It’s a great way to expand people’s imagination beyond a return to American social democracy and to imagine bigger possibilities.
I don’t think producing merely enough to reproduce your population is a bad thing, though? why does there need to be an exportable surplus?
The higher the productive forces, the less people need to work. I want to get to a world where robots make insulin for diabetics and wheelchairs for the disabled. We have to build that world first, though.
sure but in the interim, turning your population towards the export of the fruits of labor suffers the same problem that mutualism does: workers exploiting their own labor fundamentally doesn’t threaten capitalism and is in fact quite compatible with it. as climate change damages global supply chains, communities will necessarily have to look closer to home for the goods that they need to sustain themselves, while capitalism struggles to survive the crisis it’s unleashed. fundamentally, I don’t think “you aren’t producing surplus to export” is a valid critique of a socialist project.
