Political Crossfire Forums

I am a firm believer in anti-growth politics.

We need to reduce our population, our standard of living and our ecological footprint. Not just because environmental problems, but because it will lead to a better life.

So much of our social ills come from the need for perpetual growth. The world today, personified, is the chronic overachiever. Nothing ever sates its appetite for more, and so it never really savours anything - it just moves on to the next achievement.

The ghetto can't exist without the suburbs.

If the masses didnt perpetuate systems operating for maniacs, by the maniacs, and of the maniacs with a monopoly of force and a systematic moral authority. The collective creativity of the induvidual could have a chance to answer said problems. Yet what we are left with is rotting forest floor choked off by the canopy of established trees, we all, waiting for the next historical arsonist to start the next round of mass murder to end the pain.

Still voting?
You either do it yourself or you dont, period.
Quit bitching.

What about technology? as Marx put it under capitalism the forces of production are constantly being revolutionized even as forms of labor spawn new inequalities such as the rise of service sector industry and post-manufacturing employment. Really I buy into more of a ghost in the shell type universe (really interesting concept though i couldn't quite get into anime style), where it's neither apocalypse nor a bright future of unabated technological progress. Some call it cyberpunk I just call it reality.

We will always have problems to deal with but they will change and become new ones. When the internet first started booming in the 1990s for example people heralded it as the dawn of new forms of democratic engagement. Now we're dealing with the fallout of the NSA surveillance program and new forms of cyberwarfare such as the creation of stuxnet used to shut down Iranian refineries.

The question is what new issues technology is creating, not whether it's "man versus nature." As Marx correctly pointed out, Malthusian arguments about the unsustainability of population growth neglect class inequalities as the real question of in a sense why our world is so messed up.

OK. Given, there is "a problem". How do you fix it?

And, none of the crap about "population control". That's not a solution, that's a talking point. I'm talking about SOLUTIONS. Do you physically kill every 3rd child? Do you jail parents for having >2 children? I want to know what actual and enforceable solutions there are to this problem.

Well you can forget dealing with the environment and climate change, because here in the U.S. those are just socialists plots. Socialism! Eeek!

How?