Eugene Coyle wrote: Hans, Thanks for this but I think you have inverted the priorities. At the end you write:
[Hans E.] This movement must become powerful enough to sweep the suicidal oil and coal interests off the table now, and then, after the big investments for the energy and transportation switch have been done, it must discard the economic growth paradigm and fight for a rational steady-state economy. Cox: The proposition,"The movement must become powerful enough" blithely assumes nearly a whole historical epoch; for me, it provokes something like the old saw, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." And of course, a m9vement that powerful would not do anything at all with this or that sector of "the econolmy" but rather begin the building of a socialist society, since that level of strength is what we call Revolution. Put another way, if handling the problems of ecology require a movement that strong, then in fact we should just forget about ecology, renewable energy, global warming, and focus on building a revollutionary movement, since nothing short of a revolution will give us what Hans says is the necessary power to do anything with these problems. Hans said it, not I. I merely point out what it is, in fact, that he has said. And on controlling growth. First of all, growth is not a paradigm, i.e. a structure of ideas, it is just another name for capitalism. So again, Hans discusses revolution under thd label of reform. [E.C.] It will be more effective, politically and environmentally, to "discard the economic growth pardigm" right now, and then the other pieces will more easily be achieved. Gene Coyle This is an improvement, but still tends to regard "economic growth" as a set of ideas that can be discarded rather than as an ensemble of social relations. And one does not discard social relations, especially when they are the social relations which constitute the capitalist mode of production. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
