Post #2816365

You argue that removing the profit motive removes overproduction, but you are treating “human needs” as a fixed, objective metric that planners can just calculate. Advancing industry inherently creates new needs. A hundred years ago, indoor plumbing was a luxury; now it is a basic need. As technology advances, the material baseline of what humans require to participate in society advances with it. A socialist state aiming to provide for an advancing society will have to extract the resources to meet those constantly expanding needs. If your scientific planners realize that meeting those advancing needs will destroy the lithium salt flats or the deep sea, and they choose to restrict production to save the environment, they are intentionally limiting consumption. That is degrowth. You say I am confusing capitalism with culture, but you are treating “scientific planning” like magic that can bypass thermodynamics. Planning how much to extract does not change the physical impact of the extraction itself. Whether a capitalist or a socialist planner orders the mining of cobalt, the local ecosystem is destroyed. Removing the profit motive changes who gets the wealth, but it does not change the physical reality that large scale industry consumes the natural world. You are correct that the profit motive drives overproduction under capitalism. But once profit is gone, you still have a system that demands the continuous development of productive forces. Without a hard commitment to ecological limits, your planned economy will still consume the planet, just more equitably.