If we continue on present hyperconsumerist, liquidationist course the outcomes are predictable and already in train: scarcity, rationing by fiat, rationing by wealth (and the associated corruption, bullying, privateering, blackmarketing, etc -- just check the shady record of the foreign aid world for the prostitution of hungry women and kids by NGO workers in exchange for food, etc)... not a pretty picture, and it could get worse: the world as one big refugee camp policed by Halliburton and surveilled by satellite, patrolled by taser-wielding Kapos too grateful for their three squares and a bed to feel any solidarity with the untermenschen they control. Orwellian dystopia to the max, ugh. That's a nasty future and I sure hope we are not heading there.
I think it's too much to ask for a sudden 180 in government/industry (the governo-industrial complex) -- the fin de siecle atmosphere among our elite is not conducive to new ideas, but to hanging on desperately to accumulated wealth and old paradigms, and shooting anyone who threatens the ancien regime. Change, if it comes, I suspect will have to come from below: from innumerable acts of secession from the established system, innumerable refuseniks and deserters and innovators, innumerable local systems filling the huge interstices in the oversized and creaking armature of the industrial state.
So maybe that is my answer to your question: we have to create, ourselves, the means of reducing our demand. And that, I feel, involves both individual conscience and collective support.
One example: It is easier not to buy if you can lend and borrow among neighbours. It is easier not to starve if we share food. But the unwritten law of capitalism is that No One Must Share: this law is nowhere enforced more absurdly and vigorously than in the realm of intelprop, but the whole society observes it increasingly: each person must own a garage full of every possible tool, rather than ask a neighbour or a friend if they can spare a rip saw for a couple of days. This is great for industrialism: you can sell the same product to each of 1000 people in the same village, even if each of them only needs to use it once or twice a year. But it's bankrupting the biosphere and undermining social capital at the same time, since the complex web of obligation and gratitude built by lending and sharing is what keeps communities together.
Rebuilding that web of community and reducing consumption are inseparable activities. You can never do just one thing: rebuilding the health of the soil improves the crop, which improves the health of the farmer... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
I agree 100% with what you've written, with the exception that I think you may be underestimating the overall economic picture.
What I was responding to was the question raised by Kasser, re what many of us have already recognized, and thousands more do by the day, as being an imperative for a major wind-down in consumption. This increasing enlightenment is already having considerable effect on Industrialize economies.
Given the economic unknowns of dealing with awakening populations: backing off in relation to debt, conscious and deliberate decrease in consumption, the question our Leaders need to be asking themselves [and us] is how this consumerist wind-down might be accomodated without resulting in economic chaos. This is their job, of course, but it doesn't happen to be their corporate backers' favorite subject ...
It's quite fine and dandy that we should be creating our own, local means of subsistence and nurturing communal support and existence/subsistence, but the fact remains that were the majority of the Western populations to drop out of the consumer main stream without some kind of gradual, coherent adaptation in terms of policy, it's the rest of the world that will suffer cataclysm. We cannot and must not imagine that our actions will be without effect on the rest of the world.
So, I restate my question, again, in new terms. How are we to design the wind-down of the mega-consumer, industrial, colonial 'West' in such a way that the disadvantaged in our own societies, and beyond, do not suffer disproportionately?
Or should it matter to us?
But sure, if the west (tm) stopped buying stuff today, millions of people would loose their jobs. There is a transitional problem.
Then this angle perhaps works:
How do you create a proletariat? By reducing the populations possibility of sustaning itself, by way of removing control over the means of production (enclosure, regulations on trades favoring big biz, intellectual enclosure).
Then how do you uncreate a proletariat? By it regaining means of production. How? Ok, now it gets tough (and I should get sleeping). Backtracking the above looks like a starting point, but to what state? It is all about not being hindered to use the means of production so that you can produce what you need. A general rule allowing use of idle stuff, perhaps? Idle stuff like houses noone lives in, land that is not used, factories that has been shut down. All intellectual property is a sense idle as an idea can never be used up and can be used simultaneosly by unlimited people. Squatters unite! A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Then how do you uncreate a proletariat? By it regaining means of production.
by rolling back the Enclosures.
and that gets us back to land reform and agricultural reform, reform of zoning laws, land use, rights in usufruct, preservation of the productive commons.
one of the serious problems with compound interest is that money can multiply in geometric progression whereas biosolar returns are annual and fixed. one thing this means, as I've been mulling over lately, is that those who control the money can kite ahead of its inevitable devaluation: they can own, at least today, enough money to buy the whole world several times over, whereas a peasant family must work and scrimp and save for years to accumulate enough surplus to buy an extra acre or two.
this means that inevitably, the money-owners can buy all the land; their money will eventually devalue as its theoretical value spirals way out of touch with reality (see earlier posts on the absurdity of compound interest and how it forces either steady inflation or abrupt "resets"), but they can surf the moving wavefront of compounding money and -- essentially -- buy up the world, Enclosing everything and forcing the non-wealthy into a global "dispossessed lumpenproletariat" -- thereby rendering that class incapable of self-sufficiency and abjectly dependent on centrally controlled sources of food, clothing, artifacts etc -- which in turn creates a pool of cheap desperate hungry labour and a captive market for mass produced stuff. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
...which was the whole point of the Enclosure movement in the first place: not only to secure more pasturage for the capitalists' favourite beast of the time (sheep), but to ensure the existence of a dispossessed proletariat who could be forced, through hunger, to work for wages as low as was compatible with keeping them (barely) alive to tend their masters' mills.
only a person or family or tribe with the ability to feed herself by her/their own efforts is in any position to say "no" to the Boss. the rest of us, whether we care to face the fact squarely or not, are wage slaves: we eat or don't, we have shelter or don't, at the pleasure of the bosses who control our access to money and hence to food and shelter. we are not allowed to build shelters of our own (that is called "squatting" and "unpermitted construction" and is punished by demolition and/or imprisonment and/or fines); and the ag industry is moving with ever more open intent towards making it illegal for anyone to grow their own food w/o paying a money rent for "patented" cultivars.
the money system is totalising: nothing and no one is allowed to exist outside it... the days when you could pay your property tax in potatoes are long gone.
every act of charity, every act of barter, every effort of self-support, seems like a small act of resistance in such a system... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
damn right it should matter to us!
personally i'm coming round to thinking only fashion could move the meme fast enough.
we need all the angelina jolie-brad pitts, the david beckhams, etc of this world to saturate the media to make cheap, renewable energy a must-have for everyone.
a CRAZE....
like hula hoops lol... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'm beginning to lean towards strict constraints on advertising.
