We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.
What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.
So we end up with irrational forms of production as a result: we get massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion, because these things are highly profitable to capital, but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like affordable housing and public transit, because these are much less profitable to capital, or not profitable at all.
The solution is staring us in the face. We urgently need to overcome the capitalist law of value and democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities. After all, we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies. It is our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake. And so we must claim the right to decide what is produced, how, and for what purpose.
Eat your local billionaire folks.
I like how the thumbnail appears to be a stockbroker on his knees about to be arrested or executed.
Beekeeper vibes
This will only be accomplished with violence/war. Even then, we would have to unite behind whatever the “right” solution is. No, I don’t think humanity can overcome its problems. I think that we are, and intelligence in general is a pathogen on whatever host system it develops in. We will likely face a future of war and destruction until we become extinct. Hopefully, the planet will still be habitable for new life.
I understand why you’d be so incredibly pessimistic against humanity, considering that most of what we see is humanity being awful. However, all of this awfulness is very likely a strange turn from what Humans could normally be.
In The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, they present compelling archeological evidence that humans used to live in relatively egalitarian societies, even after the discovery of agriculture, and that was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years.
The evidence suggests our current way of oppressive hierarchical societies primed for exploitation is an aberration from the norm, and we have evidence that it’s possible for humans to reject this new, unnatural way of being; It was demonstrated in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Humans there succeeded in building a truly egalitarian society that valued the freedom of all.
What that shows us is that the goal of Anarchists the world over is finding the right time, place, and method to successfully rebel against these unnatural conditions everywhere, forever, and return society to an egalitarian society of cooperation. Once that genie is out of the bottle, and the majority of the world adopted it, there would be no going back, and we could finally begin to build a world we all would like to live in.
In The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, they present compelling archeological evidence that humans used to live in relatively egalitarian societies, even after the discovery of agriculture, and that was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years.
And I’m all for that, inequaity is the worst of all crimes humans commit against each other but a couple points.
You have zero data to back up the claim that this is in any way sustainable for the estimated 10Billion people living on the earth, just the argument that it seems to be a better way and people have lived like this before. Id argue, like Ton Murphybdies that it isn’t. Its sutley a model for how something like 100 Million could live sustainably on the earth but then id be accusations d of being a Linkola Pentti fanboi if I made that argument.
Graeber’s (RIP, loved that guy and he and Chris Hitchens are sorely missed) argument that it doesn’t have to be this way is false, how it is, is how it would be if you repeated the earth experiment you’d end up in the same place. It’s how we are, not who we are.
Our problems are stupidity, apathy and greed and our abikwty to deny reality.
That’s not an argument to keep being be a cunt :) Vote Green, ride a bicycle, don’t fly, don’t own a meat eating pet and cut back on meat consumption.
Well, not with this kind of attitude we won’t.
The captilist model isn’t the problem, while it’s definetly toxic and changing it to a model witt vastly less consuntion for the workd ls rocjest 10% would be a positive, statibg with the richest 1% and criminalising being that wealthy, it won’t solve the climate crisis, it’s just a symptom.
We have all the science and engineering we need but the problems are greed, apathy and stupidity and they can’t be solved.
That’s not an excuse to do nothibg, vote Green, use less, when your meat eating pet passes don’t replace them, don’t drive and don’t fly.
