[p2p-research] Fwd: "Green Capitalism" ? - opening discussion on forum

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:35 PM
Subject: "Green Capitalism" ? - opening discussion on forum
To: FYEG 1 <fyeg_gen-l at listi.jpberlin.de>


In the wake of The Copenhagen Summit,

Questioning the type of economic transition we look forward to,

I feel like taking the personal initiative to open up a discussion post on
the fyeg facebook group ,
in case any of us feels inspired to *comment in relation to Green Capitalism
or potential alternatives to Green Capitalism...*

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2341308217&topic=12369

if you do not like to use fb,
we can also use the fyeg forum :

http://www.fyeg.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=183#183

excerpts of text below...

Cordially,
Dante

http://hitchwiki.org/en/Dante

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" Green Capitalism " Vs "Post-Capitalism" ?

 "The Precariat and Climate Justice in the Great Recession"
By alex.foti:

http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/11/03/the-precarious-question-and-the-climate-struggle/

... or a ( hybrid third way ? ) "Peer Production" ?

"Class and capital in peer production." By Michel Bauwens :

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Class+and+capital+in+peer+production.-a0194549146

excerpt : " arguing that peer production is both immanent, i.e. part and
parcel of a new type of capitalism, and also transcendent: i.e. it has
sufficient postcapitalist aspects that can strengthen autonomous production
communities in building an alternative logic of life and production that
may, under certain conditions, overtake the current system. "  -
http://p2pfoundation.net

----

excerpts from
The Precariat and Climate Justice in the Great Recession
By alex.foti:

http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/11/03/the-precarious-question-and-the-climate-struggle/

" The debate is open among leftists about whether green capitalism is
economically sustainable (possibly so), and if so, if will lead to
ecological sustainability (hardly so). "

" Indeed the failure of command economies to perform the transition from
industrialism to informationalism, from the electrical engine to the
electronic chip, is viewed by contemporary sociology as the structural
reason behind the implosion of the Soviet Union. "

" Now the inherited neoliberal form of informational capitalism is morphing
into green capitalism. "

" Green capitalism cannot be simply liquidated as a marketing ploy. It
embodies the faction of the global bourgeoisie that understands the reality
of climate change and of its own declining political legitimacy in the face
of the banking crisis and the consequent end of neoliberal/monetarist
hegemony. "

" Today’s crisis marks the end of Neoliberal-Hayekian regulation, as imposed
over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to the seminal political work
done by Reagan, Thatcher, Deng, Pinochet in the two hemispheres. "

" Turned liberals, most greens today just lack the political teeth needed to
confront squarely corporate capitalism for its double responsibility in the
economic and ecological crises. If anything, they are for green capitalism.
So it falls onto the anarchists, feminists, precarious, immigrants, on those
radical actors that have a stake in subverting the present financial order,
to fight for real climate justice, to bring the economy back under the
control of polities and communities, so that bioregional and atmospheric
balances and constraints are respected."

" The issue of the distribution of productivity is crucial. The structural
cause of the Great Recession lies in the failure of neoliberalism to
distribute the productivity growth afforded by the digital revolution to
large strata of society, who then had to take on debt to finance consumption
of the new informational goods and services. Green capitalism wants to solve
the economic crisis via green jobs and a new welfare system, but it will
succeed in its task, only if it manages to widely redistribute what Negri
and Hardt call “common wealth” i.e. the backlog of collective inventions,
creations, relations and desires presently appropriated by Gates, Murdoch,
Berlusconi, and the like."

" If, on the other hand, green capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth
industrial revolution (first: steam and textiles; second: electricity,
steel, chemicals; third: electronics, networking; fourth: genomics,
greenomics), productivity will rise and this would create a favorable
context for victories on wages and labor conditions, as well as ease
political resistance to income redistribution via progressive taxation (when
taxes hit the rich proportionally more than the poor; under neoliberalism
taxation has instead been regressive). "

" The Great Recession, just like the Great Depression three generations ago,
is a major demand crisis leading to mass unemployment and underemployment.
It won’t be solved until the collective fruits of social productivity
finally accrue to the employed and unemployed instead of managers and
financiers. This requires massive fiscal redistribution from the tiny élites
to the precarious multitudes. Free public health and education, basic income
and leisure expansion, green jobs and new labor and property laws are the
first-aid tools to address the crisis and ferry us toward a postcapitalist
society, where corporations and investment banks are dismantled, credit is
socialized, copyright is abolished, culture and knowledge are freely shared,
the global economy is regionalized, food distribution networks are
localized, energy production is decentralized, and political power is
federalized, in regional and transnational federations of autonomous cities
and liberated lands. "

" The question of growth must be reconsidered, and is in fact being
reconsidered by economists and politicians in the light of the crisis: GDP
will be soon replaced by alternative indicator of economic performance and
socio-environmental progress. "

" It’s true that capitalism is addicted to growth, but this is monetary
growth, not necessarily an increase in the amount of “stuff” produced. "

" The distinction between bounded material growth and unbounded immaterial
growth is useful to conceive a social scenario that is postcapitalist and
progressive. Politically, this would also be a society where the different
aims of anarchosyndicalists (constructing a postcapitalist egalitarian
commonwealth) and anarchogreens (creating a thermodynamicist society of
peers on a biodiverse planet) can be reconciled. It’s a social scenario
where the autonomous, pirate, queer practices of the immaterial precariat
are able to defeat the political offensive of green capitalism and drive the
transition toward postcapitalism, an economy meeting ecological and social
targets where grassroots experimentation is encouraged and regulation is
horizontal and bottom-up, rather than vertical and top-down. To address both
the economic and ecological crisis in my view we would have to push for a
service, relational, commons-based peer-production economy, whose aim is the
growth in knowledge, leisure and culture as opposed to the growth of goods
and material wealth. This would be a society based on ecological
remediation, immaterial accumulation and the maximization of happiness among
its participants, rather than on material opulence for a minority of people.
"

" To conclude, capitalism destroys environments as it precarizes peoples.
The climate anarchists of the world and the precarious of europe must come
together in Copenhagen to unmask Barroso’s and Obama’s carbon trading and
government bailouts for the rich. "



-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

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