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So if someone asks you what this end of capitalism, end of growth thing is all about, what do you tell them?

I've compiled a few things that might be suitable:

John Michael Greer, especially this essay: Collapse now and avoid the rush

For a more business/investment viewpoint, Jeremy Grantham's Quarterly letter to Investors, in particularly these two:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61256841/JGLetterALL-1Q11
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/ ... 02/GMO.pdf

Nate Hagen's lecture "What if the Future is Real?"
It broad big picture stuff but hits the key points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tShiBI5diIA Q&As here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3z7r7MVMkE
Also an article "Twenty (Important) Concepts I Wasn't Taught in Business School" of his here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8402

Richard Heinberg's book "The End of Growth" is not a bad summary.
Reviews/interviews here: http://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/th ... -of-growth

Jeff Rubin's book "The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-Growth Economy" covers similar ground : http://www.DODGY TAX AVOIDERS.co.uk/Big-Flatline-Oi ... 230342183/
Rubin's a good speaker: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jeff+rubin

So what else would you suggest someone interested to this idea read?

There's a few things within the Carbon Tracker website: http://www.carbontracker.org/

I think I'd just point to the fact that Tescos are worried that they can't sell food in poor parts of various towns now because, erm, poor people are beginning to not be able to afford food.

But it's basic maths: Capitalism is a system which encourages those who already have "capital" (land, energy-supply, manufacturing equipment) to make the very most of it, on the grounds that by that means overall wealth is maximised.

The problem arises when the economy ceases to grow: those who have the capital and are accumulating wealth because of the (useful or otherwise) services they are offering using it, are effectively accumulating the wealth from everybody else.

RenewableCandy wrote:I think I'd just point to the fact that Tescos are worried that they can't sell food in poor parts of various towns now because, erm, poor people are beginning to not be able to afford food.

Eh? I didn't know Tesco sells food.

Oh all right then. "food".

I posted this a long time back when I joined this forum. There seems little point in re-inventing it:

According to Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. What he was essentially getting at is that the endless competition between industrialist bosses would inevitably lead to a collapse of their customer base. This, in turn, would lead to civil unrest and, eventually, revolution.

The reason for the above is the need for profit. In its most essential form, profit may be defined as a situation whereby you exit an economic transaction with more resources than when you went in. In order for anyone to extract a profit, a loss must be incurred by someone, or some thing, somewhere else. Either the supplier of the raw materials makes a loss, or the manufacturer makes a loss, or the retailer makes a loss, or the customer makes a loss, or the workers all the way up the production chain makes a loss. Someone or something has to make a loss. The above leads to the paradox of a situation where the ideal for any capitalist would be to do away with all workers and automate all production since this would prove to be the most profitable arrangement.

However, those workers are also their customers. Thus, in doing away with them, they have destroyed their customer base's capacity to spend money on buying their products.

Growth is the only thing that has allowed capitalism to paper over this fundamental flaw in its very heart and so allow it to last for as long as it has. Which, in historical terms, is not very long at all. This is not to say that any system of human organisation would not have run up against the same resource buffers. It's just that capitalism has proved to be very efficient at getting us here. In this sense, whilst resources are available to enable growth to occur, the "loss" is incurred by the Earth itself. Now that growth is no longer physically possible, the days of win/win capitalism are over. In a static or contracting economy all profits must be balanced with losses.

Or, to put all of the above more succinctly: Capitalism does not work in a static or contracting economy unless one is prepared to accept considerable levels of bankruptcies/social unrest etc. Fractional reserve banking (FRB) stimulates and amplifies economic growth by borrowing from the future and so avoids, for a time, the inherent flaw in capitalism. The earth has finite amounts of easily accessible industrial resources eventually resulting in a situation where growth has stopped. Capitalism's inherent flaw is exposed.

I need to expand here, on a subsidiary, but very important factor. That of fractional reserve banking. FRB is a financial process whereby if I go to a bank and borrow money from them I must pay it back with the monetary fruits of my own future productive activities. The money that the domestic bank lent to me, they also borrowed from a commercial bank. The commercial bank lent that money into existence. However, they only did so on the back of knowing that they can go to the central bank, after-the-fact and make good their lendings. Thus, ultimately, central banks/commercial lenders decide how much is lent into existence to you and me based on an assumption of how much productive activity will be happening in the future such that the lending can be repaid. Of course, the reality of how the credit trickles down through the system is far more tortuous and indirect than the schematic, above. But, in principle, this is how our FRB "money" supply grows.

FRB, in the above conceptualisation, may be seen as borrowing from the future. And so, FRB has been yet another weapon in the armoury of capitalism whereby the losses incurred today can be papered over. In FRB's case, by drawing down potential profits from the future in the form of a debt to that future. Thus, economic growth may be accelerated under a FRB system of money creation.

However, there is a fundamental truth we all know in our guts and which science has merely formalised. Namely, that there is no such thing as free lunch. As long as there are a large amount of resources, we can pretend, for a while, that there is. Once we hit the limits of those resources, though, FRB stops working as a consequence of the future failing to honour the FRB promises of today. At that point, we get economic collapse (the current crisis is the beginning of that collapse). From now on in, in order for profits to be maintained, someone has to lose for someone else to gain.

Perpetual economic growth is over. A money supply that is increased over time via FRB credit is over. Capitalism is over. The future will be either some form of socialism or a return to serfdom for the majority

Whatever about capitalism, I'd like to see the end of usury.

You gain extra money simply by having too much in the first place. This extra is taken from those with little. There must come an end point...

emordnilap wrote:Whatever about capitalism, I'd like to see the end of usury

Me too.

emordnilap wrote:Whatever about capitalism, I'd like to see the end of usury.

You gain extra money simply by having too much in the first place.

Unless you are a bank, in which case you don't actually have to have any in the first place, because you have the right to magic it out of nowhere and lend to people.

There must come an end point...

stevecook172001 wrote:I posted this a long time back when I joined this forum.

.....The reason for the above is the need for profit. In its most essential form, profit may be defined as a situation whereby you exit an economic transaction with more resources than when you went in. In order for anyone to extract a profit, a loss must be incurred by someone, or some thing, somewhere else.......

And I said at the time that it was rubbish and I'll say it again, "That statement is rubbish!"

You are assuming that the money supply is static but it is not and it doesn't need to be. The money supply can increase as long as that money is invested in long lived capital items. The government invests in capital items and taxes the return, or profit, on those items. That return or some of it, then cancels out the printed money to prevent inflation.

The capitalist system breaks down when the money ceases to circulate. It is when money is accumulated and not reinvested into the real economy that there comes a shortage of money. The problem with what was capitalism is that the rich wanted to get richer still and so restricted the remuneration of their workers.

The rich accumulated money and wanted to put it somewhere where they could reap a further return on it. Manufacturing, the traditional investment, didn't return enough because the low wages of the workers meant that they couldn't afford to buy the stuff that they were producing. Manufacturers couldn't sell enough to make enough profit to give a return on the investment.

The rich then turned to the financial markets to make money from money, which never works for any length of time. Money has to be invested in capital items which add accumulated value to an economy. The financial markets operate separately to the main economy as a bubble. Unfortunately this Ponzi scheme and its bubble bursts occasionally.

Traditionally the rich would also be taxed and that taxation would be returned to the economy as either current account spending, wages, benefits and similar or capital items such as new town halls, schools and libraries which would provide wages for their construction , maintenance and running.

This traditional way of doing things started to break down in the later part of the 20th century as managers and owners started to hog more than their fair share of the profits. It has completely broken down now so that capitalism, where unsuccessful companies would go bust, has been replaced by corporatism, where companies have become "to big to fail" and government decisions are made for the benefit of the corporations not the community.

Capitalism has been usurped by corporatists and usurers and is effectively dead but not for the reasons that Marx laid out.

Here's an interesting article that is very pertinent to the discussion:

All such market-based efforts are doomed to fail, and a sustainable economy is inconceivable without sweeping systemic economic change. The project of sustainable capitalism based on carbon taxes, green marketing, "dematerialization" and so forth was misconceived and doomed from the start because maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and there, they might coincide for a moment. That's because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society; they're responsible to private shareholders. CEOs can embrace environmentalism so long as this increases profits. But saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns: For example, the science tells us that to save the humans, we have to drastically suppress fossil fuel consumption, even close down industries like coal. But no corporate board can sacrifice earnings, let alone put themselves out of business, just to save humanity, and no government can suppress fossil fuel industries because to do so would precipitate economic collapse. I claim that profit-maximization is an iron rule of capitalism, a rule that trumps all else, and this sets the limits to ecological reform - not the other way around, as green capitalism theorists had supposed.

And contrary to green capitalism proponents, across the spectrum from resource extraction to manufacturing, the practical possibilities for "greening" and "dematerializing" production are severely limited. This means the only way to prevent overshoot and collapse is to enforce a massive economic contraction in the industrialized economies, retrenching production across a broad range of unnecessary, resource-hogging, wasteful and polluting industries, even virtually shutting down the worst. Yet this option is foreclosed under capitalism because this is not socialism: No one is promising new jobs to unemployed coal miners, oil drillers, automakers, airline pilots, chemists, plastic junk makers and others whose jobs would be lost because their industries would have to be retrenched - and unemployed workers don't pay taxes. So CEOs, workers and governments find that they all "need" to maximize growth, overconsumption, even pollution, to destroy their children's tomorrows to hang onto their jobs today. If they don't, the system falls into crisis, or worse. So we're all on board the TGV of ravenous and ever-growing plunder and pollution. As our locomotive races toward the cliff of ecological collapse, the only thoughts on the minds of our CEOs, capitalist economists, politicians and most labor leaders is how to stoke the locomotive to get us there faster. Corporations aren't necessarily evil. They just can't help themselves. They're doing what they're supposed to do for the benefit of their owners. But this means that, so long as the global economy is based on capitalism and private property and corporate property and competitive production for market, we're doomed to a collective social suicide - and no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global ecological collapse. We can't shop our way to sustainability, because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require local, reigional, national and international economic planning to reorganize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically planned eco-socialist economy

Green Capitalism: The God That Failed

UndercoverElephant wrote:

emordnilap wrote:Whatever about capitalism, I'd like to see the end of usury.

You gain extra money simply by having too much in the first place.

Unless you are a bank, in which case you don't actually have to have any in the first place, because you have the right to magic it out of nowhere and lend to people.

Ah, but can you be a bank if you don't have any money in the first place?

emordnilap wrote:... Ah, but can you be a bank if you don't have any money in the first place?

Yes! You start your banking business with a call for depositors and offer them a better rate of interest than any other bank.

There speaks a man of experience.

I watched the Bank of Dave on TV.