>Yoshie Furuhashi
>>
>> The expansion of mass consumption & regional linkages (in opposition
>> to elite consumption & subordination to financial centers) under the
>> Bond program (if ever implemented -- but who bells the cat?) can
>> presumably overcome the tendency to overaccumulation inherent in
>> capitalism in a fashion unlike neoliberalism, while creating the
>> politico-economic foundation for a future socialist transformation
>> (should an opportunity ever arise).
>
>There cannot be a 'future socialist transformation' on the basis of '[t]he
>expansion of mass consumption.' For one thing, the global problem is not one
>of over-accumulation, but of capital shortage. For another, even if there
>was sufficient capital there is a more fundamental problem of
>unsustainability. These two things are interconnected. Together, they
>constitute an impasse.
>
>Are you able to explain where the resources, energy and additional ecosphere
>to externalise the costs of this mass consumption (additional GHGs etc) are
>coming from? Do you even acknowledge as a problem, the global endemic energy
>scarcity which has seen per capita energy consumption stagnant since 1973
>and which is a very real problem precisely in those newly neoliberalised
>zones (S America, E Europe, S Africa) which now suffer chronic energy
>shortages (gasoline famines, brownouts etc) and which cannot hope to find
>the capital to invest in new infrastructure? Do you not agree that the fact
>that industrial cpaitalism has *already* exceeded planetary carrying
>capacity is a problem?
>
>The 'first practical problems' you face in truth are the complete
>unrealisability of and utopian hopelessness of the programme you propose.
>The reality is that 'elite consumption' in the North, by which you mean the
>mass consumption of around 1 bn people who are actually mostly workers, not
>members of elites--is going to decline rapidly anyway in the future, and not
>because of any redistribution to the south: they will simply be worse off
>than they already are because of the progressive disintegration of the
>energy-base, something which is already far advanced in fact. The truth is
>that you cannot hope to end mass poverty in the South merely by cutting out
>ostentatious consumption in the north, however gratifying that idea might be
>in the abstract; but what you can get and will get is infrastructure failure
>a la California and a la USSR. The truth is that if Pat Bond is unrealistic,
>your scheme is much more so, since it requires not only the willing consent
>of the global elites to their own elimination, but also the presence three
>additional planet earths plus zero population growth on this one.
>
>Mark Jones
My post concerns what I take to be the Bond program for the
periphery, so I don't take credit for it. What's your program? And
who is to carry it out?
Yoshie
