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Mining communities are not autonomous.  It may "be a culture," but it's a culture dependent upon a money system which comes to it from outside.

Of course they're not autonomous, nor is anyone else, so what's the point?

Wrong.  There clearly exist groups which Joan Martinez-Alier counts among the "environmentalism of the poor" -- the movement for community revitalization, the environmental justice movement, the rural peasantry, and so on, all of which are potentially open to a world society existing along such lines.

Really? If you look at successful progressive movements they all include at their basis a higher standard of living for the majority of society with that being defined in the traditional way.

You mean like the centralized coercive apparatus of Wall Street, in the city (NYC) that is part of your nom de plume?  Sorry, that already exists.

Actually rather decentralized. And if you're suggesting that the desire for increased standard of living is the result of coercion you're mostly wrong. The coercion that that shift required has already run its course in most of the world.  The level of violence and coercion required to reverse it would be similar to the sum total of that exercized by capitalism and communism over the past two centuries. Add that to the chaos and suffering caused by climate change and resource depletion and even if I found your end stage utopia attractive, rather than some sort of nightmarish dystopia, it still would be crazy to try to implement under the present circumstances.

by MarekNYC on Thu Apr 24th, 2008 at 03:20:25 PM EST
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