Communism* v. Capitalism and Marxism v. Demateralism
I don’t know if any of the latest statements about deaths and ruined lives under so-called communist rule are true or merely another salvo in an endless war against Communism waged by both branches of the American Capitalist Party; but, this much is certain: Communism is sustainable and Capitalism, because it requires perpetual economic growth in a finite world, is not. Capitalism requires growth to retire debt incurred by fractional reserve banking, to justify economic inequality by telling the poor they will not grow poorer as the rich grow richer, to provide new jobs for workers displaced by improvements in productivity due to technological progress, and to finance industry in a stock market that would collapse if it did not grow. None of these is necessary in a communist economy despite the undeniable fact that many regimes that call themselves communist whether they are or not have encouraged economic growth. (Of course, many (undeveloped) nations should grow economically, but new growth in the poor nations must be accompanied by even greater shrinkage in the rich nations to more than compensate for it.)
It is necessary to divide the community dividend equally among the members of the community for a number of reasons:
1. Whatever advantages of intelligence, strength, ability, character, appearance, breeding, or connections one is able to exploit to acquire wealth, they are accidents of birth that are normally disallowed as justifications for worldly success.
2. It is impossible to evaluate a person’s contribution to the community until hundreds of years after that person’s death, if then.
3. Suppose that one potato in the Mark I Economy represents the amount of emergy that is required to keep one person alive for one day. The ability of the earth to provide emergy for consumption is already so limited that people are starving to death because we do not share wealth.
Thus, wealth sharing is reasonable, beautiful, and practical. However, without wealth sharing society is vulnerable to very serious problems:
1. Differences in wealth create covetousness, envy, resentment, anger, and, finally, revolution if they grow sufficiently steep or if they are perceived as patently unfair.
2. If there are differences in wealth, we have materialism with all of the horrible things people do to acquire greater wealth because of greed, because of fear of losing what one has, or to remedy personal poverty. In Chapter 9 of On the Preservation of Species, I showed that materialism is Pandora’s Box.
Materialism is the perfect transition from the debate between communism and capitalism to the debate between Dematerialism and Marxism:
Marxism was supposed to have remedied the problems caused by differences in wealth; but, inasmuch as it requires people to work to earn a living, it still permits competition for wealth. Also, it does not address competition for power except by preventing huge concentrations of wealth that make fair competition unnecessary for many aspirants to political power. Even supposing a meritocracy in the distribution of jobs, political positions, and incomes, almost all of the problems of materialism will arise.
1. Dematerialism requires each person to have an equal share of the community dividend regardless of what he does or doesn’t do, which prevents all of the evils of materialism discussed in Appendix II of On the Preservation of Species.
2. It is important that people who do not work be compensated the same as those who do because most of the workforce will have to be furloughed to reduce the energy budget to that which can be supplied by renewable energy technologies only. Please see the three energy papers hyperlinked to http://dematerialism.net/ where this is explained and proved.
3. Dematerialism avoids punishment of misbehavior as well as punishment of sloth. People will do something interesting and/or useful because they need to be effective to be happy. Since Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment 150 years ago, we have suspected that punishment exacerbates anti-social behavior. Dematerialism lets go of punishment and revenge as well as other irrational and maladaptive behavior peculiar to Western culture or learned during out Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness.
Indeed, Marx, apparently was not familiar with the Sermon on the Mount and the many fine sentiments expressed there by Jesus. We could say that Dematerialism is the New Testament of Communism and Marxism is the Old Testament.
Houston, Texas
July 26, 2007
* In this paper, the word “communism” refers to any system of wealth distribution that does not depend upon (i) dog-eat-dog competition or (ii) the hazards of a marketplace in labor , or (iii) any system that favors economic inequality whether dynamic or static and, if dynamic, whether unbounded or not. By “communism” I mean some system of sharing the community dividend. I could replace the term “communism” by “wealth sharing” without the loss of very much except the opportunity to show respect for the great communist writers, thinkers, and leaders of the past. Normally, I think of “communism” as referring to equal or nearly equal wealth sharing. Varieties of communism are sometimes termed “socialism”, “syndicalism”, “dematerialism”, etc.
And now for something completely different:
1. Conservation within Capitalism could make the Die Off much worse if it postpones it while the population grows.
2. People who don't want a state- or consumer-planned economy (with equal shares of emergy for all) probably consider themselves superior to most other people and don't want to jeopardize their eminence and other advantages. A physics professor confessed, "I'm afraid you'll take away my money." This is part of the authoritarian or Type Z personality. This characterization does not apply to the many losers in the Money Game who are hopeless victims of authoritarian propaganda, such as the anti-abortion zealots who are convinced that communism is the same as abortion.
3. Capitalism is like Rock and Roll. The vast majority would reject both unless they had been subjected to merciless brainwashing. If you are susceptible to Rock, Country, Rap, or any of the other popular products that masquerade as music, you are probably vulnerable to anti-communist propaganda - especially if you have not yet recognized that every school curriculum, every major sporting event, and every television program - not just the commercials - is anti-communist propaganda.
4. It's too early to plan on what to do to save yourself and your loved ones from the coming Crash, Ochlarchy, and Die Off as in "Children of Men", which was based on a different etiology but the same prognosis. You must know where the bomb will land before you know which way to run.
5. We should all support the Bolivarian Revolution until we have a chance to go a little further along the path to a Natural Economy. Hugo Chavez will not oppose this process, the name of which is dematerialism – not to be confounded with the Ideal represented by the Natural Economy.
Tom Wayburn has unsubscribed himself from the_dieoff_QA, saving myself the trouble of having to boot his commie ass off this list! <g>
Many scientists believe that our love of natural beauty has evolved because of the ecological importance of leaving Nature undisturbed; however, the two major monotheistic religions come from a part of the world that is hard to live in. Perhaps it’s hard to appreciate its natural beauty too. This might account for their choices of religions that do not encourage respect for the environment nearly so much as the religions they replaced, namely, pantheism and paganism. After all, if there is a god living in every stream and every tree, it might be harder to despoil it for one’s own purpose than if there were one abstract god who, regardless of what is taught, is always thought of as being somewhere else. One might conclude, then, that environmental destruction is more an artifact of one’s tribal religion than an innate characteristic of human nature. If, in fact, monotheism is the only religion that permits man to ignore the local gods of Nature, then it is no wonder that Capitalism became an artifact of monotheism, as no other political economy could leave Nature less undisturbed.
It is the spoliation of Nature, of course, that has made possible all of the miracles of technology that we, the affluent of the developed nations, enjoy daily. Today, for example, is a day that I have enjoyed as much as any I can remember. I recorded music from the cable, converted stereo phonograph records to 5.1 digital, and achieved a great deal on the World Wide Web. As I have said previously, no one is more dependent upon the capitalist mode of production than am I. I might do poorly in a Natural Economy; nevertheless, I try to be objective and realistic in my scientific and literary work.
Houston, Texas
July 27, 2007