The ecosocialist political economy must be oriented towards a steady state economy. The objective of the economy is to satisfy the social needs within the biosphere's limits. Unfortunately, the capitalist system's law of supply and demand, instead of prioritizing providing for the basic needs of society, encourages conspicuous consumption of superfluous goods, products, and services, resorting to advertising and aggressive marketing strategies while inducing unnecessary indebtedness.
The profit-driven consumerist society is divided between those who can access goods and services they don't need and those who don't have enough to survive. In the middle are those who acquire what they don't need with the money they don't have. The capitalist society knows how to exploit the feelings of guilt and shame and distorts what is truly important for us to be accepted and respected in the community replacing it with hollow destructive goals.
A steady-state economy must be oriented never to exceed ecological limits. Producing goods, products, and services based on prior market research and promoting them through sophisticated, ubiquitous, and misleading advertising campaigns to create artificial needs is the perfect recipe for social and ecological disaster and moral failure.
The primary objective of the economy is to satisfy essential social needs within ecological limits. When a society reaches a certain level of well-being and comfort, it has to stop growing and be guided by the principles of the steady-state economy. This cannot happen within the capitalist economic system because, without economic growth, the economy stagnates, which will be preceded by a social crisis.
A steady-state economy is nothing more than adopting the principles and values that have guided humanity for thousands of years without significant change. We can be much happier when we learn to live with less; it does not mean a life of deprivation, but the development of awareness that living within certain limits does not necessarily have to be wrong; actually, it is not. The self"imposed" limits by being conscious of them is much healthier than those imposed by austerity and social exclusion measures.
We are psychologically conditioned to make well-being dependent on acquiring unnecessary goods, products, and services. As a result, social relations are increasingly commodified, a perversion introduced by the capitalist economy that transforms each of us into a profit seeker. At the base level of society, this means competing for crumbs or even trying to steal some crumbs from other people's mouths.
For the capitalist rentier class, gratuity is a sin, and greed is a virtue. This sick mentality must be fought and replaced by a culture where gratuity and free access are the norms, not the exception.
The principles of ecosocialist political economy must be oriented toward a steady-state economy to respect the biosphere's limits.
Economic stability is a social necessity; boom & bust cycles to which society is exposed generate unnecessary suffering and worsens social inequality and ecological destruction.
Economic stability is a social good, while uncertainty and social atomization are sources of anxiety, social isolation, helplessness, and alienation.
The steady-state economy is based on the equilibrium of keeping the economic activity to satisfy social needs within the confines of the biosphere. We are trained to become callous, unscrupulous, narcissistic sociopaths to succeed in the harsh economic, socio-cultural and politico-ideological environment of the capitalist, profit-driven, class-based system. In the same way, we can be trained to become something different, change the circumstances and, even better, change the societal paradigm, and humanity will change. We are not condemned to become vicious exploiters, greedy rent seekers, and firm devotees in TINA; we can do better, behave better, and live and feel better about our existence.
The engine of capitalism is economic growth through debt. Therefore, capitalism has to be imperialist and colonialist because the capitalist economy cannot stop growing, which means the never-ending need to seek new markets and gain control of resources and raw materials whenever they happen to exist.
Globalized financial capitalism controls who have, and under what conditions, access to finance. Therefore, globalized neoliberal capitalism is an imperialist neocolonialist enterprise, and the leading international financial institutions are gates keepers. Economic growth is an imperative necessity of the capitalist system, not a condition of the economy. We must understand the difference, the economy survives without capitalism, but humanity might not survive capitalism. Capitalism can be painted green, ROYGBIV, or made invisible, but the relentless destructive process associated with it will persist.
A political economy system capable of stopping the perverse and destructive dynamics of unlimited growth has to go to the roots of the problem that created the current age of Capitalocene.
Capitalism not only stimulates and rewards the negative characteristics of the human condition, such as greed, the desire for ownership, control, and immediate satisfaction. It also depends on limitless growth to survive; growth is not the consequence but an imperative need of the capitalist system. Capitalism is unsustainable, regardless of the method and/or tool used to assess it. One can excuse it but cannot deny it.
The ecosocialist political economy must be oriented neither toward growth nor degrowth but toward a steady-state economy compatible with ecological boundaries.
There is a deep need to reflect on the model of society we wish to have. What should the objectives of the economy be? What is the purpose of society? Are we doomed to serve people who are our equals in every respect but because we live in a class-based society that granted them the privilege to subjugate their fellow citizens? No, we are not.
The economy will have to grow in areas and sectors where growth is justified, and it will have to decrease in areas and sectors identified as socially and environmentally harmful. Decisions have to be grounded in sound data and taken by participatory democracy. And whenever justified, they can be reassessed, revoked, and/or replaced.
Decisions on production and consumption priorities will have to be democratically approved. The national government manages projects at the national level but in dialogue with local authorities and communities to consider specific challenges.
The capitalist market economy distorts the purpose of the economy. The production of low-quality disposable goods that require a continuous flow of resources and energy is responsible directly and/or indirectly for producing large amounts of waste for no other purpose but to make money.
For example, the fashion, cosmetics/beauty, and related industries have long stopped working to satisfy people's needs. Instead, the R&D laboratories and marketing teams create new desires and artificial needs by diversifying the offer of supposedly innovative products to increase sales and grow profits.
Why do we need new fashion lines each season besides compelling consumers to buy what they don't need, often with money they don't have? The same happens with the cosmetics industry, where nanotechnology is the buzzword to convince consumers to buy innovative products. As a result, everything is allowed to increase sales.
Most people believe in consumerism fiction, unaware or in denial that the current path is wrong; the consumption habits and the need to satisfy small whims override the will to fight for the greater ideal, a more equal society, a balanced economy, and a healthier environment.
In the ecosocialist political economy model, survival and social well-being are not linked to economic growth. The problems that distress society and destroy the environment to continue producing superfluous, useless, and harmful goods, products, and services, as in the case of the mentioned industries, are entirely suppressed.
People will have more freedom to decide in conscience and focus on what is imperative, such as the stability of the production of essential goods, products, and services to satisfy society's needs within the boundaries of the biosphere.
The capitalist cancer scattered metastases throughout the human society and earth's ecosystems; the ideological-cultural metastases are the most difficult to eradicate because they shape the individual and collective biosociocultural identity. We perceive reality and believe what we believe because capitalist imperialism's ideological and cultural metastases have colonized our psychocognitive system as intrinsic structural memories.
That's why having an honest and constructive discussion is so difficult. The cultural-ideological environment is for us what water is for the fish. The sociocultural environment is filled with necessary illusions to manufacture consent which is why breaking the propaganda chains is so challenging; concerns about immediate survival keep most of us away from deep analysis and comprehensive reflections about the processes and systems underlying our dysfunctional society.
The first step to finding solutions to a problem is to identify and dissect it. Unfortunately, the current societal paradigm makes people dismiss the issues when they are unaffected. People live in their bubbles and become oblivious to political issues; not even the black clouds mounting on the horizon are enough to change their minds.
Ignoring the symptoms and hoping they will disappear will not solve the problem. Avoiding the truth will not protect us from being annihilated.
We are exposed to a panoply of ideological-cultural narratives that shape our biosociocultural identity and how we perceive reality and adapt to it.
If we see only resources to transform into commodities wherever we look, and our social relations gravitate around profit, we can be sure we are devotees to the capitalist doctrine.
How to change the dominant ideological-cultural paradigm while we are constrained to live under its influence? We are hammered 24/7 by propaganda that aims to turn us into obedient servants who can be discarded once no longer helpful.
To free ourselves from the influence of deceptive narratives and fake values that sustain the capitalist system oppressing us requires developing counter-cultural narratives presenting ideological views sustained on intellectual honesty; the truth can erode lies even when they appear rock solid.
The capitalist economic system is a criminal order based on the subjugation, exploitation, and enslavement of people while plundering everything that can be transformed into commodities. A system dependent on imperialistic expansionism to survive while destroying the biosphere.
The capitalist system reached the perversion point where the production of goods to satisfy the needs of society is no longer the main objective of the economy; the growth of financial wealth through financial engineering and the manipulation of financial instruments in fraudulent markets is the driving force of the “economy.”
The real economy ceased to matter because the growth of wealth is in the FIRE sector; producing "normal" goods and products to supply society is a sub-system of the financialized economy.
It is essential to expose the lies we are forced to swallow daily so that the hypnotic numbness remains at adequate levels. The harsh reality of lies that sustain a criminal system is not easy to dismantle. The cultural and ideological decolonization process needs to overcome the denialism barrier. But as the awareness that we live in a profoundly dysfunctional system grows more robust, we begin to realize how imperative it is to build another political, economic, social, and cultural reality.
The capitalist system turns us into opportunistic cynics, but there are always those who fight for what is right without being assured that they will win. We may be unable to stop the transhumanist technofeudalist advance because the influence of the dominant ideological-cultural narratives is omnipotent and omnipresent. Still, we must not give up the fight.
The spell loses its effect when we realize it has no power over us. Propaganda warfare keeps us attached to the belief that there is no alternative to the neoliberal economic model, but that is a lie. TINA is not inevitable; we can overcome it with political awareness, but we must acknowledge that ideas have consequences and politics matters.
Ensuring the well-being and the equitable distribution of produced goods does not require economic growth but rather a radical change in how the economy and society are structured and managed.
It is necessary to rethink what wealth means radically. The real economy produces wealth in the form of essential goods, products, and services to satisfy the population's needs. The financialized economy parasites the real economy and destroys the fabric of society to serve the interests of the plutocratic rentier class.
A significant decrease in producing and consuming superfluous and useless goods, products, and services is an ecological imperative.
The phase-out of fossil fuels is only viable in the long term and under an international geopolitical favorable context. Hence, diplomatic cooperation between states committed to designing an international order outside the sphere of influence of green capitalism. Instead of being the means to "save" humanity from extinction and nature from ecocide, green growth is the continuation of imperialist capitalist expansionism to achieve global domination through the financialization of nature.
Green growth corresponds to compounding the problem by adding more layers of complexity to financialized capitalism, this time with the financialization of ecosystem services. The correct way to interpret the agenda of green capitalism is to follow the trail of the last decades of imperialist neoliberal globalization with the objective of absolute domination.
Green growth is yet another capitalist fallacy to continue the neocolonial expansionism for the extractive industry with the consequent ecological destruction and expropriation of native land.
The so-called green transition from the energy paradigm based on fossil fuels must be progressive and responsible. On the one hand, it has to worry about not disrupting the real economy that supplies essential goods and products. On the other hand, it has to respect ecological boundaries and be accompanied by degrowth in economic activities with harmful impacts, especially of non-essential goods, products, and services. An ecosocialist political economy is centered on meeting people's needs and effectively reducing environmental impact, unlike a capitalist economy focused on profit growth, capital accumulation, and concentration of power, which, over time, will be transformed into uncountable political control.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Green capitalism is a continuation of the doctrine of full-spectrum dominance, whose aim was global governance under the control of the Anglo-American imperialist plutocrat class.
The US would have the power to dictate the rules of global governance and, with the support of the "allies," would guarantee the means of enforcing them through economic-financial subjugation supported by military hegemony.
We take for granted a reality that depends on a complex chain that begins with the extraction of resources, goes through transformation and transport, and ends with the distribution of goods and products we find displayed in stores. This chain can be interrupted by several factors that local and national governments cannot control. We must also not forget the ecological footprint and pollution we do not see, but we have the moral obligation to be aware of. Conspicuous consumption normalized by the throwaway society is unsustainable, and by unsustainability, we must understand leaving behind irreversible damage.
In the current paradigm, it is acceptable to have access to everything that money can buy without limits. Most of us live in urban bubbles subjected to the ubiquitous hammering of advertisement ads telling us that to be happy and fit socially; we need to buy the latest model, try out the latest innovation, enjoy the new flavor, and the list could go on…
Freedom is not about having the right to access everything that money can buy but the right to equitably access what nature can give us within ecological limits. Most of us don’t satisfy our needs directly from nature; we acquire transformed products and buy food from the supermarket, which means we need an economy; what kind of economy do we need? It is the political question we need to ask ourselves. Limitless freedom doesn’t exist; there must be rules and regulations to make sure we don’t step on each other toes.
Quality and durability should be the aim of scientific research and technological development based on the precautionary principle for a sustainable society.
The biosphere's limits have to be the limits of the economy, just as the limits of my consumption have to be the possibility to satisfy essential needs, not to be determined by the "freedom" of my wallet.
Monetization distorts the value of everything we need to live; a chicken in the refrigerator window becomes a commodity. How it was grown, how long it lived, and how it was slaughtered do not matter because it is just a commodity with a monetary tag. That is called dehumanization; nothing matters besides the egotistic satisfaction of immediate desires and whims.
The disconnection with the reality from which the essential goods to our survival come makes us insensitive to the unnecessary suffering caused for our convenience. Convenience is a form of blindness; everything that does not concern us directly doesn’t exist.
Economic degrowth in the context of an ecosocialist political economy is neither a war against the economy nor the people. Instead, it has to be democratically decided by consensus, which means people must agree on what kind of goods, products, and services should be restricted or eliminated from the production and consumption chain. What is most important is to create a resilient steady-state economy that is socially equitable and ecologically sustainable.
The capitalist political economy is controlled by private finance, commercial banks, retail banks, and investment banks with the power to determine which economic sectors and activities have priority in accessing credit. The real economy that produces essential goods and services is neglected in favor of the speculative "economy." The FIRE sector and the rent-seeking plutocratic class do control the system and do not run us having our best interest in mind.
In an ecosocialist society, banking has to be public and cooperative. Banking exists to serve society by supporting the real economy, small-scale family projects, and cooperative production and distribution networks to provide for society without damaging the environment. Housing is a public good, not a speculative asset; there is no need for a private FIRE sector to squeeze the working class through debt enslavement and other financial instruments.
Financial speculation is a crime; a healthy society does not need financial markets; the whole thing is a vile scheme that needs to be ended. The so-called free market does not exist to benefit the consumer; the “law” of supply and demand is a fallacy that puts price control in the hands of financial speculators and monopolies. Prices must be fixed and controlled, and international trade agreements must have price stabilizing mechanisms because the raison d'être of the economy is to serve people, and the current system produces inequality and social exclusion while telling stories about meritocracy and entrepreneurship.
The so-called financial markets represent a form of organized crime supported by fallacious economic models and custom-tailored legal codes to protect the rentier class. In 2008, the too big to fail lie made people believe that there was no alternative but save broken criminal institutions. Since then, we have done nothing but allow things to go from bad to worse.
According to neoliberal policies, sacrifices must be made through austerity measures to cut public spending. The financialized economy prioritizes investments in the FIRE sector; the real economy is no longer the primary source of wealth creation. Instead, wealth is created artificially by resorting to financial instruments. The wealth created in the virtual world of financial markets is used by the plutocrat class to control the real economy and to bribe political actors through lobbying and the revolving door system. The system is irredeemable, and we let 15 years go by without being able to organize an internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist left project for a classless and ecological society with the capacity to confront and dismantle the status quo. Will the war wake people up to the real problem that has been eating away at the fabric of society for at least five decades?
The parasitic and predatory sector FIRE increases inequality, and social misery crushes the small family economy and small and medium-sized companies and controls who has access to the government through the financing of electoral campaigns and many other ways of rewarding the services provided to the oligarchic class and plutocracy linked to the interests of Anglo-American capitalist imperialism.
Speculative banking has to be eradicated. Money has to be controlled by the State, and public banking must be re-established.
Humanity needs an international financial system that respects national sovereignty. A financial system to promote economic development to achieve a steady-state economy compatible with the biosphere's limits. There is a need to implement an international order based on cooperation and exchanging know-how to create a stable world where the countries cooperate more and compete less. Imperialism and colonialism need to end, but when we say need to end, we must understand that it needs to be us to end it; we need to take responsibility for building the society we want.
The globalized financial system controlled by Anglo-American financial imperialism is a nightmare. The sooner we bring it down, or at least weakened and circumscribed, the better for humanity, including the dumbed-down Western citizenry.
We are living in a situation where the powers that be have reversed what should be logical and normal; the financial sector should be a public good to support the economy and provide well-being to the society, but what we have is the opposite, the real economy and the whole society has to bear the burden. In contrast, the plutocratic class controlling the globalized neoliberal capitalism has transformed into a machine for dismantling social, civil, and labor rights, resorting to the narratives of entrepreneurial meritocracy; the mythology of the free market was integrated into the social engineering process that brought us to the present day, where we have virtually no political agency.
Politics is the ideological chisel with which economic, social, and cultural reality is carved; ideas have consequences, and reality is shaped and transformed by the ideas that are best promoted regardless of their intrinsic value and what interests they are intended to defend. The set of ideas forming the neoliberal theology, which most Westerners believe is a doctrine willing to sacrifice humanity to guarantee the future where elites continue living out of touch and the useless class will have to be sacrificed, probably euthanized.
The dominant capitalist doctrine is anti-social, anti-human, and anti-nature; the solution for social redundancy is eugenics; to enhance humanity, transhumanism, and to save nature, financialize ecosystem services. What could go wrong?! Society, the economy, and the biosphere deserve more respect than the current system is willing to give. We need systemic change, not social engineering and transhumanism.
People become a problem when inoculated, infected, or colonized with deceitful ideas; ideas have consequences, and propaganda is the vehicle to spread deceitful ideas. First principle: follow the money, Cui bono, second try to think outside of the box, become a skeptic, follow people for their consistency and integrity, never because they are popular, knowledge is a socially shared good, what we individually achieve, even when our ideas and actions make the difference, it didn’t come out of the blue, we don’t stand in the shoulders of giants, progress in arts, sciences, and technology is a collective endeavor.
In the first place, we cannot leave to others what is up to us to "judge"; our well-being cannot be dissociated from the well-being of others; society is a living organism, a system made up of a set of systems that must work in an integrated way to achieve a dynamic balance, namely a steady state economy that serves society and respects ecological limits.
We have a system transformed into a wealth accumulation machine by a class of megalomaniac sociopaths and psychopaths who can afford to lead an existence completely dissociated from social and material reality and perceive themselves as demiurges above public accountability.
We are responsible for choosing the social paradigm we wish to have. We need to reflect on why we believe what we believe because much of what we believe, or take for granted, is not the product of conscious choice but the result of the process of living in a given sociocultural and ideological-political system. Symbols loaded with ideological messages are ubiquitous in the sociocultural environment where our existences occur. The function of our sensory organs is to capture signals sent to the neural areas responsible for pattern identification and classification, determining the adequate behavioral response. Most of the information we process does not represent either immediate danger or opportunity. Therefore it does not receive conscious attention, which does not mean that it does not exert influence in the process of putting together the narratives that shape our bio-sociocultural identity defining what we are and the principles we defend, whether we took the trouble to reflect on the origins, causes and consequences they have on what we stand in the world.
The formation of implicit memories does not require conscious intervention. Still, it relies on the emotional tag that attributes a quality associated with an idea, concept, perception, experience, or story to which we are voluntarily or otherwise exposed. An important principle is to cultivate a different look at the nature of the human condition, to see ourselves as what we are, a species vulnerable to ideological-conceptual and psycho-affective manipulation, and this attitude changes everything. The humble attitude of self-analysis builds awareness of how easy it is to go down paths of self-deception to avoid facing reality.
What should be the objectives of the economy? What is the purpose of society? Are we condemned to voluntary servitude because we must feel obliged to serve people equal to us in every respect, but a class-based society normalizes servitude by allowing the privileged classes to subjugate their fellow men? No, we are not. This is not how we are meant to live, but we can be educated, tame, trained, and brainwashed into becoming almost anything. Every society resembles what it rewards; if we have a closer look, we can identify default behavior patterns underlying what seems to be a diversified reality.
Do we want to be accomplices in plundering the planet until there's nothing left but leaving behind piles of toxic waste? Are we fated to "evolve" towards transhumanism and live in a technofeudalist political system? We are not, but we must stand up for the society we want to build. We cannot expect our “leaders” to change; because they won’t, their allegiance is towards the imperialist rentier class, not us. Green capitalism and green energy transition through the financialization of nature and a technofeudal form of governance.
Economic degrowth doesn’t mean the impoverishment of society, which is currently happening with the imposition of neoliberal austerity. Economic degrowth aims to curb the compulsive consumption of superfluous products, goods, and services. It is unsustainable to maintain the level of consumption of non-essential products, and we live in a society that relies on the constant appeal to overconsumption. Economic degrowth is not about attacking or demonizing any particular sector but selecting products, goods, and services that must be discontinued or prohibited from production due to the destructive environmental impact.
In a steady-state sustainable economy, innovation must serve the well-being of society as a whole because it is completely idiotic to believe that everything labeled innovative represents some "advance" to society. On the contrary, it is a sick trend that constantly compels people to seek new stuff.
We live in an age where everything is thrown away. Most products on the market are not made to last. Many consumers don't realize that this throwaway world is created by design, such as “planned obsolescence.” The disposable society can’t go on forever. The Global South should resist western cultural colonization and see the western consumer culture as poison tailored to enslave people, not to liberate people.
The Global South must implement the ecosocialist political economy because the productivist socialist model no longer meets today’s requirements. Capitalism's neocolonialist "choice" should be ruled out; only fascists and oligarchs that hate democratic societies are willing to open their nations to imperialist plunder for their benefit; they often implement neoliberal policies with an iron fist, condemning people to extreme poverty and allow ecological destruction caused by mineral and raw materials extraction by foreign conglomerates with ties to the financial tycoons. That is precisely the rules-based international order humanity doesn’t need, and we must get organized to defeat it. It won’t go away if we ask nicely; it is a class war, and we have been on the losing side for a long time while we hope for change in Obama style. Weapons of mass deception work because we believe our masters somehow have our best interests at heart. They don’t; they want us crushed and fearful.
In the first place comes food sovereignty to satisfy the population's basic needs; a country should never depend on imports of essential goods to feed the nation, primarily for a matter of sovereignty but also for ecological reasons.
The extractive economy, even controlled by the State, must serve to develop a steady-stable sustainable ecological economy for a just society. Exports of raw materials and rare minerals must obey clear international rules to avoid and punish human rights violations and environmental crimes. The disposable and planned obsolescence economy cannot continue, much less at the expense of exploiting local inhabitants and child labor, displacing indigenous people, and causing environmental devastation.
Ecosocialist policies must be deliberated through direct democracy. Democratic deliberation requires sound knowledge, which means the responsibility to decide must be preceded by carefully analyzing the best available data. A culture of democratic participation does not exist because the capitalist system relegates the political intervention of the citizenry to the role of consumer and spectator. Some people believe in the power of consumer choice, I do not deny that we can put some pressure on the system with our choices, but in the end, they are not meant to challenge the system. Many people don’t have a choice because they are too short money-wise; they buy what they can afford.
The precautionary principle is the filter that protects society from possible attacks by snake oil sellers.
An egalitarian, balanced, and ecological society can never be taken for granted. Democracy is a process; it's not something you buy and put in a drawer, but a living system that needs regular care. Potential threats will emerge where you least expected; fascism is like rust; it never sleeps. However fair and balanced a society may be, it does not have the power to prevent the emergence of narcissistic sociopaths and megalomaniac psychopaths with delusions of grandeur who will try to seduce compatriots to join forces to restore order, glory, morals, identity, influence in contrast to a decadent and immoral order that increasingly engulfs Western society.
Human beings easily allow themselves to be carried away by illusions, which is always bad for the majority. The horrors of war, imperialist conquest, and colonial adventures are real and cannot be ignored. The stick and carrot trick is recurrently used as an instrument of social engineering; on the one hand, it is crucial to keep people fearful and, on the other hand, to feed the necessary illusions of hope that favorable changes will eventually happen.
A culture of sufficiency will have to replace the culture of conspicuous consumption. Economic expansionism accomplices with imperialism and neocolonialism because the raw materials and rare minerals needed to manufacture the desired electronic devices, gadgets, and batteries for electric vehicles have to be extracted somewhere. The extractive industry has a terrible history of human abuse, corruption, and environmental destruction. Whenever they intend to settle in a region, they resort to public relations campaigns, presenting themselves as agents of economic development, job creation, and wealth for the targeted areas. Whenever the local inhabitants resist, they are confronted with violent repression by the police and military forces. Local inhabitants are also excluded from the decision-making because corruption speaks louder than words. Poor people from small villages do not have the political leverage to confront the national oligarchs, let alone neocolonialist organizations. The world market needs to be supplied with raw materials essential to economic growth so the technocentric civilization can progress without setbacks. This is the dominant mindset that we have to trust blindly. Humanity does not have the right to choose alternative paths because an imperialist elite imposes a one-way hegemonic reality.
The progressivist dogma promises salvation if we hand over control of society to techno-scientism. This theology opens new frontiers and promotes discoveries that will free humanity from biophysical limits. On the other hand, technoscientism is an absolutist theology demanding the complete loss of privacy and the merger of humans with the virtual realm.
Ecosocialism preconizes economic degrowth as a tool, not a goal. Degrowth is a political instrument to combat abuses and crimes against society and the environment. Conspicuous consumption of superfluous goods and services results from a culture exploiting superficiality and immediacy. Freedom of choice is described and understood as a democratic value. Still, freedom of choice, expression, and movement are conditioned by economic and financial capacity and socio-professional status. Nothing should be above the respect for the dignity and integrity of all forms of life and nature. All forms of freedom humans deserve to enjoy must consider that society is a sub-system of nature and the economy is a sub-system of society. The economy's objective is to satisfy society's essential needs, not to serve special interests and unlimited enrichment. Society is a complex system that cannot be stretched indefinitely because by adding more layers of complexity and requiring more resources that need to come from farther and farther away, the risk of collapse increases, and faith in the power of technofixism does not prevent collapse when the same becomes inevitable.
In a class society dominated by neoliberalism, the plutocratic and oligarchic classes control political and economic power through an unregulated globalized financial system.
Currently, the public space is emptied of political debate. Cynicism and political apathy contribute to the problems getting worse and running the risk of becoming irreversible. TINA continues to be the dominant ideology fueled by necessary illusions underpinning the current model of society. Humanity will have to choose between submitting itself to the globalist geopolitical agenda advocated by Anglo-American imperialism through the financialization of the world economy by the western rentier class and protected by the US/NATO and the network of alliances and military partnerships subordinated to the US geostrategic interests, including the approximately 800 US military bases and installations around the world, or multipolarism and respect for sovereignty based on a system of democratic and fair international rules.
The ecosocialist ideology is incompatible with the existence of private monopolies. In an ecosocialist society, there is no place for oligarchs and plutocrats, nor for a private financial and banking system that uses credit to financially enslave individuals, families, small and medium-sized companies, and states. But, unfortunately, most people believe in the legitimacy of the sector because they do not know the structural and functional betrayal of the system, from the creation of money through debt to the use of the so-called sophisticated financial instruments; look here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financialinstrument.asp.
The sectors of the economy that are crucial for national sovereignty must be controlled by the State and managed to satisfy societal needs according to the precautionary principles, which means implementing policies to discontinue, reduce and eliminate "economic" activities that have been proven unnecessary and/or are environmentally unsustainable.
Local communities must be encouraged and supported in the search for ecological solutions for an economy centered on the well-being of populations. The path is made by walking, and democracy is built by participating because democracy is a process, just as society is a system, and nothing can be taken for granted. Only a culture of permanent vigilance can prevent the degenerated seeds of fascism from germinating. By vigilance, I mean education for a society where the sense of community is rewarded; hollow words end up emptied of meaning. The social, cultural, and economic reality must convey the values and principles underlying the political-ideological system. The ideology has to be part of the everyday life of ordinary people; pompous speeches and sly rhetoric do not serve democracy but rather grow hypocrisy. Ideas live in actions and are transmuted in behavior reflected in society. Society is the mirror of the dominant ideological system materialized into human behavior.
Grow what needs to grow, degrow or eliminate what needs to be eliminated without using the loss of jobs to justify maintaining pernicious activities. In a functional society, people are first and foremost citizens; secondly, they are workers or collaborators, as they are now called. Work is essential for a society to function. Regardless of the functions performed or the roles played, citizenship is the right to equal treatment, and all existing resources must be equally shared. Wealth as a discriminating factor to access goods, products, or services is social cancer; privilege is not an incentive to excellence; individuals with a tendency towards intellectual activities do not need material incentives to stimulate intellectual curiosity; they need material conditions to be able to develop their potential and academic freedom, not mercantilist meritocracy conditioning research freedom that ends up rewarding people with fewer scruples.
The working class is more exploited despite productivity gains, and wages have lost purchasing power; the capitalist system guarantees that productivity gains are not shared with workers. The neoliberal propaganda was able to divide, atomize and isolate working-class citizens while destroying social welfare and labor rights. Privatize everything, reduce taxes for the wealthy, and austerity measures for the poor. With the relocation of companies, the service industry absorbed much of the available workforce in low-paid, precarious positions. Wealth, career, and social status cannot define the citizen's role; citizenship equality assures political, economic, social, and cultural participation. The salary attributed to performing a function, task, or service provided to society by each of us must ensure that we all live above the poverty line.
The rampant dehumanization and social insensitivity characteristic of the capitalist system and, unfortunately of, all societies that place conspicuous consumption of superfluous goods and services above common social welfare and environmental protection make societies grow dysfunctional and, over time, the implementation of dystopian solutions is normalized.
The working class is made up of a diversity of people beneficial to society; however, they are undervalued and neglected by the professional-managerial class and, in general, by those who think they are entitled to be served, regardless of profession, creed, and social class, the feeling of entitlement is part of the default cultural mindset. Work has to be seen as a form of reciprocity emphasizing the essential and never the superfluous. No one wants a society where people feel entitled to everything without giving back anything. Gratuity does not mean indiscriminate access to everything society can provide; it means democratizing access to essential goods and services for all. Housing, food, clothing, healthcare, schooling, and the right to enjoy free time is part of a functional and equitable society; how we organize ourselves to ensure everyone is fairly treated is part of the participatory democratic process. Sharing is the natural law of communal survival; the concepts of solidarity, fraternity, complicity, sense of belonging, mutual aid, and similar were practiced by indigenous peoples and tribes of all continents before they were "invented" by "civilized" peoples in the context of class-based social systems.
A society is not fair without implementing an organized model of retribution and reciprocity. The exploitation of man by man in search of profit does not generate justice or equality, but it creates unscrupulous sociopaths. To change human behavior, it is not necessary to bioengineer the human species to create a transhuman species; it is required to create a social, economic, and cultural environment where the best human qualities can thrive and a balanced society can be maintained. Like any plant or animal, human behavior is conditioned by environmental conditions that will become normalized behavioral patterns.
The concept of private property is attractive, not only because it is a defining instrument of social class but also allows every citizen to gain control of something, even if that control is always relative, the closer we get to the bottom of the social ladder, the easier to be expropriated.
When achievement is correlated with material possessions, and the economy is based on the pursuit of profit and wealth accumulation for further property acquisition in search of material, economic and financial security, everything else comes in second place or is neglected. Most people seek stability and security because insecurity and uncertainty are difficult to bear. The capitalist society is structured to force people to compete for the right to material security through a prosperous professional career, entrepreneurship, or other initiatives that can contribute to enrichment, seen as the guarantor of personal and family safety. Proprietary right is codified in law as an instrument of power and class division. The structure of society is designed to ensure top-down control, and proprietary rights represent the legal framework that best protects those who own the most.
It is debatable whether having property in a classless society makes sense. There are ways to have a perfectly functioning society without private property. Most people do not realize or do their best not to recognize that hereditary rights were and still are a class-based entitlement, allowing the rich to perpetuate control over a particular territory or another form of property. Most working-class people would do better in a society free from private ownership.
We don't need to own a house; we need one to live in. In a free market capitalist system, the FIRE sector inflates real estate market prices through speculation. It creates a housing bubble, pushing prices far above the actual market value and, when the bubble bursts, pushes countless poor and middle-class families to foreclosure.
Most measures, rules, norms, and procedures instituted and legalized to serve the interests of the dominant classes are also used to control the underprivileged classes. What appears to be a universal benefit is often codified in law to defend particular interests, hereditary rights being one such case. The side effects of property and hereditary rights are overlooked because it doesn't even cross people's minds to question them. The system is taken for granted, and most of those who consider it irredeemable would never dare to demand a radical regime change.
A society that normalizes conspicuous consumption and commodifies everything, including human relations, must generate profits for wealth accumulation and property acquisition to guarantee material security within a societal system where economic growth should last forever.
It is crucial to implement awareness to combat the excesses of mindless consumerism. However, these measures can only be implemented in a sociocultural and ideological context of a non-capitalist political economy. Class, environmental, and social consciousness are three essential pillars underpinning a political economy to serve the people and respect the environment and the community of living organisms that depend on it. Limiting or eliminating the production and consumption of superfluous and iniquitous goods, products, and services requires a political economy and a society in which people are not obsessed by the fear of compromising their livelihoods, essential comfort, and well-being if confronted with unemployment, interest rates and/or tax hikes, inflation and other downsides associated with the so-called free market capitalism. It is imperative to introduce the subject of economic degrowth in the political economy debate because of the insanity of unlimited growth as part of a dysfunctional, destructive, and criminal economic system that will not stop of its own accord.
Entitlements and privileges tend to be taken for granted even when meaningless and undeserved. No one likes to lose acquired benefits; among highly educated and intellectually refined people, some exhibit superiority and feel entitled to humiliate people who belong to a lower social rank. For people who have eventually developed feelings of inferiority because they were born, raised, educated, and indoctrinated to submit to the will of authorities, the antidote is to cultivate class consciousness that will erode the entrenched prejudices that excuse and make exploitation and social injustice palatable.
Why should a poor person feel ashamed or guilty of their condition? There is no objective reason, but the upper class takes advantage of this flawed assumption. In a class society, poor people are expected to believe they are mainly poor because of their incompetence, laziness, lack of will, self-confidence, etc. Class privileges are not awarded based on actual merit but on the service rendered to the system. The more crucial the role, the more generous the reward. Class is the root to which other problems created intentionally or derived from a dysfunctional social system are linked, some of which are planted with the sole objective of dividing the working class; woke imperialism is one such case. As long as imperialist capitalism manages and subjugates society, we are condemned to slavery.
Ecosocialism represents a civilizational transformation, a “way of life” based on cooperative interdependence. Solidarity, fraternity, and reciprocity have been emptied of meaning by a system that puts people in competition for crumbs to satisfy basic needs, making people selfish, cynical, insensitive, and cruel. Homo sapiens sapiens survived 200 thousand years living in tribal communities; if they had adopted a system similar to ours, they would have ended up self-destructing, and the species would have gone extinct. For most of the history of our species, survival was dependent on a solid sense of community-bound, the absence of the notion of private property beyond a handful of personal objects; everything was shared because it was not about competing to know who is the best, what means being the best and for how long does it last? Without social, family, and communal bonds, human beings wither away, and one doesn't need a Ph.D. in social psychology to understand that.
Dream rules life, and money rules the economy. Both assumptions are wrong. Reality rules life, and cooperation must lead the economy. Capitalism is social engineering at its worst; it only adds ugliness and exploits the worst that exists in human nature, which, like any other animal forced to survive in unnatural conditions, develops behaviors that are atypical for its species that can be manifested in self-destructive behaviors and/or sociopathic tendencies. This is precisely what happens to us, we are conditioned to adapt to abnormal conditions and circumstances, and as a result, we develop mental disorders and epigenetic changes. Meanwhile, we are told that the problem is the human condition. Society is controlled by sociopaths and psychopaths who live in a parallel dimension and look down on humanity and Planet Earth as toys that can be manipulated and destroyed to satisfy their Machiavellian whims.
The new civilization has to break with productivism and consumerism, less time dedicated to conventional work and more free time to dedicate to social, political, recreational, and artistic activities and, above all, to personal and/or collective projects that give meaning and purpose to individual existence embedded in and for the community.
Manufacture durable and quality products to save resources and energy. A healthy society, economy, and culture do not require permanent change and innovation. This frenzy culture is recent in human history. When the pace of change accelerates to the point of pressuring society to disrespect the capabilities of senior generations to adapt and have a saying instead of labeling them as incompetent and useless, we live already in an asylum euphemistically called society. Then it is time to question the purpose of such a society; dehumanization shouldn’t be a purpose, and confusing the interests of the out-of-touch minority with the fundamental objectives of society might not end well.
The resources to meet people's needs exist; the priority must be to equalize access to a basic level of well-being instead of encouraging unrestrained consumption. A society that generates anguish, anxiety, uncertainty, helplessness, and social alienation while mainstream economists brag about the virtues of the free market economic system. We are doomed if we don’t demand radical change.
I don't know what to say to anyone who doesn't feel the need to question the existence of a class-based society. In a few generations, if nothing is done, homo sapiens sapiens will be replaced by homo transhomo by the omniscient techno-scientific class funded by the imperialist plutocrat elite.
Ecosocialism is not against techno-scientific development innovations must go through quarantine and be introduced in a way that can be absorbed at an organic pace. Not everything that glitters is gold. The citizenry has the right and the duty to filter what should or should not enter the commercial circuit by resorting to the precautionary principle to understand the long-term impacts. The current frantic pace is unnatural and inhumane. We get used to it because the majority has no alternative. After all, political decision does not go through the people, and changes in legislation and regulatory bodies rarely reflect the interests of the working class and the regular consumer. We have all the reasons to demand a radical system change but mainstream politics and economics are unwilling to implement it because that goes against their hidden agendas, known goals, and best interests, so there is only one solution left, revolution. Ecosocialism is a realistic proposal that we could work on to build an alternative international order.
In current historical circumstances, discussing libertarian utopias wastes time and energy. The theoretical debate as an intellectual and/or academic exercise is understandable, but discussing political solutions to change the political and economic landscape is something else.
Technology and the State will remain with us. The core of the problem is a class-based society, and that's where we have to start instead of believing in abolishing the State to solve the problem. Just as the State facilitates labor exploitation and guarantees wealth accumulation and private proprietary rights, the State can work on behalf of a balanced and equitable society and an ecological, political economy. We need to democratize society and start by helping to decolonize the minds of our compatriots who are exploited to their core. We need to restore the spirit of class solidarity and fraternity to build a sense of shared problems and interests.
Most people take techno-scientific development as something positive; each innovation seems to represent another step on the ladder that brings us closer and closer to some technological paradise, opening doors to increasingly fascinating achievements. It is undeniable that information and computing technologies have revolutionized many sectors of activity and aspects of personal and collective life. However, we must not pretend that it has no costs and risks. Once Pandora's box is opened, it can trigger irreversible damage, and the entire web of life, including the human species, can be wiped out. Let’s not forget that techno-scientific development cannot be separated from neocolonialist imperialist expansionism, geostrategic militarism, and corporate agendas. The citizenry can easily become guinea pigs in scientific experiments to feed corporate greed and governmental agendas. Technocentric scientism, like any other religion, believes it owns the truth.
The risks of building a dystopian society are real. When techno-scientific development for perpetual economic growth does not require democratic scrutiny. Most technological innovations are introduced from the top down with little or no public debate; technology is not neutral. Every time new technology becomes available as a product of mass consumption, habits, and behaviors change. Technological innovation can give a competitive edge to the companies, organizations, institutes, universities, and the countries that develop them, but with what objective? What does humanity have to gain from countries competing for techno-scientific, economic, geopolitical, and military supremacy? Increasing complexity and specialization are not synonymous with building a safer and more prosperous future; on the contrary, more layers of complexity will bring us closer to the verge of collapse. At this point, humanity needs more cooperation, not competition for supremacy. We need to defeat imperialism and end the Capitalocene.
The precautionary principle must become the standard of reference for making conscious democratic decisions and delineating the boundaries and purpose of the economy so that resources and raw materials are used sustainably to provide for society without destroying the environment.
The idea that the purpose of the economy is to monetize, commodify and financialize everything, including human relationships, is boundlessly perverse. I think it's time to face the problem instead of continuing to kick the can down the road. Technofixism is a dangerous ideology because it disseminates the blind belief in technological omniscience to solve any problems humanity popping up on the horizon. Delusional hopism for participatory annihilation.
Complex societies avoid collapse by resorting to technological innovation, but this solution does not last forever. Human capabilities have limits, and respecting them should be considered common sense. But the delusional arrogance of the dominant political-cultural ideology is so extreme that instead of holding back and creating space for reflection, we move towards a technofeudalist transhumanist dystopia.
It is possible to live with more quality and dedicate more time, creativity, and talent to projects and activities with meaning and purpose. A society that despises empathy, compassion, and the intrinsic dignity of life is vile. We are indoctrinated towards dehumanization because this is how to become civilized, focused on techno-progressivism as the path to liberation/salvation.
The manufactured scarcity forcing the majority of the population to worry constantly is not and inevitability; it is a feature of the capitalist system that can and must be abolished. We must adopt another intellectual attitude to debunk systemic lies that parasite within ourselves.
Civilization as we know it is little more than a form of organized violence and extreme arrogance. Civilization is almost always controlled by megalomaniac sociopaths obsessed with perpetuating their existence in the form of colossal architectonic works as a demonstration of power and unbridled vanity.
Modern biotechnology and bioengineering seek to modify and redesign life to meet the needs of the fourth industrial revolution and green capitalism projects. The primary requirement of so-called free markets is to cater to the whims and interests of ruling elites who live in the parallel reality of extreme wealth and luxury.
Humanity, nature, and the planet are being modified and redesigned by people, organizations, and institutions dissociated from the real world. Economists learn how to design beautiful mathematical models that have nothing to do with the real economy but are used to rule and regulate the economy as sound tools. Much of what passes for scientific research has nothing to do with solving real societal problems. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter how dangerous, treacherous, or useless a scientific project is; some billionaire or government will fund it for as long as it fits the imperialistic agenda for global domination.
These elites fund and control academic institutions, laboratories and institutes, and organizations of the non-profit industrial complex by selecting human resources with academic and techno-scientific excellence that are willing by conviction and/or interest to transform ideas into knowledge and technological innovation for hegemonic power. In a social environment of intellectual arrogance and unlimited financial resources to squander, we can expect anything from a society where money's of democratic "control."
Ecosocialism implies a change in the civilizational paradigm. A radical sociocultural transformation is based on developing a social and ecological economy. The economy's priority is to satisfy basic needs and provide the minimum comfort to all citizens without exception.
The human being is much more than a simple bipolar consumer/spectator, as quickly apathetic and bored as he is hyper-excited and enthusiastic about trivia. For those looking for personal and spiritual growth through meditation, yoga, spiritual purification retreats, etc... the ecosocialist society provides more free time for citizens to dedicate themselves to what gives meaning to their lives. The goal of an ecosocialist economy is to build a participatory economy centered on social well-being instead of mindless consumerism, instilling individualism and inhibiting social and political participation.
The role of advertising in a consumer society is to stimulate the acquisition of unnecessary goods, products, and services that often have an unsustainable ecological footprint. The PR industry resorts to all the available scientific tools and innovations to manipulate the will and perception of consumers. The goal is to spread artificial needs, shape new tastes, explore psycho-emotional weaknesses and physical imperfections, offering easy solutions to become more beautiful, younger, accepted, happy and successful. Consumers in the lower income rank spend their time performing shitty jobs to spend their hard-earned money on acquiring superfluous and nefarious goods, products, and services, which do little more than feed illusions and encourage harmful habits and addictions. It doesn’t seem like a paradigm of a functional society.
A steady-state economy is structured to maintain a dynamic balance between producing goods and services while respecting environmental integrity. The efficient use of natural resources and the equitable distribution of the wealth generated by transforming these resources. By wealth, I refer to goods, products, and valuable services, not capital. The stability of economic output requires democratic and balanced management for social well-being within the biosphere's limits.
A steady-state economy ensures human well-being while minimizing ecological impact. An ecosocialist political economy should aim to follow that path.
A steady-state economy is not synonymous with a stagnant economy. It is an economy governed by clear social, economic, and environmental stability parameters. The boom & bust roller coaster of the financialized economy is incompatible with a real economy and social welfare; it accumulates capital in a few's hands. With capital accumulation comes the concentration of power and the ability to use it for social engineering. The financialized economy does not depend on the real economy to grow. The FIRE sector concentrates an essential share of investment, and more recently, the financialization of ecosystem services entered the chain of speculative predation of the web of life.
The concept of a stationary economy dates back to classical economics. However, it is associated with the economist Herman Daly, economists such as John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith predicted that economic growth would plateau when competitive advantages, labor specialization, and resource availability reached their natural limits. The steady-state economy offers the right conditions for demographic stabilization. The idea of unlimited population growth is as irrational as the belief in unlimited economic growth. Technological development driven by the prospect of enrichment leads to imperialist expansionism, transforming itself into a genocidal and ecocidal machine. With the development of productivist industrial capitalism, society was progressively transformed into a space dedicated to conspicuous consumption and mindless entertainment. All these trends together will become our demise, and I don’t understand why we feel entitled to drag the rest of the web of life along with us!
A stationary economy differs from a stagnant economy because the parameter used to measure the economy is the social value-added, not the monetary value of the financial wealth generated.
Unfortunately, there is a profound asymmetry between the growing destructive power of technology serving economic growth and the development of individual and collective awareness that other models of economy and society are not only possible and desirable but have become imperative.
If the wealth generated by the economy is not distributed equitably to ensure the well-being and social stability, then something is wrong with this economic model. But, unfortunately, in a class-based capitalist society, narratives that justify social inequality abound, and the most extraordinary thing is that many of those who take them as venerable explanations are exploited by a system that discards them at the very moment when they no longer are needed, and that does not shy away from to use violent methods to bring them into line.
Steady-state economics is the way to create inter-generational economic, social, and political stability. The steady-state economy does not depend on stimulating superfluous consumption because it is focused on serving society and not exploiting it to generate profits at any cost. The vitality of society does not depend on economic growth; it depends on how the economy is organized. The motto of a social and ecological economy is to serve people, not private interests, within the boundaries of the biosphere.
We currently have a financial system that uses debt as an instrument of lifetime servitude; therefore, wealth can be funneled to the top of the social hierarchy. Financial speculation is a crime against the real economy and society. Public banking is an essential requirement for any democratic political system.
Class-based societies are governed top-down by distributing roles, functions, and expertises, guaranteeing the kind of structure and sociocultural order indispensable to technological development and economic growth. This model of society exerts unsustainable pressure on the environment. Socio-politically acceptable environmental awareness cannot jeopardize the so-called free market capitalist order; the duty of loyalty towards the capitalist system and the consumer society, greed, and wealth accumulation is above dispute.
Societies that allow themselves to be enchanted by laissez-faire capitalism become controlled by unscrupulous citizens, self-centered sociopaths, and genocidal psychopaths with delusions of grandeur.
Believing in the possibility of a radical change within the framework of the capitalist order is entirely delusional. In my opinion, The only viable alternative is ecosocialism with adaptations to cover the specific needs of societies with different characteristics.
The dictatorship of the free market is against free trade; the capitalist class is monopolistic by default, competition is for the poor, and an excellent excuse to clear the market of small and medium operators by replacing them with large corporations and multinationals. The FIRE sector as it exists must be eradicated; property speculation is financial cancer serving the rentier class while metastasizing throughout the social organism in the form of austerity and an "overheated" housing market. Housing is a human right, and a society based on the so-called free market rules that sees housing as a commodity and demands inhumane evictions is criminal. More specifically, it is a society ruled and controlled by criminals.
Compliance with the law becomes a criminal act whenever human rights are violated.
Most citizens do not benefit from the “prosperity” generated by the financialized economy but must bear the consequences. Anyone who wants to understand how perverse the current economic-financial system is has to start by deconstructing the absurd ideas about how the system works. The information exists, but the fog takes time and patience to dissipate. When the process reaches a certain degree of cultural-ideological decolonization, we realize that the system is much worse than we could have imagined. The wall of prejudices that dulls our minds and hinders our steps has to be knocked down; it takes time to be knocked down because it is part of the bio-sociocultural and political-ideological identity that conditions the way we perceive reality.
Public and cooperative social housing is one of the political priorities of the ecosocialist system. We are used to seeing aesthetically uninteresting social housing districts because they are considered projects to accommodate second-class citizens. Class prejudice runs through society, and people's behavior reveals what they deny, the persistence of the feeling of class superiority, and those who live in social housing neighborhoods are the target of discrimination based on class and race. Housing is a human right; real estate speculation is absurd; only a dysfunctional system accepts the existence of environmentally unsustainable and socially unfair luxury properties as acceptable.
Urbanization must be planned in such a way as to respect the terrain's orography, seeking to minimize as much as possible the intervention in the natural course of stream beds and waterways to prevent future disasters.
The steady-state economy aims to balance the extraction of raw materials and natural resources with society's needs without exceeding the biosphere's carrying capacity. Scientific research and technological innovation cannot be subordinated to private economic and financial interests. The growth in the influence of the private sector and public-private partnerships in the economy and politics is commensurate with the decline in democratic control. The government is not the problem; the government controlled by the capitalist class is the problem. The revolving door system between politics and business is the problem. Pre-election selection before the election is the problem.
In a representative democracy, the government represents someone; if the people do not feel represented, who does the government represent? The plutocratic and oligarch class, corporate interests, and the deep State.
In a representative democracy, the government represents somebody; if the people do not feel represented, who does the government represent? Most probably wealthy corporate interests, plutocrats and oligarchs, and the deep State. Most governments manage the interests of the State on behalf of the 0.1%, and the 10% benefit directly or otherwise from it, and the further we go down the social ladder, the more the benefits decrease, and the costs increase.
Libertarians advocate a minimalist government and a completely unregulated economy called a free market and a society of individuals who interrelate based on the law of supply and demand in pursuit of private profit and wealth accumulation. A weak state does not mean more freedom, a dehumanized fragile society is not meant to be fair, and an economy controlled by the wealthy turns into an unequal, exploitative, and repressive society. The government is supposed to administer the State and represent the popular will. A democratic government representing the popular must ensure that cross-cutting social welfare is above the law of the so-called free market. Most people do not take the dangers of capital accumulation seriously, perhaps because they live in the illusion of one day being able to join the club. In my opinion, the threat is evident, and we can feel it in our skin daily. A slimmed-down, minimalist government governing on behalf of the 0.1% may appeal to the free-marketeers, but not the wage earners, the government, regardless of size, must govern to ensure that no class, group, institution, or organization acquires sufficient power to influence governance and dictate how society and the economy should be managed.
The problem is not the government but who controls the government. The problem lies in the accumulation of private wealth. Over time, wealth is used to reshape society to fit the ruling class's interests, and governments become mere managers of private interests. The current economic, sociocultural, and political-ideological order exalts the role of the wealthy class and uses celebrities as role models to be followed and praised by the lower classes.
Democracy and freedom are meaningless in a capitalist and imperialist class society where the primacy of proprietary rights and the free market financialized economy are above the foundational values of a balanced and egalitarian society.
The capitalist system is irreformable, and the struggle of the countries of the Global South must be focused on neutralizing the nations, institutions, organizations, and corporations that represent western imperialist neocolonialism and replace it by developing relations with countries committed to the creation of an international order based on in ecosocialist cooperation.
The precautionary principle must be ratified internationally as a universal guiding principle of economic and social policies for an ecological society.
Economic policy means managing and using natural resources and raw materials throughout the process, from extraction, transformation, distribution, consumption, waste management, and treatment, to satisfy social needs while respecting the biosphere's limits.
Unlimited economic growth based on producing and consuming goods, products, and services without considering their real social utility is the normalization of insanity.
The World Bank, IMF, and WTO promote pro-growth agendas intending to implement neo-colonialism and perpetual debt enslavement. The “loans” include the obligation to open the national economy to foreign investment, free market solutions, and neoliberal shock therapy.
In practice, the countries lose political, economic, and financial sovereignty, being forced to implement the dictates imposed by institutions serving the Western imperialist interests. Only a small national elite profits from the looting of natural resources and infrastructure construction that aims to satisfy the needs of multinational companies and corporations which need infrastructural conditions to export the products of their legal looting, such as oil, minerals, agricultural products, timber, or manufactured products.
This development model continues to be promoted by western economic and financial imperialism, now under the banner of green capitalism.
An economy based on conspicuous consumption under constant advertisement pressure for the imbecilization of society.
The primary function of education is to indoctrinate each new batch of recruits into the voluntary servitude system.
A steady-state economy aims to satisfy the needs of all rather than the greed of a few.
A stable economy serves the goals of an ecosocialist society and contributes to creating a geopolitical strategy based on cooperation and mutual aid. The international community must vehemently reject any project of geostrategic hegemony and imperialist domination and create the conditions to demilitarize the planet. A stable economy requires national and international fiscal, monetary, and commercial policies encouraging reducing superfluous and useless consumption.
A steady-state economy must be based on a fair reward system. When privileges are taken for granted, normalize and justify class, function, and career superiority. Respect and admiration for other human beings cannot be measured based on class or other inferiorizing discrimination.
Indoctrination and habit immunize us against the injustices that occur in our presence, cultural blind spots that make us complicit in many of the crimes that happen in the society in which we live.
A classless society is not a utopia; it was the default model for most of the existence of homo sapiens sapiens; we must go back to the drawing board and start designing a more functional and fairer society.
Under the capitalist rule, the primary function of education is to indoctrinate each new batch of recruits into the voluntary servitude system.
