logicp_writings/new/Degrowth Communism.md

Degrowth Communism

Degrowth Distributism and the Well-Being Economy

~47:30

Steady State

Lots of new light rail, lot sof new trains, lots of green energy production from solar and wind and other renewables. But no new concrete, no new steel, no container shipping, no heavy rail. That's a post scarcity future because what they mean by post-scarcity is that capitalism doesn't own things. Things are scarce when somebody else owns them and you can't get them - property rights.

A post-property rights future, with no economic growth which works by reducing the realm of necessity. If there's less need, then you can keep going on less stuff, and that gives you more freedom because you don't need as much. We're all working to satisfy needs that aren't real (Marcuse's true needs vs false needs). In the process of reducing necessity, we'll have a higher realm of freedom, but the freedom will be freedom under discipline like as how Mao talked about.

Primitive Accumulation

Saito makes the case, following Marx, that the primitive accumulation / capitalist accumulation processes render man little more than an inorganic cattle, because they separate him from all the means of subsistence and force him to work to earn a living instead. The factory buys the land your tribe lived on, they build a factory and you no longer have access to the land or the water. They allow you to work for a pittance so you can buy a living. They've expropriated you and given you the opportunity to make them a profit.

That is also the logic of decolonization.

Man is divorced from himself and nature (according to EPM) and so what needs to be done is this growth of degrowth communism to bring Man back into original unity in a higher form (not the primitive form of the past, but a higher one).

"In arguing for reestablishing the original unity in the future society beyond this alienating separation from nature under capitalism, Marx was consistent with his theory of metabolism:

"The original unity can be re-established only on the material foundation which capital creates, and by means of the revolutions which, in the process of this creation, the working class and the entire society undergo."

In addition, his remark on the "negation of the negation" in Volume 1 of Kapital, logically corresponds to this reconstitution of the original unity as a process of overcoming the antagonistic separation in the metabolic exchange between humans and nature.

However, to clarify what needs to be re-established in Communism, it is first necessary to grasp more carefully what had to be destroyed in the formation of capitalism, through the dissolution in the original unity between humans and nature. To put it bluntly, it is the "wealth" of society and nature that is severely impoverished under capitalism."