kalec

He says, “I’m still the same person.”

Degrowth demands two things: the first is abandoning GDP as the sole measure of progress, and the second is to distinguish between what is unnecessary and what is necessary, to reduce what is unnecessary and increase what is necessary. In order to transition to a degrowth society, we need to plan carefully, because we cannot simply reduce everything at the same time—nor can we increase everything at the same time, because it wastes energy and resources that are very limited. It’s a matter of focusing on the use-value dimension of production, rather than relying on the price mechanism for the allocation and distribution of products. The issue is how we do that. These decisions cannot be made by bureaucrats or politicians. So, we need a more democratic way of managing and deciding what we need—and need to increase—and what we don’t need and must reduce. A new socialist calculation debate needs to take place. It is hard to imagine abolishing the market all at once. What is the right balance between a market and non-market kind of system? We also have new computing technologies. But it’s dangerous to depend on those kinds of algorithmic mechanisms alone. So it’s a matter of finding the right balance.

The greatest strength of Marxism is that it does more than simply recognise injustice in society. We have records of people criticising social inequality for as long as writing has been practiced beyond the highest elites, and it's almost certain that an unrecorded history goes back much further. It's not very hard to see people being abused on a systemic level, looking upon the suffering of slaves and serfs, and go "Huh. That's not good. It would be nice if that didn't happen". Instead, Marxism's allows us to meaningfully understand why things are like this. It's a scientific ideology that, when applied correctly, empowers people to analyse the factors of the past that produced the present and from there plan ways to create a new future. A method to go beyond "this is bad" to "this is why it's happening" then to "this is how we can stop it".