Hi All,
Apologies if this is in the wrong place but this is my first post and I had a little trouble navigating the whole thing.
Anyway, to the question at hand;
While I whole heartedly agree that we need to move to a resource based economy and that that change needs to happen now, I'm also totally perplexed as to how exactly we do that.
I just came back from seeing the third Zeitgeist film.
It (as always) posed a very interesting and thought provoking argument for why we should have this resource based economy and how it could work but it completely skips over a very important transition phase.
At one point the film says "Imagine if we had a second Earth that was essentially a blank slate".
Well that's great to imagine but we don't have a second Earth and we have to come up with a solution for implementing this in today's society on our current (and only) planet.
While the vision of this film is important, implementing its ideas are entirely more relevent.
Even before I saw the third Zeitgeist it got me thinking on how we could implement such unprecedented change. Unfortunately I kept coming up with the same answer - communism (marxism).
Thankfully Zeitgiest to the rescue! I was sitting in the cinema and right as I was thinking it one of the guys on screen says "some people think we're communists or marxists".
Finally! Some clarification... But no, he explains almost nothing aside from the fact that marxism assumes that resources are infinite.
They completely skip over the fact that maxism and communism are supposed to be the ideal utopia that we're talking about but both failed because in order to teach humans to work for the greater good, a governing body would have to take away everything from everyone and allocate it on a need basis. Once everyone is living this way then the government would disolve and utopia acheived.
Historically utopia was never acheived because men wanted to hold on to their power. (simplified but that's communisim)
Now, I understand that a resource based economy is different in a number of ways with mechanisation and of particular note is that a computer would make all of the important decisions but heres the big question that comes from all of this: how do we get there?
Even if a computer like this existed and was functioning right now why on earth would any of the world leaders listen to it? Nothing short of a world wide revolution would work, meaning, we end the monetary system.
Suppose we do. Then what? Rely on the good will and faith of the people to keep industry pushing forward but in a now more resource conscious way, safe in the knowledge that life will get better from there? The mechanisation for it all wouldn't exist yet so they would have to for the time being. That's a lovely ideal but hardly realistic.
It's a complete awakening in the collective human consciousness that seems to be required - not impossible but having never been done before, I would like to meet the man that thinks he knows how.
So this led me to wonder; can it at least be implemented on a national level? Would that even work or do you need the worlds involvement as a whole?
So to reiterate my question:
How do we implement a resource based economy?
Does it need to happen world wide, all at once or can it begin at a national level?
And how (at least in the transition phase) does a resource based economy differ from marxism or communism?
EDIt: hah, a slightly longer question than I intended.
that way we show the VP idea, ontop of cutting cost :D,