda, set the savings rate, and from there let people make loans
> to each other to control at what points in their lives they'd like to
> consume.
This sounds like an idealized version of fascism to me.
Here is THE problem of capitalism, the core of its very threat to the continued habitability of the earth.
Productive activity in (say) plastic dolls in Guatemala changes the meaning of (say) productive activity in flour milling in Singapore. The first and core necessity of a socialist world is to liquidate abstract labor and the uncontrollable growth it necessitates.
One can fiddle around endlessly with carbon emissions, but there is one and only one way to mdoerate the destructiveness of global warming (it is to late to stop it: it can only be moderated), and that is by the elimination of economic growth, and probably by a considerable shrinking of the global "economy."
Commodity production and wage labor must be eliminated or humans a century or so from now will consider themselves lucky if they are living a reasonably decent paleolithic existence.
Carrol