Your post reminds me of the story of the Rooster who thought the Sun came up because of his crowing--

Crediting capitalism with the affluence that results from having enjoyed the one time only energy party  is like that Rooster.

There is no doubt that the West has enjoyed great wealth over the past few centuries--but if capitalism is the cause, then how does that explain the fact that there have been many non-capitalist societies throughout history that have also enjoyed great wealth.

And, when the end of the cheap energy party really begins to pinch here shortly and the economies in the West collapse, should we shift away from capitalism?

That's a new one.

www.grist.org

Capitalism caused Hurricane Katrina?

That's a new one.

Indeed it is, and not one of my invention to boot.

What I said was:When capitalism creates more and more disasters (think Hurricane Katrina, as it might strike differently in different environments),

I am suggesting Hurricane Katrina as a metaphor for disaster.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

I am on record for praising LSam highly, and I continue to enjoy everything he writes, however little I understand it.

But let us add to that now that I love JMG's reference to the ancient fable of the Rooster, ridiculously claiming to bring up the Sun by his crowing.  Possibly that refers to equally ridiculous beliefs of many people in antiquity, that witches can call down the Moon by their spells.

(I am not sure what the point is, of calling down the Moon.  If the Moon is Hecate/Persephone/Selene, then once you have her in your power, can you force her to do things for you that you could not do for yourself?)

I think it was Biodiv who on another thread recently referred to the economies of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as somehow "capitalist."  Or am I mistaken?  Of course, those societies all had institutional slavery, so I am not sure "capitalism" can still be used.  Moreover, Egypt was ruled by kings, whose will must be obeyed.  One wonders if, say, building a pyramid was a good, profitable investment of capital.  Greece is a cultural and ethnic term, but is meaningless politically; there was never a "Greek" economy.  Rome was most of the time a strictly structured class-based oligarchy; and many of the emperors, later on, emulated the example of big-building, big-spending, big-consuming Oriental kings.

In a quite different direction, there is Benedictinism, which I guess is a form of communism: authoritarian but also egalitarian, and voluntary.  In time it was corrupted; the Cluniac movement created lots of great art and little of social value.  But the Cistercian reform remains attractive, and an interesting model for many economic historians.

Then, there is the communalism of many Native American societies, especially the Southwestern Pueblo Indians.

You Seattle dudes can perhaps explain to me Northwest coast societies.  They were into slavery, and hierarchy, weren't they; and I never understood how all that potlatch business worked.

The NW Coast natives had all they needed from the bays and rivers, and needed no more.  No need for slaves nor wars.  They never ventured into the scary woods.  These natives may have been the most wealthy indigenous people in the world.  Lewis and Clark found the wealth quite stunning.  NW Interior natives were much more dependent on trade, war, and slaves.  The Northwest was a trading empire.

Wealthy American families amassed their fortunes with slave trade on sailing ships.   It was a multi-billion dollar industry.  Carbon energies are our new slaves (enriching many of the same families).

Emancipate the fossil slaves and harness your chariots to the sun.

Don't carpool alone.

Rome was most of the time a strictly structured class-based oligarchy; and many of the emperors, later on, emulated the example of big-building, big-spending, big-consuming Oriental kings.The Roman imperial economy was static, with no investor class accumulating capital.  Its economic elite lived off of the legacies of prior conquest.  It burnt off its surplus in fabulous displays of wealth, rather than reinvesting them as modern businesses do.  Its reliance upon slave labor made it unlikely to advance technologically.  By contrast, capitalism is technologically dynamic (if oriented mainly toward profit), primarily urban (as opposed to primarily rural), and characterized by a formal equality between individuals.  

The slavery of the antebellum South was an ad hoc response to a labor shortage in a frontier economy.  The Civil War which brought about its end in the US was the violent complaint of a plantation aristocracy fast approaching economic obsolescence.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

To Biodiv: Right, slavery can be found in capitalist systems, such as, I guess, the American South, and the Caribbean, till recently.  And of course the wealth of the Northeast, including liberal, high-minded Massachusetts, was dependent on the global slave trade.

But the ancient world is very different.  Sure, there was money, there were merchants, there were artisans, there was international trade.  But really, most wealth in the ancient Mediterranean was agricultural, and tied up in land.  And even then, trade did not operate efficiently: if one town had a bad harvest, and a nearby town had a good harvest, the people with the bad harvest just went hungry, their need was not necessarily supplied by their luckier neighbors.

Egypt, a more ancient and more isolated country, is unique, even weird.  There, and in Mesopotamia, it seems that an authoritarian, king-based communism was necessary for civilization to take off in the late 4th millennium BCE.  In order to take advantage of the Nile, and of the less regularly flooding Tigris and Euphrates, centralized control by an elite class was required, and was instituted.  There was not much room for free enterprise by private individuals.

So this does not look much like capitalism to me at all.  You may not like Karl Marx, but there is no need to underestimate his economic history.

If by "capitalism," strictly so called, we mean the temporary transfer of "capital," with promise to return it with interest, for the purpose of investing it in a present, time-limited venture, then that did not really get started in Europe till the late Middle Ages.  The history of the moral evaluation of usury is bound up with it.

To Sunflower, my sunshine: From what I have read about the Northwest Coast peoples, they are all fairly close to the coast, and none of them live very far inland.  Perhaps some of the Tsimshian and Nisga do, but always along rivers.  Slavery, and a socially hierarchical society in general, were commonplace.  Yes, maritime travel and trade were important; that included hunting for marine mammals (I never ate seal or sea lion, and am not sure I would want to, still less whale, which anyway only the Makah and Nootka hunted/hunt), but also raiding for slaves.  And an important way to establish social class rank was the potlatch, which might include giving away slaves along with other property, and even killing slaves, along with the destruction of other property.  And then there are the Cannibal Societies, about which my sources differ; one says that there was no actual cannibalism involved, and the flesh of specially killed dogs (!) was consumed as a substitute for human flesh; but others say that yes indeed, the flesh of slaves was consumed.

Vancouver Island is very beautiful, and Vancouver is a great city; I have not yet been to Washington, or to the Queen Charlotte Islands, or to the Alaska panhandle, but hope to before too long; and the art of the Northwest Coast peoples is spectacular -- we have a Kwakiutl mask in our living room in fact.  But the sociology of those peoples seems more bizarre than just about anything else that Native Americans ever came up with.

Organizational forms that produce things are not quite what I was looking for when I asked for alternatives that work better. I was looking for something a little more significant.  There's something more significant than production?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Your agressive stance is a product of human nature. Competition like this debate is part of human nature.  Enjoy as much of your own aggression and competition as you like -- after all, you fired the first shot.  

Human behavior is overdetermined by culture, which is a product of human history.  There might be a "human nature," but any role it might have in influencing social forms cannot be determined by reference to "human nature" itself.

I'm saying this not to display some "natural" "aggressive" stance, but merely to offer a better model of culture into Gristmill than the model I've seen so far, according to which Gristmill's privileged contributors ignore my posts while repeating brief, unsubstantiated ideological communiques such as "human nature makes communism impossible" or "more capitalism will save the world" over and over again.

An example:

I think E.O.Wilson (sometimes called the father of evolutionary psychology) would be offended by that remark.  A poll of prominent astronomers was taken in the 1970s to find out how they stood on the cosmological issue of how the universe came about.  According to the poll, one-third of them favored the big bang model, one-third of them favored the steady state model, and one-third of them favored the multiple big bangs model.  

But when asked whether their opinions were of importance to science, all astronomers voted "no."  Scientific results are determined experimentally, not according to whether or not E.O. Wilson would be offended.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Give some real world examples

of countries with economic systems that work better. In an integrated world-economy, examples of "countries with economic systems that work better" won't prove anything, since nation-states are no longer autonomous.

Governments did not design or create free markets. They are self-organizing.  This is just ideology.  Governments do not design property laws or monetary systems?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

When I read David's blog about capitalism and global warming I had an opinion but held my reaction because I do not know what capitalism is.  I lack the education in economics, political science, and anthropology to make informed progress.   IMHO capitalism is interest on money loans, motivated by greed and as a protection from risk, that is usury, I think.   As a victim of propaganda, I see capitalism as not communism.  Also, the Koran forbids usury (interest) on loaned money.  Does that mean that Islam is the new communism?

I understand the words of capital and stock derive from the heads of cattle.  This system was developed to end the bloody sword duels among competing French aristocrats.

My lack of insight has not limited my access to capitalism.   I raised $1.1 MM selling stock, a stack of paper I purchased at a stationary supply store.  It was amazing.   My goal was to stop global warming with new solar technology, using capitalism as David described, to challenge oil and coal.

Because new technology is a threat to big business, proven throughout history, I was visited by many of the big boys, and that was also fascinating.

The Sauds spoke with the most visual poetic clarity.  "We were recently a nomadic people and when we found water we shared it with our neighbors or expected to be shot.  We feel the same way about oil."  That seems to be a non-capital system.  "Most governments protect the individual from the corporation.  In the United States the government protects the corporation from the individual. They will not allow you to market solar energy."  Capitalism?  The Sauds were correct.  A  month later, on Earth Day (known then as Sun Day), my wife and father were fired from their private sector jobs without cause on the same day, the day I announced new solar technology.   The Sauds hired my dad and moved him to Riyadh to manage the lab at the Royal National Guard Hospital.  That began my journey behind the curtain of capitalism.  That journey continues today.

Capitalism is a nonviolent tool of command and control.  When that tool fails then other less pleasant tools are used.

People want a free market because it gives them what they want.  No, people acquiesce in "market conditions" because that is all their economic situations will get them.

That is a strawman. I will leave it sit.  No, my reference to the role of government in the definition and protection of property and production of money as a facilitating device for "trade" pokes a major hole in the assertion that "free markets" are "natural."  Your refusal to address it is basically a refusal to argue.

You need to get with the times.  If you are suggesting that I should embrace evolutionary psychology because I need to "get with the times," i.e. endorse an ideological fad within science, then your powers of persuasiveness are limited to readers far shallower than I.  At any rate, the main argument:

What they want is predicated by good feelings, good feelings come from hormones, hormones are released for specific reasons as dictated by evolution and are a function of genetic programming... completely ignores the role of environment, both natural and social, in shaping the stimulus-response patterns  of human behavior.  Genes merely provide a background for the plasticity of "human nature" in this regard. Hormones are a facilitator, not a determinant, of any particular behavior.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

I've had so many thoughts come and go reading all these posts at once (having spent the last couple of days away from the computer, spending time with my family, canoeing and eating, and playing with the grandkids and all that good stuff). Do I dare put my toe into this discussion at this point? Yeah, I guess so.
    My first comment is that today there is no such thing as free trade. The so-called global free trade agreements have made sure of that. What passes for free trade today, to oversimplify for which I apologize up-front, is what benefits corporations, not communities, not people, not even business unless you're multinational or have connections into that world somehow.
    To my knowledge, which is admittedly limited, there is no nation that has an economic system that "works better". (And one of the reasons may just be the global domination of western market capitalism). What we do have, and some examples have been listed but since they aren't nations their importance has been downplayed, are what some community-based economists call "lifeboats" -- models that can be replicated, expanded upon, and networked or webbed together to, over time, create alternative economic networks. These networks can be statewide, national, even international in scope. Cooperatives, by the way, are much more than barter organizations. Today there are even banks that specifically make loans to worker-owned/women-owned/minority-owned cooperatives around the country. There may be some barter, in the sense that there may be some labor traded for ownership shares or the like but when I hear the word, "cooperative" I don't think of barter organizations.
    If by charities you refer to any nonprofit organization (as opposed to charities that hand out goods and services), then charities do indeed produce goods and services, as well as technology. What about all the organizations working overseas to develop ways of cooking with minimum fuel or desalination projects or developing solar technologies for use in third world applications? I spent almost twenty years working in the nonprofit world and there are many wonderful organizations that do a lot more than hand out goods. There are even nonprofit/for-profit business hybrids.
   Nonprofit organizations, cooperatives, business -- these are all simply legal structures created by people to make things happen. We live in a society that demands our efforts to make things, do stuff, trade with one another, etc. be formalized into a legal construction. During the 1980s and forward, there were many efforts to find ways of creating new legal structures to contain the forms of more human-scale, community-based, ecological ways of relating. Suffice it to say, it is very, very difficult. There are hoops to jump through and it's expensive to hire lawyers to create the correct legal documents, not to mention tax issues.
   Here are a few more examples of structures that can help create a different economic reality: Land trusts (many, many models for many, many purposes), community currencies (both  barter network based or actual physical currency that is printed -- I helped create just such a currency in Vermont about 12 years ago), cooperatives (many, many models, many purposes), loan funds specifically to support small-scale, Earth friendly, community-based enterprises (again, many already exist in every state and many countries).
   We have to start somewhere -- and here we are. In a world where global market-based capitalism (trade that is far from "free") is in the process of transforming virtually every economy in the world over in its image. But I agree that eventually (and let's hope soon for the sake of the planet) capitalism will cause its own downfall because no system predicated on constant growth and higher profits can continue in a world with finite resources. And we've already reached the limit. The system just hasn't caught up with that fact yet -- the feedback loops are too big and unwieldy, and plenty of money is being made eating the seed corn, but when it's gone and there's no seed to plant, well then we'll be screwed.
     We can't go back in time to a supposedly more idyllic time, but what we must do is evolve as a species. Right now it seems that we are stuck. We think creating material wealth is the highest and most important thing humans can do. And instead all we're really doing is consuming the Earth, and for what? Looking to traditional, indigenous peoples for ideas, inspiration, and even some how-tos makes sense to me since, despite what seem like strange or even immoral customs to us today, indigenous peoples were (and some still are) onto something when it comes to living sustainably in their environment. Trouble comes when societies get too big, population exceeds carrying capacity, and/or egos in power crave even more power. Simplistic, but I think fairly accurate. We can learn from these mistakes, too, as well as (hopefully) from our own.

We can't go back in time to a supposedly more idyllic time, but what we must do is evolve as a species. Right now it seems that we are stuck. We think creating material wealth is the highest and most important thing humans can do. And instead all we're really doing is consuming the Earth, and for what?  This as opposed to those in the "evolutionary psychology" camp who imagine "human nature" to have been set for all time in the Pleistocene era.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/