Every time I’ve heard it described to me (haven’t read it), it seems to mostly boil down to “we recognise the problems with the current capitalism but the way to solve it is to give the good capitalists free rein to do whatever they want”, or “if we simply did x instead of y things would be better” without any explanation as to how the political will in a system which was set up for and has only ever managed to enable y, can be found to do x
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- Capitalism requires infinite growth
- Earth isn't infinite
It annoys me so much when otherwise smart people follow this way of thinking. Yeah buddy talk to me about the eventual heat death of the universe but you think the earth can provide in excess just because
Hey asshole, how are you going to make housing cheaper? How are you going to convince people to let the only asset they own that has ever gained value, lose value? Holy shit.
I read the darn book, for better or for worse. Thesis is basically "There is a lot of potential capacity in current human systems that is wasted, and it's more than you think, and if we could fix that it would unlock abundance"
The core... what is it, irony, contradiction?... is that this kind of the most obvious and trivial part of their insight, and it leaves out any significant analysis of how you can systematically identify inefficiencies in systems, how you can develop improvements, and how to create environment where these improvements can be implemented. And what you'll find is that those latter things are kind of the whole problem, and furthermore that existing structures of power actively maintain them (you can't just Technocrat your way out of it). It's basically just "you should do things good and not dumb".
It's actually pretty easy to dismiss the book out of hand, because it's obviously just two separate long essays from Klein and Thompson pasted together and timed to be read by Dem staffers in the first year of the Harris presidency. And it's in an ideological straitjacket, unable to imagine anything beyond the Biden USA but with lots of de-regulatory policy tweaks in the public and academic space. Maybe the fundamental contradiction is that China exists, and they can only pretend that it doesn't.
Disregarding that it's just deregulation again, the biggest contradiction is obviously that wages and quality of life of the working class will not be improved by increased production. It all relies on capitalists just giving the working class a bigger cut of the pie for no reason, which is obviously not how capitalism works.
Consider their moronic opening hypothetical future where work is abolished through automation. Why would Jeff Bezos with his AI-operated orbital factories give you anything at all?
Capitalism is when robots doing all the labor screws over everyone.
I don't have a lot of depth it just feels like every time I hear about this it becomes libertarian "let's deregulate" talking points.
Unsurprising that they haven't even read their own book. Direct quote from Abundance:
Just as feudalism blocked production that only capitalism could unleash, so did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might unleash. Core to this analysis of the economy was an idea that has come to be called the “fettering of production.”[24] Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many.
Marx’s aim was not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance: to unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine. There is much he got wrong, but one need not be a communist to see the wisdom in this analysis.
(The book does not follow this up by providing an example of what Marx got wrong.)
I swear they reference Marx just to get people frothing with rage and whinging about how libs are actually cultural Marxists.
I think there are bits in the book and certainly Klein's interviews where he does make some awful dereg arguments, like against air filtration requirements in apartments and shit like that, completely unforced errors to any decent human being (but he is not one).
Yeah, you're right, I kind of blocked out those "solutions" from my memory because they were so absurdly bad that Marx managed to dunk on it from the grave in their own book
flow — and while providing a damning critique of US incapability to build any infrastructure whatsoever (e.g., California's million dollar toilet, housing crisis, and continued high-speed rail failures), still seem to contend copying China wholesale is not the best system because China moving too fast brings its own kind of issues (e.g., short-term visibility projects solely for local officials to get promoted, corruption to blame corporations for actual local governance failures, etc.) and following science with disregard for ethical/environmental/etc. consequences citing things like the one-child policy.
, probably