Perhaps there might be a need to distinguish more clearly that you are particularly criticising laissez-faire capitalism and crony capitalism or at least more than welfare capitalism and perhaps other types?
You're right, I should state more clearly that I'm not anti-capitalism per se (or pro-communism for that matter, the opposite in fact), but I'm against free market fundamentalism and particularly the idea that the current - arbitrarily defined - definition of GDP growth is the be-all and end-all. Except that it never ends, of course.
That's why I'm talking about how a form of capitalism that respects limits might be better. If possible. I see that Sigmetnow has opened a
thread on this very subject.
Limitless profit, limitless private property, limitless capital accumulation.
Where did it say limitless?
The current version of capitalism encourages all those things as if they can and should be limitless.
Rewarding success creates an incentive to strive for success. When someone is so successful they start to approach your preferred limit for private property, do you want to throw away their talent? Should people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have retired after they had earned say $10 million?
Make it 100 million, as far as I am concerned.
They could have gone on doing what they did, using their talent to push technology forward, except that there would be no more financial reward. The success would be its own reward.
Or they could have deployed their fantastic talent to do other stuff, perhaps even more useful things. But as it turned out, they were prisoners of their own success, where profits have no more real value, but are just numbers, like a score card.
At the other end of the scale, getting rid of incentive to strive for success would tend to make people not bother getting out of bed. If that is the sort of green recession you think you want, should you be arguing for communism?
Maybe because we have an erroneous cultural definition of success? In ancient tribes you were regarded successful and gained respect by helping others.
If we could change this cultural value of getting respect and status based on your fame or financial success to something else (take for instance the open source community), imagine how much talent you could free up.
So how do you impose your limits into capitalism without it having adverse effects on incentivising success? Some success you may want to inhibit but I suggest there are some areas of success that you wouldn't want to inhibit.
How much success is enough? Is there a limit to success, where one or a collective can say: wonderful, look at what we've achieved, let's now improve it further, without expanding it. Does this moment ever come? Or, when someone suggests it has, do we then say: Oh dear, how are we going to incentivise success?
Might these aspects of capitalism just be something you don't like but is the wrong target for the problems you do want to fix?
My problems can't be fully fixed if those aspects of this version of capitalism (the limitlessness) aren't fixed.