> The first part of the statement only makes sense if you take the second part; people are lifted out of poverty not because more stuff is being made, but because with more stuff being made, more people can afford it. I'm not talking about eliminating growth, I'm saying that the way society operates at the moment (which I view as through exploitation and coercion) has given us such a vast product, but the issue isn't of needing to "grow" at the rate we currently are to solve issues such as hunger, it's to allocate resources according to who needs them rather than the profit that can be made from them.

Right, but if you refer back to my prior comment, I did that calculation for you. Is that enough? It's an empirical question. When is it enough.

> Nobody, not even Marx himself, would doubt the quantitative number of people that capitalism has brought out of poverty, but neither would anyone really doubt how many then-slaves in the Roman Empire were rescued from wretched conditions of not even being able to get by. The question is not whether capitalism is "good" or not, it's whether we can acheive the same or better advances in other systems which come without various negative qualitative aspects for society, culture and ecology.

Right, but let's make that a bit more rigorous. What do we mean by "same or better advances without various negative qualitative aspects"? You seem to still place some value on the traditional notion of 'growth' (e.g. more stuff, cheaper stuff, better stuff). So, presumably you'd like some social organization that produces growth and 'qualitative' benefits in some pareto-optimal configuration. I suppose essentially everyone agrees broadly with that.

I think where we diverge is that I think a system that is broadly capitalist with some regulation and externality pricing is likely to be most able to achieve a pareto-optimal balance of all of those things. Non-market coordination mechanisms don't seem like they work very well at the scale of modern civilizations.

> Again, the issue isn't that some people have big pie slices and others have small ones, it's that some people are deprived of access to social means of production, and with that they are reduced to a relation that depends on someone else to provide them with access. This social relation still persists regardless of the pie slices, because we're talking about one person who owns raspberry pie and the other a horrible pear pie.

That's not actually true though. They're not deprived of access to the natural world. They're deprived of access to the fruits of others labor, which seems quite a bit more fair.

> I don't think externality pricing would work very well in the long term where such large sums of money can be amassed that the tax won't matter very much (so damage continues)

Well, you'd set the externality at the price that'd balance the harm. If it costs $10 to counter an ounce of carbon released into the atmosphere, you price it at $10, or $10 + epsilon to account for imperfect enforcement, etc.

> and I doubt that sufficiently large taxes could come about in a democracy controlled by capital rather than "the people" - a people who still prefer the luxuries (i.e perhaps even false needs from Establishment ideology) so would be unwilling to restrict their supply.

I agree that that's a tricky problem, but once you get into the issue of "how private incentives and public governance interact" you're down a rabbit hole that doesn't turn out too well for other modes of organization either :-).