A lot of us are definitely on essay overload, but this, as usual, Jamie Wheal, is exactly right. Conclusion, absolutely: Create more. Share more. Consume less -- and we'd all be better for that. So start now. Each of us. Yes!
The people screaming “socialism” every time someone proposes cheaper housing or healthcare never seem bothered that we already have socialism for banks, oil companies, defense contractors, and billionaires. Apparently public money becomes tyranny only when ordinary people receive it. The Cold War vocabulary survives because it saves the wealthy from answering a modern question: if capitalism is working so brilliantly, why does everyone need three jobs while twenty-five people own half the planet?
Capitalism will destroy the world because it sees profits in the present and the cost of generating those profits in the (far) future. But one day the far future will be the present.
Thanks for this one Jamie. As many times as I have written about these topics on Medium (without the benefit of having taken your writing class), you have managed to capture most of the themes across half a dozen essays in this one.
Eleven years ago, in the state of Maryland, where I lived for 50 years and you did earlier in your life, the former Governor Martin O'Malley was running for the Democratic Party nomination for POTUS vs Hillary. At the time, he said it is "reform or pitchforks." We got the MAGA pitchforks, so fascism and authoritarianism wins over Communism, yeah! (Didn't we partner with the Communists to defeat Fascism in WWII?).
Here is a good sample of the liberal/left freak out on the Democratic Socialists agenda for radical reform.
Here is my latest take on power, its use, and the fact that we need leaders with new mindsets and that we the people need to take back power we have ceded to these .000000001%ers. Thanks again for this.
I don't understand this argument. Were the Marxist movements ever successful? It seems to me that they all crashed and burned spectacularly. There is plenty to critique about unfettered capitalism and our collective failure in allowing the oligarchs to steal everything they can. But I don't see any recipe for success in trying Marxism yet again.
I would be happy to have a conversation with you, because I have a radically different take on all these topics. I am a Deep Green environmentalist and make my living doing renewable energy. I have been a lefty all my life and never vote for Trump or any Republican. I supported Ralph Nader and worked on his presidential campaigns, but I broke with the Watermelon Greens over a decade ago because I recognized then that all these Green New Deal strategies are doomed to failure as they violate physics and engineering. We are not going to run the world on wind, solar, and batteries at any price point, regardless of what Bill McKibben says.
I think we need spiritual reform, a reformation that brings new doctrines and new moral teachings grounded in ecological cooperation, and not centralized command and control government with a monopoly on violence. Without spirituality and morality, we are doomed. We need economic growth that is designed from the start to work with nature and the cycle of life. The plants will teach us if we listen.
The bogeymen you mention, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, all led totalitarian dictatorships that imposed ideological conformity and murdered millions of their own people. Did you forget about that part? Or do you like that part? Some Marxists seem to want it.
Castro perhaps did not kill millions, merely thousands, banned private property, and they shot you if you tried to leave. Chavez did not kill millions either, all he did was gut the Venezuelan oil industry for a few short years of social programs, leaving behind a wrecked industry and environmental catastrophe. After he died, things got worse for the people.
After the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union, which I am old enough to remember, the Marxists never missed a beat, they simply dropped all their economic theories and switched into cultural Marxism and Eco-Marxism, both of which are total shit-shows creating real social disintegration.
Marxism was never an environmental philosophy, it is an industrial labor philosophy. The Communists were absolutely atrocious to the environment. Check out the Aral Sea. Eco-Marxism has always been a contradiction because Watermelon Greens want to shut down industry and put workers out of a job. I have gone to plenty of environmental protests against pipelines and such, who do you see on the other side of the picket line? You see labor unions and industrial workers who want to build the pipelines and love fossil fuels.
The notion that Eco-leftists speak for the working class is a fucking joke. Industrial workers want to drill for oil and gas, and they vote MAGA, not Green.
Paul Ehrlich was completely wrong about the Population Bomb. Where is the famine and collapse? I don't see any. Agricultural production is the highest it has ever been in human history thanks to technology and innovation. Poor people are fat. We do have new problems in agriculture regarding the over-application of chemicals, but this is a solvable problem.
Regarding population growth, what point are you making exactly? Do you want to slash populations in half? That sounds like a tragedy to me, and a bad day in history. Fortunately, population growth seems to be self-correcting naturally without any policy. Birth rates are down all over the world. So what are you complaining about?
Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth, none of these predictions ever came true. We are not running out of oil or any resources, we keep finding more. There are more proven oil reserves on the books today than there ever have been since they first started drilling in the 1800s. Peak Oil is a bust, there is loads of the stuff, and natural gas is effectively unlimited and is readily renewable. We all fart methane you know, it is a natural product of biology and completely non-toxic.
We are not running out of minerals either, otherwise it would be reflected in the futures markets, where the professionals who actually deal with this stuff make real-world predictions with large sums of money.
You should add Al Gore to your list of failed prophets. Nothing he said in Inconvenient Truth has come true. We are certainly on a warming trend which human activity has some role in, but ocean levels have not risen, and despite all the daily hysteria about the weather, hurricanes have not increased, forest fires are the same as ever, and so are the coral reefs, it is perfectly normal for some to die out, it's called the cycle-of-life.
The Degrowthers are wrong, their program is economic suicide that simply results in deindustrialization and poverty in the developed world, but even worse, it condemns the Global South to continuing poverty. I think it is profoundly immoral to tell poor folks in Africa and elsewhere that they should not develop their own resources and aspire to the quality of life we take for granted in the West.
It is worth noting that the BRICS nations are not embracing any of these Degrowth strategies. They are not decarbonizing, and they are industrializing. They are perfectly happy to let the West ship their industries to them so they can have all the strategic advantages and wealth. China is burning more coal today than the entire West ever did at our peak. They don't seem concerned about CO2, and I don't think they are stupid.
The path to Net-Zero is not to deindustrialize, it is to embrace the carbon cycle and restore ecosystems. CO2 is a building block of life. Forests, soils, wetlands, and the totality of biological life are happy to soak up all CO2 we throw at it.
China learned the hard way from Mao's Cultural Revolution, and so did Russia learn from Stalin. They all abandoned Marxist atheism and returned to their traditional values and religions, and now they are thriving. China speaks of having an Ecological Civilization, and that is what I want also.
You also mention Milton Friedman, his problem is a lack of morality. Socialism and capitalism both have the same problem in my opinion, both are atheist ideologies that are not bound by any spirituality or morality. Without a moral code to guide collective behavior, society goes off the rails, and we are witnessing it today.
I am desperate to hear some fresh ideas out of the left instead of going back to 1975 and acting like nothing has changed, or that the disastrous results of Marxism have not already been proven. I have never seen a Marxist provide a critique of Marxism and why these political movements failed so consistently. Come on Critical Theorists, look in the mirror.
I am not a Capitalist or a Commie, I am a Deep Green Libertarian. I believe in free markets and limited government bound by ecological ethics: a spirit of ecological cooperation, spirituality, and morality.
bud, you're completely missing the direction of this argument. I'm not a Marxist apologist. I'm saying that the retreaded bogeyman that the Alt-Right and Center Left are using these days re: US politics is overwrought and out of date. From the Nordics to Bernie Sanders to Jason Hickel, there's a wide range of policies and proposals that live a country mile away from Stalinist/Maoist revolution. The unfettered growth at all costs e/acc community is pathological and paranoid, and weirdly, stoking the discontent of the "workers" to precisely prompt the kind of backlash they warn against--but by that time, they will have absconded to their bunkers and the joke will be on us
Indeed. There’s also the degree to which capitalist-militarist aggression helped turn Marism-based socialism into authoritarianism that really wasn’t Marxism at all. The Chinese are very conscious of how we buried the Soviet Union by outproducing and outgrowing them and have been very intentional about making sure they master economic growth in part as a way to not suffer the same fate. And of course witness what we’ve done to Cuba. I don’t know the territory that well but I’m pretty darned sure any possibility of non-authoritarian socialism was pretty much killed by the capitalist nations. Of course, we’ve never actually done free market capitalism the Smithian sense, so it’s true on both sides.
As your post suggests, we should let go of the simlistic labels and focus on containing capital and containing power. Better yet, not letting them accumulate in the first place. First thing we do, instead of killing all the lawyers (or maybe right after) is draw a red line and say the Powell Memorandum and its spawn will never happen again.
I agree that unfettered capitalism is a race to the bottom of optimized exploitation that only benefits the oligarchs. But I don't hear any fresh ideas from the left, not from Bernie Sanders, Zohran, or anyone else, it's all the same shit. Bernie has been giving the same speeches since 1975. I don't hear anything new from Jason Hickel either, except despair.
We need radically new ideas and a new organizational method. Frankly, I think the entire govt is owned by the oligarchs, and the liberal desire to continually expand govt is simply handing the oligarchs the keys to the kingdom.
I think the liberals are getting played. Our labor unions and political parties are not going to save us.
I have been a third-party voter for 30 years, its been a bust. I built my career around the Green energy transition, its also been a bust.
I'm not pro/con Hickel but this was the list of suggestions he posted a little while back in Nature that sent Andreessen into conniptions. They really don't seem like they'd need a revolution to enact, and actually fit your descriptions of being a Green Libertarian pretty closely?
“Degrowth Can Work, Here’s How Science Can Help” to see what the author Jason Hickel1 had to say. Here’s his key suggestions:
Reduce less-necessary production. This means scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
Improve public services. It is necessary to ensure universal access to high-quality health care, education, housing, transportation, Internet, renewable energy and nutritious food. Universal public services can deliver strong social outcomes without high levels of resource use.
Introduce a green jobs guarantee. This would train and mobilize labour around urgent social and ecological objectives, such as installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. A programme of this type would end unemployment and ensure a just transition out of jobs for workers in declining industries or ‘sunset sectors’, such as those contingent on fossil fuels. It could be paired with a universal income policy.
Reduce working time. This could be achieved by lowering the retirement age, encouraging part-time working or adopting a four-day working week. These measures would lower carbon emissions and free people to engage in care and other welfare-improving activities. They would also stabilize employment as less-necessary production declines.
Enable sustainable development. This requires cancelling unfair and unpayable debts of low- and middle-income countries, curbing unequal exchange in international trade and creating conditions for productive capacity to be reoriented towards achieving social objectives.
My worldview is rooted in a circular economy and zero waste modeled on nature. My vision is for an Ecological Civilization, not just tinkering with policy minutiae. Change our morals and the policies will follow. We need a reformation, and the revolution will follow.
I reject degrowth as a useful policy. Nature provides the model for endless growth, jungles and forests show us the way. They achieve endless growth because every output feeds the next input, there is no waste and no pollution, and every living creature has its role in the ecosystem.
We currently have linear economic models that extract resources to be used once, with no concern for waste, then we are surprised that we have holes in the ground over here, and pollution over there. We need to change this way of thinking.
I fundamentally believe that we need to raise prosperity for the global population, that means more energy. We need 10x the amount of electricity that we have today, which is exactly what China is doing. They are the best example ever of raising living standards for large populations. Once you have prosperity, you are in a position to clean up the environment. But human poverty guarantees environmental destruction. Oligarchs stealing everything also guarantees destruction.
We need to detoxify our energy systems, not decarbonize them. Carbon is the building block of life. Methane is good, natural gas is our best friend, it is non-toxic and eco-friendly, totally safe for air, soil, and water. There is so much natural gas we can leave the coal and oil in the ground. We can make superior synthetic fuels from methane than from petroleum. I learned this from US Air Force, the single largest consumer of petroleum products on the planet.
I broke with the Greens over their opposition to natural gas, and also the opposition to waste-to-energy. Lefties complain endlessly about waste plastics and then reject the best solution for them, which is to convert them into synthetic fuels.
The best path to Net Zero is to follow physics and biology. We cannot replace high-energy-density energy sources with low-energy-density sources like wind and solar, that means we need nuclear and natural gas, both of which we should embrace. And then get to Net Zero thru nature. The numbers add up generously. Happy to share them.
I would love to continue this conversation with you. Even do it on camera. But now I am on my way to a weekend Ayahuasca retreat and I will be back Monday.
I know that I have radical views that few people share, but I know the science and tech and can present the data. I have spent 30 years on it.
Please list examples of where libertarianism and governments based on libertarianism has been implemented or ever worked in practice vs in theory. That might be a good place to start.
there really aren't any--and that's always been the rate limiter on libertarianism as a coherent governing philosophy. It works really well for young boys reading Ayn Rand and rich men-children looking for justification to keep more of their winnings. For anyone in-between, not so much.
There are different flavors of Libertarianism, roughly speaking, in contemporary America we have Ron Paul style and Ayn Rand style. I would say the original Founding Fathers and the American Revolution were fighting to throw off empire to establish Libertarian freedom, but even then there was tension between maximalist and minimalist government.
Ayn Rand is morally unbound and winner-take-all, which I do not favor.
Ron Paul is an Evangelical Christian, and he wants less government and more church. Marxists want less church, more government. We see this tension in social programs and welfare. For centuries it was the church that provided social services, and going back deep into the Bronze Age it was the temples where people sought relief.
Personally, I left the church when I was 18 because I do not believe the doctrines and dogma, and I reject Christian claims of exclusivity. But now that I am in my 50s and raised three kids without church, I see what was lost: community, spirituality, and a firm moral grounding. I was also never an atheist, I explored comparative religion, Native American, and Hinduism, and my spirituality has only grown.
I stumbled into the Mother Goddess (check out my Substack), and now I believe in a trinity of Mother, Father, Son, where the divine Mother is Mother Earth (there is more to it than that). At this point I am some kind of heretical Gnostic with no religious home.
For 5000 years of organized civilization, there was always a balance between religion and kingship. The king must answer to the gods, otherwise there are no limits to his power and abuse.
I think atheism is the critical failure mechanism of Marxism. Abandon the gods and society goes off the rails, plenty of old mythology speaks to this. First thing folks in Russia and China did after the Soviet Union fell was return to religion. China is very religious nowadays, unlike the Cultural Revolution under Mao. Confucianism works very well for single-party rule.
My politics is like Ron Paul but with heretical Christianity grounded in Native American Earth-centric morality, and I would like to return to the Anti-Imperial ethos of our Founding Fathers. I believe in the US Constitution, which is a living document subject to revision and improvement, and I believe America still needs to live up to the promise that All Men Are Created Equal, but that it remains possible.
OK, I appreciate your journey, but will take your example to conclude that the theory of libertarinanism - whether Ayn Rand or Ron Paul has never been implemented anywhere by any government or society.
Given your spiritual journey, you may appreciate this summation of the teachings of "the Nazarene" as Jamie likes to refer to Jesus of Nazareth.
There are plenty of examples of limited government that were successful. We have thousands of years of history with no government at all. Marx and Engels got the inspiration for socialism from Native American tribes, specifically the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in today's upstate NY, who also inspired the Founding Fathers on democracy. The reason why these tribes were successful was deep spirituality, morality, and matriarchal family structures, which Marx and Engels completely missed and misunderstood.
What I don't see are any examples of atheist political movements that were successful. Can you show me an example?
Every atheist political movement going back to the French Revolution ended in catastrophe and blood in the streets. In contrast, a highly spiritual yet limited govt built the Pyramids.
I am cool with Jesus, but not the Nicene Creed. And I don't see why loving Jesus means I can't also love Krishna and Isis. I'll take my wisdom wherever I can find it.
My Libertarianism is also rooted in my father's experience in the Federal government (I grew up in DC). My dad was a senior director at HUD (Housing and Urban Development). He was a quintessential Social Democrat back in the 1970s. When he retired from HUD, he said to anyone that would listen that everything HUD did was a failure and everyone would have been better off if they skipped the bureaucracy and simply taxed the rich, gave the money directly to the poor, and let them find their own housing. I think he was right.
I am also a Libertarian because of the War on Drugs, which also began as progressive social policy a century ago, attempting to clean up the very real problem of opiate addiction via the heavy hand of government. This obviously did not work to solve drug addiction, but it worked great to create a police state.
I am not an anarchist, we need government, just a leaner government that is actually good at what it tries to do, rather than a sprawling govt that tries to everything and fails at most of it.
I still haven't heard from you why trying Marxism yet again is going to lead to different results than all the previous times it has been tried.
It would be very interesting for you to tackle the David Deutch arguments that Naval and a few other hyper libertarian types have grabbed onto as logical proofs.
Decel limits the creation of new knowledge which is the only way to expand the pie and eliminate scarcity which eliminates suffering. There or thereabouts.
yeah, without a doubt the Supralinear Scaling Law suggest that larger more robust and thriving urban centers (i.e. the logical outcome of continued growth) do gain about a 20% advantage in innovation compared to smaller or more dispersed population centers. That's why some analysts suggest that the bare ass minimum for Mars colonies to actually independently thrive would be about 1M people. But...we aren't in medieval guilds and city states anymore! Our ability to harness and amplify human capital, IP, innovations etc isn't governed by meat suits in proximity--we have the internet, digital capital and now, maybe even AI booster rockets. Reckon we 100% could tease apart technological innovation and excess material consumption--it's just a question of more precise arguments and more effective policies.
Vibed extremely hard with the conflation arguments you put forth in the article. Intellectual honesty separated from one's intrinsic natural ideological leanings seems so tricky for even the smart fuckers in the public. And I feel it in myself frequently even though I'm not engaged in any of this like yourself and others are in the arena. Your last sentence there rings the most true. It's where the philosophical abstraction fails to even try to meet the road for me. Deutch for example, is brilliant across multiple domains but you can see where his hobby horses (trauma) make him dial in way too hard reflexively.
I hope it leads to people understanding that Landback and Indigenous ways of being is the ancient TEK we need now more than ever. That’s the Real Red we need to become.
A lot of us are definitely on essay overload, but this, as usual, Jamie Wheal, is exactly right. Conclusion, absolutely: Create more. Share more. Consume less -- and we'd all be better for that. So start now. Each of us. Yes!
The people screaming “socialism” every time someone proposes cheaper housing or healthcare never seem bothered that we already have socialism for banks, oil companies, defense contractors, and billionaires. Apparently public money becomes tyranny only when ordinary people receive it. The Cold War vocabulary survives because it saves the wealthy from answering a modern question: if capitalism is working so brilliantly, why does everyone need three jobs while twenty-five people own half the planet?
Capitalism will destroy the world because it sees profits in the present and the cost of generating those profits in the (far) future. But one day the far future will be the present.
"Better Red than Dead” origins:
Cold War Origin: Used in the 1950s and 1960s by peace groups and anti-nuclear weapon protesters.
Core Dilemma: Shows the deep fear of atomic destruction.
The Opposite: Conservatives and anti-communists used "better dead than red" to show strength against the Soviet Union. This is s
till being used by the ignorant powers that be against the rising vitality of the DSA and their youthful enthusiasm for change!
Thanks for this one Jamie. As many times as I have written about these topics on Medium (without the benefit of having taken your writing class), you have managed to capture most of the themes across half a dozen essays in this one.
Eleven years ago, in the state of Maryland, where I lived for 50 years and you did earlier in your life, the former Governor Martin O'Malley was running for the Democratic Party nomination for POTUS vs Hillary. At the time, he said it is "reform or pitchforks." We got the MAGA pitchforks, so fascism and authoritarianism wins over Communism, yeah! (Didn't we partner with the Communists to defeat Fascism in WWII?).
Here is a good sample of the liberal/left freak out on the Democratic Socialists agenda for radical reform.
Here is my latest take on power, its use, and the fact that we need leaders with new mindsets and that we the people need to take back power we have ceded to these .000000001%ers. Thanks again for this.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/socialism-vs-the-constitution?publication_id=61579&post_id=209134032&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=2cqkq&triedRedirect=true
https://medium.com/@jylterps/concentrated-power-leverages-enemies-fear-and-corruption-for-authoritarian-capture-f2f5f053043c?postPublishedType=repub
I don't understand this argument. Were the Marxist movements ever successful? It seems to me that they all crashed and burned spectacularly. There is plenty to critique about unfettered capitalism and our collective failure in allowing the oligarchs to steal everything they can. But I don't see any recipe for success in trying Marxism yet again.
I would be happy to have a conversation with you, because I have a radically different take on all these topics. I am a Deep Green environmentalist and make my living doing renewable energy. I have been a lefty all my life and never vote for Trump or any Republican. I supported Ralph Nader and worked on his presidential campaigns, but I broke with the Watermelon Greens over a decade ago because I recognized then that all these Green New Deal strategies are doomed to failure as they violate physics and engineering. We are not going to run the world on wind, solar, and batteries at any price point, regardless of what Bill McKibben says.
I think we need spiritual reform, a reformation that brings new doctrines and new moral teachings grounded in ecological cooperation, and not centralized command and control government with a monopoly on violence. Without spirituality and morality, we are doomed. We need economic growth that is designed from the start to work with nature and the cycle of life. The plants will teach us if we listen.
The bogeymen you mention, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, all led totalitarian dictatorships that imposed ideological conformity and murdered millions of their own people. Did you forget about that part? Or do you like that part? Some Marxists seem to want it.
Castro perhaps did not kill millions, merely thousands, banned private property, and they shot you if you tried to leave. Chavez did not kill millions either, all he did was gut the Venezuelan oil industry for a few short years of social programs, leaving behind a wrecked industry and environmental catastrophe. After he died, things got worse for the people.
After the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union, which I am old enough to remember, the Marxists never missed a beat, they simply dropped all their economic theories and switched into cultural Marxism and Eco-Marxism, both of which are total shit-shows creating real social disintegration.
Marxism was never an environmental philosophy, it is an industrial labor philosophy. The Communists were absolutely atrocious to the environment. Check out the Aral Sea. Eco-Marxism has always been a contradiction because Watermelon Greens want to shut down industry and put workers out of a job. I have gone to plenty of environmental protests against pipelines and such, who do you see on the other side of the picket line? You see labor unions and industrial workers who want to build the pipelines and love fossil fuels.
The notion that Eco-leftists speak for the working class is a fucking joke. Industrial workers want to drill for oil and gas, and they vote MAGA, not Green.
Paul Ehrlich was completely wrong about the Population Bomb. Where is the famine and collapse? I don't see any. Agricultural production is the highest it has ever been in human history thanks to technology and innovation. Poor people are fat. We do have new problems in agriculture regarding the over-application of chemicals, but this is a solvable problem.
Regarding population growth, what point are you making exactly? Do you want to slash populations in half? That sounds like a tragedy to me, and a bad day in history. Fortunately, population growth seems to be self-correcting naturally without any policy. Birth rates are down all over the world. So what are you complaining about?
Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth, none of these predictions ever came true. We are not running out of oil or any resources, we keep finding more. There are more proven oil reserves on the books today than there ever have been since they first started drilling in the 1800s. Peak Oil is a bust, there is loads of the stuff, and natural gas is effectively unlimited and is readily renewable. We all fart methane you know, it is a natural product of biology and completely non-toxic.
We are not running out of minerals either, otherwise it would be reflected in the futures markets, where the professionals who actually deal with this stuff make real-world predictions with large sums of money.
You should add Al Gore to your list of failed prophets. Nothing he said in Inconvenient Truth has come true. We are certainly on a warming trend which human activity has some role in, but ocean levels have not risen, and despite all the daily hysteria about the weather, hurricanes have not increased, forest fires are the same as ever, and so are the coral reefs, it is perfectly normal for some to die out, it's called the cycle-of-life.
The Degrowthers are wrong, their program is economic suicide that simply results in deindustrialization and poverty in the developed world, but even worse, it condemns the Global South to continuing poverty. I think it is profoundly immoral to tell poor folks in Africa and elsewhere that they should not develop their own resources and aspire to the quality of life we take for granted in the West.
It is worth noting that the BRICS nations are not embracing any of these Degrowth strategies. They are not decarbonizing, and they are industrializing. They are perfectly happy to let the West ship their industries to them so they can have all the strategic advantages and wealth. China is burning more coal today than the entire West ever did at our peak. They don't seem concerned about CO2, and I don't think they are stupid.
The path to Net-Zero is not to deindustrialize, it is to embrace the carbon cycle and restore ecosystems. CO2 is a building block of life. Forests, soils, wetlands, and the totality of biological life are happy to soak up all CO2 we throw at it.
China learned the hard way from Mao's Cultural Revolution, and so did Russia learn from Stalin. They all abandoned Marxist atheism and returned to their traditional values and religions, and now they are thriving. China speaks of having an Ecological Civilization, and that is what I want also.
You also mention Milton Friedman, his problem is a lack of morality. Socialism and capitalism both have the same problem in my opinion, both are atheist ideologies that are not bound by any spirituality or morality. Without a moral code to guide collective behavior, society goes off the rails, and we are witnessing it today.
I am desperate to hear some fresh ideas out of the left instead of going back to 1975 and acting like nothing has changed, or that the disastrous results of Marxism have not already been proven. I have never seen a Marxist provide a critique of Marxism and why these political movements failed so consistently. Come on Critical Theorists, look in the mirror.
I am not a Capitalist or a Commie, I am a Deep Green Libertarian. I believe in free markets and limited government bound by ecological ethics: a spirit of ecological cooperation, spirituality, and morality.
Happy to discuss anytime.
bud, you're completely missing the direction of this argument. I'm not a Marxist apologist. I'm saying that the retreaded bogeyman that the Alt-Right and Center Left are using these days re: US politics is overwrought and out of date. From the Nordics to Bernie Sanders to Jason Hickel, there's a wide range of policies and proposals that live a country mile away from Stalinist/Maoist revolution. The unfettered growth at all costs e/acc community is pathological and paranoid, and weirdly, stoking the discontent of the "workers" to precisely prompt the kind of backlash they warn against--but by that time, they will have absconded to their bunkers and the joke will be on us
Indeed. There’s also the degree to which capitalist-militarist aggression helped turn Marism-based socialism into authoritarianism that really wasn’t Marxism at all. The Chinese are very conscious of how we buried the Soviet Union by outproducing and outgrowing them and have been very intentional about making sure they master economic growth in part as a way to not suffer the same fate. And of course witness what we’ve done to Cuba. I don’t know the territory that well but I’m pretty darned sure any possibility of non-authoritarian socialism was pretty much killed by the capitalist nations. Of course, we’ve never actually done free market capitalism the Smithian sense, so it’s true on both sides.
As your post suggests, we should let go of the simlistic labels and focus on containing capital and containing power. Better yet, not letting them accumulate in the first place. First thing we do, instead of killing all the lawyers (or maybe right after) is draw a red line and say the Powell Memorandum and its spawn will never happen again.
I agree that unfettered capitalism is a race to the bottom of optimized exploitation that only benefits the oligarchs. But I don't hear any fresh ideas from the left, not from Bernie Sanders, Zohran, or anyone else, it's all the same shit. Bernie has been giving the same speeches since 1975. I don't hear anything new from Jason Hickel either, except despair.
We need radically new ideas and a new organizational method. Frankly, I think the entire govt is owned by the oligarchs, and the liberal desire to continually expand govt is simply handing the oligarchs the keys to the kingdom.
I think the liberals are getting played. Our labor unions and political parties are not going to save us.
I have been a third-party voter for 30 years, its been a bust. I built my career around the Green energy transition, its also been a bust.
The question is, what comes next?
I'm not pro/con Hickel but this was the list of suggestions he posted a little while back in Nature that sent Andreessen into conniptions. They really don't seem like they'd need a revolution to enact, and actually fit your descriptions of being a Green Libertarian pretty closely?
“Degrowth Can Work, Here’s How Science Can Help” to see what the author Jason Hickel1 had to say. Here’s his key suggestions:
Reduce less-necessary production. This means scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
Improve public services. It is necessary to ensure universal access to high-quality health care, education, housing, transportation, Internet, renewable energy and nutritious food. Universal public services can deliver strong social outcomes without high levels of resource use.
Introduce a green jobs guarantee. This would train and mobilize labour around urgent social and ecological objectives, such as installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. A programme of this type would end unemployment and ensure a just transition out of jobs for workers in declining industries or ‘sunset sectors’, such as those contingent on fossil fuels. It could be paired with a universal income policy.
Reduce working time. This could be achieved by lowering the retirement age, encouraging part-time working or adopting a four-day working week. These measures would lower carbon emissions and free people to engage in care and other welfare-improving activities. They would also stabilize employment as less-necessary production declines.
Enable sustainable development. This requires cancelling unfair and unpayable debts of low- and middle-income countries, curbing unequal exchange in international trade and creating conditions for productive capacity to be reoriented towards achieving social objectives.
My worldview is rooted in a circular economy and zero waste modeled on nature. My vision is for an Ecological Civilization, not just tinkering with policy minutiae. Change our morals and the policies will follow. We need a reformation, and the revolution will follow.
I reject degrowth as a useful policy. Nature provides the model for endless growth, jungles and forests show us the way. They achieve endless growth because every output feeds the next input, there is no waste and no pollution, and every living creature has its role in the ecosystem.
We currently have linear economic models that extract resources to be used once, with no concern for waste, then we are surprised that we have holes in the ground over here, and pollution over there. We need to change this way of thinking.
I fundamentally believe that we need to raise prosperity for the global population, that means more energy. We need 10x the amount of electricity that we have today, which is exactly what China is doing. They are the best example ever of raising living standards for large populations. Once you have prosperity, you are in a position to clean up the environment. But human poverty guarantees environmental destruction. Oligarchs stealing everything also guarantees destruction.
We need to detoxify our energy systems, not decarbonize them. Carbon is the building block of life. Methane is good, natural gas is our best friend, it is non-toxic and eco-friendly, totally safe for air, soil, and water. There is so much natural gas we can leave the coal and oil in the ground. We can make superior synthetic fuels from methane than from petroleum. I learned this from US Air Force, the single largest consumer of petroleum products on the planet.
I broke with the Greens over their opposition to natural gas, and also the opposition to waste-to-energy. Lefties complain endlessly about waste plastics and then reject the best solution for them, which is to convert them into synthetic fuels.
The best path to Net Zero is to follow physics and biology. We cannot replace high-energy-density energy sources with low-energy-density sources like wind and solar, that means we need nuclear and natural gas, both of which we should embrace. And then get to Net Zero thru nature. The numbers add up generously. Happy to share them.
I would love to continue this conversation with you. Even do it on camera. But now I am on my way to a weekend Ayahuasca retreat and I will be back Monday.
I know that I have radical views that few people share, but I know the science and tech and can present the data. I have spent 30 years on it.
Please list examples of where libertarianism and governments based on libertarianism has been implemented or ever worked in practice vs in theory. That might be a good place to start.
there really aren't any--and that's always been the rate limiter on libertarianism as a coherent governing philosophy. It works really well for young boys reading Ayn Rand and rich men-children looking for justification to keep more of their winnings. For anyone in-between, not so much.
There are different flavors of Libertarianism, roughly speaking, in contemporary America we have Ron Paul style and Ayn Rand style. I would say the original Founding Fathers and the American Revolution were fighting to throw off empire to establish Libertarian freedom, but even then there was tension between maximalist and minimalist government.
Ayn Rand is morally unbound and winner-take-all, which I do not favor.
Ron Paul is an Evangelical Christian, and he wants less government and more church. Marxists want less church, more government. We see this tension in social programs and welfare. For centuries it was the church that provided social services, and going back deep into the Bronze Age it was the temples where people sought relief.
Personally, I left the church when I was 18 because I do not believe the doctrines and dogma, and I reject Christian claims of exclusivity. But now that I am in my 50s and raised three kids without church, I see what was lost: community, spirituality, and a firm moral grounding. I was also never an atheist, I explored comparative religion, Native American, and Hinduism, and my spirituality has only grown.
I stumbled into the Mother Goddess (check out my Substack), and now I believe in a trinity of Mother, Father, Son, where the divine Mother is Mother Earth (there is more to it than that). At this point I am some kind of heretical Gnostic with no religious home.
For 5000 years of organized civilization, there was always a balance between religion and kingship. The king must answer to the gods, otherwise there are no limits to his power and abuse.
I think atheism is the critical failure mechanism of Marxism. Abandon the gods and society goes off the rails, plenty of old mythology speaks to this. First thing folks in Russia and China did after the Soviet Union fell was return to religion. China is very religious nowadays, unlike the Cultural Revolution under Mao. Confucianism works very well for single-party rule.
My politics is like Ron Paul but with heretical Christianity grounded in Native American Earth-centric morality, and I would like to return to the Anti-Imperial ethos of our Founding Fathers. I believe in the US Constitution, which is a living document subject to revision and improvement, and I believe America still needs to live up to the promise that All Men Are Created Equal, but that it remains possible.
OK, I appreciate your journey, but will take your example to conclude that the theory of libertarinanism - whether Ayn Rand or Ron Paul has never been implemented anywhere by any government or society.
Given your spiritual journey, you may appreciate this summation of the teachings of "the Nazarene" as Jamie likes to refer to Jesus of Nazareth.
https://medium.com/@jylterps/the-wisdom-and-teachings-of-jesus-of-nazareth-an-alethic-analysis-5427393af291
There are plenty of examples of limited government that were successful. We have thousands of years of history with no government at all. Marx and Engels got the inspiration for socialism from Native American tribes, specifically the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in today's upstate NY, who also inspired the Founding Fathers on democracy. The reason why these tribes were successful was deep spirituality, morality, and matriarchal family structures, which Marx and Engels completely missed and misunderstood.
What I don't see are any examples of atheist political movements that were successful. Can you show me an example?
Every atheist political movement going back to the French Revolution ended in catastrophe and blood in the streets. In contrast, a highly spiritual yet limited govt built the Pyramids.
I am cool with Jesus, but not the Nicene Creed. And I don't see why loving Jesus means I can't also love Krishna and Isis. I'll take my wisdom wherever I can find it.
My Libertarianism is also rooted in my father's experience in the Federal government (I grew up in DC). My dad was a senior director at HUD (Housing and Urban Development). He was a quintessential Social Democrat back in the 1970s. When he retired from HUD, he said to anyone that would listen that everything HUD did was a failure and everyone would have been better off if they skipped the bureaucracy and simply taxed the rich, gave the money directly to the poor, and let them find their own housing. I think he was right.
I am also a Libertarian because of the War on Drugs, which also began as progressive social policy a century ago, attempting to clean up the very real problem of opiate addiction via the heavy hand of government. This obviously did not work to solve drug addiction, but it worked great to create a police state.
I am not an anarchist, we need government, just a leaner government that is actually good at what it tries to do, rather than a sprawling govt that tries to everything and fails at most of it.
I still haven't heard from you why trying Marxism yet again is going to lead to different results than all the previous times it has been tried.
They’re literally trying to bring back every single thing from the 1950s.
😑🙄😑
Thanks for this Jamie.
Y’know what else operates with a commitment to unrestrained growth? Cancer! Is there still time to intervene surgically? Better be!
...and a few life style changes?
It would be very interesting for you to tackle the David Deutch arguments that Naval and a few other hyper libertarian types have grabbed onto as logical proofs.
Decel limits the creation of new knowledge which is the only way to expand the pie and eliminate scarcity which eliminates suffering. There or thereabouts.
yeah, without a doubt the Supralinear Scaling Law suggest that larger more robust and thriving urban centers (i.e. the logical outcome of continued growth) do gain about a 20% advantage in innovation compared to smaller or more dispersed population centers. That's why some analysts suggest that the bare ass minimum for Mars colonies to actually independently thrive would be about 1M people. But...we aren't in medieval guilds and city states anymore! Our ability to harness and amplify human capital, IP, innovations etc isn't governed by meat suits in proximity--we have the internet, digital capital and now, maybe even AI booster rockets. Reckon we 100% could tease apart technological innovation and excess material consumption--it's just a question of more precise arguments and more effective policies.
Vibed extremely hard with the conflation arguments you put forth in the article. Intellectual honesty separated from one's intrinsic natural ideological leanings seems so tricky for even the smart fuckers in the public. And I feel it in myself frequently even though I'm not engaged in any of this like yourself and others are in the arena. Your last sentence there rings the most true. It's where the philosophical abstraction fails to even try to meet the road for me. Deutch for example, is brilliant across multiple domains but you can see where his hobby horses (trauma) make him dial in way too hard reflexively.
Says this random internet shouter XD
I hope it leads to people understanding that Landback and Indigenous ways of being is the ancient TEK we need now more than ever. That’s the Real Red we need to become.
YES. Every word