Stories tagged with "socialism"

Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism - Professor Richard Wolff

Previously, we posted one heterodox economics view of the current global crisis (ecological economics - from Herman Daly, and from Robert Costanza). Below the fold is a guest essay from Professor Richard Wolff, a Marxian economist at the University of Mass-Amherst. He recently gave a very interesting video lecture Capitalism Hits the Fan. (I wish I were as good of speaker as he - I make it through my talks only because I think of the beer at the end)

I have thought for some time that resource constraints, especially energy, would be the end of free markets as we know them. It is now clear to most that government reactions to the popping of the credit bubble have shown no master plan other than one bailout being larger and grander in scale than the unsuccessful measure/attempt that preceded it. I do not know what 'ism' will replace capitalism- but I suspect it will be some socio-political 'ism' that is as yet undefined, something broader than all the heterodox schools which if successful, will need to integrate both our biophysical and biological realities. No discipline has the 'one' answer to our energy, environmental and social problems, which is why we continue to ask and integrate key questions with new data in this forum. (My own thoughts on the importance of Prof. Wolff's graph in relation to energy, debt and society follow his essay.)

UK's Guardian: Are Capitalism and a Habitable Planet Mutually Exclusive?

(hat tip: Energy Bulletin)

Robert Newman writes in UK's Guardian:

Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change.

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

There's much more of an argument in the article, but this was rather my point a long time ago about the governance of the commons: with scarce resources, a society either needs to find another scarce resource to compensate, a way of creating/enforcing/reinforcing tribal/cultural norms that encourage people do not hoard more than their "share" of resources, or you need a central government/public sector that controls resource allocation.