Re: Everything is Rotten

Josias wrote:

> As I heard from a wise indigenous anarchist, abolishing capitalism will probably increase our standard of living, but abolishing colonialism will likely lower it. This is because our lives have been built upon institutions that depend on genocide. Dismantling those institutions entirely, rather than reforming them, will be painful for those dependent on them.

A lot of our perceived wealth is built on exploitation (including colonial genocide) and on unaccounted-for externalities.

Under the delusions of market capitalism, fossil fuel has been a remarkable source of energy to cheaply enable far-reaching transportation. It’s all illusory because we’ve been paying for that wealth by wrecking our own planet.

Abolishing that will decrease our standard of living very much. And we’ve got to, or we’ll die. That’s what gasoline populists don’t understand.

So my take is the opposite of your anarchist friend.

Abolishing exploitation will sting for the owner class, and be great for the worker class, and if we don’t, the opposite is true. A traditional political cleavage—perhaps the main one, driving our entire system of “left” and “right” politics.

Abolishing externalities will sting for everyone but if we don’t, we all die. We’ve never deal with something like that, politically, before. (Maybe pandemics and Y2K…?)

And, I still haven’t seen any anarchist solutions to externalities, unlike exploitation; modern ancom grew out of the class struggle and has an effective plan to fight exploitation; we need a new toolbox to solve climate externalities.

The owner class