Reddit reviews The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

Sure, if we all stopped consuming 50% of what's being produced, this would make half the production obsolete. The twist in thinking is that this is a good thing and not a bad one as the growth imperative would suggest.

I see the way out through going back to more self-sufficiency. The alternative to a consumer society is a society of mostly self-sufficient people. This is the basis of freedom from economic pressures as it decouples your well-being from the ups and downs of the market economy. Then, how would you get such economically free people back into wage-slavery? In fact, this was the situation prior to the industrial revolution. There's a nice book on the subject of how initially economically independent farmers were systematically robbed of their means of self-sufficiency to drive them into the factories, basically the ironically very forced birth of the "free" market capitalism. There was also a recent article posted about the book.

So basically it is not that we simply stop consuming and then how do we get our food? Instead we go back to more self-sufficiency and no longer require neither wages nor the products of wage-labor. This way, each person can individually step out of the vicious circle that is our current economic system.

For more detail on how to do this - practically, you may want to read "Possum Living", "Early retirement extreme" or "How to live without a salary".

More mainstream are books like "Your money or your life" or "Work less, play more."

As relates to Mr. Perelman's economic and political leanings, how can the paperback copy of his 17 year of book be $30, the hardcover OVER $100?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Invention-Capitalism-Classical-Accumulation/dp/0822324911

The point of constructing a society to benefit a certain elite by constraining the freedoms of everyone else isn't that you have to do it exactly the same way as everyone else engaged in the same plan, or that 100% of your targets succumb to the structures you create. Often the "design" isn't even done consciously, but arises piece by piece as hierarchies build themselves up or transform into new ones.

The UK used Enclosure Laws. Other Europeans invaded countries and produced "free markets" by force of arms. Americans have a habit of heavily subsidizing food crops, exporting them to countries and bankrupting the peasants, then exploiting the now-desperate lower classes as cheap labor for multinational business. Presumably wage labor came to dominate other locales simply because other viable options were removed for whatever reason - war, bad luck, in the case of Haiti international blockading as retaliation for throwing off the chains of one kind of slavery...

In pretty much every example of capitalism coming to some new place, violence, coercion and a lack of options are involved in wage labor dominating economic relationships.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Invention-Capitalism-Classical-Accumulation/dp/0822324911

Again with this stupid meme bullshit. Sorry, but to most people morality isn't an economic utility function, it's about the cultivation of social virtue. If the liberal tradition is so great for the global poor, then maybe their political and intellectual forebears shouldn't have created the global poor by destroying their traditional communities and immiserating them through colonialism and authoritarian brutality so that 21st century liberals could wipe their own memories and then pretend to be saviors selling them the cure.