[D66] Dare to declare capitalism dead

[A.OUT]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capitalism-economic-system-survival-earth

Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it

    By George Monbiot, www.theguardian.com
    View Original
    April 25th, 2019

Refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border in 2016. ‘In the 21st century
rising resource consumption has matched or exceeded the rate of economic
growth.’ Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”,
“consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to
see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun. While some
people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly
and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear
alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an
enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious
status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like
saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a
degree of self-confidence I did not possess.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that
it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us
inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a
definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement
stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different,
effort to develop a new system.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first
is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the
quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses
without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably
to environmental calamity.

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from
goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of
material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political
Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They
found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century
(material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic
growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising
resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic
growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental
catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been
achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green
growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries
and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which
materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where
costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of
economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from
the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a
sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have
no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support
systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic
crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can
recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an
abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is
entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their
money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further
dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of
non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative
truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other
people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third,
the translation of economic power into political power, as control over
essential resources leads to control over the social relations that
surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz
sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth
creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing”
(extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the
environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing.
Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material
resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and
future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of
which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of
millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again.
It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has
radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while
simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose
land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of
the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and
colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now
causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating
useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to
find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less
damaging than capitalism.

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither
feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with
capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both
systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are
willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and
other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for
only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both
are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs
alone is the one true God.

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer,
and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough
framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological
civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of
our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and
the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq
Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in
the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises
from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple
principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to
the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different
thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic
system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our
lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic,
environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working
collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that
meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to
continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist