Nostr notes by Bodhi O'Shea

#Jason Hickel #Aarin Bastani #Novara #Capitalism #Perverse ...

2026-01-03T06:33:40Z

#Jason Hickel #Aarin Bastani
#Novara #Capitalism #Perverse Production

https://youtu.be/bjlqWHXrTak?si=n3BWlahn6ckThTE5

"If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the ...

2025-03-17T02:53:10Z

"If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of slavery, then how did we ever eliminate slavery? Of course, a cynic might argue we haven't; we've just relabled it. The cynic would have a point: an ancient Greek would have certainly seen the distinction between a slave and an indebted wage laborer as, at best, a legalistic nicety."

- David Graeber

"What all sides are agreed upon — or should be agreed upon ...

2025-03-12T03:40:07Z

"What all sides are agreed upon — or should be agreed upon — is that, first, total energy and resource consumption should be limited to the amount compatible with sustainable yield and with zero net carbon emissions. Second, that structural rationalization and technological advances in efficiency should be combined to maximize the standard of living consistent with those levels of resource input. And third, that whatever level of material consumption is ecologically sustainable should be justly distributed and coupled with the abolition of privilege.

These things are not only compatible with, but necessary conditions for, both “degrowth” properly understood and “ecomodernism” properly understood. And whether this results in “growth” or “degrowth” in terms of some irrational metric like GDP is beside the point.

Ultimately the real question is whether technological progress and an improved standard of living are compatible with eliminating fossil fuel use and reducing resource extraction to sustainable levels.

Simply put, either a given agenda will reduce the total consumption of fossil fuel energy and other material inputs or it won’t. If it does it’s degrowth, regardless of what accounting metric you use or whether that metric rises or falls. Phillips argues that we can maintain or improve the prevailing standard of living, while decoupling the production of that living standard from the consumption of material inputs with the help of technical innovation. In other words, he’s arguing for degrowth. And the people he criticizes are, in essence, arguing for the same thing. The actual “debate,” if there is one, comes down more to a rhetorical sleight of hand by which “degrowth” is associated with “Malthusianism,” “austerity,” or outright neo primitivism than to disagreements in material terms. If there’s a disagreement in material terms, it’s over secondary questions like whether degrowth in resource consumption can be decoupled from growth as measured by GDP, whether GDP is even a significant measure of anything but waste and resource consumption, or whether there’s sufficient waste production at present to reduce resource consumption without affecting real standards of living. So we are all agreed, or should be agreed, both that 1) resource extraction should be limited to sustainable levels, and 2) we should pursue both economic rationalization and technological development in order to use the specified level of resource inputs to generate the maximum possible quality of life. In this sense, we are all degrowthers and we are all ecomodernists."

- Kevin Carson, "We Are All Degrowthers"

https://c4ss.org/content/52500

There's another and perhaps more insidious angle to consider, ...

2025-03-11T07:24:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…ksa2
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There's another and perhaps more insidious angle to consider, a potential parallel motive for an engineered recession: the fact that recessions create prime opportunities for oligarchs to amass more assets. During recessions and depressions, equity asset prices, particularly in real estate and businesses, decline significantly. While the majority of the population lacks the capital or liquidity to capitalize on these reduced prices, the top 1% possess the resources to acquire these undervalued assets. Consequently, when the economy recovers, oligarchs emerge with an even greater share of overall wealth.

I think DJT is deliberately tanking the economy. Approximately ...

2025-03-06T06:57:47Z

I think DJT is deliberately tanking the economy. Approximately $9T in U.S. Treasury debt matutres this year—1/4 of the total national debt and 1/3 fraction of GDP. They have to refinance it. Which means someone has to buy it. The Federal Reserve faces a catch22. Given the need to issue new bonds to replace the maturing ones, there's a risk that increased supply will push yields higher. However, if economic conditions worsen, the Fed might attempt to lower interest rates to stimulate growth. Therein lies the conflict: while rate cuts typically lower yields, the large volume of new Treasury issuance could counteract that effect.
A heightened economic uncertainty, however, could trigger a 'flight to safety,' driving demand for Treasuries and keeping yields low, despite the increased supply. This scenario would allow the Treasury to refinance the debt at potentially lower rates. If successful, this would reduce future interest payments and contribute to lower deficits.
But deliberately 'tanking' the economy to drive down interest rates is a foolish and risky strategy. While it might lower yields in the short term, it could carry severe long-term consequences and human costs, including increased unemployment and reduced economic output.

According to Forbes and Finbold:

"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday the White House is determined to bring down interest rates, and investors are listening, as the market’s expectations of rate cuts swell, but the root of what’s driving the recently renewed rate cut hopes is not so rosy as the prospect of a shrinking economy as President Donald Trump’s tariffs take hold.

...Investors now price in three 0.25-percentage-points cuts by year’s end as the most likely scenario...

-2.8%. That’s how much the U.S. economy is expected to shrink by in 2025’s first quarter, according to the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow indicator..."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/03/04/investors-now-expect-more-interest-rate-cuts-this-year-as-fears-rise-of-a-tariff-driven-economic-slowdown/

https://finbold.com/9-trillion-of-us-debt-will-mature-in-2025-should-investors-be-worried/

Nostr event nevent1qqsf0ygqclz43dya64fpn42yqa3jhul2v50z46mesdd9djq5mp8lkhszyrqc5wk440pe5x0wxagxeh9mzyjdht4shjw08vpesmqxr7hq2ru0qm9d92c

2025-02-28T21:12:09Z

Trump is destabilizing the world and he's going to start WW3.

“Creating a society that goes against human nature is what ...

2025-02-26T18:17:09Z

“Creating a society that goes against human nature is what creates the suffering… We live in a completely unnatural society, that actually tramples on what it means to be a human being. That’s the essence of suffering, and there are so many ways in which our society does that.”

-Gabor Mate

"Without money or property rights, our relationships to ...

2025-02-19T06:13:25Z

"Without money or property rights, our relationships to things would be determined by our relationships with each other. Today, it is just the other way around: our relationships with each other are determined by our relationships to things. Doing away with property wouldn’t mean you would lose your belongings; it would mean that no sheriff or stock market crash could take away the things you depend on. Instead of answering to bureaucracy, we would begin from human needs; instead of taking advantage of each other, we would pursue the advantages of interdependence.

A scoundrel’s worst fear is a society without property—for without it, he will only get the respect he deserves. Without money, people are valued for what they contribute to others’ lives, not for what they can bribe others to do. Without profit, every effort must be its own reward, so there is no incentive for meaningless or destructive activity. The things that really matter in life—passion, camaraderie, generosity—are available in abundance. It takes legions of police and property surveyors to impose the scarcity that traps us in this rat race."

- Crimethink

Sure, if the state hypothetically ended overnight, the capitalist ...

2025-02-03T01:40:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…9eyn
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Sure, if the state hypothetically ended overnight, the capitalist class would have some resources they could withhold from the rest. I would submit that capital such as their dollars, or other such state fiat, their bonds, stocks, monopoly patents and the like would all become worthless overnight as well. Without a state, they would also lack the police force necessary to secure their capitalist property rights and much of the capital to hire new ones in large enough numbers. The state both created the capitalist class and pepetuates it. The state ending overnight seems like a silly hypothetical to me though. I thought I was clear in the post to which you responded that the path to ending the state is changing our social relations to prefiguratively and horizontally create a new world. Presumably in such a scenario, the working class have created their own means of production different from capitalist modes of mass production that exist today, their own helathcare, means of exchange etc, without needing to rely on a political or capitalist class for such things.

Perhaps you were also responding to a comment I made in another post re "less violence in a stateless society." I believe our environment shapes us into who we are. We don't make decisions or behave in a vacuum, and our preferences, identities, narratives, etc aren't sui generis. But, we also help create our environment. In that sense we have created the state and the capitalist class that has disposessed us from eachother. We are estranged. We have learned to rely on politicians rather than each other. Thus, like one of Milgam's experiments, we have learned to treat others as less than human. We treat our "neighbors" as political chess pieces; something to police and govern. It has become easier to come home from work, barely getting by, and not need to know our neighbors, or take direct action to help the addicts and poor in our community. This kind of disconnected environment creates monsters and violence. The most vulnerable minority, the individual, is forgotten. I am convinced that in cooperative communities based on trusting relationships and a shared ecology, there would be much less violence. "Figs don't grow on thistles nor grapes on thorns." Hope that helps clear up my position:)

Without a state the capitalist class has no way to impose their ...

2025-02-01T02:58:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…fmel
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Without a state the capitalist class has no way to impose their coinage via taxation and prevent the use of mutual credit; no way to impose interest lending; no way to impose rents and landlordism via land enclosures, or building codes that prevent Tiny Homes, cohousing, and ecovillages; no way to collect royalties and rents via intellectual property; no way to prevent workers from "staying in on strike"; no way to use occupational licensing monopoly to force independent workers to seek wages; no way to outlaw lodge practice healthcare to keep workers dependent on a political or capitalist class for their healthcare. We achieve anarchy (AKA 'non-authoritarian communism') via prefigurative horizontal direct action; by relying on eachother and building the new inside the shell of the old; not relying on some new political class who is going prescribe one utopian path for us all to follow. We can't vote or fight our way out of this. We have to make the political and capitalist class irrelevant in our lives. We are going to have to live and love our way out of this.

"People often assume that capitalism is defined by ...

2025-01-28T04:27:08Z

"People often assume that capitalism is defined by "markets and trade". But markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is only 500 years old. So what is distinctive about this economic system? Three things … :

1. First, and most importantly, it is defined by enclosure and artificial scarcity. The origins of capitalism lie in a systematic effort by elites to restrict people's access to commons and independent subsistence, in order to render them reliant on wage labour for survival….

2. Second, capitalism is organized around - and dependent on - perpetual expansion, meaning ever-increasing production of commodified goods. It is the only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history (meaning it basically has a crisis if it doesn't continually expand).

Crucially, under capitalism the purpose of increasing production is *not* primarily to meet human needs, but rather to extract and accumulate profit….

It's important to distinguish here between small businesses, which quite often operate with a steady-state, use-value logic (and which obviously preceded capitalism), and corporations whose main objective is expansion and accumulation… The result is a system that, left to itself, automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown.

3. Finally, capitalism is notable for precluding democratic decision-making. Even in countries that prize political democracy, democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital….

In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently."

- Jason Hickel