Re: [ox-en] keimform.de: Reopening the Commons: Reversing the Enclosure

Diego Saravia wrote:
> can we decide how we grow?
> 
> can we stop being invaded?
> 
> Today if yo do not have nuclear power and if you don t obey, you will
> be invaded.

True, a commons-based society can't exist as an island surrounded by a
capitalistic world.

>> So we have to deal with the limitedness of land and other resources, but we
>> don't have to accept them as scarce. Scarcity is a social phenomenon.
> 
> yes is a social phenomena, but the only way to not have it, is stoping
> growth or having negative growth
> 
> at least humankind or even more: life on earth, have no capacity to
> stop trying to grow. If you stop other will take the place.

Capitalism requires continuous growth of several percentage each year, or it
will fall into crisis (as it currently has).

But a human-oriented economy/society need only to grow as much as humanity
grows, and that's not so much -- current estimates are for the world
population to reach 8 billion in ~2025, 9 billion in 2040-2050, and 10
billion only after 2150, if at all. ("The United Nations states that
population growth is rapidly declining due to the demographic transition.
The world population is expected to peak at 9.2 billion in 2050.") -- cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Of course, it's already impossible to extend the standard/way of living of
the western world to everybody living today, without destroying Earth. But
that way is very inefficient and harmful -- while there are certainly
serious problems, I believe that it would be possible to reach a comparable
standard of living for all, through a smarter use of technology and suitable
social agreements.

So we should be able deal with the moderate growth requirements of humanity
-- but we, and Earth, definitely can't deal with the
several-percent-per-year growth requirements of capitalism.

> in fact capital, (I use the word capital as including land) is the
> actual limit, so it's scarce

Capital is money which is used to yield more money, though it can (and will)
temporarily take other forms, e.g. of resources such as land. But land is
first and foremost simple a resource -- it becomes capital if you *use* it
as capital, i.e. in order to make money, but not otherwise.

Capital is indeed scarce by definition (since making money is the goal of
capitalism, and the more money you already have, the more you can make), but
that's not necessarily true of land -- in fact, even today large areas of
land go wasted, since that can't be profitable used for making money, but
that doesn't mean that they couldn't be usefully used in another social setting.

Best regards
	Christian

-- 
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- [email protected] ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
|   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
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