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Degrowth and law – how to combine these concepts?
Reconciling degrowth and law isn’t always easy, given the anarchist underpinnings and anti-statist leanings of some in the degrowth community. One vision of a degrowth world is of decentralized, autonomous, convivial communities of people in tune with their supporting ecosystems, consuming no more than they need, sharing as much as possible and treating each other with compassion, fairness and mutual respect. No central state power, no police, no borders, no masters and servants, no conspicuous consumption, no oppression. This, however, doesn’t necessarily require a world without law, just a world with law that is much different from the forms of law that prevail in today’s rapacious and unjust world. Humanity’s overarching challenge is to learn how to stop individually and collectively doing harmful things we are used to and conditioned to doing. Meeting that challenge, through degrowth or otherwise, requires some form of law. For reasons that follow, I propose that that the emerging field of ecological law is well suited to help guide a transformation to degrowth societies.
Contemporary law, including environmental law, is anathema to degrowth. Dominant forms of law today are tied to hierarchical structures centered around states and private property, and contemporary law is a fierce handmaiden to many aspects of the prevailing neoliberal order, including capitalism, that degrowth challenges. Environmental law is part of this contemporary law. In calling for ecological law that transforms contemporary law, the Ecological Law and Governance Association’s (ELGA) Oslo Manifesto (2016) notes that the roots of environmental law in anthropocentrism, human-nature dualism and individualism has rendered it fragmented, reductionist, blind to ecological interdependencies and weak in comparison to law that protects private interests and state sovereignty.
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2019: Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric, Opaque
2019: Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric, Opaque
Add up Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric and Opaque and you get a world spinning out of centralized control.
Here are the key dynamics of 2019: fragmented, unevenly distributed, asymmetric, opaque. Want to know what’s happening with inflation, deflation, recession, populism, etc.?
It depends on what you own, when you own it, where you own it and its relative scarcity and stability–assuming you have trustworthy information on its scarcity and stability.
By ownership I mean all forms of capital: cash, tools, skills, social capital, trust in institutions, etc. Whatever forms of capital you own, the returns on that capital and its relative stability depend on the specifics of context and timing.
Will there be deflation or inflation? The right question is: Will there be deflation or inflation in my household?. In a rapidly fragmenting economy and society characterized by opacity, asymmetric information and unevenly distributed results, generalizations are intrinsically misleading / false. The only possible answers arise in a carefully limited context: my household, my neighborhood, my industry, my company, etc.
Here’s an example I’ve mentioned in the past: healthcare costs. If you’re one of the lucky households with heavily subsidized healthcare costs (for example, a government employee with limited deductibles, low per-visit costs and modest co-pays), your healthcare inflation is likely negligible.
But if your household doesn’t qualify for subsidies and has to pay market rates, you’re very likely to suffer double-digit healthcare inflation.
2019 is the year that central banks and states lose control of the narratives, the economy and the social contract, all of which are dynamic complex systems which excel in producing banquets of unintended consequences.
Control of the narrative requires harvesting “the right data” and spinning an interpretation that supports the status quo.
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Why I’m Hopeful
Why I’m Hopeful
A more humane, sustainable world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.
Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn’t leave much to be happy about.
The most hopeful thing in my mind is that the Status Quo is devolving from its internal contradictions and excesses. It is a perverse, intensely destructive system with powerful incentives for predation, exploitation, fraud and complicity.
A more humane, sustainable world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.
I know many smart, well-informed people expect the worst once the Status Quo (the Savior State and its corporatocracy partners) devolves, and there is abundant evidence of the ugliness of human nature under duress.
But we should temper this Id ugliness with the stronger impulses of community and compassion. If greed and rapaciousness were the dominant forces within human nature, then the species would have either died out at its own hand or been limited to small savage populations kept in check by the predation of neighboring groups, none of which could expand much because inner conflict would limit their ability to grow.
The remarkable success of humanity as a species is not simply the result of a big brain, opposable thumbs, year-round sex or even language; it is ultimately the result of social and cultural associations that act as a “network” for storing knowledge and relationships– what we call intellectual and social capital.
I have devoted significant portions of my books–
An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times
Resistance, Revolution, Liberation
Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform
A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All
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The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard
The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard
We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and economic might of the central state.
In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score” (May 7, 2018), I wrote about Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic nightmare emerging in China’s “Social Credit Score.”
The idea here is the central state sets up a vast, pervasive surveillance system to monitor all its citizens, and assigns a social score to each citizen based on his/her compliance with regulations and social norms as defined by the state.
In Kafka’s nightmarish novels, an opaque, impenetrable and impersonalized bureaucracy controls the social and economic structures of everyday life.
China’s system is based on a social score, but one’s social score has enormous economic consequences: the citizen with a low score can be denied rights to travel, his/her children can be denied access to educational opportunities and so on.
As I noted, there doesn’t appear to be a legal process for challenging one’s low social score, or much transparency on the various violations and weighting of violations that go into calculating each individual’s score.
I’ve often written about the difference between force and power: as per Edward Luttwak, force (coercion) is costly and clumsy, while power works via persuasion, grudging or otherwise.
China is attempting to create a system that is extremely coercive (a low score generates severe punishments) but also seeks to internalize the social scoring system: no authority figure is required to force individuals to comply; each individual internalizes the rules and modifies their own behavior accordingly.
This aligns with China’s historic reliance on internalized social norms to control its vast populace. Even in the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), the central state relied on the internalized social norms of Confucian values to “order society” with minimal coercion.
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It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”
It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”
Our current socio-economic system is nothing but the application of force on the many to enforce the skims, scams and privileges of the self-serving few.
I’ve placed the word capitalism in quotation marks to reflect the reality that this word now covers a wide spectrum of economic activities, very little of which is actually capitalism as classically defined. As I have explained here for over a decade, the U.S. economy is dominated by cartels and quasi-monopolies that are enforced by the Central State, a state-cartel system of financialized rentier skims that has no overlap with Adam Smith’s free market, free enterprise concept,i.e. classical capitalism.
This is what passes for “capitalism” in modern-day America: the super-rich get super-richer, a thin slice of technocrats, speculators and entrepreneurs advance their wealth and the vast majority lose ground or stagnate:
Here’s another snapshot of state-financier “capitalism” in modern-day America: the centralized organs of the state (the quasi-public Federal Reserve) creates trillions of dollars and hands the nearly free money to financiers, insiders and speculators, all of whom benefit immensely as this flood of cash pushes stocks into the stratosphere:
There are other versions of “capitalism” that are equally rapacious, all of which are iterations of crony-capitalism: gangster-capitalism, theocratic-capitalism, colonial-capitalism, and so on.
The key feature of these forms of organized pillage that mask their predatory nature by claiming to be “capitalist” is they ruthlessly suppress the three core dynamics of classical capitalism:
1. Competition
2. Open/free markets
3. Free flow of capital in all its forms (financial, social, intellectual, etc.)
The only way the few can pillage the many is if the many are denied access to competition, open markets and freely flowing capital.
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Upon The Next Crisis, The Rules Will Suddenly Change
Upon The Next Crisis, The Rules Will Suddenly Change
We can add a third certainty to the two standard ones (death and taxes): The rules will suddenly change when a financial crisis strikes.
Why is this a certainty? The answer is complex, as it draws on human nature, politics and the structure of societies/economies ruled by centralized states (governments).
The Core Imperative of the State: Expand Control
As I explain in my book, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation, the core (i.e. ontological) imperative of every central state is to expand its reach and control. This isn’t just the result of individuals within the state seeking more power; every centralized state views whatever is outside its control as a threat. The way to reduce or neutralize a threat is to take control of the mechanisms that generated it.
Once the state has gained control of these mechanisms, it is loath to relinquish them; to relinquish control is to invite chaos.
There is of course an intensely self-serving dynamic to extending state control: those being paid to enforce this state control have an immense vested interest in the state retaining (or even extending) this control, as their livelihoods now depend on the state doing so.
The higher-ups in the state also have a vested interest in retaining these new controls, as more control means more wealth and power accrue to those at the top of the centralized power pyramid: this extension of state control means private enterprise must now lobby the state for favors, and it gives the higher-ups more perquisites and favors to dispense—for a price, of course.
This vested interest arises throughout the power pyramid, from the bottom functionary with newfound power over common citizens to the managers of the departmental bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the new control to the apex of state authority.
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Wait a Minute–Who’s Fascist?
Wait a Minute–Who’s Fascist?
The core belief of the Establishment is the central state should run everything.
If you’re an Establishment insider, the mainstream media will give you plenty of column inches and airtime to label Donald Trump a “dangerous” fascist: for example, Democratic insider Robert Reich’s fear-mongering frenzy Donald Trump is a 21st century American fascist, in which Reich conveniently overlooks constitutional limits on any president, “fascist” or not.
In effect, Reich is announcing the Constitution is dead and powerless to limit the President. Well, if that’s the problem, then why not attack the real problem, which is the Imperial Presidency? Why not? Reich served an Imperial President as a loyal lackey, that’s why–and he remains an energetic supporter of the central state and its bread-and-circuses institutionalized serfdom.
If you’re an Establishment insider, you’ll get ample opportunities in the corporate media to label Bernie Sanders a “dangerous” socialist. You don’t even have to be a member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (a staple of the Clintons’ attack strategy)–any insider can get airtime to label Sanders as “dangerous”–either because he’s socialist, or because he’s not radical enough. Any attack will do, and you’ll get plenty of opportunity to flesh out any attack, no matter how biased or nonsensical.
It is of course classic Orwellian Doublespeak to label any threat to one’s power “fascist,” and to laud one’s corrupt and venal allies as “freedom fighters,” but the Establishment’s panicked reliance on accusations of fascism is new and yes, dangerous. So let’s step back and ask–precisely who’s the fascist here?
It turns out that the definition of fascism widely attributed to Mussolini– “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”–has no provenance: researchers cannot find this quote in any original source material.
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There’s No Upside Left
There’s No Upside Left
The upside is ephemeral, illusory or wishful thinking; the downside is real and lasting.
There’s no upside left–not just in the real economy, but in jobs, politics or policy tweaks. Yes, there will be huge relief rallies in the stock market–relief that the Fed is still omnipotent, that the Fed didn’t destroy the world by withdrawing liquidity, etc., etc., etc.–but in terms of sales and profits, there’s no upside left: an increasingly nervous upper middle class is reining in profligate spending, while everyone below the top 10% is running out of credit cards, student loans, etc. to tap.
Whatever surplus the real economy generated has been skimmed by financiers, lenders and the central state. Stock buybacks have boosted the wealth of corporate managers and institutional owners while creating zero jobs; lenders have feasted on high-interest credit cards, federally backed student loans and subprime auto loans that are immediately spun off to credulous suckers (Widows and Orphans Fund of Norway, et al.) as high-yield securitized debt.
Anyone working for Corporate America or government has little upside but plenty of downside: bonuses are being slashed, divisions closed, sold off or privatized in the case of government, all to cut costs.
State and local pension funds, bloated by seven years of speculative frenzy, are about to start bleeding from every orifice as reality and risk intrude on the central banks’ fantasy of never-ending asset bubbles.
Whatever pension and bennies you were promised–start practicing your fractions, because only a fraction of the bloated promises made by politicos desperate to get re-elected can be paid in the real world.
Doing a great job will either get you fired or overworked: no upside there. If you have the courage (or foolish devotion to truth) to be honest, then you’ll be fired as a disruptive “non-team-player” who stepped on too many toes in the pursuit of excellence.
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